First, there is a nice photo-story about of USA 61, which is now on display here in Valencia outside our Team Base, over on the Valencia Sailing site. As always, our thanks to VS editor Pierre Orphanidis for his continuing good efforts to promote all the teams involved in AC 32, including ours.

Second, am pleased to report that our web guru in Munich, Roland Neubauer (which, in German, appropriately enough means "new builder") is working with our webhost Knallgrau to build a few new features into our Blogsite -- including a fix for the comment spamming, so that comments soon can be turned back on.

Finally, this afternoon Roland tells me that, over the next couple days, the BOB is migrating to a new server. During this period we will suffer the blogger's syndrome known, not so politely, as postus-interruptus. Please pardon our virtual dust; we should be fully back on the air and posting again by Friday. Thanks for your patience.

The BOB is under attack by spam 'bots (short for "robots") -- automated internet software that adds "spam" (unwanted ads and other information) to a website.

In the past few months the amount of spam being automatically posted as "comments" here on the BOB has increased dramatically -- more than a dozen per day, somethimes that many in an hour -- and most of the spam are links to sites that are not exactly, shall we say, family friendly.

You probably are not even aware of it, as your Ed. and our intrepid webmaster, Roland Neubauer, have so far managed to delete them almost as fast as they were posted -- at least during our waking hours.

In the past week it's gotten to the point where we spending far too much time each day deleting these nasties. So we have decided to shut down the ability for anyone -- or anything -- to post "comments" here on the BOB until a suitable software prophylactic against the 'bots can be installed.

We regret having to take this step. Your comments, while not numerous, have usually been insightful and fun. Our goal is to have the commenting facility turned back on before the start of racing in April. Thanks for your understanding.

Thanks for your many nice emails, and even Skypes, about the BOB's "onward and upward" progress. Here are answers to a couple common questions:

+ Easiest URL (internet address) that get's you to the BOB?

www.bmworacleracing.com/blog


If you have not already done so, why not (right now!) bookmark the above link in your browser so you have it in your "favorites" or similar list? Just click on the link above and hit Control+D.

Yes, http://bmworacleracing.twoday.net/ also works, because the BOB is hosted on the servers of a European blog service called twoday.net. Or, of course, you can start at our main team website, www.bmworacleracing.com, and click on the link to the Team Blog on the right side of the main page. Then there's always Google -- searching on "bmw oracle blog" returns a direkt link to the BOB at the top of the list that Google returns.

+ How to email the Editor?



Above is an image (you can generate your own at http://cooltext.com) as opposed to text, so that internet robots that search sites for email addresses will not find it. To help us avoid any more spam than we already get, we will appreciate our readers not giving that address out to any spammers!

With five days to go in January, for the first time we have exceeded 8,000 visitors in one month and had over 15,000 page views -- the BOB's best month ever.

The statistic that our web guru up in Munich, Roland Neubauer of Sport Media Services (BMW's web agency for sports marketing), says is most gratifying is the "average length per visit" -- it continues to hover around two minutes, which, he says, is exceptional in the web business.

It's a lot of work to keep the BOB going and fresh, but at the same time a lot of fun. Your support makes it all worthwhile. Thanks to all of you -- our loyal, long-time readers as well as newcomers -- for following the BOB and our team. And to BMW (especially Anne Rohstock) for making it happen, and to the other members of our team like Captain Craig Christensen, Jane Eagleson, Max Hoellerl, Gilles Martin-Raget, and Karen Webb who contribute ideas, stories and photos. Richard Gladwell of Sail-World NZ has also been a big help.

We promise our best efforts in the remaining months of our quest for the Cup -- on the water and off.

While we're at it, our thanks to Mr. Nicholas Stark, whom we don't recall ever having met, for his kind letter to Scuttlebutt (North America) earlier this week:

* From Nicholas Stark: In 'Butt 2263, I read the piece about Larry Ellison -
the USA's Best CEO. Interesting and revealing tidbit. But, what I thought
was even better, was following the link back to the BMW Oracle blog where
the Ellison piece appeared under the category "Cool People", and then
reading each of the stories about all the "cool people" who have been
blogged over the past two years. Excellent reading about a lot of nice
people in our sport who don't otherwise get much visibility. It's such
people who make our sport so great, and it was enjoyable to read about each
of them. Made me feel even better about our sport and the people it
attracts. Other AC teams, and other teams, events, and organizers within our
sport would be wise to emulate BMW Oracle's blog.
http://bmworacleracing.twoday.net/topics/Cool+People

A number of you have asked if there is a more direkt way to get to the BOB than through the main team website, where all along there has been a nice front page link (thank you, Roland). The BOB is hosted by an Austrian company -- for reasons that I am sure make sense to BMW -- called Two Day, hence the "twoday.net" URL that you may have noticed connected with the BOB.

Suffice to say, to get to the BOB you can simply direkt your browser to www.bmworacleracing.com/blog. Hopefully that's easier to remember. Better yet, please bookmark our site in your "favorites" list.

We have checked the BOB for compatibility with the new versions of both Internet Explorer and Firefox, and all looks fine to us. Please let us know if you ever have any problems with viewing our blog with either of those browsers or any other. We also note that the BOB is quite readable on a number of popular mobile devices including Treo, Sony-Ericsson and Nokia smartphones.

While we are at it, we are pleased to report that our site stats continue very strong. October readership nearly matched the record set in July, thanks it would appear to interest wide and far in the Allianz Cup. Thanks for your continuing support and kind comments. They are appreciated, and motivate us to keep it up day after day throughout the year. Now, with our growing success, it is planned to continue through the balance of this Cup.

Honorable mention, too, to all of you who contribute story ideas as well as additions and corrections to what we have otherwise posted on here. Apropos of which, I should give myself a bonehead award for the best typo of the year. A post during the Allianz Cup was complimentary of the TV guys and their good output despite a "makeshift control room" -- but "makeshift" was missing the "h". Luckily the post was done in the evening SFO time when at least the the bulk of our USA and European readers would been offline if not asleep; and, thankfully, early Europe time the next morning (only an hour or so after the post went up) eagle-eyed Sten Mohr (DEN, afterguard) noticed the typo and dashed off an email calling it to my attention. We were able to fix it before too many people read it and thought we were trash-talking Sam Usher and his very capable NarrowStep TV team. Ah, life at the speed of the internet!

Finally, a close friend of our team has just written to say what a good job we have done walking the fine line between telling people what is going on within our team but, as Vito Corleone said in The Godfather, "Never tell anyone outside the family what you are thinking." ;-)

As always, you can tell us what you are thinking by email, via blog [at] tfehman [dot] com.

Our readership is global and growing steadily. We appreciate very much your interest and support. To see an interesting web stat for this blog's global reach, current to the moment, click here.

Wednesday was the one-year anniversary of the BMW ORACLE Blog, or "The BOB" as our friends on the 2007AC Forums have come to call it.

We very much appreciate the many nice emails (even one text) about the BOB's first year, and the comments posted by DBS and Alex. Truth is keeping up the BOB takes a fair bit of time and effort, but it is usually a lot of fun and rewarding for the pleasure our families, friends, and fans are apparently finding in it. Interesting, too, to see how our team's general reaction has gone from skepticism (or worse), to tolerance, and, now wide acceptance.

Thanks to BMW for the idea and support, to Dicko for green-lighting it (this blog aside, Dicko has been surprisingly supportive, even innovative, when it comes to marketing/promotion/communication), and to Jane and Mirko for trying their best to keep me in line and on message without constraining let alone censoring. And it goes without saying, but to my wife Leslie and our dauther Meg who put up with me banging away on the computer at all hours of the night and day.

A special thanks to the gentleman who runs the "back end" -- Roland Neubauer of Sports Media Service in Munich, a talented agency that helps BMW with a lot of their online comms. Earlier this week we asked Roland if they could come up with our first-year stats, and he came back this morning with these:

316 stories
262 comments
1330 (!) images
approx 120,000 words

The images stat was a big surprise. Had no idea we'd posted that many. While in NYC this week a new Canon pocket cam with image-stabilization (hands getting shaky with age?) has been acquired, so, hopefully, we can lift our photo game a bit.

But, yikes, 120k words? That's 10,000 words per month. And we more or less took a couple months off along the way. No wonder the laptop keyboard is looking none too flash these days.

Finally, we are pleased to report that, thanks to all of you, the sitemeter shows a large and steadily growing readership over the past year:


Looks like June will be another record month.


OK, so let's get on with year two, and the final 12 months of AC 32. And it has started with a bang. Last evening BMW ORACLE had major functions in four cities around the world: Rome, Valencia, Kiel and NYC. Jane has a good story and some photos on yesterday's Rock Ctr events on the main team website. In short, it was a terrific day for the team, Cup and, indeed, our sport.

And, of course, the sailing and support teams in Valencia are hard at it getting ready for Act 12. We're on the plane back to VLC tonight, and can't wait for the racing to begin next Thursday. Should be a terrific regatta, and ensuing year.

Thanks again to you, our families, friends and fans for your continuing interest and support. Let us have any comments and suggestions -- always appreciated.

Thanks for your many kind emails. No, we have not (knock on wood!) walked in front of a bus or any of the many cement trucks one finds these days in the massive construction zone otherwise known as the Port America's Cup. Just taking a bit of a blogging break before the upcoming LV Acts to catch up on other pressing business, and to be as well prepared as possible to have a successful go of it in the all-important months ahead -- on the water, ashore, as well as online. "Stay tuned -- we'll be right back."

One of my several bosses -- in this case Blog Boss Roland Neubauer(GER) of BMW's web-agency Sport Media Service GmbH in Munich -- reports that the August and early September page-view and -duration numbers for the "BOB" (the BMW ORACLE Blog) have gone through the roof. I will try to drag some hard numbers out of Roland and Co. so that those of you who are web-savvy can get some comparative idea of how we are doing. Still a very small fish in the blogging pond, but among sailing sites apparently now one of the larger.

Also, we are pleased to note that yesterday's "Freedom" post struck a chord as it has been referred to on a number of other key sailing sites, has generated more than the usual number of emails (LOL -- which isn't saying much since most posts generate none), and the last time I looked there were fully ten (!) comments left by our dear readers -- where usually there are none or at the most one or two.

Thanks to all of our readers for your continuing, and apparently growing, interest and support.

Two of my other bosses, Russell Green and Mirko Groeschner, have asked that we keep it going at least through Acts 8 & 9. Time permitting, we will give it our best shot. Thanks, too, to BMW's Ralf Hussmann who pushed for it in the first place, and to Oracle's Judy Sim for her moral and other support especially when things get a bit hectic during the Acts.

As always, your feedback and suggestions to blog [at] tfehman [dot] com are much appreciated.


Judy Sim and Ralf Hussmann.



An "edgy" image of Roland Neubauer.



Onward and upward.

Our drive is to win the "Auld Mug", the America's Cup, the crown jewel of sailing. In order to achieve this we push to the limit almost every single day. And it is often the little stories, that aren't as well as publicised as, for instance, a risky manoeuvre during a Match Race, or a new piece of equipment, that make the difference between victory and defeat. Many of these events generally go unnoticed by the public, but it is these events that add up to determine the spirit of the America's Cup, indeed to define the culture and soul of our team. In the BMW ORACLE Racing Team Blog, we would like to share these stories and events with you. Thank you for your interest, and for joining us as we pursue with passion the oldest and arguably grandest trophy in sport.

About Blog Editor Tom Ehman

Tom Ehman is head of External Affairs for BMW ORACLE Racing, and serves as chairman of the team's Executive Committee. He was the founding chairman of the Challenger Commission, and continues to edit the CC Blog. A USA native, he and his family had been living in Germany the past eight years but have relocated to Valencia for the duration of the 32nd America's Cup. This is Tom's ninth America's Cup campaign, and we are pleased to have his extensive Cup knowledge and experience guiding our team Blog.