Monday, October 26, 2009

Google Social and bikes

I've enabled Google Social and Google now (occasionally) returns results from my "social circle" to, theoretically, get the latest dirt on what my friends are talking about.

I typed in "Tour of California" for example, and Google Social returned Steephill's 2007 AToC dashboard, my Sacramento photoset from earlier this year, and a call for volunteers by the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition for 2008.

Google Social completely missed, however, Hayduke's back to back rants about the 2010 Amgen Tour of California and hypothesizes a correlation between large racing events and scofflaws running stop signs in Santa Cruz. I'd say Google Social is, for now, a work in progress, which is partly why they call it "experimental" I suppose.

E-HUB


Speaking of experimmental and innovation, I'm impressed with the work that apparently went into the E-HUB. A couple of cycling enthusiasts in Slovenia developed this spring loaded rear hub to help "round out" eccentric leg motions when pedaling. Many Cyclelicious readers know of past attempts to improve the pedaling stroke with elliptical chainrings, and I'm personally dubious of this attempt. Some of the endorsements for E-HUB, however, got my attention, especially that from RAAM winner Jure Robic (from, incidentally, Slovenia).

James @ Bicycle Design discusses the design of the E-HUB at his blog, and Ron at Cozy Beehive does an impressive job analyzing the numbers and breaking down the claims of performance improvements behind this hub.

1 comment:

James T said...

Yeah, I am very skeptical of the E-Hub too, but the fact that guys like Robic and Jani Brajkovic are using it kind of got my attention. Maybe thay are just using it because they are paid to do so, but I would still like to try it myself before completely dismissing it.