The last three months since WorldofO.com opened a Twitter account, we’ve seen a significant increase in orienteering related content and users surfacing at Twitter. In April we included the last tweets from @Worldofo in the right margin of the WorldofO.com frontpage, and since then we have seen several fresh Twitter accounts starting off with following @Worldofo. Read on to see what Twitter is – and how it can be useful for the orienteering community.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a micro blogging platform that enables its users to send and read each others’ updates, known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to other users – known as followers – who have subscribed to them. Read more about Twitter at Wikipedia.

You can send a message to any Twitter account by including @username where “username” is a Twitter account in your Tweet. For example, including @worldofo in your Tweet, you will send a message to @worldofo, and I will read it – and in most cases also answer it. Everybody can read both question and answer (if you don’t use a direct message), and thus I can have an open conversation with my readers.

Retweeting is another good way of using Twitter – which I am also using at @worldofo with Tweets which are interesting for the orienteering community. To retweet is to repeat some information previously tweeted by another user – kind of like forwarding an email. Start the tweet with “RT @username” or “via @username”, and include the original Tweet. During the JWOC, the @worldofo account e.g. retweeted information from the @jwoc2009 account when startlists and maps with routechoices were available. Retweeting a Twitter message helps spreading this particular information faster and more widely, as for example used during the Iran election riots. The Twitter user who retweets a post works like a multiplier.

How can Twitter be useful for the orienteering community?

In cycling, a lot of the top cyclists have a Twitter account where you can follow what they are doing and thinking, @lancearmstrong being the most prominent of them. In orienteering, none of the top runners have got a Twitter account yet, but many top runners have personal blogs.

The problem with the blogs of the orienteering elite is that many are updated only weekly – or even monthly – because of all the work involved with writing a blog post (and training is always the main priority for an orienteer). When the orienteering elite start setting up Twitter accounts, they will be able to post short messages more frequently, and also communicate more easily with their fans. Posting from your phone is easy – even taking a close-up photo of an interesting leg on a training map and posting it to your Twitter account using your phone is done in a minute. Who will be the first Top-50 orienteer to actively use a Twitter account?

World of O at Twitter

• @Worldofo: Short messages about important news, things happening in the orienteering community, news regarding the WorldofO.com site, and communication with WorldofO.com users.
• @Worldofo_news: Most articles published at Worldofo.com are pushed to this Twitter account – use it as an alternative to a RSS-reader to get updated with the latest news from the orienteering world .
• @EliteOrienteer: This account will follow all Elite Orienteers at Twitter. No posting planned to this account for now, but it will be used to give you the latest Tweets from Elite Orienteers. Currently this account is empty – who will be the first to be added?

More services around Twitter are planned at WorldofO.com as more and more orienteers start to use Twitter.

By sending a Tweet including @worldofo, you can give feedback to me. I will read all Tweets addressed to @worldofo, and answer most of them. Everybody will be able to read the answers – and both question and answer must have maximum length of 140 characters.

Some interesting orienteering-related Twitter accounts

• @elitekok – Kristiansand OK Elite. Tweeted about the race of each runner in the KOK team during the Jukola night. I’m sure Halden SK will follow next year …
• @Ultimate_O – Ultimate Orienteering. Ultimate Orienteering just started tweeting – expecting to hear a lot from them here.
• @jwoc2009 – JWOC 2009. A lot of useful information during JWOC 2009.
• @highlandsopen – Highlands Open. I have not found too many orienteering event at Twitter yet, but expect many to follow in JWOC 2009’s steps. Highland Open is there, and added a lot of old maps from the Highlands Open competition for now. [Update: See also @scottish6days - tip via Twitter].
• @sloweb- South London Orienteers and Wayfarers. Tweeting frequently about the SLOW club.

I am sure that in 2-3 months, this list will be a lot longer. Add a comment below if you know about Twitter accounts which should have been in this list.

It is now possible to add/change map information in World of O Maps, but currently with some limitations in functionality. The two most important limitations is that new maps may not be added for countries which already have a full o-map database (Switzerland, Norway, Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Great Britain and Estonia) – however changes and additions of map images, terrain descriptions etc. may be made for maps from these countries as well. In addition, currently new maps can only be represented by a point, and not by their outline.

Notes:

• This is a beta version: The addition of maps is not fully testet – can there therefore can (and will be) some problems, I guess. Please report any problems you find, and I will work hard to fix them.
• It is currently only possible to give map position using a single point. Later it will be possible to draw the outline of the map.
• Ordering of maps is not yet made public, as some issues must be solved regarding protection of email addresses and avoiding spam. These issues are however close to be solved.
• Changes for countries which have an official map register will be made available to the federations. If they choose to not apply these changes, it will decided how to proceed with the information.

• Remember that you are responsible for copyright for all material which is uploaded and/or linked to in the map register.
• Note that no maps are public available before checked by webmaster. This can take from a few hours up to 14 days (usually within 24 hours).
• Addition of new maps for countries which already have a o-map database will be included for some countries later on, but coordination of this work must be done with the local federations before such possibilities are included.

As always: Any comments are appreciated! Use anonymous comments below if you don’t want your name public, or send me an e-mail.

Links:

• World of O Maps
• Form for addition of maps to World of O Maps

With WorldofO GEO you can find out if there are any orienteering maps close to where you are, just by clicking on a map. This is what I have wanted since I started using the Internet more than 10 years ago – and now I am finally seeing it getting closer to fulfillment. I am traveling a lot – as most orienteers, and I always try to find out if there are any orienteering maps in the area I am traveling to. Or any trainings, competitions, clubs or people I can contact to help me do some orienteering.

7000 maps inside today
WorldofO GEO will help you with all of this when it is out of beta (based on the information you put in of course). The present beta-version is limited to orienteering maps only, and it is not opened up for addition of user information yet. Thus, you have only the 7000 orienteering maps which are currently inside to play with – which at the moment are the maps from the orienteering map registers of Austria, Czech Republic, Great Britain, Norway, Switzerland and Slovenia. However, more maps are to come, and the functionality for addition of your own maps for countries which do not have a separate orienteering map register will also be added soon. Furthermore, I will add functionality to add other information to the maps, like terrain description, terrain images etc.

The functionality for clubs, competitions and persons is not included in this public beta-version, but most of the work is already done.

Send an email to betatest@worldofo.com
To limit the number of users in this beta-testing period, registration through sending an empty email to betatest@worldofo.com is required to be a beta-tester. After a few minutes you will receive back an email with the web-address for WorldofO GEO, a username and a password to access the site. Your email-address will not be used for any purposes later on. Note that WorldofO GEO may be unstable in this beta-testing period.

All suggestions for improvements, problems with the user interface and general comments are very welcome. Please help me making WorldofO GEO even better!

Video demonstration
Press play below to see a video demonstration of WorldofO GEO.

Screenshots showing WorldofO GEO in action

In the right column of World of O it is now possible to perform a search through more than 800 different orienteering pages – including all sites included in ‘World of O’, national o-federation pages, club pages in several countries, etc. If you notice that your club page is not included, send me a message, and I can include it. Or even better: Send me a link to a list of all club pages in your country.

Update 24/10: Now more than 1000 orienteering pages included after including finnish, norwegian and swiss o-club pages.

Update 26/10: Now more than 1600 orienteering pages included after including swedish o-club pages and several other pages as well.

It is possible for anyone to include this ‘Orienteering page search’ on their page by including the following few lines of code on their page:

<!-- Google CSE Search Box Begins --><br /> <form id="searchbox_010292661561620684538:ce8kzhtdjjw" action="http://worldofo.com/news/showresults.html"> <input type="hidden" name="cx" value="010292661561620684538:ce8kzhtdjjw" /> <input name="q" type="text" size="24" /> <input type="submit" name="sa" value="Search" /> <input type="hidden" name="cof" value="FORID:9" /></form> <p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://google.com/coop/cse/brand?form=searchbox_010292661561620684538%3Ace8kzhtdjjw"></script><!-- Google CSE Search Box Ends -->

which gives the following search form:

A new feature is now introduced at World of O: It is now possible to tell your opinion about a story by giving the story a rating between 1 and 5. Rating a story is extremely fast and easy – it will not take you more than a second or so. Please give feedback if you have problems with this new feature. If too many people have problems, I will remove it and try to find another way to do this. Please tell me if you like it, or if you would rather like to have it removed.

The reason for introducing this feature is that many people have told me that there are so many news stories going “through” World of O every day, that they miss the good and important stories if they don’t come back two times a day. The “most read” feature which was introduced early this summer helps a bit, but rating stories will make it possible to go a step further – and the chances you will miss the really good stories will hopefully become smaller…

Update 24/10/06: Very few people voted, so this feature is temporarily removed. It may be introduced later on again, but then in a somewhat different form.

Finally one of the top austrian runners will be present here at World of O. Martin Pongratz is ranked 194 at the World Ranking, and has quite a few interesting (and long) stories at his web page – so it will definetely be worth a visit. He has, for example, put up splitbrowser graphs for the sprint finals and the qualification runs in the World Cup final in France last week (I only put up graphs for the middle and long finals and the relay). By following his stories, you will also see what is up in austrian orienteering – next up is the austrian night champs the coming weekend.

Link:

• Martin Pongratz homepage

I have had several requests about where to find some of the stories I have written here at World of O – for example the Micro-O analysis from the Norwegian Champs, the stories from WUOC and some of the national team presentations I wrote before WOC in Århus this summer. The thing is that all links to these stories from within ‘World of O’ have disappeared to the public due to the structure of World of O.

To please the ones asking – and others who may be interested as well – I have made an archive for old postings, which is also searchable. You will find this searchable archive, and all World of O news stories written by me here at http://news.worldofo.com now (see sidebar). For older postings, only the first paragraph of the posting is included here and searchable, but with a link to the full post.

I hope this is what some of you wanted! In addition, it is now possible to add comments to the stories I have written. This might be useful in the further development of World of O. One thing I am considering in that respect is to make a search interface for all stories which have been published in World of O. The problem is that many links to old stories might be broken, and that not all links point directly to the story, as many pages do not have a separate page for each post. Do you think this would be a useful feature? Are there other features you are missing at World of O?

All runner profiles are now updated with results from all qualification and final races which have been run thus far in this WOC, including todays long final. Pictures from the race today and yesterday are also included in the runner profiles. Note that you get a larger version of the pictu …

Read complete story »

All runner profiles are now updated with pictures from todays race. Pictures from the race yesterday are also included in the runner profiles now. Note that you get a larger version of the pictures when you click a picture. You find the runner profiles here: Use of pictures All picture …

Read complete story »

Gøril Fristad, Carl Waaler Kaas and Faaborg Elite Team and NM-uka 2006 pages have been added. Also, after several e-mails from people telling me that the design of ‘World of O’ was boring and old-fashioned, I used part of the weekend to freshen the design of ‘World of O’ up a bit. Please le …

Read complete story »