World of O - from 1995 and onwards

January 1995

World of O started as a collection of links. My first orienteering webpage was live in 1994 on the server brems.ii.uib.no - what is now known as World of O was live from January 24th 1995. The original version of World of O was a linkdatabase, orienteering map database and email address database which was updated "by hand". In 1996 some forms were added to make it possible for people to add links and email addresses by themselves. This is the announcement of the revised version of World of O from the good old orienteering mailinglist in May 1996 - this is when it went from updating by hand to "automatic updating" and World of O started growing fast:

From: Jan Kocbach
Date: Wed, 01 May 1996 16:37:39 +0200
Subject: Updated o-page: World of O
Message-Id: <31877733.59D@brems.ii.uib.no>

Hi.
The last few days I have been updating my orienteering pages a lot. People can now easily add their results, invitations, orienteering-pages and email-addresses to the pages using forms. The submitted information is sorted in various ways, and is also searchable. Please submit your orienteering pages, results, invitations, etc. to the page. Everything isn't thorougly tested yet, but I think most of it should work by now. The page can still be accessed by the old URL
http://www.fi.uib.no~jankoc/orientering/orientering.html,
But the real location of it is:

Fancy version: http://www.fi.uib.no/~jankoc/worldo/worldo.html
"Plain" version: http://www.fi.uib.no/~jankoc/worldo/worldoo.html

Jan.

In the second half of the 90's "World of O" was probably the worlds most linked-to and visited orienteering web-page. In 1995, it had approximately 5000 visitors, summing up to 25.000 visitors in 1996, and 80.000 visitors in 1997. The domain worldofo.com was purchased in 1997. You can see a working version of "World of O" as it was between 1995 and 1997 here.

December 1998

World of O was now a big link database with a lot of sections - Orienteering pages, orienteering maps, software, events and email-addresses. Several thousand links and email-addresses were in the database already in 1998.

You can see a working version of "World of O" as it was between 1998 and 2005 here.

May 2001

The number of links in the database increased significantly the next years - so did the number of users. In addition a news section was introduced in 2001 - giving the latest news from OrienteeringOnline and Alternativet.nu.

June 2004

No significant development was done between 2001 and 2004 - but the site lived on with a lot of email addresses and webpages being added continously. Towards 2005/2006 the amount of "dead links" started to become very large though, and the use of the site also declined.

April 2006

In 2006 the new "World of O" was launched. Instead of focusing on links and email-addresses, the focus was now on orienteering news. Already at launch around 100 news sites were included in World of O. The site soon became very popular again - more than the old version had ever been.

March 2007

A lot of development was done in 2006 and 2007 - making the most popular news more accessible by first starring them - and later thumbs-up'ing them. Also a calendar (cal.worldofo.com) and a orienteering map database (maps.worldofo.com) was added in addition to a runner database at runners.worldofo.com. Also "page2" was introduced - a separate page for orienteering news pages which did not fit on the front page. In addition the "Orienteering achievement of the year" was introduced to celebrate the greatest orienteering achievement of the year.

August 2007

In the spring of 2007 "WoO-TV" was launched - a TV channel for orienteering. It got quite popular the next year - with several good orienteering videos published both by WorldofO (e.g. the popular videos from WOC 2007 in Ukraine) and by other publishers.

Other notable development in 2007 was the World of O Ranking - a ranking of top runners for each separate discipline.

October 2008

In 2008 a new feature was introduced for the more casual visitors who did not want to read through all news in chronological order - the "Current Headlines" on top of the page. This lead to more casual visitors.

Other news in 2008 was the popular Route to Christmas series and LiveBlogs from important events like Jukola and 10mila. Forum news was also introduced on the World of O frontpage - a popular addition.

June 2009

A big milestone for World of O in 2009 was the "omaps.worldofo.com" site - giving you orienteering maps from events and trainings all over the world directly into a datbase. This was first introduced into World of O using the "daily orienteering map" in the right margin in June 2009.

In addition news from Twitter from top orienteers was introduced on the World of O frontpage.

October 2009

Later in 2009 more space was devoted to omaps.worldofo.com on the frontpage of World of O due to its popularity.

2010 and 2011

A lot of new development also in 2010 and 2011. 3DRerun was the biggest new development - a tool for GPS-analysis of competition of trainings and also for TV/video production based on GPS analysis. In addition spin-off projects "101 orienteering maps", "o-training.net" and "worldofxc.com".

Other milestones

Many milestones are missing here - but at least this gives a small introduction to the development of World of O since 1995.