In 1987, 5-time Tour de France winner Bernard Hinault and legendary NBA disappointment Derrick Coleman both used products that were recently released in a colorway inspired by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. For Coleman, it was the Nike Dunk sneaker. For Hinault, it was a Look bike. Here are the current versions:

More thoughts on this in my upcoming ROAD Magazine column…

via VeloNews, Sneakerfiles and SoleFresh

Mashable! has a great interview with rapper Chamillionaire about how he marketed his song “Ridin Dirty” to sell 4,000,000 ringtones and win a Grammy. He basically spells out how to promote content through social media channels and talks about why the traditional metric of album sales no longer works to measure an artist’s popularity.

I’m not a huge fan of his work, but I’ve always respected the man. He spent years selling mixtapes directly to a street-level fanbase and keeping about $10 from every CD sold, while turning down record deals that would have paid him a buck or two per sale. Here’s a clip of the interview:

…and here’s the Floyd Landis parody version:

Analysis from a web usability expert indicates that users read half the information only on web pages with 111 words or less. Then they only spend 4.4 seconds for each additional 100 words, and will read about 20% of the text on the average page. The dataset was capped at 1,250 words per page because “Pages with a huge word count are probably not ‘real’ pages anyway.” (Today’s Cyclingnews is over 2,400 words.)

I suspect that print pages are more closely read, but I don’t have any statistical basis for thinking that. If it’s true, I wonder if web reading habits are eroding how much we read on paper.

(that’s 109 words)

via ReadWriteWeb

This is a great look: bringing a short-term sponsor on board for a specific race. In this case, it’s what looks like the Italian division of a forklift company sponsoring Saunier Duval-Scott for the Giro d’Italia. As the press release points out, it’s a good sales strategy to help a sponsor get their feet wet.

But it’s also interesting conceptually - thinking of the team as a series of geo-targeted sponsorships instead of one big sponsorship. Focusing on this kind of short-term package might work well for teams that are taking that “we’re going to build our own brand without a title sponsor” approach, especially domestic teams. Since there’s no consistent national coverage (or promotion, for that matter), the attention that a team receives from outside the cycling community is clustered around specific events. So, for the weekend that cycling is a big deal in Tulsa, selling a mini-sponsorship to a local business wouldn’t be a bad idea.

via press release

Now that Toyota won’t be renewing the biggest sponsorship in domestic cycling, it will be interesting to see what happens to United Pro Cycling Team, LLC. When they launched at the end of 2005, they were talking about revolutionizing the sport by promoting the United brand (as opposed to that of their sponsor) to generate revenue through merchandising, their fan club, a bike company, and so forth. They came hard out of the gate in 2006, with J.J. Haedo winning the first stage of the inaugural Tour of California, and they’ve had some great moments since, like Dom Rollin’s stage win this year. They’ve run a well-marketed, winning program, so you can’t say that they’ve been a bust. But they haven’t met their own expectations, either.

At least initially, their sponsorship prices were based on some lofty projections. At Interbike in 2005, Kurt Stockton and I had a meeting with a clothing company right after United’s team owner Sean Tucker met with them. When our meeting started, the first thing we heard from the company was, “That guy just asked us for more pieces as part of the sponsorship than we sold in North America this year.”

I won’t guess at how well their jerseys have sold, other than to say that I’ve never seen one not on a team member. United Bicycles flopped amid rumors that sales were in the single digits. The 25,000 registered fans mentioned in the release is 25,000 more than most teams, but a fraction of the six-figure membership that Sean originally envisioned.

Not to knock Sean - he’s run a good race team and done a solid job of building the United brand (thankfully dropping the faceless rider who graced the original logo); I just think he bumped up against a lower ceiling than he anticipated. Looking at the United program, it’s not so differentiated from other domestic teams but an attractive sponsorship property nonetheless.

Tuesday’s episode of Bob Costas’ “Costas Now” show on HBO featured a round-table discussion with Costas, old-school sportwriter Buzz Bissinger, NFL player Braylon Edwards, and Will Leitch, founder of Deadspin, a major sports blog. Bissinger pretty much went crazy and attacked blogs as sandboxes for crass, uninformed idiots - which they often are. You can watch the segment here. He starts ranting at about the 14:05 mark.

The underlying premise was that blogs are killing the craft of traditional sports journalism, which of course scares traditional sports journalists like Bissinger and Costas. That premise is correct to a large extent, but it misses another major factor: that the athletes themselves will play a role in the demise of the sportswriter by using those same tools to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of the information and talk directly to fans.

Here’s an example:

Earlier this year, there was a big to-do about how the Red Sox players were threatening to boycott their Opening Day games in Japan unless the team’s clubhouse staff received the same $40,000 bonus promised to the players. Every sports media outlet covered the story, but no reporter could possibly explain the players’ perspective as well as Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling did in this blog entry.

If they write like that, athletes will do more than pictures of Matt Leinart partying to make sportswriters obsolete .