2007 was a fun year for us. 

• We pioneered live coverage with the Molokai challenge in May and by the end of the year were doing it as a matter of course for all the big races.
• We were invited by the organisers of the Dubai Shamaal race to go to Dubai to cover the race - we worked hard and blew the site ten minutes after the race ended - our ISP pulled the plug on us because so many people were watching (and continously reloading the page) that our site was using 95% of the power of a server that hosted 1,500 OTHER websites as well as SS.I. 
• The site went through a major revamp and now looks like a professional news site.
• Our figures steadily increased to the point where in November/December in a single month we had 180,000 pageviews from 17,000 individual readers from 144 countries around the world.
• We re-launched the Surfski.info World Series and suddenly we're getting enquiries from all over the world (the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, Belgium, Germany, Spain and the latest country, Japan) from races who want to be part of the series.  And they're conforming with the rules that we set (in conjunction with a group of top paddlers again from all over the world).
• I competed in two of the races - the ARB Surf Ski World Cup in Durban in July (one of the most hectic, most fun downwind paddles of my life) and the Cape Point Challenge in December - 56km of pure grind (and extremely satisfying to complete).
• I've been invited to go to Hawaii in May to cover (and compete in) the 2008 Molokai Challenge.  I can't wait.
• Oh - and a highlight was twenty minutes of personal coaching from the big O on my favourite downwind route, the Millers Run.  It was truly inspirational and now all I want to do is get out to practise what he taught me - both downwind paddling and in my basic stroke.

But what now?

My family is complaining that all I ever do is paddle or write about paddling; my fellow directors at my real work are looking ever more askance at my after hours activities!

Ideally of course I'd like to be able to work on Surfski.info full time.  I have a list a mile long of the things I could/would do from accelerating the World Series (we have no sponsor yet) to setting up hosted event websites to creating the ultimate "live coverage console".  Oh, and there are a couple of movies I'd like to do on the Millers Run and general downwind paddling.

So where to from here?

Clearly, in order for any of this to come to fruition, we're going to have to find some way(s) of commercialising Surfski.info.  We have plans for that - but we believe it's going to take a lot more work and probably 2-3 years before we can create a sustainable business out of it.

So, we're going to push advertising a lot more.  Our anchor tenant, Epic, must be joined by many more advertisers (we have a total of 4 at the moment). 

We're going to make some of the content available only to registered users.  This will enable us to build a bigger database of readers - which in turn will mean we can create a monthly (perhaps weekly, eventually) newsletter which will in turn give us opportunities to sell advertising.  We'll never bombard our readers with useless information, and we'll always have a handy "opt-out" button, but we think some readers will be keen to have a regular summary of the big stories of the month (or week).

We're definitely going to create a much better "live coverage console" that won't need to be refreshed all the time.  Clearly we want live audio and video coverage and we'll be doing live GPS positioning.

We need to remember too why we're doing all of this in the first place...  to promote the sport of surfski paddling all over the world.  The moment it turns to promoting the website or specific individuals, we'll be in deep trouble!

So, again, where to from here?

I'm not sure - I do know though that the road ahead is going to involve a lot of paddling; a lot of writing and lot of technology.  I have a feeling that 2008 is going to be a Tipping Point for the sport and that by the end of it we'll have a series of races that all the top paddlers can afford to compete in.  I think we'll have many more people around the world following the races and competing when they can and that the World Series will be the catalyst for this.  I think Fenn and Epic will continue to go head to head at the front of the races - but that there will be some exciting new contenders as well. 

Roll on 2008!