Blogging tool for divers: Sharing your Diving Life

We can't be underwater all the time, we know that. It is a simple fact. Us, the diving species, sometimes we need to do "irrelevant" actions like eating, sleeping, filling the tanks and blogging.

Yes, I said blogging and not logging. We all log our dives, but since the second boom of the internet more and more divers are using different systems to share their dives in a more interactive way.

Now a days instead of logging your dive, you just blog about your dive on the internet. Yes. On the internet. You create your own blog, you add some photos, you customise the text, and you make a brief description of your experience. After you finish, you publish your new dive in your blog and instead of closing the book (like you used to do with your paper logbook), you invite your buddies to comment and add their opinions in your Blog.

Is this a weird idea? Not so weird if you understand the advantages. An old paper dive log was a private item. You never share your log because at the end of the day, no one really cares to read it. Boring technical info never brings feedback.

Understanding this and maybe searching for something different, the diving community has had its own virtual space since last year. A place, in the middle of virtual surface intervals, where divers from around the world type their everyday diving lives. When I created MyDivingLife.com I did it with the idea of letting everyone now about my life and about the future arrival of my son. My wife and I got the fantastic news while we were working diving in Thailand, and after 1 year diving between Australia, Thailand and Egypt. After a few simple emails and tons of requests for sharing the same space to other divers, MyDivingLife opened its doors to divers from all over the world.

The non-profit, diving blog system, has managed what many diving expos worldwide haven't managed yet, to bring divers closer to other divers. Don't get me wrong, these are not Dive Business executives, these are simple diving fanatics, people in love with the SCUBA world, people that have realised that sharing your passion is one of the most interesting experiences ever.

At the begining, like any story, MydivingLife had just a bunch of ocassional bloggers, now days it has more than 200 dedicated blogs that include Dive Centers Owners in Tasmania to Zookeepers in the US. Diving Blogs from all countries, all diving organisations, different temperatures, styles and philosophies.

The result? An amazing success! Why? Well, it is not difficult to understand. MyDivingLife www.mydivinglife.com only talks about one topic: Diving, and the writers and authors of every review, article and blog, are just real people, real divers with feelings, fears, dreams and personal lives.

No, there are no Jessica Albas (pity!) or superheros here, the real diving community is a bunch of people that are in permanent search of new information, knowledge and buddies. Because behind all the bytes and data that the intenet hides in it's code, divers from all over the world are leaving a testimony of a process, a development, a learning curve.

After each dive, after each moment remembering that experience, the author and diver is sharing with us something that is so difficult to explain to a non diver. Only we understand when a diver tries to explain the peace, the freedom, the excitement and the joy a perfect dive.

So if you think the world is crazy? Maybe you are right, but out there there are people even more crazy, people that want to scream hard how much they love diving.. and that's how we have read in the past months from divers wedding engagments, divemasters every day working life, tsunami survivors, PADI Course Directors experiences, or simply diving students going thorugh the first sessions of confined water exercises.

In a personal view I'm still in the process of understanding why blogging is such an addiction. I guess it is like diving: it is not so much about the diving, it is about being able to share with the world, the amazing feeling you get everytime you touch the water.

So, in my case, while we wait a few years until my 8 week old son is able to read my Blog, I will continue writing, leaving a handbook of lessons, experiences and instructions of how to go on diving trips with prams, nappies, excitement and the faith that diving will always be there for us.

Source: Gabriel Machuret - email@nitrogendreams.com - www.mydivinglife.com