We at Made by Many launched an experimental blog 10 days ago. Normally we create blogs, blogging platforms and blog-based communities for clients (other than our company blog), but this time an opportunity arose to do one for ourselves and to use it like a laboratory.

The opportunity was provided by my little brother Jonny Malbon, who set sail in a non-stop, round-the-world, solo race called The Vendee Globe. It’s the one that Ellen MacArthur almost won eight years ago. Only 68 people have ever completed it. Sometimes people don’t come back. It’s mad: the premise being “last one round the South Pole’s a sissy” and the race involves these 60 foot super-high-tech lightweight surfboards with too much sail area. It’s a formula one drag race round the planet that takes around 90 days and involves a long and lonely stint in the outer space of The Southern Ocean. The video below provides a good overview.

The ultimate Vendée Globe 2008 from Artemis Ocean Racing on Vimeo.

So what are these experiments?

Well, Jonny is at the head of a very long tail of content being produced, distributed, picked over and reassembled by citizen journos (blogeurs) and old media alike. It’s a feeding frenzy for a global community of die-hard yachties. Most of them are in France, it has to be said, but there’s a huge online buzz about this race: these are big floating gadgets after all, and practically the only way you can follow the race (bearing in mind that most of it happens way offshore) is through digital media created onboard the boats by the skippers, and consumed online in a thousand places. Most of the boats have big, expensive sites and some are very good, but we’re interested to see what you can do with a simple blog and by using all the free tools we can get our hands on.

One of the most exciting of these tools is Twitter.com, and in less than a week Jonny has gathered 78 followers at his TwitterStream. This, and the fact that we have linked various Twitter accounts with with Netvibes and various Facebook accounts has led to 35% of our referrals in the first week coming from these services.

Screenshot of Twitter. Yes, it’s been up and down. No, it actually isn’t cool and this is an annoying error screen.

Jonny is Tweeting live from the boat, which is a far as we know a world first - and, quite frankly, a much better use of Twitter than informing the world that your bus is late! We’re piping these updates from Twitter into the sidebar of the blog - but we’re also experimenting with how you can design this sort of content to encourage portability - see the image below that shows how a style we designed to display tweets at JonnyMalbon.com below is now finding its way into niche sailing sites, partly because it simply looks good:

We’re also thinking carefully about the needs of the super-engaged fans around the world who are trying to piece together what’s happening from many sources in (mainly) two languages. We’re providing summaries - we call them ‘info-bursts’ and ’round-ups’. They’ve been really successful.

Another thing we’re experimenting with is guest blogging and blog-swaps. We found this guy Michael Kingdom-Hockings, who writes a blog called New Freebooters about the Vendee, was commenting a lot at JonnyMalbon.com - so we co-opted him into our content team, and we’ve blogged at his site. I’ve never met this guy, we just found him by doing the blog and he’s written some good stuff.

And we’re collecting together multimedia (audio and video clips) from all over the place and re-posting it all in one place.

So, is it working? Well it seems to be. From a standing start with no marketing (aside from link-love and commenting) we’re up to 196 visits/430 page views a day as of yesterday and climbing. The weekend didn’t slow it down. Come and have a look and let us know what you think.