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EDITOR'S
ROUND-UP
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Another great week... Dear friends, It's been another good week for Catholica with a further steady building of our endeavour. Yesterday I took time out — about six hours of it altogether — to try and get a fairly accurate grip on the size and shape of our community at this point. This is the picture I've come up with which I am happy to share with you... We have 261 separate email addresses as either subscribers to the daily or weekly bulletins or as members of the forum. There are now no overlaps between the daily and weekly bulletins and we have 142 subscribers to the Daily Bulletin and 35 subscribers to the Weekly Bulletin. There are 142 members of the forum 53 of whom do not receive either the Daily or Weekly Bulletins. There are about six multiple identities on the membership list of which I have three (editor@catholica.com.au/briancoyne@viastuas.net.au/tomscott@viastuas.net.au). 44 Members have logged in to the forum in the last 14 days. A further 33 logged have logged in over the past 30 days. 30 Members have registered but have never logged in. My rough conclusion is that we have a core membership of about 40-45 people who are presently interested in contributing to the forum regularly, somewhere between a further 30-40 who would like to make some contribution, and the remainder are either lurkers or providing moral support, as well as a few who, for legitimate reasons might be providing summary reports for various groups of people. Regarding the total number of visitors to our website: it is difficult to estimate this accurately. The descriptor "Unique Visitors" which is used by tracking companies such as eXTReMe (the public tracker available on our site) actually counts many individuals many times. I do have access to a number of other trackers and the log files of the server. Based on all the information from these sources I estimate we have somewhere between 1,000 and 1,200 separate individuals who visit the Catholica site each week. The average visit duration is 652 seconds and this compares to one of the other major online publications in Australia which has had an average visit duration of 452 seconds over the same period. (*Note the log files always underestimate this figure as it also tends to take into account the downloading of image files, for example, that accompany the daily email and various other "technical" visits which are very brief. It is a good comparison figure through that can help establish how much human contact there is with the material being published on a site compared to other sites. Obviously advertisers liks sites that are attracting people to hang around for longer periods.) In both our members and public forum at the moment there are good discussions going on as to how we might improve the balance of material in the forum between the heavier theological and spiritual content and the more social content which helps build a sense of community. I commend those discussion to all our members including those who only visit our site once a week when this weekly digest is distributed on Saturdays. In overall terms we are thrilled with this picture that has emerged at this stage of our development. We do still have more work to do on getting our forum "firing" at the very best we believe it can fire at. That improvement will come in time though. I suspect we still need to find about 30 other individuals who have the skills to contribute to the forum and who will view this as a worthwhile expenditure of their voluntary energy. Some consider chatting on the internet a waste of time and has nothing to do with "the real work" of building a Church community or "proclaiming the Good News". We happen to have a different view which has largely been forged directly from our own personal experiences of finding it enriching to our faith and social life. At the moment less than 5% of the visits to our website originate from search engine enquiries. When we have the funding in place to really begin the development of our endeavour in that domain you will begin to see a fairly dramatic change in the place of origin for visits to our website. Now to today's takes. I feel sure they are going to both raise a lot
of interest for the very different sorts of questions they are asking... |
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OUR
COMMENTARIES FROM THE PAST WEEK...
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Best wishes for a great day wherever you happen to be ... in life, and in our world, Brian Coyne Catholica Australia |
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