February 20, 2006
Case Wiki Hits 1000 Users
I just noticed that the Case Wiki has hit the 1000 users mark! Since the wiki can log you in automatically if you are logged in to CAS, I thought these numbers might be a little deceiving, so I decided to do a little analysis...
Of the 1025 people in the user table as of this post, 301 have contributed at least 1 revision, of which there are about 7500. For comparison's sake, the Case Blog system has 1013 authors and 920 blogs. The 5962 individual posts have been made by 374 distinct people. The Case Wiki was launched in June of 2005 and this blog system in December of 2004.
From these numbers, it appears the Case Wiki is growing faster than Blog@Case, at least from a user-contribution perspective, as it should be. Since the Case Wiki is a "factual" nexus about Case, one would expect people to find it quicker, as the content of a wiki would theoretically yield more search results than opinions, which are commonly made in blogs. Also, the barrier to publishing in the Case Wiki is much lower. There is no need to create your blog. You just click the "edit" link and you are there. I would be misleading if I neglected to mention the actual "popularity" of each service in terms of unique page hits. The numbers of hits in the past three months to the Case Wiki is roughly 1.281 million. Blog@Case has 3.58M, almost 3x more. Blog@Case is definitely a more popular service. (Case Wiki stats, Blog@Case stats).
I believe both these services have only scratched the surface when it comes to usability potential. Many people still do not know Case has a Blog or Wiki system. Until these services get prime-time exposure, it will probably remain that way. It makes me start to wonder about how to best advertise an IT service. It would be interesting to see the usage graphs for IPTV and the My Case Portal after their posterings last semester. As a teaser, I can say that the next product from SIS will attempt to address the problem of people not knowing about service availability. If you are a good internet sleuth, you will have no trouble finding the test site(s) for this product.
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You can advertise on Facebook to Case users for $12/day and get something crazy like 80,000 page views.