Monday 3 May 2010

Web 2.0 and Sailing

What on Earth has Web 2.0 got to do with sailing and, what is Web 2.0?

Well first of all, the term "Web 2.0" is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups, and folksonomies. A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with each other as contributors to the website's content, in contrast to non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them. So this blog might be an example!


Our neighbouring club, Brightlingsea Sailing Club, have had a brilliant idea of how to make use of technology to let people know what the weather is. They have an electronic weather station on the roof of their club and the summary data from this is tweeted to twitter every hour.

 Today's Brightlingsea SC twitter feed with very large gusts

This means that using your mobile phone, you can get hourly updates on the wind and weather conditions downstream from the club house. This is important because at Wivenhoe Sailing Club we are very sheltered from the true wind conditions down river. 

Wivenhoe SC (top left) sheltered compared to Brightlingsea SC (bottom right)

Today's race was cancelled because of the wind although the Barman and I have been out in much worse (suckers for punishment!).


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