November 2007 Archives

Social bookmarking sites are remarkable little things.

Rob Coppinger’s article NASA manned Mars mission details emerge was submitted to popular bookmarking site Digg.com yesterday and swiftly proved a winner.

Before long it was top of the Digg Science listings and had bagged over 1600 Diggs and 300 comments.

Referrals from all this activity was primarily responsible for the article’s impressive performance on Flightglobal. It received 29,529 views in 24 hours, single-handedly shipping in 16% of total site traffic for the day.

Ironically, the story wasn’t the lead story on Flightglobal, on the homepage or even lead story on the Space channel home page. Just shows you what we know …

Sadly, bookmarking traffic is notoriously hard to predict and to sustain. One day’s Digg champion is the next day’s internet flotsam.

Having said that, it’s a lovely bonus when it comes in and if you’re feeling in the mood I’d recommend you have a go at bookmarking any interesting stories you find on Flightglobal via the links at the bottom of each story.

We’ve added an additional channel to our current navigation on Flightglobal - Environment ...

The environment and all its associated issues is a subject that simply grows more critical everyday and it more than deserves its own dedicated area on the site.

At present the channel contains editorial material from the Flight team, as well as a widget showing the latest industry-wide covergae on carbon emissions.

The plan for the future is to augment this coverage with sector-specific blogs, aggregated content from other industry sources, aviation and the environment reference tools and much more.

In addition, we will be splitting down the broad environment label into more focussed labels such as technology and carbon emissions in order to improve the user’s experience.

Flightglobal is about to enter into an intense period of redesign and development.

The intention is to modernise the site, put it more into line with today’s user needs, and to tie all content areas together in a consistent, organised way.

The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed a recent up-turn in Flightglobal’s blog activity.

To date our blog portfolio looks like this:

Flightblogger: One of the world's most renowned aviation bloggers joins the Flight team.

Flight Image of the Day: Picture editor Paul Gladman offers his daily image highlight from Flight

Editor's blog: Online Editor Michael Targett highlights the site's new developments

Unusual Attitude: Kieran Daly gives his take on the turbulent world of aviation

Hyperbola: Rob Coppinger orbits the blogosphere to give you the latest space news

The Woracle: Graham Warwick gives his own forthright views on the flight industry

The Dew Line: Flight journalist Stephen Trimble offers a unique insight into the defense industry

Flight International blog: The Flight team offer their take on the latest aviation news

Airline Business Blog: Airline Business editors take a sideways look at the airline industry

The Woracle, The DEW Line, Flight International and Airline Business had previously formed the mainstay of Flight’s blog squad, but recent additions (Unusual Attitude, Hyperbola, Flight image of the day, Flightblogger and this blog) have accelerated our activity in the blogosphere.

Now, there are blogs and there are blogs (a blog in reality is just an adaptable publishing platform which can be used in a variety of different ways). Our various blogs are serving various purposes. For example, this blog is providing info on the development of the site among other things, where as the Flight Image of the Day blog is purely an image-based offering.

Then there are our news blogs, but there are even differences there. The Flight International blog is a team effort and covers a broad range of topics, while something like Rob Coppinger’s Hyperbola is a very focussed blog, exploring the granular detail of space flight. Airline Business often looks at the lighter side of the industry, as opposed to newcomer Flightblogger whose blog serves as a spotlight on new airliner development.

And let’s not forget user blogs. Over on AirSpace there is now the facility for users to start their own blogs about anything they choose to blog about. Already there’s a couple on the go, including one simply highlighting amusing aviation-related internet games.

Our ambitions are to continue to add more blogs. Ideally, in the future, there will be more spotlights covering all areas of the industry, as well as blogs delivering humour and personality.

There are even rumours of a blogging return of Flight international’s infamous Uncle Roger, so stay tuned.

It’s taken us a while but as of yesterday the complete Flight International 100-year archive of scanned and OCR’d (searchable text) pdfs are up on Flightglobal.

Without meaning to blow our own trumpet this is a pretty impressive achievement.

There aren’t that mainly publishers that have been around for 100 years let alone scanned in their entire history and put it online for free. And I don’t just mean within the aviation industry but in the broader publishing world.

The technical aspects of the project also represent a significant achievement. 210,000 individual pages have been scanned in and subjected to Optical Character Recognition to ensure they are searchable. In addition, every page has been thumbnailed to aid the user when browsing. And the unique pdf viewer has been built pretty much from scratch.

All that remains now is the task of crawling the individual pages to extract meta data to ensure that search engines such as Google have the best idea of what each page contains.

I hope everyone is getting as much out of the archive as we are. There are some true gems in there, and as we go into 2008 we’ll be making much more of the pdfs throughout the site.

Hello and welcome to the Editor’s Blog on Flightglobal.

My name is Michael Targett and I’ve had the pleasure of running the site since March 2007.

The purpose of this blog is twofold:

1) To provide a window into the development of the site’s content and functionality, and subsequently allow users to feedback their thoughts during development stages and help us to focus our energies in a more user-centric way.

2) To provide an official channel of communication for site announcements, notices and essential messages. However, the beauty of the web allows this channel to go both ways, me > users, users > me.

Meanwhile if you’re a fan of Flightglobal you can see us on AirSpace or join our new group on Facebook.

Cheers,

Michael