In passing I feel I ought to say that I was very encouraged by this meeting as a whole. It was a positive and forward looking and I think edifying (meaning up-building) meeting and I hope more people will post their own thoughts on what happened.

I gave a short report to the Pubs Dept meeting on the launch earlier this year of the new on-line ISA Directory of Automation which came on stream a few months ago. The URL is isadirectoryofautomation.com/

One of the delegates asked if he could enquire why a new URL, rather than a “subdomain” of the ISA URL – www.isa.org was used. I said he could ask, but I had no answer or defence, principally because it never occurred to me that this was an important point (and I could hardly be called a neophyte in this web game!)

Nobody could give an answer other than it was perhaps an easy one to remember. (The same may be true for the URL for Automation Week (.isaautomationweek.org/) and other sites set up by the ISA with URLs other than the main www.isa.org).Perhaps this was thought as a good idea in helping to establish their identity. However it was pointed out that this was perhaps a false theory in the modern on-line word.

Using these disparate or different URLS instead of strengthening the ISA “brand” by establishing one strong authoritative presences, instead dissipates the possible presence into many different channels.

Does this matter? Well, yes it does.

Have you ever tried to “google” the word “Automation?” If you have where do you find the ISA’s website? Try it now if you like! In my experience it is on page three or four or maybe even further down. In fact it ought to be in the first three entries on page one. Now try “Automation Directory” and see if you can find it. We tried it at the meeting and failed to find it after seven pages! (By the way I think that if you’ve searched for this before some search engines are intelligent enough to second guess you and move up what they think you might want further up the hierarchy! – I stand to be corrected in this but I find if I use one computer to do a search and then another I tend to get different results!

Why is this?

The search engine is looking for usage, or how popular a page or site is. So isa.org has a certain number of visitors, so will the Directory of Automation, so will the Automation Week site. But the search engine has little to go on to associate these with each other has it? Remember the adage “garbage in garbage out?” Or have you ever experienced a problem with having printing done by a professional printing firm where simple mistakes are made because you assumed that they understood exactly what you wanted without spelling it out clearly. No search engine, however intelligent, cannot identify www.isadirectoryofautomation.com, or www.isaautomationweek.org with www.isa.org. The URL isa.org does have an existing authority with the search engines but when we start another URL this is from scratch rather than building on what we already have. Each new URL has to establish its own authority from nothing. Reinventing the wheel as it were.

All searches lead to isa.org

So what to do?

It is actually a quite simple procedure, I’m told, to change this to say “automationdirectory.isa.org” or “automationweek.isa.org”. If this is done then every visit to both of these sites will acrue and be recognised as a visit to the isa.org domain and so its perceived popularity will rise and its “authority” will grow as this total increases. And so on, the addition of each section as say england.isa.org (or isa.org/england), or district say district12.isa.org etc will add the usage of these sites to the total. Say 10000 people visit isa.org and 2500 people visit www.automationweek.com and 5000 people visit the Directory they would be regarded as separate entities by the search engines and thus would be back in the exterior darkness of the back pages of Google, Yahoo and the rest of these engines.

ISA has a global presence with potentially 14 District web presences, all the sections, divisions and departments as well as some of the individual standards’ and education sites. All these can and I would suggest should be contributing to this popularity. Hopefully as a result of that simple question at the pubs meeting we will see the authority of ISA rise in the eyes of these engines and start to take its rightful place on page one.

Dear Newsletter Editors and Webmasters,

ISA has created new articles and ads that you may use in your newsletters and web pages. Some of these articles and ads promote the benefits of ISA membership; others promote ISA Automation Week 2010, some advertise training; and others encourage ISA members to volunteer, ask for help, invite visitors, etc.

These articles and ads can be found in the Society Leaders Resources section of the ISA website, under Section, then under Editor Resources. (You’ll need to log in!) Then, down the page, look under “Articles” or “Ads – ISA Products and Services.” I will be adding more articles and ads in the future, so please check back frequently.

You’ll also find a link to the Press Room on the left hand column. ISA news releases are another good resource for articles. Technical papers from our Division symposia are always a good addition to newsletters, as well.

One last thing. Please take a close look at your web pages and newsletters and check out how you use the ISA logo compared to the logo usage rules at this link. If you find that you’re not displaying the logo correctly, or that you have the outdated Society name instead of International Society of Automation, please make the necessary adjustments to protect this important branding element.

Dianna L. Noyes, Administrator Section and District Services, The International Society of Automation.

ISA Expo 2009

As you may or may not be aware, ISA Expo is being replaced by ISA Automation Week beginning this year (2010).  Executive Director Pat Gouhin points out that ISA Automation Week is “organized around a different model than ISA has used in the past. The new model focuses on the conference as the center of the event, because we believe that automation and control professionals at every level seek knowledge above all else.”

The ISA Automation Week conference program will focus on the latest industry developments and standards in key manufacturing disciplines like automation, energy and power, green manufacturing, instrumentation and process control, safety and security, systems and enterprise integration, and wireless, networking, and industrial communications. Conference sessions will include both theory-based and applications-based presentations to appeal to a wide variety of automation and control professionals.

The purpose of this thread is to solicit input from the automation community with regard to these conference sessions.

Put simply, what topics would interest you?