Online Committee Report, GlobalMeet 2014

Report of the Online Committee

Summary

The website has been running consistently and smoothly since July. There has not been any new major effort of the Online Committee. There has been a change of project manager at SixFeetUp, but the transition has been smooth and should not have any impact.
 
The main topics reported in this brief report include 
  • Update on the  deployment  of new features (including videos)
  • Update on Pareja
  • Update on Social Media
  • Analytics
 

Deployment of new features

The media resources features are operational on the development server. Deployment will be effective by the end of the year.
  • The Online Committee would like to investigate one small technical feature before deployment to make sure that links won't be easily broken.
  • The videos will be displayed in an embedded flash player. This has the advantage of making the player client-independent but requires minor re-encoding of some videos. This is not a difficult task, and this is being done progressively.
  • IEEE.tv hasn't provided any feedback yet. All the information was provided to them in June, and they were recently recontacted. There is, however, a test channel at 

    https://ieeetv.ieee.org/player/html/viewer?channel=information-theory ; IEEE ads seem to appear every once in a while.

 

Pareja

  • Backup. A complete final backup on Pareja has been made. The Online Editor will keep an archive.
  • Web.com. Our hosting plan Web.com should hopefully be terminated this month. There was one last concern about the archiving of all the Online Editor's emails that delayed the process.
 

Social Media

All new items and pages can be shared on social media. This has been consistently enabled for all the news items after July 2014. An experimental Facebook page has been setup at  https://www.facebook.com/pages/IEEE-Information-Theory-Society/339934289488983 (the link will be simplified once this goes public). Items are easily added from itsoc.org using the sharing features, but this not automatic.
 

Analytics

The last five months of web traffic remain stable with over 300 visits/day. The traffic comes for 64% from search engines, 16% from direct traffic, 14% from referring sites, and 6% from email links. 

Statistic 6/30/2014-9/20/2014 2/10/2014-6/29/2014
Visits 14,667 (7,447 unique) 42,040 ( 23,007 unique)
Pageviews 35,509  109,929
Pages/Visit 2.42 2.61
Bounce Rate 60.49% 58.9%
Avg. Time 00:01:33 00:02:21
New Visits 50.77% 50%

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 2/10/2014 to 6/29/2014.
 
Page name Pageviews 
Job opportunities 1,071
Upcoming conferences 738
Australian School 603
Transactions information 542
IT paper award 508

 
The following table shows the top 10 countries from which visit originates  for the period 2/10/2014 to 6/29/2014.
Country Visits
 United States 4,531
 India 1,302
Iran 678
Germany 561
China 540 
Canada 489
Australia 450 
France 343
UK (including Scotland) 335
Switzerland 329