I’m really excited to finally be done with this, the third version of Velocity. We have been working on it for the past six months and of course we have a long list of refinements we’d still like to make, if you have any ideas let me know. Soon we will be opening up franchises. The biggest change is the many places where the user is invited to contribute.

Dan jokes about being “lazy”, but everyone know the best (and sometimes worst) thing about this site, and all other small community sites like it, is that when the users contribute, collectively a more complete story can be told. That “laziness” is the essence of the Web 2.0 experience, remember your dad yelling at Cronkite, that’s the essence of 1.0 media.

Also we now will track IPs on anonymous posts, so you can still do it but if you really cross the line we have a good head start on finding you, it’s the best compromise we could come up with for now.

If we want this web site to continue to serve this community everyone will have to pitch in, we can’t expect a couple guys to cover everything indefinitely, that was never our idea, we just wanted to get the ball rolling. We are trying to break the barrier between content reader and content provider, so everyone is fully participating.

I can’t wait to see how everyone decorates their little piece of the new site, I look forward to reading more articles and blogs by our users, we have so many talented writers and photogs in NYC.

More new features:

All submitted articles will be checked over to make sure they are appropriate and then put live on the site with a link to the authors MyVelocity page

Local teams, we have instituted a form that each team leader can use to list his or her team as well as update the page with news items, including links to the teams site as well as the teams sponsors site. Right now we have the teams up in there old generic “article” state but in the upcoming months we would like the teams to replace the old version with the new format.

Local rides here to we have a few old article on rides but we hope to build a full database of local rides with pertinent information.

Local Races Is a section we have had a few requests for, in essence its a listing of all the local races so that newer racers can preview the courses and hear what more experienced riders have to say about each race. We will have links to promoters sites and maps, accommodations and other useful information.

Local Bike Shop. Will allow individual bike shop owners and patrons to list there favorite bike shops. Her you can here what others riders have to say about the merits of each shops

Local Classified. We are really excited about the prospect of people being able to buy and sell stuff from people that are only one or two degrees of separation from if they don’t not actually know the cyclist listing the ad, and its free! Each ad will be linked to the users MyVelocity page so you can see what team they are on and other information that

Upcoming Races can be contributed by promoters and users alike to notify everyone about what events are coming soon, of corse we hope to link each one to the local races profile, that synergy!

Promotions is something we have included for those in the bike buiss who send us promotions that we dont always feel would make a story per say but as a courtesy we wanted to include a place for them to post