The Web we weave...

This week marks the 25^th birthday of the World Wide Web (the Web). Let’s draw the line right now. The web is NOT the internet. It’s ON the internet and allows us to view all those zillions of websites that we access every day. Not long after the web came into existence, we were promoting and producing a solo yacht race around the world from Charleston, South Carolina. The BOC Challenge, or Around Alone as it came to be known, was a 27,000 mile race around the world, one person, one boat, alone. We had competitors for all over the world, a feeder race from England to get the European competitors over to America and a host committee in Charleston that would make any global event producer proud.

 

As you might imagine with one person on a sailboat thousands of miles from land, communications for the race was crucial.  When the event started in the 1980’s, ham radio operators were its only lifeline and the reliability of those air waves was dubious at times. When we got to Charleston in the 90’s, we had satellite tracking in its very early stages but it was a ground-breaking and life-saving addition to the race at the time. Cellphones were getting smaller but coverage was spotty and a battery might last for a couple of hours without a recharge. The system was getting better but still limited.

One of the promises we made to sponsors of the event was daily position reports and news releases. And then, it was not as easy as it might sound today. Laptops had dial-up connections that took hours and email was still a thing of the future.  We were faxing position reports and releases to over one hundred worldwide media each morning and it literally took hours to get the word out.

As we were grappling with the system to make it as efficient as possible, I received a call from a professor at the College of Charleston.  He knew about the race and said he had an idea for our communications effort that he wanted to share with us. We set a time to meet and arrived to a cavernous lab room full of computers, wires and boxes of electronics. One of our sponsors was IBM and the fifteen-pound “Thinkpads” they gave us were pretty futuristic but still they would crash when we put about as much information on them as is on the 500 MB inch-long flash drive that’s in my bottom desk drawer today because it’s so small.

The professor told us that he heard from a local newspaper reporter that we were going to issue daily position reports.  He said he had a better way to distribute them than via fax. “We call it the "spider web" and it’s linking computers and colleges all over the world almost instantaneously,” he remarked, “And some businesses and media are beginning to join in on this experiment as well.” He went on to demonstrate it to us by posting one of our news releases and sending it to Italy, the home of one of our competitors. Within a few minutes, we got a phone call back telling us they had received the message at the other end and could easily distribute it from there.

Little did we know that this was the beta test and we were the guinea pigs for the World Wide Web and we were astounded to have this new-found capability. It literally became a life-saving tool when we printed screen-drop positions for boats in trouble that we could send immediately to authorities anywhere in the world. It was an amazing aid to rescue efforts on more than one occasion. And we knew it was working because, if we missed a scheduled reporting time, dozens of calls came in from around the world asking what the problem was.

Thanks to the College of Charleston, we were the first global event to use the web to communicate on a daily basis.  Our media coverage increased 20-fold from the past and our race was safer and better managed as a result of this capability. Over 5,000 feature articles were written about Around Alone and we logged 500 hours of world network television time devoted to it.  Even Time, Sports Illustrated and People magazines sung our praises.

By the next event four years later, we had live satellite tracking on much improved laptops. Like radar, you could actually watch the boats move in the middle of the Indian Ocean on your laptop screen in real time. Cell communication was hitting its stride and we were getting over 150,000 unique visitors to our website on a daily basis. We partnered with a company called Quokka Sports, owned by some America’s Cup sailors who were prepping for live coverage of the America’s Cup.  We got their beta test with a great crew of reporters and photographers who followed us around the world posting information several times a day. Never before could a global sports event be followed so closely by so many. As communicators, we were very fortunate to be involved in the infancy of this world-changing creation known as the Web.

Happy Birthday, World Wide Web. We love you.