Calvin

Saw this video on YouTube today:

Which reminded me of this video I saw awhile back about Palau:

What an awesome sight.

More Shark Week promotion, this time on MSN Videos. Pretty awesome.

Sharkman Clip

The Discovery Channel website is hosting a game call Sharkrunners to promote their upcoming Shark Week. You get a ship and crew, and plot a course up and down the Pacific coast hunting and researching sharks. You don’t have to have the game running on your browser all day, the ship will continue on it’s course while you’re away. When you do come across a shark, you’ll be notified by email (or optionally with a text message).

I missed my too opportunities for a shark encounter, so I can’t say what happens, but the more encounters you have, the more funding you get for upgrades and crew. So far, all I’ve learned is that I shouldn’t quit my day job.

So check it out, and if you sign up, you can add me as your rival, my user id is cyu77. Right now, my rival is $32k to my $0, so I’m an easy target.

Cool story.

Hammerhead Shark has Virgin Birth

via CBC.ca

Like usual, there were a lot of small changes in the latest update, but this is favorite:

View this video at metacafe

You can also now add Metacafe videos to dive sites!

—Calvin

Another great video from National Geographic:

We’ve been busy here at MND getting everything ready for Beta, but unfortunately a lot of it has been those small things that you hardly see (we’re hoping those small things will add up to big things).

One thing we’ve just added that I’m especially excited about is that now you can post YouTube videos to your blog post. Previously, you can only add videos to dive sites, but now all you have to do is paste the URL for the video in your blog post and we’ll automatically put the YouTube player in its place.

Here’s an example of what it looks like. Recently National Geographic started posting videos on YouTube. Here’s one of my favorites:

Shark vs. Octopus

For now, only YouTube is supported, but I’m looking to add other video sites like MetaCafe as well. If you have any other video sites you would like us to support, please let us know.

—Calvin

If you’ve been watching this MyNextDive lately, you’ll have noticed that we’ve been regularly adding new features the last few weeks. I’m happy to say that we’re now pretty much feature complete for Beta, with all that is left being some minor touch ups before making that leap.

I’m going to highlight some of the recent features added MND, please check it out and give us feedback.

Dive Trip Details Pages

You can now view a trip in more detail from Trip Details Page. From this page you’ll be able to read in descriptions of the sites visited on the Dive Trip, read other users comments about the trip, and add your own comments to the trip. Here’s an example:

Calvin’s 5 Dives In 4 Days in Virgin Islands

To see these detail pages, you can click on the Sitemap link at the top any of our pages, or click on the comments link when browsing Dive Trips from our Trip Planner.

User Pages

Everybody now have their own personal space where they can tell others about themselves, make blog posts, and keep track of their activity on MyNextDive. You can also say hi and leave comments on other user’s page.

Dive Site Pages

All dive sites now have their own pages so that you can learn more about a site before adding it to your trip. If you’ve been to that site, you can leave comments and add photos you’ve taken of that Dive Site. Here’s an example:

Grass Cay, Diving in The Virgin Islands

Better Avatar Support

Previously, you had to go to another website in order to add an avatar to your profile. That is no longer necessary. You can now add your avatar here.

Besides the above changes, there were a lot of small bug fixes and tweaks to the Trip Planner, Forums, and other pages that we felt was necessary to make the experience better for you folks. Please spend some time exploring MyNextDive and tell us what you think.

Thanks, Calvin

First off, welcome everyone to MyNextDive!

Neil and I are trying to create something very special here—we’re committed to creating nothing but the very best community for Scuba divers online! So if you have any suggestions for us, please let us know!

—Calvin