It has often been said that Sydney is made up of tribes. This definitely holds true in the cycling world as well. Commuters don’t want to talk to roadies, roadies don’t want to talk to roadies from other clubs, etc etc.

As a result, it can be very hard to find people to ride with, or talk to about bikes. There are a number of forums on the net, some of them even have Australia specific areas however Sydney is never represented there as much as it should be, in part because the camaraderie of Melbourne cyclists mean that they discuss a lot, and Sydneysiders discuss little.

I’ve long wanted to build a site to help this situation a little, the usual excuses stopped me from doing it (you know, working, spending time with my young family, and actually riding my bike etc). Then recently Phil was experimenting with Ning and eventually I went and had a proper look at it too. Ning is the perfect toolset for building what I had in mind, so I really had no reason not to do it.

I present to you, in full Web 2.0 Beta glory : www.sydneycyclist.com

It’s still only a few days old, and things are still being tweaked. But if you are a cyclist in Sydney, please come and join us and say hi!

On the tech side, Ning is an incredibly cool platform – once I’ve spent some more time with it I might do a post from the technology angle.