Walker Tracker Blog

Like most every social website, we get people (or bots, most likely) who sign up in order to spam the site with their dubious commercial enterprises. Today I kindly had a member point out a spammer to me (Thanks TLS!), which I quickly dispatched with (kerpow!). Both bots and people are a little challenging to weed out. For bots, you can usually foil them w/ a human-intelligence barrier to entry, while it’s very difficult to spot real people who wish to spam. I feel like I’ve seen an uptick in the latter. These are people who are employed (probably for a pittance) to join sites such as this to post links in order create better search results in search engines.

I realized then that this is one  the great things about having a website with a reward mechanism — in this case a point-system. I can put a price on spammers. This works well in just about every way.

1) I’m alerted to users who, because of the number of signups, it’s prohibitive for me to find

2) Members of the community are awarded for spotting these

3) Both of us benefit from having the spammer gone.

It’s crowd-sourced spam control.

The alternate scenario is:

1) I likely wouldn’t see the spam

2) It would annoy another member, or make them feel like there was low quality control on the site (or the site was being overrun)

3) I might get notified, depending upon if I’d had personal contact with that person, or if they felt like it was worth the effort.

The ease-of-reporting is also an important factor – and so building a reporting system into the site is on the list.

I’ve been asked this question a ton of times — here’s what I usually tell people:

Depending upon your budget, I’ve definitely found that nicer pedometers encourage people to stick with walking. A pedometer is a cheap investment already — and so I would encourage everyone to bypass the $1 – $5 pedometers and go for something that will:

1) Last you

2) Not count a bunch of steps for non-walking activities

3) Be very wearable (most of the people on Walker Tracker wear their pedometer all day, every day)

A pedometer like this is going to cost you in the neighborhood of $10 – $40. Walking really is one of the cheapest physical activities.

My favorite pedometers are the ‘pocket pedometers’ — you don’t need to clip them on, you just put them in your pocket and they’ll count fine from there. The cheapest of these is the Omron HJ-112, which is about $20 at Amazon. Its big brother is the Omron HJ-720ITC. If  you are ordering in bulk, you might try onlinefitness.com for a discount.

For cheaper options – the Omron HJ-150 and HJ-151 are both decent, sturdy pedometers. It’s also worth checking out  what pedometers our community likes here —  it looks like other highly-rated pedometers according to our community are the Sportline 345, Sportline 350, Yamax DigiWalker CW-701, New Lifestyles NL-2000.

In order of features, I like:

• wearable in a pocket. If you don’t wear it, it’s not going to do you any good.
• memory (usually 7 days – I like to see how I’ve done over a week, and it’s useful for entering on Walker Tracker)
• resets at midnight
• sturdiness
• can’t ‘fake’ steps (uses an accelerometer over a pendulum. Or rather, it’s much harder to fake steps)
• a continuous activity measure (on Omron pedometers this is called ‘aerobic steps’ (in the newer ones, for some reason they renamed this to ‘moderate steps’ - it measures when it feels you’ve been walking long enough to benefit your heart)

There are lots of other metrics that pedometers can calculate — miles walked, calories burned, etc, but most of these are just mathematical calculations based on the number of steps you’ve walked. They’re useful features, but not absolutely necessary.

Best of luck!

In many ways, Walker Tracker is already a game.

You play yourself, using statistics and charts to achieve a better average, walk more and game yourself into better physical shape.

You compete with others in Walker Tracker Competitions

However, we wanted to go one better by creating a sense of progression and currency to the system. We wanted to find a way to reward positive behavior, and to allow our walkers to reward each other.

I spent a lot of time looking at other systems that do this. Role playing games, World of Warcraft, slashdot/digg, school, life, economies, etc. In creating the system I tried to create mathematical point calculations that would reward fairness and walking improvement as well as to create a functioning ecosystem with a balance of supply and demand.

In Walker Tracker’s Levels/Points system

• You can earn points
• You can give away points
• With a certain amount of points you gain a level
• A level is mostly a symbol of progress and status
  • That said, gaining levels does open up new features on Walker Tracker, and you do receive more ‘Giveaway points’ each time you ‘level up’. More is planned for tying features and secret parts of Walker Tracker to the level system.

The most important metric we can track is Diligence. One of the largest goals of Walker Tracker is to permanently change one’s lifestyle behavior. To build physical activity into a routine. Walking every day, logging your steps, measuring your change is one of the best things we can help you accomplish. That which is measured, improves. For that reason, levels and points are weighted heavily toward diligence and meeting your own goals. It’s not a measure of how many steps you’ve walked, but whether you’re achieving what you set out to do by joining a walking program.

So far, I think it’s going fantastically well. I feel an excitement at each time I progress up a level or receive points from someone else.

Let us know what you think!

If you want to become a level one walker right now, all it takes is your first step entry!

Sign up to get started

We have a new, nifty domain if you want a shorter, .org domain for your walking program.

Plus, I like that it ‘verbs’ what we do here: myCompany.walkz.org!

Check it out in our Custom Walking Program page.

There’s an intriguing new study out of Australia (University of Queensland) this week. They studied six types of interventions to encourage physical activity in adults, the two most cost-effective were:

• pedometers
• mass media campaigns

The press release is here.

I liked the editors’ summary (pdf), which contained this opener:

The human body needs regular physical activity throughout life to stay healthy. Physical activity—any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that uses energy—helps to maintain a healthy body weight and to prevent or delay heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, colon cancer, and breast cancer. In addition, physically active people feel better and live longer than physically inactive people. For an adult, 30 minutes of moderate physical activity—walking briskly, gardening, swimming, or cycling—at least five times a week is sufficient to promote and maintain health. But at least 60% of the world’s population does not do even this modest amount of physical activity. The daily lives of people in both developed and developing countries are becoming increasingly sedentary. People are sitting at desks all day instead of doing manual labor; they are driving to work in cars instead of walking or cycling; and they are participating less in physical activities during their leisure time.

Google’s walking maps. I can’t say enough good things about this utility. The directions are clear and accurate, the time estimation meshes with the moderate activity guidelines, and it even projects a step count for you! All you have to do is put in an address or intersection starting point and destination, and select ‘walking’ from the drop-down menu (’By car’ is the default, and ‘public transit’ the other option) and you get instant walking directions that take one-way streets and sidewalks into account.

My favorite cookbook writer, Mark Bittman, put this link out on his Twitter feed today. A dynamic map showing the swift increase in obesity rates across the U.S., broken down by state. Watching the annual shift from light blue to red really brings home the swift increase in obesity. Where does your state fit in? Walking regularly is one way to combat this epidemic!

Walk Score dot com. I had heard about this website but not realized how multi-functional it was until I checked it out myself. A “walk score” is basically the number of places you can walk to from any given address. I plugged in my current address and my soon-to-be-current address and was beyond pleased to see that my home walking score would increase from 75 to 82 — with a maximum score of 100, both are quite acceptable. However, walkscore.com goes so far as to list and categorize the walkable amenities. There I could see that I am far closer to many possible walking destinations, as well as learn more about the contents of my new neighborhood. Yoga classes less than half a mile away? Sign me up!

Remember classroom pizza parties? They were such a treat. We would get a couple of greasy cardboard boxes of pizza slices, followed by a tiny plastic tub of orange and vanilla swirled ice cream. I loved to eat that ice cream with the tiny wooden paddles that were provided in lieu of spoons. Well, one Southwest Virginia school replaced its end-of-year pizza party with an activity party, and the students unanimously agreed that rock climbing and swimming are better than sitting in a classroom eating pizza. One of the most exciting parts of this story is that while many of the students qualified for the party by virtue of test scores, one kindergarten class made it in after winning a pedometer contest! Nineteen kindergarteners recorded 436,000 steps in just eight days. Pretty amazing, and awesome.

“As a result of many successful programs at businesses across the country, workers have become more engaged in their own health care, productivity is increasing, absenteeism is dropping, and employers are passing some of their health care savings to their workers,” the White House said in a fact sheet.

“Employers are discovering that improving quality of care can reduce health care costs. Small actions in the workplace can generate large benefits.”

Read the full article

We couldn’t agree more! We know some people who have a fantastic walking program program for corporate wellness.

Hooray! We’re on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/walkertracker

Stop on by and say hi. Ben

“The garage next to mine is empty,” volunteered my apartment manager the other day. “If you want to switch to it, it’s a lot closer to your back door. It’d be easier with the kids.”

It’s true. It is closer. About 25 (I just ran out and checked) steps closer. On first thought, it sounds nice. It would make my life a little easier. But at what cost? On reflection, I keep coming back to a post I read in one of the Walker Tracker forums, which said, in essence, “I don’t look for shortcuts anymore. Now I look for long cuts.”

That is one of the benefits of walking with a pedometer. We know, we all know, that walking is good for us, that each increment of activity we can add to our daily routine is helpful. But it can be hard to remember, sometimes, that taking 25 extra steps from the garage, or 120 extra steps to the next bus stop, is truly valuable. In fact, without a walking program, or even the idea of one, it’s probable that you don’t think of those distances in terms of steps but as obstacles in between Point A and Point B.

Now, however, pedometer in tow — even on the days I don’t check it, I’m aware of it adding to my step counter — I welcome these former obstacles. More steps! I think, as I plug away haphazardly toward my goal of 10,000 steps every day. I, too, look for long cuts. I won’t be moving our bikes and boxes to the closer garage. Last night I walked to the video store, even though the car would have had me watching that much-anticipated episode of The Wire a lot faster.

Every step does add up, and a pedometer makes it more obvious.

What are some long cuts you’ve started taking as you’ve added the pedometer to your life?

In Lecco, Italy, less than a hundred miles from Milan, the town has made a commitment to give up schoolbuses and encourage children to walk to school. The New York Times ran a fascinating article on the walking program, called “piedibus,” or “foot bus,” because the children walk in guided groups along a predetermined path.

From Students give up wheels for their own two feet:

Although the routes are each generally less than a mile, the town’s piedibuses have so far eliminated more than 100,000 miles of car travel and, in principle, prevented thousands of tons of greenhouse gases from entering the air, Dario Pesenti, the town’s environment auditor, estimates.

This inspired me to find out if there was anything similar happening here in Portland. There are no piedibuses, at least not that I could find, but there is a school walking program called Safer Routes to School which operates from a similar desire to improve the health of children while improving the health of the planet.

The Portland Safer Routes to Schools offers a selection of family-friendly walking maps based on each school’s neighborhood. These walking maps show recommended routes to school, the location of traffic signals, high- and low-traffic streets as well as offstreet paths, and even have a “map game” with child-focused instructions on how to read a map and plot a path.

Safe Routes is the national clearinghouse for walking safely to school. Check to see if there’s a program in your town — if there’s not yet, Safe Routes has information on how to set one up.