Puget Sound Off Receiving Worldwide Attention and Recognition

June 19th, 2009 at 08:29am Toby Campbell Permalink

The Puget Sound Off (PSO) web site — a joint project of the University of Washington’s Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, the YMCA of Seattle, and the City of Seattle — focuses on promoting and facilitating youth civic engagement.

Recently, PugetSoundOff.org won an award from the Public Technology Institute (PTI) for best web and e-government services. The CCCE has worked with the City of Seattle Department of Information Technology and the Seattle Metrocenter YMCA to develop the Puget Sound Off website, curricula, and project partnerships in the community. An array of Seattle youth organizations, including teams at Youth Media Institute, Rainier Vista Neighborhood House and Horn of Africa Services have led the use of the site developing online groups and posting video, blogs, photos and more. The Mayors Youth Council and the City’s Citizens Telecommunications and Technology Advisory Board have also helped in developing the project.

This award recognizes the unique opportunity Puget Sound Off provides for online youth expression and civic engagement. PSO provides area teens with a community networking and online engagement site, together with on-the-ground training in media literacy, cause related journalism and content development. The site also features tips for online safety and a Flash-based curriculum on digital communication skills, which the CCCE has been instrumental in developing through the Surdna Digital Youth Advocacy Skills program. This CCCE curricula has been packaged on the “how to” section of the PSO site in a library of interactive videos to help youth master blogging, digital storytelling, and other multimedia skills.

Many of these curriculum videos were created by undergraduate interns and graduate students participating in the CCCE’s Becoming Citizens Program. The content of these curricula have been informed by CCCE research on digital media and civic learning, supported by the MacArthur Foundation.

Though aimed at connecting Puget Sound-area youth, PSO is regularly being explored by a worldwide audience, with a clear plurality of hits originating from Seattle. The information about who is visiting PSO and where the users are located comes from Google Analytics, a popular web site tracking service that reports a number of statistics about a site’s visitors—where they visited from, which links they followed to reach the site, what pages they visited, and more. We began using Google Analytics to record PSO’s visitor data on February 27, 2009, and here are a few web traffic highlights from the period between then and June 19, 2009:

General

• PSO has accumulated 16,744 “visits” in all, which are defined as site use sessions delineated by at least 30 minutes of inactivity. This works out to roughly 148 visits per day, though they are not evenly distributed—traffic tends to dip slightly on the weekends.
• These visits produced 93,194 “pageviews,” which count the number of pages a person views in a single visit. The average number of pages viewed per visit was 5.57, indicating that many visitors are deeply engaged with the site.

Location

• A majority (53%) of all visitors come from the Seattle metropolitan area and Puget Sound region. 56% of all visits originated from Washington state, 30% came from US states other than Washington, and 14% came from outside the US.
• Eight out of the top ten visitor-producing cities are located in the Puget Sound area. The other two are New York City (#4) and Los Angeles (#10).
• PSO is a truly global site, having hosted visitors from 108 countries spanning every continent except Antarctica over the past 2.5 months alone.
• PSO is big both at home and at school: the top two ISPs sending visitors are the Seattle Public Schools and Comcast (many of which are undoubtedly home users).

Traffic Sources

• Roughly equal shares of traffic (totaling 78%) come from search engines and “direct” visits, in which visitors either type the URL in manually or have PSO bookmarked. Many keywords in searches were clearly civic in nature, such as “should the death penalty be legal” (#7), “affirmative action pro” (#11), and “difference between free trade and fair trade” (#16).

Clearly, PSO is having a powerful impact both within the Puget Sound and beyond. We anticipate these encouraging traffic trends to continue as word about the site spreads. Visit PTI for more information on the PTI competition and PugetSoundOff blogs to see an array of new blog posts, video and images on what youth are sounding off about today.

Entry Filed under: notes from PSO, participatory media