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.