Editorial, Geoscientist 17.5 May 2007
Your editor is overcome with pride after the successful re-launch of the Society’s new email Newsletter.
One of the biggest projects being undertaken for the Bicentenary is the creation of a new Society website. Although it will live at the same address, this new site will not only offer even more content – including a whole new area devoted to Geoscientist Online – but it will make everything much easier to find. The fact is, such has been the current website’s success at bringing the Society closer to its Fellows and the world at large, its burgeoning content has completely outgrown its original architecture.
This massive project is being managed by the Society’s Data Manager Nic Bilham and Assistant Project Manager Kholilur Rahman; while the contractors carrying out the work are SOUK, successor company to Broadband Communications, who created our current site. At the time of writing, nobody outside a charmed circle has seen the new site; but a sizable number of you now have an inkling of its “look and feel” from the newly revamped Society email newsletter - distributed for the first time on March 16 (Issue 71), and which was the work of Website Administrator Dr Daniel Milner.
We took the liberty of sending this new newsletter to all those Fellows for whom we have emails, rather than the smaller number who had chosen to receive the old newsletter, years ago. That plain text message was a very different product, made the way it was for good reasons at the time, but under very different circumstances than now prevail. Of course, the new newsletter has a clear “unsubscribe” button, so it was easy for those who still didn’t want to receive news of upcoming events, jobs and publications to opt out if they so wished.
However, to our great delight, only 10 people did so – and five new requests to subscribe, cancelled out half of those. So, the result of this experiment has been that our newsletter now goes to 9632 people – Fellows and non-fellows - every two weeks. This mute endorsement was satisfying enough, but that some recipients were moved to write to us was more than we could have hoped for. Here is a representative selection of your reactions:
- Bravo from North America… a grand service for Overseas Fellows … most useful … continues to preserve the GSL's "edge" on leadership of the profession. My thanks to you and to the Directors!
- THANX for the new style e-mail Society Newsletter. It looks great.
- Good morning: Nice new look to the newsletter!
- I like it!
So – thank you all. If you think someone you know might like to receive the Society’s fortnightly newsletter, please forward one to them so they see how marvellous it is, and immediately click the “subscribe” button.
And if you would like to subscribe yourself but have no friends, never mind. We love you. Just drop
[email protected] an email by clicking on the link.