People are constantly telling me how they want to write for Yobeat. Usually I will pass them off to Nick who is either best or worst editor ever, and we never hear from them again. But when Timbro, who is known as “the funny one”in our circle, started pitching ideas to me, I decided to manage him myself. Today he made his YoBeat debut with a great interview with (recently laid off) snowboard designer, Dave Appel.

But this weekend the real Timbro saga will begin. Inspired by Best Week Ever, it’s going to be hilarious and to give you a taste of what to expect, here is the photo shoot that went down for it. When you have three photographers in a room, things can get fun. First the shot.

Jared managed to catch me getting the shot.

And Zimmerman got the shot of the shot of the shot on his iphone. Amazing.

I went snowboarding on Friday and had an epifany of sorts. It could have just been that warm, sunny days in the middle of January bring out the kooks, but most snowboarders are not cool. Now that I am focusing a bit more energy on YoBeat I want to figure out how to make it unique, but also have mass appeal. As it stands right now we are failing miserably.

It seems like you have two options in something such as the snowboard media: Appeal to the core while alienating the masses, or appeal to the masses and alienate the core. Obviously it seems the later would be more appealing in a business model (numbers sell ads!) but the core are the ones who are buying new product every year and driving the trends. And it can definitely be argued that the starter jacket set aren’t ever going to read the magazines anyway.

But thanks to the endless possibilities of the Internet some variation in media is starting to appear. The first site that comes to mind is Shayboarder. While most of the “cool kids” I know don’t really appreciate what Shay is doing (I mean she doesn’t even care about being cool!) she is doing a lot of things right. Great content for beginners, and she is covering snowboarding because she truly loves it and her passion exudes from every post. I think the general public, who only snowboard because they enjoy it (and are mostly beginners), really appreciate that about her site. And it seems like she has a following to show for it.

But with YoBeat we’ve definitely taken the opposite approach and now I am sitting here thinking, what the hell am I doing? Don’t get me wrong, traffic is good and click through rates are even better, but growth potential seems limited because we are appealing to about 2% of snowboarders (at least according to my exhaustive research  of riding on Friday.)

I am sure I am not the first, or the last, person to debate this, but now that the Internet is completely changing things, maybe it’s worth reconsidering things.  I enjoying reading YoBeat and it seems other people do to, so we’ll probably stay the course, but who knows…Just some food for thought I guess.

Our media kit is coming along (ok, not really) but when it’s done it’s going to be awesome!

Enough about that. These pictures of Jeff were taken with my new point and shoot, the Panasonic Lumix FX37. Pretty sick (the camera, not my skills.)

One of my fun weekly tasks with Alliance Wakeskate is to update our Myspace profile with the Monday Cover of the week. It’s basically the only time I go on Myspace anymore because it is so yesterday in the world of (anti)social networking. They obviously know that and are attempting to combat it with tons of new features. Which brings me to my point.

Today when I signed on to upload the photo, I found a completely new flash-based photo upload system showing all the random crap on my desktop. Guess what. It didn’t work. I had to go back to the old upload system, still flash based, but a little less fancy. Just another piece of straw on the camel’s back of why I hate flash.

I have the same problem with wordpress. Never fails when I try to use the flash-based image uploader, it gives me an error message and I have to try again with the browser uploader. This system works every time. Why they don’t just have you use the browser uploader in the first place is a mystery to me. I think it’s all part of flash designers master plan to stay employed.

My friend Dave Lehl just relaunched his photography website and wrote asking me to link to YoBeat. I agreed and then went to the site and found a flash site. After a few minutes of trying to select images, I gave up and told Dave to just send me a few of his favorites. I explained I found his site frustrating to navigate, which he obviously disagreed with. But aside from the slow load time, the incompatibility with search engines and iphones and its difficulty to alter, my real problem with flash is just this. Flash sites generally are built to be navigated one way. And while this navigation may be intuitive to the people who design and build them, not everyone uses the internet the same way. So while the site seems super easy to navigate to one person, it’s a clusterfuck to another.

Of course flash designers will disagree, but they are trying to stay employed so I can’t really blame them. But this is my opinion and I am not the only one who feels this way…In fact I feel like boardistan really said it best.

Somehow I got on Nike 6.0’s media list. Well actually I know exactly how. When they were just starting out, someone emailed YoBeat and asked for our address. I have been getting random packages ever since.

It’s a good list to be on, as special overnight deliveries have included a rad screen printed poster, a tube of orange shoe laces surrounding an actual pair of shoes, and other rad, random stuff. It’s usually artsy enough that you keep it around, and you frequently see the pieces on display at the offices of magazines and the like. Basically, it makes me feel cool and legitimate to receive these items.

However the latest Nike 6.0 Holiday trinket leaves something to be desired. A few days ago a bottle of hot sauce with a Nike 6.0 label  showed up, wrapped in a fed ex envelope. The concept was actually pretty good, instead of Tapatio it said Tapa6.0 and has a funny kids face (probably someone on the team) photoshopped over the usual senor…Where this one fails is the execution. The photoshop job is poor. The label is just printed on a regular ink jet printer and you can see the glue from where they took the old label off. I mean, thanks for the hot sauce, but compared to past mailings, this is a true testament to the ecomony. Especially when you take into account the chocolate shoe I got last year!

I hate to doom and gloom about the economy, and honestly, I feel like a lot of people are using it as an excuse. But I did find this to be a funny example of how bad things may be. The best way I found to combat it is to not think about it. Going snowboarding is a great way to do that. Here’s a write up of today’s mission on Snowboarder.com