A Year In Shipping – A 2008 gCaptain Roundup

2008 marked the first full year of operation here at gCaptain.com and the growth we saw was both amazing and unexpected. In 2008, we grew by over 136%, receiving over 780,000 visitors and over 2 million page views. We had visitors from all seven continents and welcomed visitors from every nation on earth with the exception of Chad, Mali, Brazzaville and Tajikistan. Our Forum has swelled to nearly 1000 active members who we cannot thank enough for their participation, humor and wealth of knowledge beyond anything that we can provide.

To say the least, this year has been a wild roller coaster ride, similar to most everyone else in the world. We have seen our share of ups and downs, but have been able to remain positive, ride the good and take the bad with a grain of salt. As some of you may know, we have been able to start running gCaptain.com full time from beautiful San Luis Obispo, CA, which has been a blessing. We even hired our first employee, Mike Schuler, bringing the gCaptain team to a whopping 3 full time employees. If anyone is interested in marketing their product or service online, Mike is an expert and can be contacted at +1-805-720-6268. We are excited to welcome him aboard!

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Most Popular Blog Posts of 2008

5. 5 Most Ambitious Bridge Designs of Today

4. The Ten Largest Container Shipping Companies Visualized

3. Disaster At Sea – Photos of Maritime Destruction

2. Exclusive – Shellbacked iPod Touch Video

1. The Emma Maersk’ s Wartsila-Sulzer Super Engine

Special mention goes out to Fred Fry of Maritime Monday fame. Through his hard work this featured segment has become a must read for mariners and shipping industry executives each and every week. Many readers have commented that they wouldn’t know how to start the week off without it. You can also find Fred online HERE.
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Most Discussed Forum Topics

5. Favorite Maritime Movie?

4. Songs About the Sea and Sailors

3. Animal Planet Whale Wars

2. MSC Commercial Cruise

1. Best Captain’s Quotes

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Top Videos Of The Year

5. M/V Fedra Beached Near Gibraltar

4. Wartsila-Sulzer Super Engine – The Emma Maersk’ s Power Plant

3. Golden Shellback – The Boxed Set

2. 2007’s Top 10 Rescue at Sea Videos (2008 Post HERE)

1. Windoc Incident – Story Behind YouTube’s Most Chilling Video

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Top Maritime Technology Stories

5. US Coast Guard Embraces Social Media

4. Fuel Cells For Ships

3. Google Plans Floating Server Farm

2. How One Ship Crashed The Internet For 75 Million People

1. Fixed Rate Broadband Nearing Global Coverage

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Top News Items Of The Year

5. Mariner Shortage and regulator’s persistent efforts to further the problem

(Booby Prizes go to… USCG, S Korea, Ship Owners – Twice, among others)

4. Cosco Busan Fall Out

3. Financial Crisis Hits Shipping

2. Piracy

1. Record Year For Ship Causalities (The list speaks for itself)

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Things to look for in 2009

The gCaptain team does not always see eye to eye but one thing we are all in agreement with is that 2009 is going to be a very big year with new features being launched in the coming weeks.

New Forum Platform
Yvon Chouinard, owner and founder of Patagonia, has always said that if you want to increase your business improve your product. With this in mind we are in the process of converting the entire gCaptain forum onto a new platform known as vBulletin. This platform is widely used around the web and will add a number of new features to the forum that should make our 1000 users quite happy. If that’s not enough to convince you, consider this… with the forum recieving over 2500 pageviews daily it recently surpassed the blog as our most popular section. Many thanks to our community of supporters!

New Job Board
After years of using the current online maritime job boards we have had enough! In early 2009 gCaptain will be publicly launching our new cutting edge job board. Like all of our other gCaptain.com features, our Job Board will be 100% free. Free to post jobs and free to find jobs. If you are interested in becoming a bate tester for the new gCaptain Job Board please contact us.

Another Redesign
We are sure your asking… Wasn’t this blog just redesigned a few months ago? Yes and thanks for noticing but usability, design and search engine optimization are critically important to us. We even launched a new business unit this year to provide these services to clients. We think all the information provided on this site should be easily accessible to new and veteran readers alike.

Stay tuned!

Finally…

In a short 18 months of operation this website has grown beyond our hopes and dreams. We have you to thank so if we can repay the favor please don’t hesitate to contact us.