2. Water News
• A “news monitoring and dissemination
service”
• Each day the E-Services Librarian looks
for relevant newspaper articles, journal
articles and conference proceedings
• Posts title, short summary of article and
link to full article
3. In the beginning…
• Amina Itani, Annette Carter and Rae Davie came up with
the idea in 2004
• Used free, external service Blogger
(https://www.blogger.com/start)
• 8 subject-specific blogs:
– H20 News Monitor Service
– Sustainability News
– Library News
– Engineering & Infrastructure
– Water & Wastewater Research
– Business & Economics
– Environment & Sustainability
– Desalination
4. Problems
• Concern that external blogs may pose risk
to organisation
• Usage statistics very low
– Each blog was averaging 2 views and 1 visit a
day
– Lots of usage was external (reinforcing
concern that blogs were a risk)
5. Usage statistics were low
Usage statistics were low
(except for spike in May
(except for spike in May
due to Library Week
due to Library Week
promotions)
promotions)
6. Migration
• BlogCFC, developed by Raymond Camden,
(http://blogcfc.riaforge.org) chosen to replace
Blogger
• Advantages
– Could be brought ‘in house’ and run on internal
servers
– Written in ColdFusion (policy stated solution had to be
written in ColdFusion or asp)
– Open Source
– Free
7. Modifying BlogCFC
• Made it look ‘prettier’
• Improved the way statistics collected
– Counted when people ‘clicked through’ to article
rather than when clicked on title of article
– Collected date of visit/view so could monitor usage by
month
• Added extra fields and tables to underlying
Microsoft Access database
• Removed RSS functionality, also del.icio.us and
Digg IT (not supported inside firewall)
8. Water News Launch
• September 2007
• One blog, with categories, rather than 8
separate blogs
• Number of categories increased to 10
based on suggestions made by staff
• Didn’t have separate Library News
category
– Instead promoted new databases and
e-books in relevant subject-specific category
13. However usage
However usage
statistics remained low
statistics remained low
– lower in fact because
– lower in fact because
no longer any external
no longer any external
usage
usage
14. Subscription Functionality
• Water News subscription functionality wasn’t
great but not priority either
– Sent out e-mail every time a new post made
– 6 or so posts a day resulted in subscribers being
‘spammed’
• By March 2009 Water News had 6 subscribers,
made fixing subscription functionality a priority
• Modified so that subscribers received one e-mail
a day with all that day’s posts:
The ‘Water News Daily Digest’ was born!
15. Water News Daily
Water News Daily
Digest as received by
Digest as received by
subscribers…
subscribers…
16. After modifying subscription
After modifying subscription
functionality, Water News
functionality, Water News
became overnight success
became overnight success
17. Users even started
Users even started
making comments
making comments
on Water News…
on Water News…
18. Message
• Don’t give up on a good thing
• Small change in functionality can make
big difference to your would-be audience
