Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Lunch with Paul Andrews

Semi-retired journalist Paul Andrews is visiting the Bay Area from his Seattle home. He used to write for the San Jose Mercury News back in the stone ages before he packed his bags to become the technology columnist for the Seattle Times.

We had lunch at Cafe Borrones in Menlo Park where he told me about his bike rides with Jobst Brandt (mountain dirt trails on skinny road tires), Dave Scott (super nice guy who pulled the entire ride, kind of like Fabian Cancellara pulled Saxo Bank during the Team Time Trail), Greg LeMond (ran into him once), and other Bay Area cycling legends.

In 2000, Paul met blogging pioneer Dave Winer and tried out Winer's early blogging software. "I tried it out and was blown away," writes Paul in his old tech column. "For a career journalist, blogging was like dropping a newsroom, printing press and fleet of trucks in my lap," so he began blogging about bikes and other topics at the turn of this century, which is five years before I began blogging about bicycle issues in Boulder County, Colorado. As far as I can tell, the other "oldest" bike blog is The Cycling Dude who began publishing, I believe, in 2003 or 2002 (Kiril, please feel free to correct me).

These days, Paul Andrews blogs as The Bike Intelligencer. He knows road biking and the people involved and there's good stuff to read over there -- I've added it to my RSS feed.

1 comment:

Kiril Kundurazieff said...

A great story, and the 1st proof I've seen that someone was BikeBlogging before I began in the US, in Jan. 2003, and Velorution began in Great Britain, in Dec. 2002.

For me this is welcome news, indeed. ;-D

BikeBlogging has certainly evolved since those early days as people, especially within the industry, have discovered it's potential, especially with YouTube videos, and Podcasting thrown in.

People are doing things with Blogging that a person like myself, with little time, knowledge, and resources, can't do, and now Social Networking tools like Facebook, and Twitter have been added to the mix as well.

The possibilities for the future are unlimited.