Well, I'm the one to blame for the Defending Our Oceans web work. Way back in late 2004 the idea of the Defending Our Oceans expedition (then called the somewhat wordier Year in the Life of Our Oceans) was born.

"Let's have a website!" they cried. "It'll be the best website ever! We can have video blogs from the ship, and a webcam, and a discussion forum, and sign people up to join our standing army! We can even put a banner on the moon!" By this stage I was quivering in my sneakers, but a year later and we indeed did have a website with video blogs -- now the very glamourous Ocean Defenders TV -- and a webcam, and a google map, and Ocean Defenders around the world (although not quite the million we envisaged...yet, we have a dedicated list of committed, enthusiastic and active supporters). We've had not one but two discussion forums, the sadly departed Galley Gossip, followed by the swanky new Oceans forum. We don't have a banner on the moon, although I can't guarantee that we won't infiltrate the crew of the US space mission and get an Ocean Defenders sticker slapped on the back of some unsuspecting astronaut's space suit.

The difficult process of bringing Defending Our Oceans onto the modern interweb involved recruiting and organising our volunteer onboard web editors for the entire expedition (there have been at least 13 on the Esperanza so far as well as guest stars on the Rainbow Warrior and Arctic Sunrise), as well as monitoring the weblogs and video blogs, writing the content and newsletters, supervising the designs (which I either did myself or bribed ex-Greenpeacers to do for bargain rates), coordinating cyberactions with campaigners, working with IT to devise mailing list strategies and back-end applications such as the discussion forum, cyberaction tools and sign-up processes, working with external and internal suppliers to develop e-cards and animations, organising translations, and rolling out the sites in additional languages.

At one stage I was building sites in six languages (we now have 13) despite the fact that, beginner's Dutch and baby-level Swedish aside, I only really speak English. I remember staring at some Greek text and trying in vain to work out if Νέα or Η πορεία went first in the menu. Luckily for you multilinguists, Greenpeace webbies around the world have heroically helped with translations and updating the non-English sites. Also lucky, I have a close friend in Bermuda who gave me a holiday on the beach, or we would never have got this far.

As we progressed through the longest "year" ever, I managed to poach a few team members, including Andrew "right hand man" Davies, who you may remember from last year's Southern Ocean Expedition, as well as our very talented designer Elaine Hill, who was onboard during the Mediterranean leg. She is the reason the site looks so great (in my humble opinion). We also have a talented intern, Giona, and Cristina our resident marketing and networking guru. Our wonderful techie Gert grapples with the gremlins hiding in our email system, only emerging, bruised and victorious, when he has made sure you will get your Ocean Defender ezines. There are too many more people who have contributed to ever thank or mention without sounding like a bad Oscars speech. I owe all of these people many pints of beer.

Meanwhile in my spare time (ahem) I have dabbled in Greenpeace Nordic web work, done a bit of editing on the Green My Apple campaign (being perhaps the most vocal Mac user who dares to bring a Powerbook through the doors of our international office), and occasionally appeared on the Making Waves blog.

This has no doubt been the most challenging (and life-consuming) assignment I have ever taken on, and has taken me from Amsterdam to Stockholm via Tokyo and Sydney .

I guess my most memorable moment was a year ago (!) when I was exhausted with the entire project. Then I got a phone call from one John Bowler. "We've found them," he said. The footage of the whaling fleets started flooding in and the worldwide Greenpeace global web team sprang into action. And at that moment, I remembered why I work for Greenpeace, and why this project is so worthwhile.