Six degrees of Nike+

A fun day, today. We’re trying to do a show for Scope based around the ‘six degrees of separation‘ idea, which seemed like a good idea at the time but has turned into a recurring logistical nightmare. Plus, all the subjects we’ve managed to loosely tie into the theme have resulted in us utterly failing to find precisely the right interviewee in Ireland.

I lucked out, however, with an item ostensibly about Nike+, the instrumented running shoe thing that uses an iPod as a data store and allows all sorts of cunning interactions via Nike’s website. I had hoped to interview Panic’s Cabel Sasser via Skype or similar, since his excellent review of Nike+ as a massively multiplayer online game was what got me thinking about it in this context in the first place.

Cabel, sadly, proved a tad elusive or busy (or maybe his spam filters are set to stun?). Where do you turn next? Euan, durr. Who kindly put me in touch with Bernie Goldbach, who merrily rocked up at a gym on the outskirts of Dublin today and did the honours for us. And very interesting he was too, about all manner of things including – happily, in the circumstances – Nike+.

(I’ll have more to say about Twitter anon, incidentally, given that I simply hadn’t heard of it a week ago and it’s suddenly coming at me from all directions. Ironic)

Joe the director romped through the rest of the stuff, Danann didn’t complain when we made him run a couple of kilometres, bless him, and off the crew merrily went to Galway, on the other side of the country. Tomorrow, they’re trying to get themselves introduced to a plasterer called Kenny. Run with it, it’ll make sense in the end.

First, however, they’re going to have to find a camera, since they left one in the gym. Which is, I think, the first time I’ve encountered that particular bit of stupidity. Oops.

(not as bad as it sounds, though – they have a DigiBeta with them, but for odd reasons they’re supposed to be shooting on the little Z1 they left in the gym. Durr.)

2 thoughts on “Six degrees of Nike+”

  1. Yeah, and Bernie touched on that in the interview – I’m hoping we can keep it in the piece, because while Nike+ really is quite cool, my goal was to use it as a jumping-off point for raising privacy questions, amongst other things. Bernie did a great job on this, so… fingers crossed.

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