Yesterday I integrated some of the newly announced Facebook Social Widgets into heraldscotland.  Using their new auto-connect system, any Facebook users who visit heraldscotland will now be able to see what their friends are recommending and sharing on our site.

The demo below outlines how it all works…

I’m quite pleased with how smoothly the integration went — literally just a few hours from first looking at the developers documentation to having these features live on the site.

We’re less than 24 hours into the trial, but the results are already impressive — over 1,600 Facebook users have shared our most popular article which, multiplied by the size of their average social graph, means this article has been highlighted to nearly 200,000 Facebook users who wouldn’t otherwise have seen it.

Ok, first a quick bit of background: The Government are funding a pilot scheme for independent TV news production in Scotland, the North East of England and Wales.  In Scotland, this would replace the regional news currently broadcast by STV.  If you’re interested, The Guardian has a good history of the whole process.

Only two proposals made it through to the final selection process in Scotland.  One bid was from a consortium including STV and the other was our bid, the Scottish News Consortium, which includes the Herald & Times Group (where I work), Johnston Press, DC Thomson and Tinopolis.

The winning bidder was announced by the DCMS today… and it’s us!!!

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At 2pm on Monday we took heraldscotland.com out of public beta and directed all of our traffic from www.theherald.co.uk and www.sundayherald.com to the new site.

We ran the beta for just over a month during which time approx 10% of our regular online readership switched over to the new site.  This gave us a lot of valuable feedback and led to various tweaks and changes to make the site more user friendly.

We also had a fairly mamoth task of copying across 90,000 articles from the old sites and re-mapping those URLs to our new Polopoly URLs so that old links (example) from the likes of Wikipedia (example) and the search engines continued to work.  Wikipedia alone had links to over 2,300 Herald and Sunday Herald articles and given its massive PageRank and search engine reputation, it was essential for our SEO efforts that these links continued to work.

It’s still early days, but the site seems to be coping well — both with the traffic and the number of articles in the system which, including our 20 year archive, is now nudging one million articles.

I’ve recently completed a new IT exhibit for Glasgow Science Centre called The Animator.  

The exhibit allows visitors to create their own Wallace & Gromit style stop-motion animations using a built-in camera and a simple touch-screen interface.  

The key with this one was absolute simplicity.  All commercial stop-motion applications have tons of features that most people will never use, and have interfaces that take a while to learn.  By contrast, The Animator was designed so that people could learn to use it in seconds, then go on to create an impressive looping animation in just a couple of minutes.

Keep a look out for it on your next visit to GSC.

We finally flicked the switch tonight on our first Polopoly-powered site!  Heraldscotland.com is now officially a public beta, running in parallel with the main Herald and Sunday Herald sites for the next couple of weeks while we train everyone up on the new system.

More details to follow when I have time (as well as launching heraldscotland.com this week, I’m also on a five-day Java training course).  For now please go and have a play with it and let me know what you think…

The new version of s1jobs has won the Online Excellence category at the prestigious Marketing Society Star Awards in Glasgow.   The site, which was designed and built by my technical team last year, beat strong competition from Blonde, BigMouthMedia, Story UK and Whitespace to take the award.  

The win recognises the talent and dedication of everyone involved in the build.  It was a real team effort with sales and marketing staff playing a key role in the design and development process.   Full credit to everyone involved in the build, especially Colin Clark and David McLaughlin who did the majority of the design, HTML and programming work on the project. 

David Craik, Head of Marketing for s1 accepting the award

It seems one of the key factors in ’s1jobs 2.0′ winning the category was the measurable effectiveness of the new site.   The improved job seeker interface — including a personalised homepage, improved job alerts and AJAX-powered search results — combined with an improved recruiter offering — JobCasts, personalised CRM, and automatic applicant screening — led to a direct improvement in all our key metrics.  Visitor numbers were up, the average application rate soared while the number of page impressions actually decreased*.   

* While a drop in page impressions would be bad news for some sites it isn’t an issue for s1jobs, which generates revenue through job listings.   A drop in page impressions (coupled with an increase in applications) simply means users are getting to the content they want more easily — a great result.