I was really pleased to see two positive reviews of the JournalTOCs current awareness service appear this week in the media. One of them even mentioned moi!
The first review was by Martha Loesch, and it appeared in the Technical Services Quarterly journal, which is published by Taylor & Francis. Martha was enthusiastic about JournalTOCs, but made a couple of criticisms, about the length of the Browse Publishers lists, and Search for Articles by Keywords results, which she said contained too little information.
Santy, who manages the service, has already made changes to the Browse by Publisher lists, in line with Martha’s sugggestions, and it now includes A-Z options. He’s also going to look at whether the article search results can at least include journal titles without making the results pages look too cluttered.
The second review appeared in Search Engine Land, and was titled: Academic, But Valuable: A Free Alert Service. This was written by Gary Price, a lovely and very enthusiastic chap who I know from way back when both of us used to give presentations at Online Information. I would be giving my specialised talk on new engineering information resources to at most 60 people, whilst Gary would give his talk about advances in search to a much larger audience in one of the bigger rooms. It was always difficult to squeeze into the room to watch Gary, so popular were his talks.
Search Engine Land is a news and information site covering search engine marketing, searching issues and the search engine industry, and the site is led by journalist Danny Sullivan. Gary is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and is also the co-founder and co-editor of INFOdocket and FullTextReports.com. Both of these weblogs contain news and new resources of interest. All three publications are highly respected and extremely well read.
If you look at the Search Engine Land home page, you’ll see that they have more or less mastered the art of exposure in social media. They have over 80,000 Followers on Twitter at @sengineland, over 31,000 Likes on Facebook, and over 75,000 subscribers take their RSS feed.
INFOdocket has nearly 1,000 subscribers to its RSS feed on Google Reader alone. Here’s the INFOdocket link to the announcement about the review of JournalTOCs.
So, it was really good to see JournalTOCs covered so positively in both reviews. I wanted to see how effective the publicity was. A day after appearing in Search Engine Land, the review has been Tweeted 319 times, Liked 8 times, and Shared 96 times.
It has also been Tweeted 8 times from INFOdocket. Using Social Mention, I can check a number of these mentions, plus some more which have appeared elsewhere.
I can also see from Twitter Search that there’s been many mentions of JournalTOCs over the past 24 hours.
This is all wonderful, as JournalTOCs depends on word-of-mouth publicity.