Longboarding Today

When he was 12 years old, he promise himself to skate and surf all his life, so far he had kept that promise living in Hawai, now he’s 51 and his name, Jay Adams, one of the legends of the skate, consider the father who inovated the way to crash the streets. Years had been pass since Jay Adams was a teenager skating and surfing all day, but today we can see that many other children who arelooking for the same dream as Jay, just do one thing and one thing only, skate.

Most of the society see the longboarders as a group of childreen that pretend to be cool by rebelling against society by listen to music with no flow to it and hating everything around them while they go around the streets in a piece of wood with wheels. It is nothing like that. Nowadays it’s an interesting sport, avariant of the skateboard, also related to surfboard or snowboard, but in this case with wheels.

It was originated in Oahy, Hawaii, with four different variants, the speed boarding, crusing, sliding and carving. It one depends of what and where the person want to slide.
The speedboarding, is the type of boards with more stability, they have large trucks and large wheels, and you can go up to80km/hr, it’s pure adrenaline.
Crusing, the boards are as long as the used in speedboard, but they have to be stable at low speeds, this is just to have a smooth and easy ride.
Sliding, this boards are faily short and a kicktail on both sides, and the wheels are harder and slide very easily.
Carving, this boards are designed to carve really tight and fast, they have wide soft wheels for maximumtraction, most common use in slalom races.

By the side of the type of board it’s the design of each one, You will be amazed by all the designs that have been made by the companies to get new market target and sell more products. You can have from a small light board to a large heavy board depending on what you want to do, for example to go faster.





It’s already known that this sport hadgrown a lot in the last couple of years, and belgium is not exception, even if the weather is not close to the yellow beaches in california, the culture of longboard had grown, it’s common to see at least one person riding his board if the sun is up.

Today we live in the social media era, so now the people that like to practice longboard can join together and show their experiences, beingFacebook the largest and popular social network on the internet, is the place to find people to gather and slide. Longboard it’s a hype in the city of Kortrijk, if we compare the facebook groups of longboard, we can find the three of the most popular, “Longboarden in België” has 107 memebers, “Belgium Longboarding” with 153, “Belgian longboard and finally Kortrijk Longboarding with 147.
So if youcompare the numbers Kortrijk is really big, comparing with all belgium.

Kortrijk is an amazing place to slide, the asphalt is beautiful and it has some good spots, that’s why it need a better way to conect all the longboarders, where they gather and socialize in a more special way.

Today if you are not part of the social networking you are losing a lot of content, the networks are huge andbusy, so that’s why is necessary put some context and select the information we need. That’s the reason of a new trend that had emerged, the trend of the closed networks. If we focus our selves in the closed networks we can find two different aproaches, closed by circles or closed by proximity. We can clasified the closed by circles aproach by degrees, being social network the first degree where allthe connections take place, ans where all close friends and family are, personal network as the second degree, here is the people really important for us like friend, class mates or colleagues and knowledge and skills as the third big degree, here all the special bonds are secondary and it’s all about an specific thematic information without a personal relantship eventhough this one can...