World of O News » Development

Twitter Usage Finally Increasing in Orienteering

Jan Kocbach — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:00:07 +0000

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.

World of O Maps: Open for additions

Jan Kocbach — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 09:00:58 +0000

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:

WorldofO GEO: Ready for beta-testing

Jan Kocbach — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 06:00:23 +0000

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

Search more than 800 O-pages

Jan Kocbach — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 10:00:28 +0000

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:

<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>

which gives the following search form: