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What are Earth-Touch users interested in seeing?

We’ve been encouraged by the stats we are seeing relating to story popularity, because your interest seems fairly evenly spread across habitats and species. People appear to be enjoying our underwater coverage as much as our coverage of the Kalahari Desert, and our focus on creatures as small as ants as much as our coverage of elephants and lions.

Interestingly, of all species, sharks and meerkats appear to be the most popular so far.

Feedback

Do you have any insights about using the site to share with us? Which footage do you enjoy the most? Is there anything you’d like to see more (or less) of? Where do you live and at what time of the day do you prefer to access Earth-Touch? Which functions do you think are the best (or could be better)? How did you hear about us, and would you recommend us? Are there things about Earth-Touch that you think could be improved?

Please share your thoughts with us by posting your comments on the Earth-Touch blog, or by emailing us directly, on feedback@earth-touch.com. We are dealing with a few small usability and technical bugs as they crop up. If you’ve noticed a bug, please report it directly to us by clicking the beta sash in the top right-hand corner of the website.

What do we know so far about Earth-Touch users?

It’s early days yet, but we’d like to share a few stats with you on the Earth-Touch site, averaged out from when we first went “live” back in April 2007 (to the internal team only), then to 100 invited users on 4 July, and finally to public beta in August.

So far, we know that on average, visitors open many stories each time they visit the site. About 75% of our users are returning to the site for a second or subsequent visit, while about 25% are first-time visitors. The number of visitors to the portal has been climbing steadily since we first went live.

We have already welcomed visitors from dozens of countries. So far, most of our users have been from South Africa. We’ve also attracted significant interest from the United Kingdom, United States, Nigeria, Botswana, Japan, Ecuador, Germany, Greece and Canada.

Keeping you informed

We truly appreciate you, our founding users. We intend to send out a regular newsletter such as this one, highlighting popular content, and advising you of new developments and upcoming events. If you wish to unsubscribe from this newsletter, please simply click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the page. We hope, though, that you’ll stick with us as we continue to grow and develop.

With grateful thanks,
The Earth-Touch team

High-definition video

One of the best things about joining Earth-Touch.com is that you get to download as many high-definition wildlife videos as you like. You can then watch them at your leisure on a big screen TV, iPod or computer screen. Just follow the simple instructions that follow and enjoy.

When viewing a video, if you move your cursor over the video window you are given the option of downloading that video in either high- definition or standard-definition formats. The buttons to do this are at the top of the video window and labelled SD or HD. Simply click on the version that you would like to download and you will be prompted to save it to disk. Once downloaded to your hard drive, simply open the video using a suitable video player (eg Quicktime or VLC).

SD or HD?

Standard definition (SD), at a resolution of 480 x 854 pixels, is great for video iPods, normal TVs, etc. Download size is typically between 40MB and 80MB.

High definition (HD), at a resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels, is twice as good (and twice as big) as SD and looks fantastic on big plasma and LCD screens.