ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ.org: Going viral
Recent headlines about ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ have been eye-catching. "A Machine that Works like the Sun!" "Is ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ the Way to New Energy?" "Costly Quest for Electricity's Holy Grail!" Since April, articles have appeared in the The New York Times, BBC News, Reuters, Financial Times and Nature, as well as in major newspapers in France, Japan, Germany, and Korea. The fact is that ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ fascinates, and as the project scales up to manufacturing and construction, there will be plenty to report.
The best source of information for those interested in finding out more about ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ—from any spot on the planet—is the World Wide Web. The new ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ website launched on 14 May is a depository for historical and technical information about the ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ Project, progress information, job openings, news, photos and video clips for journalists, links to the Domestic Agencies and daily updates on world press articles referencing ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ. A French version is currently in the planning stages.
Improving the content and the layout of the site has made a marked difference in the site's "hit" statistics. ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ.org now enjoys nearly 15,000 unique visitors per week—up 20 percent since launch. Visitors to the ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ site are spending more time—three times as much—and navigating to more pages. The ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ Newsline and the pages on Jobs, the Tokamak, the ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ Team, Building ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ and Facts and Figures are the most popular destinations. ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ videos have been viewed 14,000 times from the website and another 10,000 times from the ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ You Tube channel.
For Topher White, ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ Webmaster, the challenge is to make the new content of the ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ website—articles, videos, photos—available in dozens of formats across the Internet. "In June, the BBC published an article about ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ that brought one thousand people to our site in two days. We call this direct traffic. But the audience that can be reached as our site 'goes viral'—that is gets linked by more and more sites around the world—could well bring us into the millions." To encourage this, Topher uses a process similar to newspapers syndicating their articles. "We make our content freely available to other computers. Over time, content gets picked up automatically and replicated in unexpected places all over the Web, for example in blogs, on-line newspapers and in popular sites like Twitter and Facebook."
Topher says that the website is a dynamic tool for communicating about ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ; a tool that can be continually enriched and improved. "It's the single-most effective medium for communication today. No matter where people first hear about ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ, the odds are high that when they decide to learn more about us they will do so through the Web."