text, photo, video lifestlye mashup

The activity stream on mepath.com has expanded to include video.  Each sporty activity stream starts with photos, then video and then a list of blog posts, all are up-dated on 24 hour cycle.  The mashup of content types has made each sport stream more instantly identifiable and while you can go to flickr and youtube to view the same content having it all aggregated in one place provides a convenient way to discover information on a daily basis from the world of sport.

My current favorite streams are the skiing activity stream and the triathlon activity stream.

triathlon activity stream

Triathlon is a new-ish sport that consists of three other sports, swimming, cycling and running.  A triathlon is usually run with those sports in the order written.  Being made up of other sports gives mepath both a challenge and opportunity.  The challenge, a triathlete maybe blogging about their swimming and a pure swimmer will also be blogging about swimming.  While a triathlete will have an interest in all swimming the post from  triathlete swimmer maybe more relevant, for example, triathlete have to swim in chopper and usually outside harbours, loch/lakes or rivers etc.  And that is the opportunity we will start to bring to the site, give users the ability to filter blog posts on the context they would ideally like to priorities their reading on.  Of course we call this lifestyle linking.

swimming technique

My swimming activity stream today brought a post on swimming technique .  What I really find beneficial about this information is that it is authored by a fellow swimmer and in this case a triathlete too.  He sets the background that us fellow master swimmers recognise and the post acts as a reminber on what to concentrate on next time we hit the pool.

 

James

skiing activity stream

I’m a month or so into viewing the skiing activity stream on mepath.  While skiing is my favored winter sport, it is freeskiing that gets me full of excitement.  Skiing away from a ski resorts, the effort of hiking up to the top and the thrill of skiing virgin snow etc.  The skiing activity stream has provided me with blog posts of fellow enthusiasts.  Not only are there so many skiing opportunities away from the big ski resorts the bloggers also usually document the local guide they know or have found.  And we can all share from the excitement and thrill of viewing the photos and videos posted and posted in context.

Having all the information on tap when planning a vacation must hold great opportunity, location, guide to social activities.

James

lifestyle linking swimming

Swimming is one of my favorite sports and mepath picked that up when I uploaded my blog url to the site.  This means I have two lifestyle feeds to read every day, swimming and open water swimming.  Over the last month I have picked up on the big swimming news stories, Phelps got himself some attention for his non swimming activities and I read about the lady swimming across the Atlantic (BTW, I then read about it again a few days later on the bbc.co.uk website).  What I have enjoyed the most is the posts from the individual swimmers out their in the blogosphere.  I have picket up a video of freestyle technique and learnt about how popular open water swim meets can be in Taiwan. 

mepath.com is running in pre beta mode right now so the volume of post is low but I am looking forward to discovering what else is going  on in the world of swimming as we scale the site and to lifestyle linking me to the best posts.

 

James

me & make personalization

The ‘me’ and ‘make’  idea is at the heart of mepath.com.  ‘me’ is the lifestyle we choose to live, and that is being captured in an increasingly digital form due to the great range of web2.0 websites, tools and devices.  This is our data, owned by us, it can also work for us in all aspects of our life.    ‘make’ is looking to the future to create personalized products our future lifestyle will use.  The personalization uses the right lifestyle context data to work for us, and work for ‘me’ under our full control.

 

More on this as we implement more of the ‘me’ and ‘make’ functionality.

mepath release 0.15 sigin functionality live

Last post we talked about our OpenID implementation as the only way to sign in to and register for mepath.com.  There was very little to do inside mepath.com then but that has now all changed.  Those wishing to sign in to mepath.com have all the functionality of the public site plus the ability to add a URL of a blog that you author about your sporty lifestyle or from a blog that you like to read.  Just one URL right now, if you write more than one blog or use a service like Friendfeed.com  to aggregate your lifestream the plan is to allow you to bring that context of your life into mepath.com.  We are working on this but it will take us time to implement.  We’ll keep you posted on our progress.

We also introduce the ‘Make’ tab to the site and the back ground color of the screen goes green to indicate this context.  The idea here is to take the ‘me’ context e.g.  me > swimming  and show links to products that can be personalized to your lifestyle needs. 

Feedback on the OpenID signin/register easy of use and the internal functional of mepath.com would be warmly welcomed.

 

Cheers for now.

 

James

OpenID mepath registration sign-in

We have chosen an OpenID only registration and sign in path way into mepath.com. Our implementation needs testing so if anyone out there on the WWW owns an OpenID URL then we’d be please to get your feedback on our implementation.

mepath.com 0.1 release but still before Beta

Another lengthy lapse between blog posts, our apologies, all efforts have been going into the 0.1 release of www.mepath.com .   It is still real early days so we are keep the before Beta status meaning while the site is open to the public the sites reliability can not be guaranteed.  In fact it is likely to change  most days as those valuable early adopters and friends provide great guiding user feedback.  Be great to get your too.

What can mepath 0.1 do?  If you write about your sporting activities in a blog, if you add that url to mepath it will try and figure out those sports (it looks for 40 sports at present) and presents an activity stream and peer group for them.  An activity stream consists of blogs post from other bloggers right now(other content later) that participate in the same sport(s).  Or you can view sporty activity streams for 40 sports .

before-beta mepath.com

mepath.com is evolving again.  It’s been named before-beta as while the site is open to the web, the site is still finding its voice, so expect changes and thus reliability of use will be variable.  However, we think it better to share our idea as openly as we can.