In additional to its numerological significance, the number 22 is also the number of ways that brands can use social media. That’s according to a comprehensive piece on Mashable by Peter Kim. His list:

1. Blogs (Johnson & Johnson, Delta Air Lines)
2. Bookmarking/Tagging (Adobe, Kodak)
3. Brand monitoring (Dell, MINI)
4. Content aggregation (Alltop, EMC)
5. Crowdsourcing/Voting (Oracle, Starbucks)
6. Discussion boards and forums (IBM, Mountain Dew)
7. Events and meetups (Molson, Pampers)
8. Mashups (Fidelity Investments, Nike)
9. Microblogging (method, Whole Foods)
10. Online video (Eukanuba, Home Depot)
11. Organization and staffing (Ford, Pepsi)
12. Outreach programs (Nokia, Yum Brands)
13. Photosharing (Rubbermaid, UK Government)
14. Podcasting (Ericsson, McDonalds)
15. Presentation sharing (CapGemini, Daimler AG)
16. Public Relations - social media releases (Avon, Intel)
17. Ratings and reviews (Loblaws, TurboTax)
18. Social networks: applications, fan pages, groups, and personalities (British Airways, Saturn)
19. Sponsorships (Coca-Cola, Whirlpool)
20. Virtual worlds (National Geographic, Toyota)
21. Widgets (Southwest Airlines, Target)
22. Wikis (Second Life, T-Mobile Sidekick)

In bold/italics are tools used on The Road Diaries campaign for SRAM. All of these have their strengths, but I’ve found photosharing to be especially effective.

Here’s a screenshot from Cyclingnews that I noticed while researching the next ROAD column.

(no, this does not mean that the bikes are put away.)

There were a lot of teams on the market for title sponsors this year. Despite the new sponsorships announced before the Tour, it looks like the first team to fold will be Roger Legeay’s Credit Agricole, according to VeloNews.

To my knowledge, they’re the only current “ASOtour” program with roots in an actual cycling club: Velo Moto Club de Paris. Check out this picture of Roger Walkowiak from 1958, their first of over 40 years as a pro team sponsored by Peugeot. Afterwards, it was Z, Gan, and Credit Agricole since 1998. Former riders include Eddy Merckx, Greg Lemond, Stephen Roche, and Chris Boardman. Thor Hushovd aside, the recent years have been a slight decline for them: 9th, 11th, and 15th in the ProTour from 2005-2007.

Most importantly, they showed a lot of class with Saul Raisin. They didn’t just honor his contract after his injury, but they really included him as part of the team until it was clear that he wasn’t going to race again.

There are some cool videos here, unfortunately not embeddable. But check out the 2001 TTT win at the Tour with Bobby Julich, Jonathan Vaughters, Thor Hushovd, Jens Voigt and Stuart O’Grady in yellow. Chris Boardman’s Merckx-beating hour record is great too.

Someone should post those on YouTube before Credit Agricole takes the team content off their website.

With the news today that Michael Rasmussen is suing Rabobank for wrongful termination, I went looking for his website to see if he had any specifics about the suit. While, it doesn’t have any recent news, it does have a listing for his vacation rental properties near Lake Garda! Check out the map:

View Larger Map

He’s also got a bike shop in the neighborhood, featuring “the t-shirt that support the real winner of the Tour de France 2007.” Sounds like a great venue for a team training camp!

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

Sea Otter doesn’t change too much from year to year. It was hard to tell if there were more riders and spectators because I was only there for the day on Friday, but the expo definitely felt bigger. Anyway, it was nice to catch up with people and I had some good meetings.

Plus, I saw this on the bathroom wall: