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Cycle Oregon and Social Media

Now there are more ways than ever to stay connected.

For 2010, Cycle Oregon is taking the plunge into the wonderful world of social media to provide you with new ways to connect with fellow riders and share the experience with friends and family. These include:

A Facebook Fan Page
A flickr photo group
A YouTube Channel
A MapMyRide Training Group

The Facebook fan page will be used to provide news, training tips, information on some of the towns we’ll visit and links to a host of additional resources that will help you make the most of the season and beyond. Those of you who are already active on Facebook – and there are a lot of you – are encouraged to add your own thoughts, comments, links, snapshots and insights. Even if you don’t have a Facebook account, you can still view the page, and we encouraged you to check it out.

Have you ever noticed that it’s sometimes hard to remember all those individual moments of beauty and bucolic splendor you encountered during Cycle Oregon? Do you ever wish you had stopped to take more pictures? Do you ever wish you could see all those great shots that other riders are taking? We’ve created a place on flickr, the world’s most popular photo-sharing site, where everyone can upload their images for their fellow riders to enjoy. You do need to be a member of flickr to post photos, but, like Facebook, anyone can view the page. Best of all, basic flickr memberships are free. If you’ve got some good pictures from previous years, please post them. Be sure to tag your images by year so the photo pool is easy to search.

The Cycle Oregon YouTube channel has a few videos from previous years, and our goal is to add to the collection after the Weekend and Week rides. If you’ve made videos of Cycle Oregon you’d like to share, please e-mail us at info@cycleoregon.com.

For those who like to take a more scientific approach to training, we’ve set up a group on MapMyRide.com just for you. There you can create training goals, log your progress, share maps of your favorite training routes and download maps or GPS files of rides that others have contributed. Data-heads and those with GPS cycling computers or even iPhones will find this site a particularly compelling place to visit and celebrate your inner geek.

Over the next few months, we’ll be providing tutorials on this blog to help newcomers get more acquainted with these sites. In the meantime, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please let us know. Just don’t forget to step away from your computer from time to time to actually train!

Finally, if any of you have the urge to provide a guest post to this blog, you are welcome to do so. Just email us at info@cycleoregon.com.

We realize that some people just aren’t into social media, and that’s OK too. If it just isn’t your thing, fear not. We will continue sending the newsletter and important updates by e-mail.


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