By: Hailey Temple
The School of Information Studies’ (iSchool) community blog, Information Space, surpassed one million page views in 2013, and reached its highest page views in a single day at 6,218 views recently.
“I'm very proud of the work that our team has done to get to this point. This is really a team effort and everyone involved should be proud of his or her contributions,” said Kelly Lux, director of social media and adjunct professor at the iSchool.
Information Space, fondly referred to as InfoSpace, began in 2010 as a means of providing students an opportunity to share their thoughts about the Information Age. Since its humble beginnings, Lux and the iSchool community helped the blog grow into “a true school and technology blog,” as Lux envisioned when she began working on InfoSpace with graduate assistant Alyssa Henry ’10 G ’12. Information Space now publishes new posts every weekday with students, staff, and alumni contributing to the blog.
As technology has rapidly transformed in recent years, Information Space topics have also morphed to address the popular conversations and questions in today’s technology field. Recently, popular topics include Snapchat, Netflix, and Instagram – subjects that immediately impact the college students and adults interacting with today’s technology. iSchool junior and InfoSpace blogger Lindsey Silverman feels that these relevant posts contribute to the blog’s popularity: “It helps that students are posting about relevant topics because that’s what people are searching. It’s nice to know that people are actually reading what we write each week.”
To Lux, Information Space has evolved into a forum for the iSchool community to express their personal interests and improve their communications skills. “One of the most important parts of this for me is giving students an outlet to communicate their ideas on a platform that allows them to be seen as professionals, as part of a team, and to build their personal brand,” said Lux. “Communication skills are so important in every field, and our bloggers are showing they have top-notch writing skills.”
As Infospace continues to gain popularity and adapt to the rapidly shifting technology world, Lux hopes to improve the blog’s web presence and add video bloggers to the team to showcase student talent. “Our blog is our school's most visible web presence, which makes it a really important piece of our marketing,” said Lux. “I'd like to see it become a place to tell more of our stories, because there is amazing student work being done at the iSchool.”