
You can’t really say I’m either a bike geek or a computer geek. My eyes glaze over when we start talking gear ratios and a bike pretty much looks like a bike to me. I just like to ride. The same with technology. There was a time when I was considered pretty geeky but now I’m just a user as befuddled as most by my PCs idiosyncracies.
But I do love both bikes and the promise of the internet. That’s why I spend so much time as a bicycle advocate and paying attention to issues such as net neutrality.
Recently Congress passed legislation that will require bloggers to reveal the free-products they receive when they write about them. That applies to bicycling products too.
And of course you’ve heard about the trouble newspapers are having now that there content can be gotten on the internet for free. Is that any way to run a business? But are you willing to subscribe on line?
You’ve also heard about Google’s profits from content-related advertising. Everyone is trying to find another model that will work for them on the internt. How to turn all those page-view into money?
YouTube hasn’t figured it out yet despite there being the host for most of the viral-videos–you know the ones that everyone is talking about. This is the power of word-of-mouth at an industrial scale. But how do you insure your product goes viral?
Specialized is selling a new line of bikes designed for town=riding. They are heavier, less agressive and better for commuting than a road bike. The market is those folks who rode a bike as a kid, but probably haven’t been on one since. Can we move these former cyclists back onto the bike path and maybe into commuting? Bike Rumor has pics!
Doing so would improve the safety of cycling for all of us, improve health, lower health-care cost, reduce our carbon foot-print and genearlly make planet-earth a better place, right?
As much as I agree with all of that, I can’t help but see the Global Experience Project as just a big advertsing campain. Specialized has given Globe bikes to bloggers from around the world in return for those bloggers to write about their experiences on bikes.
So, it is a soft-sell. Specialized doesn’t expect rave-reviews aor technical reviews at all. They hope these bloggers will reproduce the “going viral” experience and drive more people to cycling and sell more bikes whether Globe branded or not.
I can’t even object to that. But I do note that it is an experiment as much as an experience. How do we get the power of word-of-mouth to take off virally? That’s the real question we are looking at.
If Globe bikes sell well, we’ll probably see lots more products offered to bloggers for free.–Corrie
Around the Globe: Follow the Globe Experience Project
November 4th, 2009 by Matt · No Comments
What do London, Hawaii, North Carolina, Los Angeles, Georgia, Portland, the Netherlands, Colorado, San Francisco, Ontario, Australia, Seattle, Texas, and New York City all have in common? All of these locations are a part of the Globe Experience Project.
Read more from one of the Globe bloggers at BikeHacks.com