In an online Web world of unlimited long tail choice, it's not enough these days to launch a multimedia publishing service and social network with generic focus. Chocolate & vanilla sites like flickr and panoramio have become bloated with terabytes of bland content, and it often takes too long to weed through pages to find niche community-of-interest information and media.

Marcello Ferrero of Bluemapia recognized this, and so when he and his friend Massimo Cortinovis decided to take their passion for sailing to the online world, they did it right. Both ardent sailors, Marcello and Massimo built bluemapia for themselves, which all began as a weekend skunk works project for a freely available opensource mobile client designed for personally use, followed by a 3-month Web design effort to support mobile content publishing and sharing plus trip planning. These are the developer talent stories I love to hear about... A couple of passionate guys with Web development skills who built location-based services for their own use, but realized how to extend it out into social contexts through a community of similar-minded folks - in this case about twenty million other sailors in the Mediterranean.

Bluemapia's mobile client allows users to upload all types of multimedia observations to the Web interface which includes marine-specific pushpins for waypoint place-marking and point-of-interest annotation. Other soon-to-be released spot-on features include real-time peer-to-peer location sharing and tracking, marine weather, proximity-based messaging for communicating with other sailor members, and a geo TV feature which allows users to share live, geo-referenced video. If you're a sailor, download the client today and start publishing, sharing, and contributing to what has the promise to become a premier online destination for the boating community.