It was on this day in the year 2000 when the City & Guilds College Union launched a new website. The then C&G President, Dinesh Ganeserajah, formed a group called ?Active? to boost the constituent union?s activities. One of the projects was a ?portal? that would be the home page of choice for engineering students.

The ?C&G portal? featured news articles written mainly by Mr Ganeserajah and, guess who, Mr Arif. The website was launched in a rush to pre-empt ?Click?, a potential rival from the ICU Media Group. Felix provided initial publicity for the website with an article titled ?Guilds website ?terrible??.

The website seemed to be receiving enough hits, especially during election season, to warrant further work. A new design and an improved online publishing facility were in the pipeline for the start of the next academic year under the project name of ?Live? (it was ?Life? for one night!) The site was launched in time, and with Mr Arif now running ?Active? he used his powers to attract more people to write news for Live.

With the surge in news articles and a revamped discussion feature, the website began to attract a large group of regular visitors. By the end of the year the site had become a news hub, swamping the C&G component. The website had to be divided and with Active being very inactive, the new C&G Media Group were to oversee the next upgrade. In October 2001, C&G Live's media component became ?Live!? with a new look.

Over the past three years, the website has managed to publish 611 articles, attracted over 40 journalists and amassed 12 megabytes of data. The news features very little ?sex? (mentioned in 10 articles), ?drugs? (in 3 articles) and ?rock? (5) & ?roll? (16). There is also more ?work? (144) than ?play? (51), more ?Mr? (188) than ?Ms?, ?Miss? and ?Mrs? put together (25); ?Arif? (101) is more popular than ?Pell? (49) and ?Heeps? (38) combined while ?Ganesh? (82) beats ?Sykes? (61).

Mustafa Arif has published the most articles with 115 stories under his name, Oliver Pell comes in second with 73, Dragon Slayer (56) and Simon Scrapmetal (50) are third and fourth. The most frequent posters in the news discussion are Mustafa Arif (with 551 replies), Oliver Pell (273), Andy Heeps (244), Sam (212) and Rob Park (181) who together make up for 25% of the dialogue.

The success of Live! is due to the large amount of time and effort from the people above. They have kept the site alive and provided the content, without it all the technology behind the site is useless. Let?s hope that Live! continues to thrive and grows to reach more of Imperial?s students.