Breaking an International News Story was fun!
What an insane couple of weeks I’ve had – sometimes everything happens at once!
One of the sites I’ve been working on at my part time job, which has seemed to be about to launch for months, has finally taken the plunge. My uncle asked me to set up a gallery for their wedding photos, which was a lovely job to be given. An interesting new customer appeared for blog upgrades. And I had an Open University assignment due, which I kind of got done somehow.
But at the same time, my first and long term customer (I say customer but that doesn’t really do him justice) was involved in some kind of top secret project he couldn’t quite tell me about until it was all confirmed and ready to go to the press… which then happened. It turned out to be the discovery of a World War 2 ship by Australian divers – a momentous and serious matter, but also very interesting for me as I got to see, and be part of, an international news story coming out.
Being based in Australia meant that when they sent material, it tended to arrive late at night, and I would need to put it on the website as soon as possible, so that there would be a chance of any later press referring to it.
The first set of data I received was obviously most urgent of all: a press release and an exclusive photo. I added these to a web page I had set up ahead of time, and then posted the story to Digg, Reddit, delicious and Ma.gnolia. Worth a go, I thought, having seen everything else I posted there apparently vanish without a trace. So I started watching the web stats…
After about 30 minutes, there had been 2 visitors from Digg, and then nothing more for a while. Then someone else arrived from a forum. I checked the link and sure ehough, there was a link posted to our site with a message about the photo. And then the hordes descended – I think I may have a URL now for every naval history forum on the internet! What’s nice as well is that after a while the diver / photographer also started posting the link on the forums.
It was amazing to see this story spread, and proof that when a story is important enough news to somebody, the social bookmarking sites can work.