Sometimes it's not who you know, it's who you don't want to know...

Just like our friends at the NSA, the team at Illicit Snowboarding have been tracking and spying on all the world's conversations. Here's the scoop of what we've found people have been talking about at the Sochi Olympics up to this point...

I thought I'd have a look around the snowboarder profiles on the Sochi Olympics site and two things struck me; firstly, the website was full of interesting glitches which made this process very tricky (but that seems to be a standard for this Olympics), and secondly, why do all the snowboarders look so damn grumpy?

This week we scoured the depths if Imgur to find their best snowboarding posts. Imgur is the photo sharing site beloved of Redditors and the great thing about it is that the photos come with their own comments, so our caption writer was able to take the week off...

Over the past few months across the snowboard magazines and the blogosphere there's been a heated discussion about what Shaun White brings or doesn't bring to snowboarding. Some people hate him, some are disappointed by him and some have defended him, interestingly few have professed to actually like the fella. There's been lots of well argued opinions, but ultimately it has all been opinions and as they say, opinions are like arseholes, everyone's got one. We wondered what's the reality? Does Shaun White represent snowboarding or not?...

We though we'd have a go at creating some motivational posters for snowboarding. These things are guaranteed Facebook bait, so this post is bound to be a winner. It's just a common snowboard saying stuck on a stock photo, how hard could it be?...

We hit-up the London Freeze Festival on Saturday and this is what we found...

For several years we've been creating infographics to help visualise different aspects of snowboarding. One thing we've almost entirely avoided using so far is the much maligned pie chart, described by this guy as, "easily the worst way to convey information ever developed in the history of data visualization". This week we challenge our fears and give this plucky little underdog a chance. And it's also a chance for you to win big by giving it a shot too, thanks to the team at Extreme Pie who have agreed to supply the prize. Sometimes this stuff just writes itself... 

Traditionally snowboarding has been seen as a young person's game, but snowboarding has been knocking around now for a generation, and as the snowboarders have aged the demographics of the sport has skewed dramatically. A decade ago only a quarter of snowboarders were over twenty four, but today almost half of snowboarders are. It's a trend that gets surprisingly little coverage considering these older snowboarders are by far the fastest growing group of snowboarders. One of the results of the interests and increasing influence of these older snowboarders has been the emergence of an ever more active snowboarding memorabilia market. I've not seen anyone cover this growing part of snowboarding before, so this week I got in touch with the guy who runs the Vintage Snowboard Trader group on the Facebook to find out more...

Over the past few days I've been slowly ploughing my way through this truly terrible book. It was one of the toughest and most miserable things I've ever done in the name of snowboard blogging. I didn't just have difficulties getting through the experience, there were times that I truly questioned my will to go on living. It's now my duty, as a warning to all of snowboarding, to share my experiences in the hope that others don't have to go through the same pain...