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I’ve updated My Tech Glossary.

Tags: Tech, Writing & editing by GD
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Mark S. Luckie of the Washington Post has put together a collection of newspaper sites that help you view and visualize 2010 U.S. census data.

Type in your zip code on the New York Times census map, for example, to see how population and demographics have changed where you live.

Thanks to the Newsfeed at MediaBistro.com for the pointer.

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This excellent infographic showing some effects of radiation exposure appeared earlier this week in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Compare the radiation you might be exposed to with a dental x-ray as opposed to with a CT scan. Then consider whether you’d apply for a job as a radiation worker.

The graphic artist is Melina Yingling of McClatchy Tribune Information Services.

Source

Erin Allday, Japan Nuclear Health Risks Minimal, Experts Say,” San
Francisco Chronicle, March 16, 2011.

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Click on the word Play under this interactive map to watch depictions of seismic activity in Japan before and after March 11.

Ken Schwencke and Thomas Suh Lauder of the Los Angeles Times prepared this mashup from USGS data.

It’s odd that watching these graphic depictions of Richter scale numbers can cause the heart to beat faster, something that might not happen if we were to read the data in a simple table. Is it the motion that causes this?

Related Posts

Visualizing Data: Infographics
Infographics: U.S. Unemployment Since 2007
Infographics: Radiation Exposure

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“Why write?” asked interviewer Jeffrey Brown of author Roger Rosenblatt, author of the new book Unless It Moves The Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing.

“We write to make suffering endurable, evil intelligible, justice desirable, and love possible.”

Rosenblatt advises students of writing to “strive for anticipation, rather than surprise, imagination, rather than invention,… and to write with precision and restraint.”

Read the transcript or watch the video of this interview on PBS Newshour, January 31, 2011.

Thanks for the pointer, MC.

Tags: How to, Reading, Writing & editing by GD
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We live in a culture of sharing, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook told Wired.com in 2009:

people choose to share all this information themselves…. people need to move through this process of realizing that sharing information is good, and slowly sharing more and more information over time. But by doing that you get a lot richer information…

We feel more connected when we share, and the sense of being in community can have positive effects.

It’s often said that the Internet is a global village. But anyone who’s lived in a village knows that a village has both its cranks and its heroes, its gossip and its town crier, its snoop and its police, its fool and its sage.

Which one will you be?

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen says you should think twice before posting to the Internet. “Think about how [what you write in email, blogs, or discussion forums] will look to a hiring manager in ten years,” advised Nielsen in 2005.

What is the dividing line between sharing about your life and projecting a professional image that will help you get that job interview?

Nobody likes a person who shares too much, but nobody likes a big phony either.

Sources

. Jakob Nielsen, Weblog Usability: Top Ten Design Mistakes (see rule nine), Alertbox, Oct. 17, 2005.
. Fred Vogelstein, The Wired Interview: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, wired.com, June 29, 2009.

Related Postings

. Social Networking, Privacy, and the Law
. Tamar Weinberg: Social Media Etiquette Handbook

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Journalist and blogger LaToya Egwuekwe has created an animation that plots U.S. unemployment data by county and state from January 2007 to early August 2010, The Decline: Geography of a Recession. She gathers the numbers from the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Thanks to my friend James for the pointer.

Related Post

Visualizing Data: Infographics
Infographics: Timeline of Japan Earthquakes
Infographics: Radiation Exposure

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Where you work helps define who you talk with, what you think about, how you solve problems, and how you think about the future. The economic downturn has led to changes in how and where a number of people do their work.

If you miss going in to the office, the San Francisco Chronicle has two recent stories about people who’ve found some new ways to work together:

• Tom Abate, Shared Work Spaces New Resource for Solo Worker (June 4)
• Carolyn Said, San Francisco Sees Influx of Tech Incubators (June 18)

Tags: Random access, Tech, Writing & editing by GD
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How do you present numeric data in a way that will catch the viewer’s attention? Here are two bright examples of ways to convey information:

• Doug McCune superimposes crime statistics on a map of San Francisco, California.
• Marca.com provides a World Cup 2010 calendar that shows teams, schedules, and events.

These brightly colored graphics are much more immediately interesting than are rows and columns of data, even if they convey the same information.

Thanks to Ryan Kim of the San Francisco Chronicle and hound at Testy Copy Editors for the pointers to these pages.

Related Posts

Infographics: U.S. Unemployment Since 2007
Infographics: Timeline of Japan Earthquakes
Infographics: Radiation Exposure

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The May 2010 issue of the Editcetera newsletter mentions the onlinestylebooks.com site, where you can research style decisions from more than 50 style manuals.

Thanks to the people at Copyediting.com for the recommendation.

Tags: Grammar & usage, How to, Random access, Writing & editing by GD
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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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William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well and other wonderful how-to books, tells international students at Columbia University: “As you start your journey…, you may tell yourself that you’re doing ‘communications,’ or ‘new media,’ or ‘digital media’ or some other fashionable new form. But ultimately you’re in the storytelling business.”

Source

William Zinsser, Writing English as a Second Language, The American Scholar, Winter 2010.

Tags: Grammar & usage, How to, Random access, Reading, Tech, Writing & editing by GD
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Jakob Nielsen provides some interesting information about computer users’ tolerance for interactions on web sites in the Alertbox posting “Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience.”

Writes Nielsen: “0.1 second is the response time limit if you want users to feel like their actions are directly causing something to happen on the screen.”

Worse yet: “The average page visit lasts about 30 seconds, but the more experienced the users are, the less time they allocate to each Web page.”

If you’re posting a video, he writes, don’t run anything longer than 1 to 2 minutes.

Lighten up, babe.

Source

Jakob Nielsen, Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience, Alertbox, Oct. 5, 2009.

Tags: Reading, Tech, Writing & editing by GD
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