5.16.2006

YHOO and the 'user-generated' look


If we drink the current digerati kool-aid (e.g. The Economist New Media Survey, 2006), user-generated content will inherit the Earth, and everything will look like it came out of the living room of Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar. Yahoo co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo try the approach with their own product plug (Announcing the new Yahoo! homepage ), perhaps not nearly as funny as the beloved Wayne and Garth, but still impressively charming for a couple of billionaires:

5.08.2006

Ironman in Action at Wildflower 2006


Tom Knauer, a Hawaii Ironman qualifier and tireless evangelist of the triathlon sport, generously led over a dozen friends on a weekend RV trip to Wildflower 2006. He showed us all a wonderfully fun time, no matter what event we took on.

Here's a much-deserved digital media toast to Tom:

May your pre-race bike tuning always go without a hitch:

Race prep at Wildflower 2006


And may you always finish with cheering crowds (note: video requires broadband connection and contains VERY LOUD crowd noise - adjust your speaker volume before play):



Thanks for sharing the joy of the sport , coaching a few of us through our first tentative steps, and for suffering all the unforseen headaches of pulling together this road-trip.

5.04.2006

If we are what we eat...


Lunch 2006 May 3 Wed - sandwich
Originally uploaded by lyndon.

... then this flickr feed is my self-portrait in the making:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lyndonwong/tags/eatinghabits/

I recently volunteered to subject my eating habits to analysis as part of a sports nutritional study. I've never known much about the topic, other than the notion of fueling up on carbohydrates before endurance activities like long runs.

To minimize the tedium of recording every little thing I ate, I had the brilliant idea of photographing my food (...a picture can capture a thousand calories in an instant, and digital cameras make it viable to record everything). Of course, vanity quickly set in, and I started to:

1. adjust my eating habits to make the photo stream look more flattering

2. leave out photos of some between-meal snacks

OK, so I cheated, just slightly... but overall, my little experiment hints at one of the many potential benefits of leading a transparent life, aided by social software. Imagine if all of us had photo streams of our daily food intake... and concerned friends, strangers, and nutritionists weighed in with comments.

Since the public appetite for 'reality media' seems quite high, this could one day trump watching silly television shows. I personally would love to follow what Lance Armstrong eats week-in and week-out.