Sail-World 07-08 –looking ahead to Olympic year

by Rob Kothe & the Sail-World Team on 25 Sep 2007 Yesterday a major power outage in a Canberra server farm, took down more than 4,000 websites for much of the day. Our Sail-World and Powerboat-World sites were amongst them.

However during the down time we took the opportunity to speed up our news and image databases, with new database software. Beyond that we have a major Internet server upgrade in train that will boost our load speed by a factor of six in the next month.

Just in time though…. it’s less than a year to the Qingdao Olympics and this will be the biggest year for sailing on the internet.

During 2007 our America’s Cup newsletters provided a world-wide boost in Sail-World traffic. The 2007 Sail-World audience will push past 750,000 unique visitors and the 2008 audience is likely to break through to a million world-wide.

In 2007-2008 Sail-World editors will be at all of the three ISAF grade one southern hemisphere regattas, all the Olympic Class World Championships in 2007-2008 and will be at the Olympic Sailing regatta in Qingdao.

Building on the extraordinary success of our America’s Cup newsletter, the Sail-World team will be publishing an Olympic Class newsletter series. There will be 20 newsletters in the series, each going to an audience of more than 50,000 readers. We will be following the Australian team, hoping for an Olympic regatta that surpasses the 2000 Australian medal haul.

However our keelboat and offshore racing audience will not be forgotten, the count down to the Rolex Sydney to Hobart has already started, with the Hempel Gosford to Lord Howe race just a month away and our coverage of the Australian season will be bigger than ever.

One of the new boats on the Australian scene is the Dart SB3, these exciting sports boats will be showcased at Skandia Geelong Week. Multiple Laser World Champion and Volvo Ocean Race CEO Glen Bourke loves the class.

BTW - If you are into the off-water and on-water America's Cup antics, Richard Gladwell our NZ editor has been doing some research that is already putting the cat amongst the seagulls.