About Our Company Blog

Business By Robert K. Foster

There is an old saying along the lines of “Wait until your ship comes in” or “My ship has come in”. My understanding of the origin of this phrase is that it comes from the early days of seafaring when wealth and prosperity could be had from the ocean. Whether it was a large shipping company that would build a tall ship and send it out to trade in some far off port or a small fishing boat that made its daily voyage out on the sea to fish, when that ship returned the hope was that a major windfall of profit would be had from the cargo it contained in its hold.

The name of my company, Windjammer Company LLC, comes from my interest in tall ships and the early maritime history of the United States. ( See Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut: http://www.mysticseaport.org/ ) Regardless of the product my company provides, Tall Ships are a perfect symbol for me of the entrepreneurial spirit of our country and the hopes I have for my own company.

We have an “image” blog, Seer’s Eye Journal, that I maintain here at the company which is designed to display our photography and artwork in the best light possible on the web. After using the imageblog for awhile I found there had been a number of occasions when I had considered adding much longer written entries. However, the design of the imageblog did not adapt well to long written passages.

Since the Windjammer website also has many other types of written content such as news and information I eventually decided to add a more “traditional” weblog to the site. I designed this new blog so that all content on the Windjammer site would be centrally accessible through the blog, even short summaries from our other imageblog. Of course, working on one’s own website is yet another way to keep your skills in practice.

When I was casting about for a title for the new weblog I decided it should be in keeping with these seafaring themes and I remembered the above old saying and how it seemed a good fit for writing about this company as it progresses through time. I’m not sure when my ship will come in but the hope is always there for the windfall to come. Thus the title “Your Ship To Come In” came to mind as it implied some future possible event. The blog had that title for all of three or four days.

Another possible title was “Windfall” but that seemed less explanatory of the spirit, content, and purpose of the blog. For a brief tagline the phrase “A company captain’s web logbook of voyages on the Internet sea.” seemed to say it best. I personally love word play and coming up with new terms so when I started looking for words related to “Wind” I came up with the term “windwright”. I did a Google and dictionary search on the term and apparently it is used in a role playing game but doesn’t appear anywhere else. And so the current title of this blog became “Windwright’s Narrative” to indicate ongoing tales about crafting the wind the way a wright would.

Why Wind? For me wind is symbolic of the flow of data and ideas on the Internet and through communication. After all, information technology provides us with a new kind of ship, sailing on a new kind of ocean. I craft my websites in ways that I suspect are very similar to the ways of shipwright’s of old. Instead of wind in our sails we have the bits and bytes of data being served to millions all over the world from each of our own little ports on the Web. If we are indeed turning to and creating a new information economy on the Internet then the analogy of ships on the ocean is not far off the mark.

So please check back regularly here at our weblog for news, information, photos, and artwork from Windjammer Company LLC. Oh, and perhaps the occasional stimulating piece of thought provoking writing. Thanks for visiting.

Posted: Sunday, June 17, 2007
Source: http://www.thewindjammer.com/index.php/print/about_our_company_blog/