A few weeks ago, I decided to prepare and can my own pickles for the first time. Without an expert canner to guide me, I obsessively read up on the dos and don’ts of pickling and canning.

I found the process to be quite easy and enjoyable, as long as I adhered to the steps. Back in the office, I triumphantly told Jonathan of my success, and he said, “there must be some sort of connection between pickling and content strategy.”

There is. And here they are—what preparing pickles can teach content writers:

1. Do your prep work. My grandmother was an excellent pickle-maker, and her secret weapon to ensure delicious and crunchy pickles is an ice bath. Before you even get started on the pickling, you need to soak the sliced cucumbers in ice for at least three hours. You can’t rush this part of the process, even if it does eat up most of your Saturday afternoon.

Before you start writing, you need to put in the time and do the essential research that will inform your writing. Thoroughly read your background sources, and spend the time referencing additional sources that will strengthen your piece. You want to put in this time BEFORE you get going—if you don’t, you might end up with a less-than-appetizing finished product. No one likes soggy pickles, and no one likes less-than-compelling content.

2. Don’t forget to wear your gloves. Having decided that my pickles should be both hot and sweet, I spent the better part of an hour carefully slicing countless jalapeño and poblano peppers. I was more careless than careful, and the oils from the peppers seeped into the pores on my hands, and painfully burned for the rest of the afternoon.

When writing potentially hazardous content, be sure to wear gloves. If you don’t, you might continue to feel the pain even after the piece is complete.

3. Sterilize. If you don’t wash, dry and sterilize your mason jars and lids, you could end up with poisonous pickles.

Same goes for content writing: you want to make sure that your piece is germ-free, clean and entirely your own content. Even the slightest bit of unwanted substance puts the entire jar at risk.

4. Listen for the ‘pop.’ When your mason jars are packed full of pickles-to-be, you place the sealed jars in a hot water bath and boil for 10 minutes to process.

After carefully removing the jars from the hot water with a pair of tongs, they’ll begin to cool. Over the next hour or so, you’ll hear a loud ‘pop’—which means that the jars are air-tight, and the seals have taken properly.

Before your draft becomes a completed piece, you need to make sure that it ‘pops’ as well. Read the piece aloud. Does it have that Je ne sais quoi that makes the article shine, or do you need to take a step back and re-process?

5. Store in a cool, dark place. Being a pickler requires patience. After you have canned the pickles, you need to let the jars sit for at least two weeks to let the spices infuse the cucumbers. You could eat them earlier, but they probably wouldn’t taste much like—or nearly as good as—properly aged pickles.

Writers rarely have the luxury of sitting on a piece for an extended period of time. Unless you’re on a tight deadline, do allow any time you can spare apart from your writing. Be patient. Walk away. Sleep on it and revisit in the morning with a clear head. You’ll see something that you didn’t before.

Your pickles (and your content) will thank you.

—Wendy Joan

(Jalepeno photo by Beau B, mason jar photo by Brown Eyed Bombshell, Pickle photo by Wendy Joan)

You’re making your readers angry. Stop it.

Content strategists often get very wrapped up in the concrete deliverables of the content creation and production process, and that’s understandable, because they are the sorts of things that are easy to make into line items in a proposal budget. If there is a sexy part of content strategy, it’s content creation and delivery.

But the final piece of the content strategy puzzle is often the part that gets the least thought and fewest resources once the sexy part of a project is “completed.” Of course we are talking about site maintenance, one aspect of content governance.

In the olden days, many sites often had a “contact webmaster” link that would often open an new email, or send you to some onerous form, or worst of all, send you to an FAQ page that had the sorts of questions that no one had ever or would ever ask.

Even if you were able to send a message about your problem, the chance of getting any sort of meaningful reply was vanishingly small, if you received a reply at all (That’s right, I’m talking to you, Newsvine. You’ve never responded to TWO queries about my account. But hey, I’m just one more ANGRY user who no longer partakes of your product.)

But all those user inquiries do go somewhere (even if it’s an unmonitored mailbox or some sort of auto-reply bot), and how those emails are handled is going to go a long way toward making your users happy. Anytime you can get a kind human response out of a computer means a lot to the puzzled and frustrated human on the other end.

Here are several tips on how to be the best website manager you can be:

1.    Know thy CMS. Chances are if you are the one checking the system admin inbox you are also the person updating the content on a regular basis. If you were really lucky, you got to participate in the design and beta testing of the site, so you’ll have fixed many of the UX flaws that might have made your visitors angry. But, inevitably, there were items that got pushed to “YourSite 2.0” and some wonky features that got left “as is” because no one wanted to go to the trouble/expense of fixing them, rationalizing that, “people would figure them out.” Regardless of how you ended up where you are (and how bleak that landscape might be), learn your platform inside and out. Know how the content needs to be tweaked in the back end so it looks and performs its best on the front end. Whether you’re using Joomla, Umbraco, or, God forbid, RedDot, you must become one with your CMS.
2.    Be a problem solver. The vast majority of people aren’t writing in to pay you a compliment. They have an issue. Give them an answer. And if you can’t give them an answer, or if you know the answer to their question isn’t going to make them any happier, apologize, sincerely.
3.    Take accountability to the next level. If you see the same issue cropping up over and over again, don’t blame the users; take a hard look at your site and fix what you need to in order to create a better and less frustrating user experience.
4.    Become an expert in the site’s subject matter. If you are running a site about cars, you better know your bias-plys from your radials. This is going to make your job easier in the long run and is going to make the provision of excellent customer service faster and more reflexive.
5.   Be nice. You will be asked stupid questions and you will be asked them over and over again. It may be the 10,000th time you’ve been asked something, but to the person on the other end, it may be their first experience with your site. Make sure it’s not their last.
(And for the truly off-the-wall questions, have a sense of humor. Years ago, while working at a ski resort in Colorado, questions like, “At what altitude do the deer turn into elk?” and “When it gets really busy, do you use both side of the chairlift?” were commonplace. Roll with it.)
6.    Be open to new ideas. You will receive a lot of suggestions about how to improve your site. Some of them will actually be good. Politely thank everyone and quietly implement the best ideas.
7.    Know when to escalate. Some people will be asking about your products and services. You should consider this an epic fail for your site and something that rates pushing the panic button if it happens too often. If people are contacting the webmaster and asking how to buy your products, you have a huge UX problem.

Most of what you need to know about being a website manager you learned in kindergarten. Be kind, helpful and patient. Listen. Share your knowledge. This is all basic stuff, but considering how rare it is to encounter it in the wild, it certainly deserves another mention.

—Jonathan
@bentpiton

Photo of The Minotaur and The Hare by Jim Linwood

This past weekend, I undertook the laborious task of sorting through stacks of The New York Times from 2009 and late 2008. From those countless newspapers, I cut out 21 stories, and whittled down the list to bring you what I consider the best of the best stories I read over my morning coffee this past year.

In Booming Gulf, Some Arab Women Find Freedom in the Skies

By Katherine Zoepf, December 21, 2008

Rania Abou Youssef, 26, a flight attendant for the Dubai-based airline, Emirates, said that when she went home to Alexandria, Egypt, her female cousins treated her like a heroine. ‘I’ve been doing this for four years,’ she said, ‘and still they’re always asking, ‘Where did you go and what was it like and where are the photographs?’

In a journalistic sea of black burqa news reporting, a refreshing look into the profession of choice for young, working women in the Persian Gulf—flight attendants.

Ex-Detainee of U.S. Describes a 6-Year Ordeal

By Jane Perlez, Raymond Bonner and Salman Masood, January 5, 2009

Mr. Iqbal said he had been beaten, tightly shackled, covered with a hood and given drugs, subjected to electric shocks and, because he denied knowing Mr. bin Laden, deprived of sleep for six months.

As the country anxiously prepared to welcome a new president (who vowed to close Guantanamo Bay within a year), The New York Times published this terrifying look into the six-year imprisonment of a Pakastani man never charged with a crime.

Iraqis Snap Up Hummers, Seeing Them as Icons of Power

By Rod Nordland, March 29, 2009

In a country with at least 20,000 Humvees and a war-weary population, who would think there would be a market for a civilian version?

An interesting look into the Baghdadi elite, and the not-so-culturally-different idea that driving an oversized SUV exudes wealth, power and confidence.

No Job and Soon No Benefits, Race to Help Son Stay Cancer Free

By Kevin Sack, April 20, 2009

‘You just feel that you’re at a loss, that you’re at your wits’ end.’ I ask myself, ‘Do I really have to lose my home to save my son’s life?’

When Danna Walker found out that she had lost her job with DHL, she was more worried about finding health insurance for her 21-year-old son who has been cancer-free for just one year, than putting food on the table.

This story made me want to send it to every member of the House and Senate, because if the Walker’s story can’t swing votes, nothing will.

You’re Name’s Not on Our List? Change It, Beijing Officials Say

By Sharon LaFraniere, April 20, 2009

The character is so rare that once people see it, Miss Ma said, they tend to remember both her and her name. That is one reason she likes it so much. That is also why the government wants her to change it.

A new law in China requires each of it’s 1.3 billion citizens to replace their handwritten identity cards with computer-readable ones, Chinese citizens with uncommon names might not have any choice but to change their names.

Another Side of Kerouac: The Dharma Bum as Sports Nut

By Charles McGrath, May 15, 2009

He collected their stats, analyzed their performances and, as a teenager, when he played most ardently, wrote about them in homemade newsletters and broadsides. He even covered financial news and imaginary contract disputes.

Did Jack Kerouac invent fantasy sports? Doubtful, but the writer kept a secret pastime that none of his Beat counterparts had ever heard about: he “obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention.”

Made in India, But Published In New Haven

By Peter Applebome, May 31, 2009

Alert readers of The New Haven Advocate and its sister publications in Hartford and Fairfield County may have noticed a consistency among the bylines in its newest issue: Annie Rani, Dev Das, Nidhi Sharma, Asmi Rana, Neha Bhayana, Shreya Sanghani, Vijeta Bhatia and others.

Peter Applebome’s “Our Town” column on outsourcing local journalism was the catalyst for a previous Eat Media Blog post. An interesting—albeit depressing—look at how the global job pool might very well be eliminating the need for local, on the ground reporters.

E. Coli Path Shows Flaw in Beef Inspection

By Michael Moss, October 3, 2009

Ground beef is not a completely safe product. . .

This article has my pick for the most-informed scare tactic report of the year. As a self-disclosed vegetarian, countless meat-eaters brought up this article to me, vowing to never eat ground beef (or, at least, non-organic ground beef) again.

—Wendy Joan

(Writer’s note: All headlines mentioned in this article are from The New York Times’ print edition. Photo by fraley_tera)

Is it ever OK to lie with your content?

Quick answer: Yes, but only if you are very good. More on what “good” means in a second.

Back in July, spy photos and brief video surfaced on several automobile enthusiast websites. Depicted was a prototype Porsche station wagon, known in automotive parlance as a shooting brake.

The photos and video caused a sensation and spread throughout the enthusiast community, driving loads of comments on blogs and rampant speculation as to when the boys from Zuffenhausen were going to release the official car to the public. The Frankfurt Auto Show? Tokyo? People wanted to know.

The questions continued to pour in. Did this mean Porsche was abandoning it’s oft-maligned SUV, the Cayenne? Was this new shooting brake, clearly based on the entry-level Cayman, going to be Porsche’s only venture into the world of station wagons? Was Porsche going Volvo on the world, and completing its sellout?

The company had nothing to say. And if the voices clamoring in the blogosphere had calmed down for just a minute, they might have heard the faint sound of snickering.

As it turned out, Porsche’s shooting brake was a fake. The whole thing was dreamed up by the then soon-to-be-unemployed staff of Top Gear America as a parting gift to the show’s many fans.

Most people hate being duped, but in this case, there was no backlash against the show. Accumulate enough goodwill in a community and you will be forgiven the occasional whoopee cushion on the chair.

If you were inspired by the Top Gear crew’s antics and are determined to set the world afire with your own tall tale, here are a few things to keep in mind if you want to be good and do it right..

1. Execute. The only way you have even half a chance is to come up with something clever and then make it sing. It ain’t going to work if people don’t believe it.

2. Don’t mess with people’s emotions in a negative way. I think we can all agree that the Balloon Boy fiasco—originally dreamed up as a publicity stunt—managed to generate only the wrong kind of attention once the truth came out. Nothing that ends with a criminal investigation is worth it.

3. Enhance your cool. Some people don’t react well to being pranked. There isn’t much you can do about this, but you are required to have a sense of humor when dealing with those who don’t.

4. Don’t forget your audience. The Top Gear stunt worked well because the automobile enthusiast community is used to manufacturers trying to hide new models (often in plain sight) and used to manufacturers building show cars that never make it to production. Plus, these are enthusiasts; they love to talk about cars, the good, the bad and the ugly.

5. Be prepared for blowback. Some people, bless their gullible hearts, won’t understand the joke and may begin acting on some of the falsehoods you’ve laid out. Years ago, I wrote a newspaper column, published on April 1, which stated that the legislature had just passed a law changing Daylight Savings Time to mean a two-hour forward leap instead of the customary one. Despite naming my fictitious governor’s press secretary Jacques Strap and despite reminding readers to look carefully at the dateline of the newspaper, we were deluged with calls wondering when this was taking place. Exercise your power judiciously.

—Jonathan
(@bentpiton)

It has never been easier to gather audio. Free editing programs (like Audacity) and recording device applications for many cell phones make it possible for anyone to gather audio without additional financial obligations. For many print writers, the transition to audio storytelling is intuitive: at the very core, it’s your story, narrated by your voice, with added sound to set the scene.

Here are a few tips to get you started:

Know your device because if you don’t, you’re not going to have any audio to edit. Before you start formal recording, it’s important to spend some quality time with your device, getting to know its wants and needs. Will your phone interfere with your recording? How often does your recorder need its batteries changed? Will a light wind ruin an on-the-street interview?

Be familiar with the sounds that your recorder picks up—some are more forgiving than others when it comes to throat clearing, distant traffic and air conditioners. When it comes to unnecessary noise, it’s more effective to prevent it the field rather than editing it out later.

Travel Light and Arrive Early. Resist the urge to overpack and keep your gear to a minimum; it makes you much more accessible to the people you’re interviewing. I can get by with my recorder, a pair of headphones for checking levels and a spare set of batteries.

If you’re covering an event, arrive early to collect ambient noise of guests arriving—in a pinch, ambient sound makes for a great way to set the scene or transition from one idea to the next.

Talk to Everyone in the Room. If you’re at an event, like a rally, town hall meeting, etc.—it’s just as important to gather interviews from the event-goers as it is to record the speeches from the event. Talk to attendees before and after the event, and catch up with the speakers for their impressions. When you’re in the field, you’re not entirely sure what your story is yet, so it’s best to gather as much information as you might need for your story to take form back at your desk.

Organize Your Audio Files ASAP. As soon you’re back in the office, download your audio and label your files. Believe me, you’ll forget. Give everything a listen through to discover all the details you missed while navigating through the field, get a feel for your content and start putting a story together!

Happy recording,
—Wendy Joan

For the last four weeks of so, I’ve been practicing a good writing habit. As soon as I get into the office, before I check my emails or agenda for the day, I write for ten whole minutes.

Week one was automatic writing. Lately, I’ve been assigning myself little writing assignments for my ten minutes.

This morning, nearly fresh out of ideas, I turned to Google for a writing prompt. I had NO IDEA how unhelpful the results would be. Here is a sprinkling of the most appalling and least helpful:

1.    Poking fun at you, a relative gives you a dubious award at a family picnic. In a twist, you accept the award and give a short speech. Write the scene.

2.    You are running for president of the writing community. What promises do you make to swing voters in your direction?

3.    When was the last time you saw a coaster? What meaning of the word ‘coaster’ inspires the best memory for you?

While these prompts might meet with some success at a senior center writing seminar, content writers need more meat, more action. If we’re going to spend time writing for ourselves, before we start a day of more writing, certainly we can find a more provocative muse than a coaster, or the prospect of being president of the writing community.

Here’s a prompt from the notebook of yours truly, inspired by my recent fascination with historical fiction.

•    Choose a story from a news source of your choice. (Sparse, AP wire or police blotter stories work the best for me.) Write a scene based on the characters involved in the news story, either leading up to the main event of the story or explaining what happens after the news story comes out.

Do you set aside time to write for yourself? What do you do to get your wheels turning?

—Wendy Joan

Bookmark hell from ian alexander on Vimeo.

Learn the all the notes. Sing all the songs

Whistle While You Work

Business goals, gap analysis and taxonomy definitions are useful tools for determining what should be said where. And the different tactical delivery methods: (video, how-to article, mobile, info-graphics, social media) dramatically affect the presentation and context of the content,  helping us determine the how. Combined with budgets, calendars, SEO, style guides and a host of other details, Content Strategy attempts to responsibly create quality content and put it where it is most appropriate, in the most viable format. What song we whistle while we are doing it is inconsequential, as long as it is in tune with rest of the symphony.

Content Strategy Mimids

Most everyone can recognize the song of the Blue jay, Seagull or (fill in your regional bird). Each bird’s song is distinctive and helps them mate, protect, and communicate. But Mimids, the family of birds that includes mockingbirds, are one of the few birds that can mimic the sounds of other animals, including other birds. This is their most powerful tool and the foundation of how they survive.

Content Strategy, a broadly under-defined term, fits rather well into the family of Mimidae (Mimids). Our tools and roles are centered on our ability to mimic, understand and interconnect many different practices. Sometimes due to our ability to whistle different tunes, we are viewed as extra, unnecessary or covered under the punch list of another practice. When this is true it is usually due to poor project management or unsatisfactory vendor assessment/selection.

Great content strategists are like that friend you have who is just as comfortable (and charming) discussing Renaissance art at an Upper West Side gathering as they are graffiti in a Brooklyn rail yard. They are the kind of people who, years after knowing them, you realize they speak Swahili and went to Rice on a basketball scholarship. They are multi-faced, fascinated and fascinating. They are happily many sides of many coins and their ability to sing the appropriate song at the appropriate time, without sticking to a style, or favorite key, is what makes them valuable.

In the Content Strategy (CS) world there are four basic families:

The Mimid Families

Content Strategy Technologists—are perfect for projects that are CMS heavy (assessments, migrations, template setups), or require medium-to-heavy code/data base lifting or understanding in order to bring a project to fruition. The technologists are usually technical project managers or coders who understand that technology that just pushes numbers around is called a calculator. And calculators aren’t all that engaging to read on a Sunday.

Content Strategy Editorialists—are perfect for projects that require managing and organizing content at the nuts and bolts level (content inventory, style guide creation, editorial calendaring and curation.) These folks are writers at heart but stole away from the Underwood years ago and realized that content needs technology. *See bankrupt magazines and newspapers.

Content Strategy UX/IA’ers—are perfect for projects that require managing and organizing content at both the macro and micro level (gap analysis, wire-frames, content identification). Content Strategists with IA/UX leanings are a powerful blend of logic, information architecture understanding and have a particularly valuable focus on the space where content meets and becomes information. Go Team OmniGraffle!

Content Strategy Designers—are perfect for projects that require managing and organizing content when design is a key element of how and why the information is being presented to the user. There are some designers who simply copy the text the copywriter gave them from WordPad to Photoshop and make it pretty. There are others who ask questions like “why are we saying this on this screen.” Wireframes, information architecture and even some front-end coding are tools in their belt. These people usually have great haircuts.

Detailing these four types of Content Strategists is not meant as a selective quadfurcation but more as a glossary of the broad skill-set under the Content Strategy umbrella. And while each of the above may have leanings towards one strength, be it Design, UX/IA, Editorial or Technology, the practice itself hinges on the practitioner’s ability to understand all the notes and know when to sing which song, when to listen and when to hit shuffle.

—Ian

It’s a simple question really—what is your digital footprint?

The obvious first step most people would take would be to consult one of the mainstream search engines.

So sure, you can Google yourself, or if you are feeling particularly jaunty, give Bing a whirl.

Metasearch engines like Dogpile and Mamma can give a broader view, sometimes pulling in more obscure results.

Semantic search is the next step. Kosmix, Clusty and Primal Fusion are just three examples of this new way to search the web.

But if you want elegance and simplicity in the answer to our simple question, there is only one place to turn, Personas, an MIT-based project that began as an art installation.

The homepage is lovely, and, until a few days ago, looked like this:

But, this week, some explanatory text was added:

I have an uncommon last name, Maziarz, so if I do a web search on myself, the results are pretty focused, so I was interested to see what Personas came up with. I ran the search five times, and, interestingly, got five different answers.

The first, and my favorite, due to the outsized presence of the word “illegal,” is below:

I’m not sure where the “fashion” or the “religion” bars come from, but the rest were at least plausible. The other four times I ran the search, “news” continued to dominate (no surprise after 10 years in the newspaper biz), but illegal disappeared altogether and the other fat and thin bars varied.

As the Personas homepage notes, data mining techniques are growing more sophisticated by the day, meaning that even the most faint parts of your digital footprint are being scanned, collated and analyzed by government and corporate entities.

How does the web see you?

—Jonathan

@bentpiton

If you want great content, nothing beats a compelling story.

It’s the first rest day of the 2009 Tour de France cycling race and in the absence of having to follow live updates from the roads of Gaul today, let’s look at nine elements of great storytelling as illustrated by this year’s Tour.

1. A rich backstory. This year’s iteration of the Tour has something that has been sorely lacking for the past few years: a compelling backstory. The backstory is one that’s as old as human civilization: the conflict between the power and vitality of youth versus the wisdom and experience of age.
2. A young brash upstart. 2007 Tour de France champion Alberto Contador, known as “El Pistolero,” (The best cyclists get cool nicknames, unless they already have a Saturday matinee idol name, like Lance Armstrong.) was the heavy favorite coming in to the race. Not only was he riding for the strongest team, Astana, but he has proven himself to be one of the best climbers in cycling, winning the trifecta of cycling’s grand tours—Spain, Italy and France—already in his young career.
3. The old lion, back for one more shot at the title. Seven-time Tour champion Lance Armstrong stunned the cycling world last fall when he announced he was returning to competitive racing and planned to compete in the Tour de France, cycling’s biggest race. Armstrong, who spent more time in the tabloids than on his bike in the past few years, said he was mainly coming back to draw attention to his Lance Armstrong Foundation , one of the premier cancer education and support resources, but most pundits speculated that if Armstrong was going to race, he was going to race to win.
4. A grueling test. The Grande Boucle, as it’s known in France, is cycling’s most demanding test. Three weeks. Thousands of kilometers in the saddle. Tens of thousands of feet of climbing. Nowhere to hide. This year’s course is somewhat peculiar for several reasons.  The team time trial was back, but the individual time trials are short and technical. The race’s two forays into alpine territory feature only three summit finishes and one of the Tour’s legendary obstacles, the Col du Tourmalet, was placed in the middle of stage, reducing its race impact to nil.
5. A shot across the bow. In the race’s only summit finish in the Pyrenees, into the ski station at Arcalis in Andorra, a select group of contenders rode together toward the summit until Contador, apparently not acting on team orders, attacked the field and rode away alone toward the finish. This show of strength added fuel to the fires of discord between Armstrong and Contador and indicated a possible split in the team.
6. The French. Can you minimize the fact that this race is taking place in France? No way. The French love a good story and they love to be right in the middle of it. After a love/hate relationship with Armstrong while he was winning the Tour, the French have jumped on the Lance bandwagon this July. As Velo News editor-at-large John Wilcockson (@johnwilcockson) noted last week, “The French love an underdog—and old dogs.”
7. An unwritten code of conduct. When Contador took off on the road to Arcalis, Armstrong was bound by the part of the cycling code that does not allow you to attack a teammate once he goes up the road alone.  Armstrong instead stayed back to mark the other contenders, none of whom tried to follow Contador. Contador is bound by the same code (of course, they are more like guidelines than actual rules) and has stated that he won’t follow an attacking Armstrong when the race hits the Alps later this week.
8. A near insurmountable obstacle. What happens in the Alps may not even matter because of what stands in the way of riders on the penultimate day of the Tour. Two words that strike fear in the heart of every cyclist: Mont Ventoux. A summit finish on the “Giant of Provence” will likely decide who will ride into Paris the next day wearing the race leader’s yellow jersey.
9. Wild cards. Armstrong and Contador are not the only world-class cyclists competing in the Tour this summer. In addition to two other potential podium finishers on the Astana team (Levi Leipheimer and Andreas Kloden), 2008 TdF winner Carlos Sastre, two-time runner up Cadel Evans and others lurk, waiting for an opening.

Can Lance Armstrong beat back Contador’s challenge and the sands of time to win an eighth Tour?  Coming back to “win one more” rarely succeeds, but Armstrong can look at one other great champion who made it happen: Pete Sampras. Sampras won his fourteenth and final major championship, the U.S. Open, two years after most pundits had written him off.

The 2009 Tour de France has all the makings of race for the ages and certainly has more intrigue than the last few iterations. When will we know the true quality of this year’s story? Not for a while yet.

A story only becomes truly great when it passes into legend and someday when that legend becomes myth.

— Jonathan

(@bentpiton)

Photo of Mt Ventoux Summit by Pereubu

Photo of Tom Simpson Memorial on Mt. Ventoux by Welland