Open Blog on Digital-Seas

I attended the meeting of Germans famous forum-schiff.de user group Saturday, 30th of August near Rendsburg at the Kanal-Cafe. A Good place to shoot ship-images on the Kiel-Canal, even though the image background at the spot was a bit difficult to manage :)

So everybody was almost all the time outside, spotting and of course talking with each other.
I met Tomas Pinas from Oslo again and we spoke about the developments towards commercializing of shipspotting.com and the next user meeting in Rotterdam in May 2009, also had interesting talks with “hafenfreak”, Martin Leuschner (VT), Dieter Kannengießer, Martin Witte und Christian Costa about spotting and monitoring and could took images of about 15 ships during the day.

Also, beeing in the fields means a good chance, to check on live signals compared to the live situation. The monitoring of AIS signals in the canal happened in three different setups. A small Shipplotter installation with antenna, scanner -discriminator and laptop was available for comparison against AISlive, vesseltracker and Digital-Seas, which where accessed over a mobile-vodaphone connection on the internet. The big picture on the Canal has been available at all three ways, but only SP with antenna and DS showed no distinction, when looking at the live situation. Complete coverage of the area and no delays of the signal are the DS guaranty for beeing usefull and made me kind proud.

I would have liked a bit of program over the day to make efficient use of the time and talk about our niche topics as spotters. But the relaxed athmosphere and seeing everybody relishing the perfect day, was a nice impression too. I missed the night talks and the Sunday, since I had to leave in the early evening for my three hour drive back to Rostock.

Thanks to the organizers of www.forum-schiff.de for the beatyful weather, the nice place and the chance to meet and talk in the Kanal-Cafe. Hope to see everybody next year again.

We have a nice coverage from a sharer in Livorno (thanks for that), without getting a ring or message from him. Since I really would like to include this area on a constant basis, please give me a short reply about the setup.
Saluti a Italia !

The weather was our friend during this years Hanse Sail-luckily! About a million of visitors enjoyed this traditional baltic event on the quays of Warnemuende and Rostock Port. 230 sailing vessels from 13 nations proudly showed their countanance and wooden corpus. Thousands of visitors again took the chance to get a closer look at the “Gorch Fock“, “Zobel”, “Braunschweig” and other ships. The “Gorch Fock” will be back in 2009.

The results of the regattas: the “First ship home” from the big ones was the Clipper “Stad Amsterdam“, whilst you have to know that the schonerbrigg “Greif” -being second ship home- has got much less sail area that the dutch vessel. The “Greif” won a neck-and-neck race against the swedish brigantine “Baltic Beauty”. The winner of the single-masted sailing boats is “Stella Maris”. On Saturday especially the viewers in Warnemuende had an awsome picture of the fireworks, because at the same time they had the chance to watch the cruise liner “Regatta” leave the Rostock Port.

We hope that anyone who took the chance to watch all that via Fleetmon also had an great experience and enjoyed the Hanse Sail 2008!

Rostock will be crowded and there will be much to see through the eyes of nearly 20 perfectly positioned webcams.
We are looking forward to welcome all the huge sailing ships in Rostock Port. Watch them entering the harbour in real time using Fleetmon, our special vessel tracking device.
We are excited to have lots of old maidens for a visit - lets all keep our fingers crossed that the weather is our friend this year! Find out more here:

www.digital-seas.com/hansesail

Put Digital-Seas Widgets onto your Homepage!

Now you can get a piece of Digital-Seas and your contributions also onto your own website. We start with a gallery of the latest vessel images of our database.

Just copy and paste the code for your site and get some fresh content to show.

And meanwhile we continue to program even more widgets for you like: - a “tiny fast uploader” and “all your images on DS” .
Any more wishes here from you ? Please Comment.

Remarks:
To use all of the widgets you need an account on Digital-Seas. After you have logged in you will find a new section in your “My Digital-Seas” area called “My Widgets”.
Here you can copy the HTML-code which you need to be paste into your homepage.

I would very much appreciate seing some images of the Kieler Woche, taking place this weekend. Who is out there and photographing ? Another couple weeks and we will host the “HanseSail 08″ here in Rostock. That will be our…

I would very much appreciate seing some images of the Kieler Woche, taking place this weekend. Who is out there and photographing ?
Another couple weeks and we will host the “HanseSail 08″ here in Rostock. That will be our easy chance to spot lots of Tall-Ships and with some luck there is enough wind to catch them sailing. We will prepare another special dedicated to this event in our Fleettracking sektion.

Also, wer hat in Kiel die tollen Segler fotogorafiert, würde mich freuen ein paar Bilder der Kieler Woche zu sehen :) Harry?

Image taken of all Tall-Ships on Fleetmon on Sunday-afternoon 08/06/29

We had quiet some trouble with all the Fleet Tracking pages this morning. The reason was my early morning work this night, where I missconfigured the url-routing. I’m sorry about shutting off the region-views that way for almost…

We had quiet some trouble with all the Fleet Tracking pages this morning. The reason was my early morning work this night, where I missconfigured the url-routing.
I’m sorry about shutting off the region-views that way for almost 6 hours.

Everything is i.O. again.

We are now support OpenID for sign up and log in on Digital-Seas.com. OpenID lets you safely sign in to different websites with a single password.

If you already have a OpenID, you should take a look at the little OpenID Logos in the Login boxes. There you can use your OpenID for sign up and log in.

Learn more on the explainations about OpenID page.