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evolution of DB
- Thread startergman
- Start date
Thread Status: Hello
, There was no answer in this thread for more than 60 days.
It can take a long time to get an up-to-date response or contact with relevant users.
It can take a long time to get an up-to-date response or contact with relevant users.
I recall around 1998 when freedivingmag.com was a separate site run by Cliff Etzel. Deeperblue was more of a scuba site, I think. Then they merged, or so I heard.... but I think it was more of a hostile takeover. Otherwise Cliff Etzel would be the one running DB... 
Yes, a hostile takeover, engineered from the Boardroom high atop the Deeper Blue Tower in the City of London. Satellite phone calls arcing over the planet to Freediving Editor Paul Kotik in the luxuriously-appointed cabin of DB-1, the corporate Grumman Gulfstream II... armies of lawyers burning the midnight oil in Wall Street offices...Carl Icahn and George Soros watching anxiously from the sidelines...Saudi oil sheikhs trembling in their desert tents...and off in the distance, serenely regarding the capitalist maelstrom, the PRC Politburo chaired by the eternal essence of Mao himself.
That's exactly what happened !
That's exactly what happened !
Well - it's interesting to see what stories people come up with
The official story is not as interesting as that i'm afraid.
A little back-story about me. I had my first scuba expereince when I was about 8 years old, the typical sitting round the pool on holiday with the parents when some local dive centre comes up and flogs over-priced taster sessions. Anyway it got me hooked, to the extent where I wanted to dive all the time. I learnt to dive properly as soon as I could and did my assistant instructor course when I turned 16. By the time I headed to university I was definately hooked on teaching and diving as much as I could.
So, I entered University in 1996 and decided to flex my web design skills (I was doing a Business Computing Degree). I decided that publishing some of the extensive stories I had about various "challenging" students and dives that I had had by that point. I published numerous stories until 1998 where I started to get interest from other writers about contributing to the site with their stories (one of our earliest stories The Sharks Dining Room author has just got back in touch to write some more!!).
I decided at that point to make it more like a magazine format and starting asking for volunteer helpers. I got a couple of editors and load of writers who all started contributing.
At the same time I was very interested in the "politics" of the diving business and since I was trained by the British Sub Aqua Club (BSAC) I decided to help out with some working groups and got to know quite a few of the "higher up" people. BSAC held a conference that year called "Underwater World 98" or something along those lines. It was an awesome conference and I teamed up with BSAC to do some rudimentary online coverage.
Since I was still at University when I attended the conference and had a real passion for trying to get new people into the sport of Diving, especially younger people. It was a real challenge recruiting new members for the University Sub Aqua Club and one of my ideas was to introduce snorkelling as a program for younger students (school and university ages) as a means of getting them hooked on diving. I worked hard behind the scenes at the conference to hook up with the main snorkelling managers at BSAC and hatched an idea to start doing some more articles on Snorkelling.
This is when I did some searching on the internet and came across Cliff Etzel's "FreeDiving and Snorkelling Internet Magazine" (freediving-mag.com). Cliff was on the verge of shutting it down as he had lost his interest in funding the site (running internet sites was still pretty expensive in those days) and was running out of steam on writing articles. We decided to team up with me providing the expertise on running content sites, providing hosting, generating advertising (where I could) and funding the site generally, whilst Cliff tried to recruit and manage some writers.
There was nothing hostile about the merging of the sites.
We operated the sites from the same platform but seperate sites up although in 1999 we went through a redesign to create a common look and we introduced the forums to generate some discussion.
In 2000 we decided to combine the sites, go through yet another redesign and create a "super" site dedicated to diving in general.
Some of our best writers and editors joined us in the 2000-2002 period (Paul Kotik, Malcolm James, John Bennett (R.I.P), Sara-Lise Haith to name just a few!)
The introduction of the forums in 1999 made a huge difference. It was the first moderated forum with a dedicated FreeDiving section and people started moving in. The explosion in growth started in 2000 and just kept going.
FreeDiving started to take a major focus of the forums and the main site around that time and we recruited a lot of help where we could. Cliff started having some personal issues and dipped in and out of being the editor over the whole period.
I decided in late 2001 that we needed to give the site a good update and add a decent [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system"]Content Management System[/ame] behind the scenes to take the pressure off me uploading content manually. I spent around £5000 in 2002 on a custom built system by our friends over at SitePoint (based in Australia and the people who run one of the largest websites dedicated to web developers). The produced the system which still runs the main site today.
Several things happened that year, firstly I organised for both Cliff, Paul and I to attend DEMA for the first time. We also got the sad news of Audrey Mestre's death hit our headlines and with our semi-live coverage of both the record attempts and the aftermath propelled us further into the limelight and set us as experts in the FreeDiving Media field.
In 2003 Cliff's decided to take a break from being one of the editors and Paul stepped in as the formal FreeDiving Editor. It also saw us take the first few steps, after our attempts at crawling back in 1998 and 2002, at full blown online coverage of major events. We covered the Sony FreeDiver Open Classic 2003, despite challenges from the organisers. We descended on mass at DEMA 2003 in Miami which proved ourselves to some of the PR people in the Scuba side of things.
Since then we have tried to grow both the community angle (which as you know is going strong in here) and the editorial side. Special Feature Coverage of events became something of our speciality and some of our highlights have been AIDA Team World Championships 2004, BIOS Freeology Open Classic 2004, Cambrian Foundation Akumal Cave Project 2004, F.R.E.E Turkey - Yasemin and David World Record Attempts, Performance FreeDiving Record Attempts in 2004, 2005 and 2006 and of course all our DEMA coverage.
In 2004 we also introduced some other aspects to the site with our ability to run FreeDiving Courses here in the UK (and soon to be Egypt). Combine that with our Editorial and Community Forums and we are one hell of a site.
Golly! There is so much more the whole story about DeeperBlue that it's hard to remember it all to put it down!
The whole past 10 years have definately been a labour of love for me and it hasn't been cheap by any means (it's very difficult to make money of content sites and i'm sure i've sunk £xx,xxx odd into the site) but I have to say that DB has given me some of the best friends and times in my short life so far. I sometimes feel I have to pinch myself to see what this site has become.
So - there are so many Thank You's to do especially to my volunteer staff and to all visitors and members of the site!
Here's to another 10 years! :friday
The official story is not as interesting as that i'm afraid.
A little back-story about me. I had my first scuba expereince when I was about 8 years old, the typical sitting round the pool on holiday with the parents when some local dive centre comes up and flogs over-priced taster sessions. Anyway it got me hooked, to the extent where I wanted to dive all the time. I learnt to dive properly as soon as I could and did my assistant instructor course when I turned 16. By the time I headed to university I was definately hooked on teaching and diving as much as I could.
So, I entered University in 1996 and decided to flex my web design skills (I was doing a Business Computing Degree). I decided that publishing some of the extensive stories I had about various "challenging" students and dives that I had had by that point. I published numerous stories until 1998 where I started to get interest from other writers about contributing to the site with their stories (one of our earliest stories The Sharks Dining Room author has just got back in touch to write some more!!).
I decided at that point to make it more like a magazine format and starting asking for volunteer helpers. I got a couple of editors and load of writers who all started contributing.
At the same time I was very interested in the "politics" of the diving business and since I was trained by the British Sub Aqua Club (BSAC) I decided to help out with some working groups and got to know quite a few of the "higher up" people. BSAC held a conference that year called "Underwater World 98" or something along those lines. It was an awesome conference and I teamed up with BSAC to do some rudimentary online coverage.
Since I was still at University when I attended the conference and had a real passion for trying to get new people into the sport of Diving, especially younger people. It was a real challenge recruiting new members for the University Sub Aqua Club and one of my ideas was to introduce snorkelling as a program for younger students (school and university ages) as a means of getting them hooked on diving. I worked hard behind the scenes at the conference to hook up with the main snorkelling managers at BSAC and hatched an idea to start doing some more articles on Snorkelling.
This is when I did some searching on the internet and came across Cliff Etzel's "FreeDiving and Snorkelling Internet Magazine" (freediving-mag.com). Cliff was on the verge of shutting it down as he had lost his interest in funding the site (running internet sites was still pretty expensive in those days) and was running out of steam on writing articles. We decided to team up with me providing the expertise on running content sites, providing hosting, generating advertising (where I could) and funding the site generally, whilst Cliff tried to recruit and manage some writers.
There was nothing hostile about the merging of the sites.
We operated the sites from the same platform but seperate sites up although in 1999 we went through a redesign to create a common look and we introduced the forums to generate some discussion.
In 2000 we decided to combine the sites, go through yet another redesign and create a "super" site dedicated to diving in general.
Some of our best writers and editors joined us in the 2000-2002 period (Paul Kotik, Malcolm James, John Bennett (R.I.P), Sara-Lise Haith to name just a few!)
The introduction of the forums in 1999 made a huge difference. It was the first moderated forum with a dedicated FreeDiving section and people started moving in. The explosion in growth started in 2000 and just kept going.
FreeDiving started to take a major focus of the forums and the main site around that time and we recruited a lot of help where we could. Cliff started having some personal issues and dipped in and out of being the editor over the whole period.
I decided in late 2001 that we needed to give the site a good update and add a decent [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system"]Content Management System[/ame] behind the scenes to take the pressure off me uploading content manually. I spent around £5000 in 2002 on a custom built system by our friends over at SitePoint (based in Australia and the people who run one of the largest websites dedicated to web developers). The produced the system which still runs the main site today.
Several things happened that year, firstly I organised for both Cliff, Paul and I to attend DEMA for the first time. We also got the sad news of Audrey Mestre's death hit our headlines and with our semi-live coverage of both the record attempts and the aftermath propelled us further into the limelight and set us as experts in the FreeDiving Media field.
In 2003 Cliff's decided to take a break from being one of the editors and Paul stepped in as the formal FreeDiving Editor. It also saw us take the first few steps, after our attempts at crawling back in 1998 and 2002, at full blown online coverage of major events. We covered the Sony FreeDiver Open Classic 2003, despite challenges from the organisers. We descended on mass at DEMA 2003 in Miami which proved ourselves to some of the PR people in the Scuba side of things.
Since then we have tried to grow both the community angle (which as you know is going strong in here) and the editorial side. Special Feature Coverage of events became something of our speciality and some of our highlights have been AIDA Team World Championships 2004, BIOS Freeology Open Classic 2004, Cambrian Foundation Akumal Cave Project 2004, F.R.E.E Turkey - Yasemin and David World Record Attempts, Performance FreeDiving Record Attempts in 2004, 2005 and 2006 and of course all our DEMA coverage.
In 2004 we also introduced some other aspects to the site with our ability to run FreeDiving Courses here in the UK (and soon to be Egypt). Combine that with our Editorial and Community Forums and we are one hell of a site.
Golly! There is so much more the whole story about DeeperBlue that it's hard to remember it all to put it down!
The whole past 10 years have definately been a labour of love for me and it hasn't been cheap by any means (it's very difficult to make money of content sites and i'm sure i've sunk £xx,xxx odd into the site) but I have to say that DB has given me some of the best friends and times in my short life so far. I sometimes feel I have to pinch myself to see what this site has become.
So - there are so many Thank You's to do especially to my volunteer staff and to all visitors and members of the site!
Here's to another 10 years! :friday
BatRay said:
nooo he is in love :inlove and also has a few things of his own going on. check out his profile and you can see what he has been up to.
island_sands said:
Another one for your catchbag eh? rofl
Can't believe Ms Haith has been around soooooo long...
And for all of you who want to know more about Bullhead sharks... don't change the channel!
hehehehehe so long but haven't been too much around yet
not my catchbag but hey you never know rofl
Tell us about these bullhead sharks then Sasch... (hey didn't we get engaged in April rofl)
not my catchbag but hey you never know rofl
Tell us about these bullhead sharks then Sasch... (hey didn't we get engaged in April rofl)