New Social Community For Runners

RunnersWall - This week a new community popped up ( www.runnersWall.com ) with the goal of providing runners of all ages and abilities the opportunity to network in a setting away from races, professional training sites, publishing companies and original equipment manufacturers. ** While there are plenty of great web offerings out there...and runnersWall will be assisting runners with finding them.... the primary purpose of runnersWall is to give runners a free form viral community that they will be building.... from the ground up. This is a national site...with the opportunity to bring together thoughts and ideas, stories and memories in a truly unique manner.... so I encourage all Runners and their Family Members to sign up and start providing content. While there are plenty of outlets within the Internet for Runners/Racers to post to Blogs, Forums, Feedback Surveys etc... One aspect that runnersWall is offering is the opportunity to give Family members something to do on race day...and that is post stories, pictures and video content...while a race is going on... which at events that Robi is announcing at...can then be shared with the larger live audience... There will special guests joining the site on a weekly basis, special contests, surveys, Race Directors posting comments etc..etc... It's an experiment.... how big will the community get...how much content will get posted....what will the look, feel and function of the site be in 6 months to a Year..... only time will tell... Go to runnerswall.com and findout...be a part of the story....and share your story with the World.

Messages From The Front

Las Vegas- This years Las Vegas Marathon marked the first time that an American Marathon provided a non Radio Station or TV station live web cast simulcast of a major international Marathon. That alone...all 9 hours of live streaming is something to talking about...or maybe reflect over is a better term.
What made the live simulcast (web cast was direct feed from live public address system) truly unique was a interactive component brought forward by the broadcasts producer Rob Powers. In essence what Powers pulled off was a on line community message center whereby Armed Forces members were encourage to send messages to loved ones...running in the event.
With the assistance of the Las Vegas Marathon organizing committee under the leadership of Terry Collier, Executive Race Director, Powers was allowed to have the events webmaster create links for both the live broadcast and auto fill email forms directly on the events main web page. From there Troops sent messages which auto routed directly to Powers' email account. " I thought if we ended up with 40-60 messages the program would be a success....that and the aircard on my laptop (which was driving the web cast from the announcers stages) not dieing" said Rob "In the end we had over 300 messages come in with around 200 of them coming in on race day...during the race." he added.
The overwhelming success of this program has showed Powers and others that live race day connectivity beyond the existing results oriented text messaging, live web results updates is very real. Plan are already underway for Powers to lay this program down at dozens of major running events in 2009. For more information go to: www.RobPowersAnnouncing.com