Development of a strong online presence was one of my key aims with Wired In (initially known as WIRED). With the help of website developer Ash Whitney, I launched Daily Dose, a drugs and alcohol news portal, in early 2001. This website was followed by substancemisuse.net—which contained sections for people suffering from substance use problems, practitioners, and members of the general public—and the news portal Drugs in Sport. We later built wiredinitiative.com, which focused on the range of work that Wired In was conducting. (1,036 words)
I’ve often been asked why I came up with the name WIRED, the original name for Wired In. I could say that it was because I wanted to connect people, which I now consider the main ‘power’ of the name Wired In. In fact, the reason was that I initially saw WIRED as a way of providing people with information about drug and alcohol use problems, and how they could be overcome. WIRED was quite simply an acronym: Web-based Information REsource on Drugs—alcohol is, of course, a drug.
I had initially received funding from the Welsh Development Agency, which at the time was the economic development agency for Wales, to develop and maintain an online resource that would help people in Wales better understand the nature of drug and alcohol use problems and how they could be overcome. Use of illegal drugs, in particular heroin, and excessive drinking were major problems in parts of Wales, particularly in areas suffering economic and social problems such as in the Welsh valleys. These problems had increased as coal mines in the valleys closed.
A technician in my university department, Neil Carter, suggested I approach a web-developer friend of his, Ash Whitney, to see if he would build my first website. I visited Ash in Cilfrew, which is close to Neath, late in 2000 and we hit it off immediately. Ash agreed to build a news portal focused on drugs and alcohol, that would allow us to provide links to key content posted on specialist and non-specialist (including the popular press) websites on a daily basis throughout the year. I hired Jim Young, a technician who had previously worked in my neuroscience laboratory, to help me run what Ash and I decided to call Daily Dose.
As I have explained earlier, Daily Dose was launched 1 February 2001 during my Inaugural Lecture for being awarded a Personal Chair (Professorship) in Psychology by my university in Swansea. During that lecture, I explained that I had changed ‘career’, from running a neuroscience laboratory to working with people in the community. I wanted to help people overcome substance use problems and this would involve my team’s work impacting on the people themselves and their families, treatment practitioners, commissioners of treatment services, academic researchers, and members of the general public. I emphasised that it was essential to improve information flow in the field and the internet offered a perfect tool. At that time, it was not being used in an effective manner to impact positively on the field.
I told my audience that I was now going to officially launch our first website, the drug and alcohol news portal Daily Dose. The next moment Daily Dose became probably the largest website (at least physically) in the world as I revealed it on the large screen in the main lecture theatre in the university.
Prior to the launch of Daily Dose, I had spent time with Jim talking about the sort of information that I wanted disseminating and showing him key websites. Initially, I did a trawl of newspaper websites before I went to work, passing on the key links to Jim, and he did the major trawl in the evening. It didn’t take long before Jim was doing all the trawling. He soon became well-versed in selecting key content and avoiding some of the rubbish which appeared in the popular press. His penchant for locating relevant information soon earned him the sobriquet Sniffer Dog.
In the early days, Daily Dose had a number of sections. The Daily Dose section contained links to new content found on that day. I posted what I considered to be the most important articles of the week (generally 24 taken from the week’s Daily Doses) in a Weekly Dose. The Professional Pick was a selection of 20 links to articles we considered to be of greatest value for professionals working in the field. As a new article was ‘professionally picked’, it replaced the last one on the current list. This section would eventually move to another of our websites. An Archive of all previous Daily and Weekly Doses was provided, along with an About Us page.
Daily Dose later became the leading information portal on drugs and alcohol. It started to attract sponsorship, which was administered by the charity Wired International Ltd I had previously set up. The portal eventually attracted over 8,000 subscribers, was linked to by many major organisations in the world, and was top of many millions of listings on Google.
I developed another portal, Drugs in Sport, in 2002, for which Jim trawled the internet daily. This website closed in 2007 due to lack of sponsorship funding, and Daily Dose closed in 2010 for the same reason.
In 2002, Ash and I collaborated to build the main Wired In website, substancemisuse.net, which contained sections for people suffering from substance use problems (either directly or indirectly), practitioners, and members of the general public. There was also a Wales section, which included some of our Drug and Alcohol Treatment Fund evaluation reports. We later built wiredinitiative.com, which offered a range of different sections focused on the range of work that Wired In was conducting (e.g. Personal Stories, Research, Education/Training).
I loved working with Ash and we became close friends. We still are today, even though we live on different sides of the world. These websites of yesteryear were rather crude compared to today, but web technology has advanced considerably since that time. Some of the pages of those websites are still available today on the Wayback Machine archive. I’ve enjoyed looking back through some of that work. Ash built this Recovery Stories website in 2013.
