Open Blog on Digital-Seas

We’ve created a solution to show live traffic in the Baltic (on several big screens) for a newly opened place here in Rostock called “Pier7″. It is located right at the Port entrance of Rostock and it’s a crowded place with a shop and a restaurant and lot’s of space to hang out and have a drink during spotting. They were asking us to develop something like a “Schiffsbegrüssungsanlage” (ship welcome point) and we made some suggestions for having a live view on maritime traffic. On the big screens inside and outside the area, it is now possible to follow the action, watch AIS traffic, get to know the next days arrivals, look at live webcams and nice for us: know when to take the next shot (with a coffee on the table if you like to…)

So everybody who wants to come to Rostock-Warnemünde and spot some ships, do not miss the Pier7 spot and relax at this nice located place.

today we released a way to comment on user images.
I wanted to express my opinion on images I like and a way to do this right here on the site.
Would be glad to exchange opinions, experience and ideas about spotting ships.
Everybody is welcome to do the same now.
See for example this interesting shot of Miraflores:
the Tug ATLAS II

Lets talk about images now

with Varna in Bulgaria beeing online, we are also covering a nice port in the Black Sea thanks to Peter of VTExplorer. The view of the Bosphorus in Istanbul gives you great maritime live and with the help of Mehmet there, we will also get some vessel images right from this wonderfull place. Sinisa shared his signal from Split in Croatia with us and we opened our new station today with the help of Andreas in the port of Limassol in Cyprus.
Thanks also to Henrik who managed to put the North of Denmark online and Lars in Malmö for his great “Swedish” coverage.
Look up in the North of Norway, the Ports of Riga in Latvia, Tallin in Estland or Kotka in Finnland. There is much better coverage now for GB and Ireland.
Samothraki in Greece will be our next shot this month :)
With all those new places to cover, there are around 2000 vessels per day more to handle.
We will work hard to release the next version of Fleetmon with much improved performance soon.

Get your fast overview here: www.digital-seas.com/coverage

just to give you a short update on our developments in the new year 2009:

commons:
more then 20.000 Users registered,
more then 50.000 vessel entries in the database,
more then 10.000 vessels with over 20.000 image-uploads,
new AIS Sources every month (Malmoe, Helsinki, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Dover, Athens)
new global AIS vessel traffic - KML with our complete coverage is now available,

content:
restructure of menue: Tracking/Regions to reflect new AIS sources,
permanent up to date overview of our AIS coverage,
new topic in forum section regarding image copyrights,
brand new sharing server, new webserver,
loads of code fixing in the website and the AIS section of the site,
lots of conversations to possible partners,

Please let us know in the Forum Section about your experiences and whishes with Digital-Seas.
(or comment right here :-)

Thanks to all of the users,
great cheers to our sharers and
all the best for the new Year 2009!

Trying to produce a better understanding when explaining AIS, I have to come up with some visuals also.
So here are the first results. There will be another final version.
Let me know about any comment :-)

Update, 20081212, 9:20am GMT:
System is running again, we did need 6 hours indeed for transfer and switching.
So welcome back on Digital-Seas, we hope you “feel” the improvement !

20081211, 12:00am GMT,
We are sorry for your inconvenience.
Digital-Seas is getting new database servers this night (starting: December 12, 2008 at 0:15 am, GMT). During the offline time no image uploads or vessel tracking will be possible.

We have to stop our database and switch over to the new machine, which will take about 4 hours.
Then we will test the new setup which will take some time too :-)

Let’s cross our fingers, if all went fine, digital-seas.com and Fleetmon will be up again early in the morning of December 12th GMT.
The new machine will make all of us happier because it`s about 8 times faster than the old one, with plenty of space for the next time (half year?).

Best regards, (Thomas and Lars) your DS-team.

Image via Wikipedia

The first Ports of our neighbor country Poland are now with Gdańsk and Gdynia covered, which makes us very happy.
Those are quiet busy ports in the Baltic Sea and it’s good to go east with the traffic monitoring.
We merged the traffic inside our Region View:
http://www.digital-seas.com/fleet_tracking/regions/baltic_sea_sw.html

with a little help of our friends…

Thanks to Stevo in Belgium, Johan in the Netherlands, also Costas and Lekkas in Greece, we did increase the reception of DS for more then 50% in the last three weeks. We rearranged the areas into the known Seas, we dropped the city selections, because there are just to much (hope, everybody is using a fast computer).

Very motivating for us, we now wish for a client, which is able to track all the vessels at the same time.

We are working on that of course. There are a couple extensions in the search function and the detail view of a vessel. We are now displaying the ship history of names and flags. Did we mention the new Blog and the Forums. Please make use of them and start interacting with us!

Uploads of vessel images have strongly increased over the last months, thanks to all the supporters for that.

Next step on Digital Seas will be the introduction of Zone-Alerts for individual vessels and areas, a big step into even more practical returns of this site.

Who ever could support us with more AIS reception is very welcome here! Lars