The Racing Geek

The following is a post I wrote for the YRB blog. My readers get the bonus YouTube footage directly embedded on the page

A few weeks ago when the research community was looking at CHI, Formula 1 racing fans were looking at Germany to watch a very different event. Nick Heidfeld was driving a F1 car around the famed Nürburgring-Nordschleife circuit in Germany. “The Green Hell” as it is popularly known is one of the toughest race tracks on the planet and last hosted an F1 race back in 1976 when Niki Lauda’ near fatal crash put an end to F1 at the track. It has since been used only for sports car racing and also as a public access race track. On April 28, BMW organized a special event where several of their racing cars would be driven around the ring including 3 laps in their 2006 BMW F1 car. The event had F1 fans all over the world speculating about possible laptimes and thousands showed up to watch the event live.

At this point you are probably wondering what this has to do with YRB. The answer is media: the very first images and videos of the event came from Flickr and YouTube. This is not new to the world of journalism, public citizens have been scooping the press for years. With the rise of the Internet, bloggers have started breaking stories and are often authorities on specific topics. However this event was a bit different because it was specifically conceived of as a public relations opportunity. The BMW PR machine had been hyping the event for weeks and had a full team there to capture the event in its full glory. Within 24 hours of the event they released a slickly edited video showing the highlights around the lap. It included onboard footage, helicopter shots and even video from chase cars. Despite all the effort and the fairly quick turnaround time, the corporate PR machine was beaten by a handful of people with cheap camcorders and Internet access. Not only was the fan media the first to be available, it also showed many things that the official video did not. You could see things like the size of the crowd, the sound of a distant F1 engine, the wait for the car to go past, there were even a few shots of the camera car.

This kind of situation leaves the consumer with an interesting choice: On one hand you have the quick and dirty fan media which is immediately available and on the other hand there is the better edited professional media which is available with some delay but usually more comprehensive. The consumer now have to decide which source they want their information from and that will depend on the topic and its time sensitivity. This choice is going to become even harder in the future as fans start editing their media more and the professionals speed up their editing process. I believe that in the end trust and authority will become the deciding factor – all else being equal users will choose the source that they trust the most.

At YRB we are very interested in both sources of media and are studying how people collect, consume, share and remix media. We don’t know what media sources will “win” but we do know that this is a very interesting time for research.

Photo by peve.de.

Official BMW video

Fan Videos

[tags]media, sharing, F1, formula 1, Nürburgring, video[/tags]