We sat together after a dive in Dahab / Egypt writing all details of our last dive in our paper logbook, flipping through pages of a reef fish book, trying to find all animals we have spotted down there.
Suddenly we wondered why there is no professional, high-end webservice, offering a rich-media logbook to recreational divers, with search functions, nice pictures of the spotted animals, input assistances, calculation helpers etc. Inbetween minutes, all kind of different features shot in our minds and we were really excited, that this is something we really wanna do...
The rest of the divetrip, we sat together on the evenings, discussing and fevereshly looking forward to start creating this website. After almost a year of work (mainly in our free time), we are overhappy and also a little bit proud to present you: yourdivebook.com.

For us - and hopefully for many of the users of yourdivebook.com - diving is related to exciting journeys and holidays. We interrelate nice memories not only to the dives themselves, but to the whole time around them. In our minds, we see sunny days, picturesque beaches, palm trees, friends and a lot of fun.
Yourdivebook.com gives its users a chance to store and safe all these nice memories in the rich media logbook and furthermore share all these nice memories and experiences with friends, buddies and other divers all over the world - all for free. Your divebook offers a quick and easy way to insert your dives, assisted by many little input and selection helpers. In our community area, you will find old buddies, instructors, dive masters etc., stay in contact and maybe even plan upcoming divetrips with them again. In our forum, all diving-related topics wait to be discussed, the user finds travel recommondations, events, general information about diving, etc.

Beside that, your divebook calls its users to commonly build two diving-related encyclopedias: the Underwater Life Library and the Divespots Library. These areas try to store, combine and offer the high value data, divers all over the world collect while diving and maintaining their logbooks. Both areas follow the wikipedia principle, encouraging all users to share and present their knowledge, photos, thoughts and ideas and thereby building a database of the most exciting divespots and underwater creatures. The more people participate, the more valuable all these information will become. Planning upcoming divetrips can now be based on the unbiased recommendations and experiences of theoretically thousands of other divers worldwide. Considering their opinions and tips will help you to find the perfect locations for yourself. Are you aching to spot a specific species underwater? The Underwater Life Library will show you, where most divers have spotted it.

The ratings of the Underwater Life Library and the Divespots Library is generated by the rating of all dives of the users in their logbooks. So if a member logs a dive at the Blue Hole in Dahab, Egypt, and rates this dive with 5 stars, these 5 stars are added to all former Blue Hole dives of other logbooks and the average becomes the rating of the divespot. The rating system of the underwater life follows the same principles. Of course this rating should not implement, that there are more or less important lifeforms underwater. It simply tries to reflect the fact that there are more or less exciting creatures for a diver to spot underwater, due to the rareness, beautiness, etc. of the animal. We think, that valuable information slumbers in the divers logbooks all over the world. If we manage to collect and connect their information, relate them to another and make them accessable, the benefit will not only be interesting for our users, but also for scientists, biologists, politicians etc.

Of course, we are aware of the fact, that divers and the diving tourism destroys coral reefs and other habitats of many animals. But for us, the solution shouldn't be to completely prohibit recreational diving, but to stronger eludicate divers about the sensitiveness of these ecosystems, stronger enforce divers to carefulness, improve diving courses in matter of the protection of the environment etc. We also definately claim more protected areas, numeric restrictions of divers, cylcles of recovery times for high frequented and already endangered dive areas etc.

But still, diving is a very good chance to see, experience and thereby understand more about the uncompareable beauty of the underwater world - it is not a bad thing. We think, that once experienced the world underneath the water surface, the awareness of the vulnerability of this ecosystem, and the duty to preserve it, definately raises. We don't have to completely keep away humans from the underwater world, but to carefully control how we encounter it.
In providing and collecting valuable information about the oceans, lakes and rivers of the planet, maybe this website even can play its little part in helping the underwater world to be better protected.

Of course we also try to earn money with this service, by advertising. But we think there is nothing wrong in doing so. Our main goal is not to get rich with yourdivebook.com, but stated in the textlines above. So far, we didn't earn a penny, but invested money and a lot of our free time to bring yourdivebook.com alive.
We will check, who wants to advertise here, what philosophies are behind them and to what benefit this advertisement could be for our users.

We are always interested in partnerships with people and organisations, who share our former stated goals and interests. We are looking for reasonable ways to support the protection of the underwater world. This support could be contributing revenues of yourdivebook.com - if there are some one day ;) - but also personally or "physically" involving. Please let us know, how we can work together or help you to conserve the underwater world and also encourage people to explore it in a sustainable way.

Thanks for reading.
The YourDiveBook Team.
yourdivebook.com
October, 2008