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The latest issue of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox newsletter is about how users read on the Web, whether they scroll down pages, and what kind of attention they pay to particular page elements.

Take a look at the graphics under the heading “Scrolling Behaviors” that show readers’ attention, captured through eye-tracking technology, and particularly at the “gaze plots.”

Note that the final paragraph of the text-heavy Amazon.com page on the left gets a lot of concentrated attention. That shouldn’t happen, if it’s true that people don’t like to scroll down to read long chunks of text on the Web.

Nielsen does not say which of the three pages in that graphic got readers to buy the item(s) in question, rather than just to browse pages about them. That would be even more interesting.

Source

Scrolling and Attention, Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, March 22, 2010.

Tags: How to, Tech, Writing & editing by GD
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What are the differences between traditional publishing, vanity press, and self-publishing? How do the newer print-on-demand options compare?

Writer Carla King takes a look at the issues in her PBS MediaShift column, Self-Publishing, Author Services Open Floodgates for Writers.

Tags: Reading, Tech, Writing & editing by GD
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From the nation of Georgia comes an example of what not to do with your media.

French television station TV5Monde reported last night that a Georgian broadcasting station had perpetrated a hoax on the order of Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds.

A news broadcaster at the station had falsely reported that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had been killed and that Russian tanks had begun to invade the nation.

The French station reported that Georgians had panicked, causing a run on food supplies at markets, and that calls for emergency medical help had skyrocketed as a result of the so-called news. But it was all a hoax.

In the article Panic in Georgia After a Mock News Broadcast, Andrew Kramer of the New York Times gives some details.

Tags: Random access, Tech, Writing & editing by GD
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Working with a new tool requires patience. Learning how to use it often takes time from the very thing that you wanted to use the tool for.

I recently worked with five busy professionals to put together a panel discussion on freelancing. Tiny decisions about who, where, when, what, and how had to be made around multiple schedules and across geographical distances.

At first, we communicated by email. But the volume of email soon got out of hand, and some information got lost in the shuffle.

I set up a Google Sites wiki as a virtual meeting place. We were able to write updates, introduce ourselves to one another with short biographies and photos, store contact information, post target dates, and work together on the questions that we would discuss. Best of all, each panelist could check in at his or her convenience to see what others were saying.

But some panelists hesitated to add to the wiki, perhaps intimidated by not knowing how to use the tool. Others were not checking in regularly. So we reverted to emails that said things like “Don’t forget to check the wiki!”

Although everyone agreed that we should meet before the night of the panel discussion, finding a time and place to meet in person proved too complicated.

To schedule a meeting time that would work for the greatest number of people, I set up a poll through Doodle.com. The panelists and our helpers could then vote on when they could attend.

We eventually held two conference calls on FreeConference. The service was not quite free, but setup was relatively simple and the call automatically recorded for later use.

The February 24 panel discussion, Tips for Surviving and Thriving as a Freelancer, went very well, with 75 people seated in the Mechanics’ Institute meeting room and café for the meeting.

Publicity had reached Bay Area Editors’ Forum, the Northern California Translators Association, the Northern California Science Writers Association, San Francisco Women on the Web, readers of the Sin and Syntax site, and likely a few others.

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Tags: Random access, Tech by GD
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