I read with great interest an entry Ben Ellison made on Panbo
(electronics blog) in regards to activecaptain.com and gave it a try.
I am very impressed, and have become a quick fan and frequent
contributor.

I can see how active captain is going to quickly put an end to me
shelling out $100+ a season for updated marine facility guides which
contain mostly outdated information. (Ever try to go to a Restaurant
or West Marine location in a guide book, that is no longer there?).

I am a software company owner, to impress me is saying a lot. This web-
site is done very well in every respect. Especially in that it is very
easy to be a contributor. Click and grab a map to get to your area of
interest, zoom in, click on facilities that already exist, and see
recently updated information and reviews.

Want to enter your own information, it is really simple. See a
mistake someone else made, that is simple to fix as well. Suddenly we
are all editors of an on-line pilot guide. Want to know the price of
fuel, if we are an active community about this, the price of fuel
would be updated within days of it changing. Maybe they should put the
buoy's there as well, or at least create a category of contribution
that lets us captains post "warnings" where buoys, or other map
information is know to be wrong. I think I am going to suggest to the
authors that they create a category for "notice to mariners", and
maybe people in each local community could take responsibility for
reading and posting them in active captain so we can have them appear
in on active captains view of google earth! Then, in addition to
saving money updating our marina guide books, we can both save money
getting less frequent updates to our navigation software, and have a
way to double check quickly how out of date our navigation software is
for an approach to a new marina.

Some things I like about active captain:
- When other people make an entry that is wrong, you can change it
(that's YOU who are reading my google post right now!), everyone is an
editor and the accuracy and relevance of the information goes way up!
The marina owners are going to hate this ... ask Microsoft, who is
unhappy with their Wikipedia entry, and cannot get their view of
themselves into the Wiki database to stick, because the community
controls it. Likewise if a Marina or local restaurant provides high
prices or poor service, it will be on-line for all to see, if they
improve things, the same.

- Once you create a review, you can edit it (text and all) without
creating a new entry. Ever diss someone and come to regret it later
(Larry ?), or make a review and then find on a repeat visit things
have improved, and you want to change your original review (text &
all). I don't know about you, but I feel comfortable making a negative
entry, for example one I made for Danford's in Port Jefferson, knowing
that if on repeat visits I don't experience the same problems and/or
other review writers tell me my experience was abnormal, I can update
my review to be positive again. In a marine guide, you are very
unlikely to read a bad review, and that really doesn't help the reader
to distinguish between what I will really experience in a marina by
reading the guide book.

- Reviews carry a rating on the captain who made the entry. The rating
seems to vary on how much you contribute that turns out to be
accurate / accepted into the database. This gives more weight to the
active members, and kind of forces the marina owners to just fix
what's wrong rather then attempt to post good reviews of themselves.

Security - I read someone is afraid their email addresses will be
"harvested". This is unfounded. Give me a break, some of the many
vendors you pay for service, buy parts, magazine etc. have contributed
your email address and personal information to huge corporate
databases to the point anyone in the marine business can pay a tiny
amount of money to get your email address cross referenced to non-
marine sources and census data. I believe, for less than $1000 I could
get the email address of everyone who owns a boat along with the age
of your boat, how many kids you have, your kids ages, your income,
etc. etc. Registering with this service is hardly a risk in any way,
contrary to an author who suggested creating a temporary msn or yahoo
email address, I wouldn't bother.

Support - I have been very happy with the support I received over the
last two weeks. Granted virtually nobody needs to get support,
everything is pretty self explanatory, but as I tried to push the
limits of the web-site I found some inconsequential things (e.g. in an
anchorage suppose to be depth, or a comment), I got responses the same
or next day. This is far above the call of duty.

Enhance your marine experience, save a tree, and get honest
information about your destination, and go to www.activecaptain.com
and be an editor to what has unarguably established itself in two
short weeks, the ultimate on-line marine guide that is open to all of
us being the editors!

And ... if you had a good experience at Danford's in Port Jefferson,
post a review, if my comments are not supportable by the experience of
others, I will revisit it.

b393capt,

Thanks for hitting the nail on the head. We came up with this idea
after years of frustration with the current boating guides. What we
found is that we only went to guide books when we couldn't get
information from other boaters. They (other boaters) were the ones
who
told us what marinas to avoid (never see that in the guide books) and
what not to miss (have never been steered wrong).


In our last cruise south we made extensive use of online weather and
it was great to have current information any time we wanted it. We
started talking about how this could be done for marinas, anchorages,
local knowledge, etc. What we always came back to was the desire to
be able to "talk" to boaters who had been there and done that before.
Out of that came ActiveCaptain.


We have had several marina operators call concerned that "anyone"
could write about them. This only served to make me realize that
maybe we were on the right track to having information shared.


Yes, you're much more likely to get honest reviews - the printed
guides are clearly afraid to print anything negative about marinas.
I
see you're not out of line complaining about Danford's in Port
Jefferson. Already there is another review confirming your suspicion
that they have a service problem. You're not going to get these
honest
surveys anywhere else.


Your Notice To Mariners idea is great, does anyone else here agree?


Karen
===================================
Content, Communication, Community
www.activecaptain.com