Interactions.org, Quantum Diaries and Social Media Kevin Munday/Leah Hesla 10 May 2012

Interactions.org, Quantum Diaries and Social Media

Kevin Munday/Leah Hesla

10 May 2012

State of Interactions.org

2

3

Current state of Interactions.org

From Google analytics• Averaging ~27K visits from

~11K unique visitors/month

• Greatest hits (Nov-April) Home page (128K) Blog watch (26K) Image Bank Search (22K) Reactor Neutrino release (10K) Opera, Act II (4K)

4

Peak traffic

9 November—Reactor Neutrino Release

18 November—Opera Redux

13 December—Higgs Status

8 March—Daya Bay

5

Where does traffic come from?

• Direct 80K• Search 49K• Referral 58K

Math.columbia.edu Fermilab Quantum Diaries Facebook CERN T.co Lineacollider.org Reddit USLHC

6

Google Keyword searches

• Interactions.org• Interactions• LHC News• Particle Physics News• LHC news 2011• Dark Matter• Particle News

7

Current state of NewsWire

• ~4,015 subscribers (up 202 since October)

• 37 distributed so far this year

• Direct pickup by Google News

The Week of Interactions

• Published every Monday as a digest of weekly postings

• 422 subscribers• Highlights:

News NewsWires Images Video Quantum Diaries

8

9

News

• ~300 news items posted year-to-date, archived and added to RSS this year

Google standing

• No. 1 (of 8.6MM) for “particle physics news” • No. 1 (of 43.7MM) for “high energy physics

news”• No. 11 (of 10.6MM) for “particle physics”• No. 1 (of 11.5MM) for “particle physics

images”• No. 57 (out of 271MM) for “physics images”

10

State of Quantum Diaries

11

QD StatsFrom Google

Analytics

• ~1,500 visitors/day

• ~80-100,000page views/month

12

Rock stars

• Higgs liveblog: ~55,000 Pageviews on 13 December

• CERN discovery on Tristan da Cuhna: ~16,000 Pageviews on 1 April

13

State of Social Media

14

Twitter

• @ParticleNews 6,202 followers and

counting

• @Quantum_Diaries 1,666 Twitter

followers

15

Facebook

• 1,923 likes on Facebook

16

Enhancements since October

17

Beacons of Discovery

• Launched in French and Turkish

• Multilingual Drupal ready for more!

• http://www.interactions.org/beacons/files-for-translations

18

Highlighting QD and Beacons

• Left column of every page

• Graphical

19

User-submitted images

• Web interface

• Easier to submit images

• Queues for editing/approval

20

Mobile

• Our goal was to launch mobile this Spring

• Mobile traffic increasing

• Will continue to increase over time

21

Mobile>Responsive

• Site optimized for browser size and preference

• Controls optimized for likely interaction (mouse vs touch)

• Optimized media delivery by likely connection type, browser capabilities

22

In progress

23

Content/interface improvements

• More multilingual news “Trusted sources” provided by committee memebers Should be seeing more soon Please send good stuff when you see it

• Review site content and sections

24

Moving Forward

25

Plans for the next six months

• Server migration

• New committee chair

• Codify new web strategy

• Incorporate more multilingual content

• Review site content and sections

26

Discussion Points

27

Clarifying posting policy on Quantum Diaries

1. Bloggers on Quantum Diaries may be individuals, experimental groups or institutions such as laboratories. 

2. Quantum Diaries is a vehicle for bloggers to speak directly to their audiences in their own names. Their posts do not necessarily reflect the positions of other bloggers or of the InterAction Collaboration, the group that supports and runs Quantum Diaries. 

28

Clarifying posting policy on Quantum Diaries

3. Any blogger belonging to an experimental group or an institution, whether as a collaborative member or as a Quantum Diaries representative, is subject to the editorial and communication guidelines of that group or institution. 

4. Provided that they follow point 3, all bloggers are responsible for their own content. No individual blogger exerts editorial control over another's post, and no group or institute exerts editorial control over posts outside their own.

29

Clarifying blogroll policy on interactions.org?

Disclaimer:

Interactions serves those interested in particle physics by collecting and posting relevant blog entries on its website. The blog posts on the Interactions Blog Watch page are the reporting of individual bloggers and do not reflect the opinions of the Interactions collaboration or its members. No blogger's perspective is meant to reflect that of any other blogger represented in Blog Watch, nor is any blogger's post necessarily objective reporting on the field of

particle physics.

30

Clarifying blogroll policy on interactions.org?

Policy statement:

Blogs represented on the Interactions Blog Watch page discuss and report on news relevant to particle physics research. Inclusion in the Interactions blog roll is based primarily [solely?] on how much of a blog's content is related to particle physics.  For inclusion in Blog Watch, at least one-third of a blog's content [posts?] should be related to particle physics. The Interactions web team only aggregates blog posts based on this criterion and does not include or exclude blogs on the basis on any other criteria.

31

Feedback?

Handy hotlines

• News@interactions.org for press releases

• Webmaster@interactions.org for anything

32