As promised, I’ve shut down the C&I survey. Final count: 39 responses.
I’m not sure whether I’ll provide the results and my interpretation here, in Cites & Insights itself, or both. Probably both.
Very quickly, I found two things surprising in the survey responses, and one of them will affect how I proceed:
- Assuming that survey responses represent C&I’s core readership, almost nobody in that core reads C&I as HTML essays. So, while I’ll probably continue to generate them, I won’t spend any real effort trying to make them prettier or more useful–and I definitely see no reason to make C&I “web-first,” with HTML as the primary format, until/unless a sponsoring agency comes into play. (On the other hand, the split between print PDF reading and online PDF reading may encourage me to think about providing an alternative, single-column, “online-optimized” PDF version.)
- There was no significant dislike (or lack of like) for any of the sections of C&I that might be regarded as less than wholly apropos or serious. Since those were also the sections that I heard favorable comments about from the handful of folks upset that C&I almost went away completely, that encourages me to keep doing the lighter stuff.
Beyond that, I need to (and will) do a full writeup. Oh, and there will be dramatic changes in section names–although in that case the survey turns out not to be terribly relevant. Stay tuned.
And thanks again for your responses (and for Seth’s comment on the most recent survey-related post, which was not in fact the basis for the changes I’m making, but certainly could have been).
