Floyd Landis Leverages Web 2.0 in Pleading His PR Case

Floyd Landis, the American cyclist who placed first in this year's disputed Tour de France, is taking his PR and legal case to the blogosphere with what the Wikipedia Signpost calls the "Wikipedia defense."

Landis hasn't set up an actual wiki, but he is making all of the evidence in his case available on his weblog through the Ajaxy box.net file sharing site (username and password are PublicAccess). No one can edit the files directly, but the move is very creative.

A more interesting approach might have been to release the documents under a Creative Commons License and let the wisdom of crowds weigh in on how to improve them (should they so desire).

Comments

[trust but verify]

Actual discussion of the case and documents is being held at the Daily Peloton Forum, where Landis posted actively for a week or so to crystalize a community.

http://www.dailypelotonforums.com/main/index.php?showforum=19

As adjunct to that discussion, an actual Wiki has been set up to collect the wisdom as discussed, at

http://landiscase.wikispaces.com/

Completing the picture, I continue to act as a clearinghouse of news with daily roundups at

http://trustbut.blogspot.com/

Trustbut has received some leaked documents, and arranged to archive everything that was released and reconstructed at the independant http://archive.org for ease of access, including individual page files for use as links in discussions.

There's a strong case to be made that these independant and loosely collaborating sites are far more credible than anything he could have done on his own. He intentionally seeded them by releasing the documents. He gets basically all the potential value, and very little of the hassle.

He *has* opened himself up to external criticism, both by actually and tacitly encouraging these sites, and hanging in for discussion that was not all positive toward him or his efforts. This has done much for his credibility, though maybe not much for his actual case. Since he needs to fight both fronts (legal and PR) to ultimately "win", this is enlightened activity.

TBV