194 days to go
SOUTH is looming large on the horizon. A year from now, if all goes to plan, I'll have been home from Antarctica for just over a month, and while it's difficult to predict exactly how this stupendous journey will affect me, I suspect I'll be slightly more relaxed in 12 months' time. You see, this project has generated the mother of all to-do lists, and while the original plan was that we'd have most of the details sewn up by now, leaving us free to concentrate on roller-skiing, poring over maps and filing down our toothbrush handles, the truth is that we have a mind-boggling amount of things to organise between now and October.
Frustratingly, I can't (yet) blog about a lot of the really cool stuff that's going on, but there's one thing I can let you in on (unless you've spotted Tony's brand new blog, where he beat me to announcing this by several days)…
Yahoo! have come on board as SOUTH's online media partner. This means that they'll be running the expedition website, much like they do already with Kevin Sites' Hot Zone. And much like they have with Kevin, they'll be plugging us into a huge audience (he often racks up several thousand comments per post). The implications of this partnership are still sinking in – not only does it give us something tangible (and indeed enormously valuable) to talk to potential sponsors about, it also means we'll have rather a lot of people following our every move for the four months we're on the ice.
Yahoo's traffic numbers in the hundreds of millions per month, which could mean a sizeable audience. A brobdingnagian virtual auditorium. It won't be long before the seats start filling up, and right now I'm pacing around the wings with the dawning realisation that I've bitten off something rather big here. Stay tuned; it's going to be a crazy few months…
— Filed under SOUTH