BOW WAVE 537

Bow Wave Issue 537--Twitter Edition

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Wavy Line	sam@wavyline.com
(c)2010 WavyLine.com	Issue No 537 08 Mar 10
Published free of charge to Readers
Editor: Sam Ignarski
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In this issue:

1. Welcome
2. Quarterpoints for March 2010
3. SIN is Ten Years Old
4. Wanted--a Tech Solution for Cracking the Curse of Empties
5. The Consolation of Limited Resources
6. And Finally...

1. Welcome

Poem of the Week

Happy the Man

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite or fate, are mine. Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Horace, from Odes, Book III, xxix. Translation
by John Dryden

New Readers this week include:-

Shawn Connolly
Roger Bartlett of Aramco
Garyia.com
Wanda Downs of ACL Cargo
Debbie Maclou of IAG in NZ
NY Average Adjuster Jonathan Spencer

News of Readers

Reader Susan McKee from Indiana is a freelance
travel writer with a very broad range.

http://SusanMcKee.com

Karen Wong has moved to the Swire Pacific Risk Management Department

Lawrence Robert "Larry" Glosten, the Seattle naval architect died 22FEB10 2010 in his home on Bainbridge Island, Washington. He was 91.

Note from the Editor

Greetings from a bright but perishingly cold South of England. Item 2 continues our thinking on social networking. Our FOB Network project is proceeding on course and the newly designed pages for individual profiles, groups and home will be ready to be viewed in a few weeks. Individuals will be able to join for free and businesses will be charged only a nominal fee.

Enjoy!

2. Quarterpoints for March 2010

Twitter--What Use is it?

THE rise of the Web 2.0, otherwise known as social networking, is well under way. It has claimed the attention of many people, especially those aged under about 35. There are some early adopters in the shipping, transport and insurance industries but the progress in these fields has some way to go.

The rise of working using platforms such as Facebook, Myspace, Linked-in, Plaxo, to name but a few, recalls the early progress of email in the early 1990s, which took its time to become ubiquitous in our world. Back then the concerns of companies were much like they are now in the face of the new online networking tools. They worried about the security of their businesses, the difficulty of controlling the messages in and out of their servers and the dangers of someone in the company acting without authorisation.

But in the end, the attractions of email were impossible to resist. How could anyone do without a medium that was connected to the world, extremely cheap, as reliable as any modern post service and to which it was possible to attach work documents of all shapes and sizes? These powerful attractors are also present in the new generation of online networks, enabling individuals to join and quit groups of likeminded people, friends, colleagues and even peers in other companies elsewhere.

Into this new mix there is also the strangely powerful Twitter. This extension of the use of text messaging has become a new facet of connected life. It allows tweeters to send a short text, no more than 140 characters, to those who have subscribed to their output, called followers.

It is much loved by celebrities and their fans and has been colonised by people who like to send short and sometimes frequent comments on the events in their lives and at its worst manifests nothing so much as daily inconsequential chatter. But actually it is also a very powerful way for news to spread via first hand witnesses and observers of the scene. At 140 characters there is space enough to forward interesting links to items residing on websites and blogs.

I have been using Twitter for only a few months, but it is already apparent that the quality of industry-specific news is different to the feeds I already get via email. It is fast, to the point and very responsive to events. As news of the earthquake in Chile began to emerge, the first messages came in to me via Twitter. Later, as the Pacific riparians began to brace themselves for tsunamis, the time of the landfall as well as the broadcast of the event from Hawaii was tweeted to me by an early adopting retired former partner of mine from Thomas Miller. His was one of a half dozen tweets that came in during the first 24 hours of the disaster.

The strangeness of this new medium poses questions for everyone working in the traditional medium of print. Most, if not all, the publishers of maritime news, both mainstream and fringe, already supply a daily stream of tweets to followers, though not all use the medium whole heartedly or to best effect.

One distinction which holds good is that the publishers of original material and reports, who originate shipping stories on a daily basis, are few in number and are greatly outnumbered by those who circulate and retweet stories. The old internet adage that content is king holds true for this new medium as well

I imagine Twitter, or something like it will in time become a good servant to maritime people who work in the fields of casualty, breaking news and sudden events. A system that can harness the reports of a large global network of knowledgable observers somewhere near the location of the casualty or event will be hard to eschew.

The strengths and weaknesses of the medium have already been proven at large-scale events such as the protests in Tehran and elsewhere and authoritarian governments are hard pressed to take the benefit of the internet and connectivity and yet exclude the torrent of eye witness reports. The medium in effect redefines what we consider as the public domain.

Where to get a glimpse of this new medium hard at work in our industry? You can get a good impression on James Tweed’s Coracle site, where he posts a running feed of shipping tweets and also a top 40 of shipping tweeters.

The lists of users include law firms, the US coastguard, many online publications and mariner societies, safe working specialists, recruiters, and many given over to the cruise industry. The ranks of what may be described as the industry commentariate are already well represented. Crowley Maritime also has a Twitter presence. There is a twitter service based in Southampton Docks showing dock activity by ship departure. These will certainly be joined by others as the medium spreads.

Here we are again: a new medium, very cheap, highly targetable, not really part of any company’s proprietary set-up, difficult to monetise but probably part of any internet strategy for those who live by their output on the internet.

The rise of the new social networks and the sudden appearance of things like Twitter (which at present has no more than 75m subscribers) has convinced me that we will be using the internet in new ways quite soon. Many more people will become alive to the charms and strengths of online networking already known to twenty-somethings the world over.

Follow me on Twitter:

@SamIgnarski

3. SIN is Ten Years Old

To Lower Thames Street we went to hear Martin Stopford launch the latest iteration of his Shipping Intelligence Network, a vast trunk of data, some 177 000 pages full, launched ten years ago a few days before the internet bubble began its sag. He pronounced himself content that Clarkson Research went down the road marked "subscription model" where his customers were given the opportunity of paying for the data they accessed

http://clarksons.net

4. Wanted--a Tech Solution for Cracking the Curse of Empties

James Brewer writes:-

Empty containers: doncha hate ‘em? They clog up the place and are a symbol of the lopsidedness of world trade growth. Trade flows on Asia to Europe routes have recovered almost to the volumes of a couple of years ago, but in Europe every second container that is imported goes back empty without generating revenue. Stefan Brandt, finance manager of ZIM Germany, called for some clear thinking on the thorny subject when speaking at Copenhagen Business School (incidentally his commercial alma mater) at the workshop under the auspices of the European Union ’s new SKEMA digital library project (see last week’s Bow Wave), and appropriately so, because a cohesive approach to data is exactly what is lacking in box positioning. Every shipping line is doing its own logistics for its empty containers. You would expect companies working in logistics to have big computer systems to control the equipment, but "you would be surprised to see how few suppliers there are in this industry who have this capability," said Mr Brandt. "There is a lot to gain from a better grip on the logistics side. The real bottleneck is at the seaports. As long as you do not build a new port to plan your railway, truck and waiting lines, you will always have these limitations." If a truck made great time from Munich to Hamburg, and then lost two hours at the port gate, all the gain was gone. Infrastructure must be improved before congestion hit again.

Mr Brandt warned that the margins for truck companies were low, as were trade entry barriers. Everyone was aiming at cost leadership and market share because they could not differentiate on other things. He said that the freight economics of rail was closer to that of trucks than people might have expected --and barge traffic was only really making economic sense on the Rhine.

The SKEMA seminar heard some plain speaking from ship finance experts, too. Lars Kyvsgaard of Nordea Bank and Morten Raunholt Eismark of Danske Bank warned of a financing shortfall and of the need for banks to reserve more capital against loans. Clients would be expected to present clear strategies and not be mere "tonnage providers".

5. The Consolation of Limited Resources

We found this clip in the latest edition of the CargoLaw newsletter, edited by our good friend Michael McDaniel. Amazing the flights of ingenuity which are prompted by a profound lack of cash.

http://tinyurl.com/lifeastruck

6. And Finally...

Some Laws from the House of Frazer Hunt in Sydney:-

1. Law of Mechanical Repair - After your hands become coated with grease, your nose will begin to itch and you'll have to pee.

2. Law of Gravity - Any tool, nut, bolt, screw, when dropped, will roll to the least accessible corner.

3. Law of Probability -The probability of being watched is directly proportional to the stupidity of your act

4. Law of Random Numbers - If you dial a wrong number, you never get a busy signal and someone always answers.

5. Law of the Alibi - If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the very next morning you will have a flat tire.

6. Variation Law - If you change lines (or traffic lanes), the one you were in will always move faster than the one you are in now (works every time).

7. Law of the Bath - When the body is fully immersed in water, the telephone rings.

8. Law of Close Encounters -The probability of meeting someone you know increases dramatically when you are with someone you don't want to be seen with.

9. Law of the Result - When you try to prove to someone that a machine won't work, it will.

10. Law of Biomechanics - The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the reach.

11. Law of the Theater and Hockey Arena - At any event, the people whose seats are furthest from the aisle, always arrive last. They are the ones who will leave their seats several times to go for food, beer, or the toilet and who leave early before the end of the performance or the game is over. The folks in the aisle seats come early, never move once, have long gangly legs or big bellies, and stay to the bitter end of the performance. The aisle people also are very surly folk.

12. The Coffee Law - As soon as you sit down to a cup of hot coffee, your boss will ask you to do something which will last until the coffee is cold.

13. Murphy's Law of Lockers - If there are only two people in a locker room, they will have adjacent lockers.

14. Law of Physical Surfaces - The chances of an open-faced jelly sandwich landing face down on a floor, are directly correlated to the newness and cost of the carpet or rug.

15. Law of Logical Argument - Anything is possible if you don't know what you are talking about.

16. Brown's Law of Physical Appearance - If the clothes fit, they're ugly.

17. Oliver's Law of Public Speaking - A closed mouth gathers no feet.

18. Wilson's Law of Commercial Marketing Strategy- As soon as you find a product that you really like, they will stop making it.

19. Doctors' Law - If you don't feel well, make an appointment to go to the doctor, by the time you get there you'll feel better. But don't make an appointment, and you'll stay sick.

P.S. Also courtesy of Frazer, David Cummings rounds off the week with some more jokettes:-

-->Most teenage girls in Australia think middle-aged men are sexy. The bad news is they think middle age is 25.

-->To make a long story short, there’s nothing like having the boss walk in.

-->Why does mineral water that "has trickled through mountains for centuries" have a use by date?

-->The only thing that wakes you up faster than coffee is spilled coffee.

-->A dialect becomes a language when its speakers get an army and navy.

-->I’m adopted, and I'm glad my parents were at least honest enough to tell me. But why every day?

-->Who coined the phrase 'coined the phrase'?

--> A developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods. An environmentalist is someone who already owns a house in the woods.

-->I had to take a drug test last week and it came back negative. Which means my dealer has got some explaining to do.

-->A man who was sacked from the dodgems is taking his employers to court. He is claiming funfair dismissal. (You can’t have high class material all the time.)

http://www.davidcummings.com.au

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