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Something which people who don't ride bicycles sometimes have difficulty understanding is, why do we do it? It's certainly one of the questions I've been asked many times in past by co-workers and others.

Why not use a car or motorbike to get around more, or have fun with some sort of motorized off road recreation such as an ATV or Trailbike? Especially as many of the new full suspension mountain bikes can be around the same price as some of the motorized equivalents!

To me, one of the main reasons is a very direct feel of freedom. Both while commuting, and while on the mountain bike trails. There is nothing between you and the experience. You want to go faster? Pump your legs. You want to zoom around that sharp corner? Position your body, get your speed right, and throw the bike around the corner!

Everything feels immediate and direct while riding a bike. You're very aware of everything around you as you ride. Passing sounds, smells, sights. The texture of the road surface. Even the sound of the road surface. The wind, the sun on your face.

Add to this the fact that you're directly powering this vehicle with your own muscles - heart and circulation pumping to keep up, and a few doses of adrenalin and natural dopamine (essentially a pleasure hormone) produced by physical exercise, and the humble bicycle takes on a very compelling light in my opinion.

As far as using a bicycle for everyday commuting goes, it naturally depends on your cities environment and cycle-friendliness as to whether it will be well suited. I'm quite lucky as we have a relatively compact city here of around 450,000 people, which is quite flat, and has many cycle lanes.

Of course bikes can also go where cars cannot - and indeed I take advantage of this to as much of a degree as I can while travelling the city. I prefer to avoid heavy traffic wherever possible, and by navigating certain routes through public parks etc, can avoid large sections of heavy congested traffic and fumes! Much more enjoyable this way, and almost turns the rest of the journey into a game as well, sprinting through sections of bustling city streets to get to the next quiet and relaxed part of the journey.

As my experience with bikes is limited to commuting, downhill mountain biking, and a little cross country/trail riding, I can't really comment on the draw of road cycling, but I'm sure at least some similar aspects come into play.

When riding a trail, whether and easy trail or a technical one, I find troubles and worries just fade away, as I focus on all the direct sensations around me, and concentrate on riding well (and not crashing!). This has without a doubt been a huge benefit of riding for me, especially during difficult and stressful periods of working life. I've discussed these aspects with friends many times, and we've agreed how positive a pastime such as mountain biking can be. You can start a ride scowling and miserable from the days events, but 5 minutes in and you're almost certainly going to be hooting and hollering as you narrowly avoid trail pitfalls and ride trail features that get the adrenalin pumping. After the ride, stress forgotten, and worries seemingly fading into laughable parody, things take on a different light.

So I thought some of you might like to see how I setup my helmet cam for mountain biking.

Firstly, what I was wanting to do was mount a small camera on the side of my helmet, so it captured everything that I was looking at as I rode. This also reduces the shaking and vibration of the footage, especially while you're off the seat, as your suspension and body naturally soaks up most of the rough bumps from the trail you're riding.

I got a small bulletcam (also known as a lipstick cam *snigger*), which runs 420 line resolution. I actually have a second bulletcam which is 480 line resolution, and can handle extreme changes in lighting level better, but for my initial helmetcam setup that I'm describing here, I stuck with the slightly cheaper one for the unknown dangers of field testing it! (Incidentally, I actually ended up staying with this one in any case, as the footage was perfectly fine for my uses).

This is the helmet cam - it has one small plug for DC power input, and one other small plug for the video-out signal. This was attached to the side of my fullface helmet using a length of velcro and some electrical tape. Not particularly fancy, but it did the job well, without any fear of the camera falling off.

As I mentioned, the helmet cam does need it's own power supply, so I used an 8xAA battery pack, the battery life of which lasted surprisingly well.

Now I just needed to send the video output signal from the helmetcam to my recording source, in this case a Sony MiniDV cam - an older model TRV33e, which most importantly, has a 3.5mm A/V input plug on it. This is vital that you check this out when buying a miniDV cam for this purpose, as many of the newer models do NOT have 3.5mm A/V input plugs. Ensure that it doesn't only have a 3.5mm microphone input plug, which are common!

This is the cable that I bought off Ebay for a few dollars. It has a 3.5mm plug on one end, and 3 RCA connectors on the other (designed of course for VIDEO / RIGHT AUDIO / LEFT AUDIO). The only thing I was interested in at this stage was the Video plug (yellow).

The yellow RCA plug on this cable was plugged into the video-output plug on my helmetcam, and the 3.5mm plug on the other end was plugged into the A/V input on my Sony miniDV cam.

This is the Sony miniDV cam TRV33e - which I bought quite cheaply secondhand off a local online auction site.

I could then go to the top of a mountain bike trail, set the Sony miniDV cam recording, wrap it in a Tshirt and shove it into my small camelbak pack, leaving only 2 wires intertwined with each other, poking out going to my helmet cam, the power cable and the video cable - and ride the trail, recording every moment!

And that's pretty much it! The footage is quite clear, and everything has survived to this day, despite several crashes on downhill mountain bike tracks.

Here are some videos of the helmetcam in action... my friend is riding ahead of me on his Kona Stinky, and I'm following on my Specialized Bighit...

A fun little local DH trail

The same fun little DH trail, when everything goes pearshaped

Ok, so you'll see the Video Map button in the top navigation menu now.

The Video Map is basically a fully interactive map, which you can drag around, zoom in and out of, from a world map overview, right down to street level.

Now when you upload your mountain biking video, you can pinpoint exactly where in the world your footage was filmed by using the mini map on the video submission form.

You video is then automatically added to the world Video map - along with all the others which people have added.

This lets you easily check out riding from any region you want. Pretty nifty!

The concept of WeRideBikes is simple - riders from all over the World submit videos of them and their buddies tearing up the mountain bike trails, doing tricks on their bmx's, or racing on the road. Whatever you do on a bike, share your piece of the World of bike riding.

What's the riding like in different regions across the Earth? Now we have the means to build up an awesome original video library featuring bike riding in any number of different countries and regions.

That's right, I've been slaving away now for some time, and as a result we're just about ready to rock.

Feel free to join up and get your Revver videos uploading, because soon this place is going to be buzzing!

I've got the interactive maps on the way too, so keep an eye out for that. You'll see it featured throughout WeRideBikes very soon.

Stay tuned everybody...