In 2018 the MarineTraffic blog featured more posts than any previous year, by many more contributors than ever before. We covered everything from ship tracking to ship photography, technology in the industry to important maritime events. So for our final post of the year, we decided to take a look back at the five most popular blog posts of 2018.
5) New COO sets sights on MarineTraffic growth
The arrival of a new Chief Operations Officer was big news for the team at MarineTraffic. The appointment of Nikos Psaltopoulos is crucial as we look to create a high-performance culture at MarineTraffic, and one that will continue to build the technologies that enable greater efficiency in the maritime industry, through transparency and better access to information.
On his part, Psaltopoulos said MarineTraffic needs to always think like a start-up and ensure there is a constant culture of innovation. “The next few years are going to be very exciting as we work towards building a company not just for today or tomorrow, but a company for the future.”
4) Mapping the density of ship routes using big data
In February, MarineTraffic launched its new and vastly improved Density Maps. The aggregation of billions of data points from 2017, and the refactoring of previous year’s data, meant the new Density Maps were updated on two fronts, resulting in the most comprehensive multi-layered map visualisation of global shipping activity ever released.
The new Density Map format created from vessel trajectories, instead of positions, illustrates vessel activity in even the most remote of places, where AIS coverage is not as strong. The ‘cool’ coloured lines signify that a route has not been taken often, the ‘warm’ coloured lines signify where routes are regularly utilised. The result of all this work is a global picture of shipping activity.
3) The Strangest Ship Tracking Requests
Each year, the team at MarineTraffic deal with 23,000 incoming requests, all handled with professionalism and care by our Customer Success Team. In this post, journalist Alex King delves into some of the strangest and most unique requests the team has received over the years. These include an optimistic MarineTraffic user asking the team to help find their lost wallet on a ferry, a distressed woman asking to help her track down her ex-boyfriend, who had disappeared from her life without a trace, and a ship owner caught cheating when his wife used MarineTraffic to discover that he was not where he should have been. All of which made for a very light-hearted and amusing blog post that proved to be very popular with readers.
2) Five reasons shipping incidents make great headlines
In this blog post, Dustin Eno, from Navigate Response, looks at the reasons why shipping incidents continue to attract readers interest. He claims there is a recipe for the perfect news story, one that attracts viewers, generates clicks and gets shared. While the formula varies slightly, the key ingredients are remarkably uniform across cultures and demographics.
He writes that shipping incidents have always provided the right mix for a perfect story in one easy package, but vessel tracking platforms have made those key ingredients more accessible and improved their quality.
1) Seven things you should know about AIS
The most read post of 2018 on the MarineTraffic blog was an in-depth look at how the Automatic Identification System (AIS) works. The post lists seven key things you need to know about AIS, from its humble origins as a technology aiming to improve safety at sea, to how it works, how it’s developed over the years and who uses it and why.
For example, did you know that more than 40 million users track vessels annually through the MarineTraffic platform? Millions of users now have a global picture of relevant and valuable information, from helping maritime businesses increase efficiency to allowing financial analysts and hedge funds to monitor global commodity flows.