Online Committee Report, ITA 2013
Summary
The website had been running smoothly and consistently until February 5th, when it experienced significant slowdowns and errors (error 504). The problem has been fixed on February 8th, with the website running up again, but the fundamental cause of the problem has not been precisely identified yet. The developers have scheduled additional time to fix the issue next week, and the Online Committee will provide more information then.
The main topics covered in this report are the following.
- Online version of the Newsletter
- Online Discussion papers
- Syndication of table of content from Transactions
- Analytics
- Mailing list
Online version of the Newsletter
Following the discussion during the BoG meeting in Lausanne, the Online Committee has investigated the possibility of using an online version of the newsletter to complement the paper version. As an example of what the current website would allow us to do, a sample online newsletter has been setup here based on the December 2012 newsletter. We can already display editorials or short articles with pictures, and thanks to the already implemented Latex support, it is possible to (almost) copy-paste a LaTeX document into a page. The inclusion of more fancy articles (including complex tables, etc.) requires a little more effort but is already feasible.
The benefits of having an online newsletter include the following:
- a timely dissemination of the articles
- the possibility of publishing articles online as they are received - readers can be kept informed of updates by subscribing to a specific rss feed
- improved visibility of articles (e.g. the articles discussing recently awarded papers, etc.)
The Online Committee recommends to port the next newsletter online as an experiment. This could be achieved with minimal effort and some coordination between the newsletter and the online editor.
Online Discussion papers
Following the suggestion of the BoG, the Online Committee has also investigated the possibility of introducing online Discussion papers. A feature for posting comments is already available in the website infrastructure and an example of discussion has been setup here . Presently, the features are the following.
- one can enable comments on any document on the website; this can be controlled on a document by document basis.
- registered users have the possibility of introducing comments by clicking on the "add comment" button; this automatically creates a discussion thread;
- all comments are public, but can be hidden to non-registered users if the object is itself private;
- comments can be moderated (i.e. posts can be deleted by an administrator);
- the comments can include LaTeX equations;
- the owner of a document receives an email notification when comments are posted;
- users who leave comments receive an email if their comments receive a reply.
However, the current features are not as complete as a true Wiki; missing features could be added in the future if needs be.
As suggested by Nick Laneman, a possibility to experiment this feature would be to have students post review papers or summaries from seminars. The Online Committee recommends to identify student volunteers to test the current setup.
Syndication of table of content from Transactions
The Online Committee has also investigated options to more actively push the table of content of the latest issue of the Transactions. Presently, it is already possible to subscribe to a feed on IEEEXplore: feed://ieeexplore.ieee.org/rss/TOC18.XML. Several options are then available to advertise a new issue:
- Option 1: Encourage members of the IT community to register to the feed by providing detailed instructions on the subscription process;
- Option 2: Create a "mailing list" (through feedburner) to which users can register, which would push the latest table of content to emails;
- Option 3: Pull the content of the feed from the IEEEXplore feed and display it on the website; one can imagine complementing this with a news item once the latest TOC is available.
Options 1 and 2 can be implemented with minimal effort and without extra development. Option 3 would require some development time (to be estimated). The Online Committee recommends that the BoG decides on one or a combination of several options to implement.
Analytics
The last five months of web traffic remain stable with over 300 visits/day. The traffic comes for 66% from search engines, 19% from direct traffic, and 14% from referring sites.
| Statistic | 4/1/2012-9/2/2012 | 9/2/2012-2/3/2013 |
|---|---|---|
| Visits | 47,184 ( 23,165 unique) | 39,197 ( 20,882 unique) |
| Pageviews | 137,649 | 98,248 |
| Pages/Visit | 2.92 | 2.51 |
| Bounce Rate | 56% | 63% |
| Avg. Time | 00:02:14 | 00:02:14 |
| New Visits | 44% | 48% |
All of the above statistics may be self explanatory except for bounce rate , which is the percentage of single-page visits.
The following table shows the top 5 page views (not including the main page) of the website for the period 9/2/2012 to 2/3/2013.
| Page name | Pageviews |
|---|---|
| european school 2013 | 2,301 |
| upcoming conferences | 1,590 |
| recent news | 1,465 |
| information theory paper award | 1,324 |
| Claude E. Shannon award | 970 |
The following table shows the top 10 countries from which visit originates for the period 9/2/2012 to 2/3/2013.
| Country | Visits |
|---|---|
| United States | 12,462 |
| India | 2,390 |
| France | 1,911 |
| China | 1,828 |
| Germany | 1,690 |
| Canada | 1,596 |
| Iran | 1,321 |
| Turkey | 1.064 |
| UK | 979 |
| Japan | 972 |
Mailing list
The mailing list for news events has 255 subscribers. This is significantly less than the number of subscribers to the old mailing list, although it is hard to evaluate the number of dormant subscribers that had accumulated over the years. In addition, some people might have opted directly look at the website. Analytics reveal that about 50% of subscribers visit the website once they are notified of a news item.