People who tap the Internet from high-speed connections spent more time online in January than people with traditional phone lines... Nielsen/NetRatings reported Tuesday that broadband usage reached the critical 50 percent benchmark in January, when people with high-speed connections accounted for 51 percent of the 2.3 billion hours that Americans spent online throughout the month. By comparison, the survey found that broadband users spent 727 million hours online in January 2001, accounting for 38 percent of the total time spent online in the same month last year.

Well, DUH! How many of you folks with fat pipe connections shut off the stream when you leave your computer? Part of the attraction of fat pipe is... It's always on!

There are so many problems that I can think of with this survey... How are they measuring online? Self-reported? Packets coming in? Keystrokes? What if your homepage is one that refreshes every so often automatically? How many different ways (that people use their computer online) can you think of that would skew the results?

The real problem I have with this sort of crap is the 'journalists' who dutifully report such dreck, without providing more information about the methods used, or without asking more questions. With the embracing of soundbite news, and journos' willingness to simply recycle press releases, no wonder the bigco news organizations are losing revenue -- people who can think and reason are looking to make their own interpretation of events by piecing together things from the variety of other resources that are available online.

The perception of journalists' ability to add value is seriously under fire, now that they are no longer the sole source of information to the public. Many journos who simply were going through the motions are going to have start working again. Yes, some principled journos never slipped into the bad habits, and some may have been pushed down that ugly slope by editors' or news consultants' decisions (or corporate owners applying pressure, for that matter). The end result may ultimately be stronger news coverage or interpretation, but I'm pretty certain that there will be some serious bloodshed (job-loss) as the journo herd gets thinned out.

8:31:32 PM  [] blah blah blah'd on this    

Techniques to avoid chartjunk include replacing crosshatching with (pastel) solids or gray, using direct labeling as opposed to legends, and avoiding heavy data containers

This isn't a how-to, it's a how-not-to. An interesting page that will provide some good food for thought on a current project...

5:50:20 PM  [] blah blah blah'd on this    

OK, I'm baffled. How the heck does a URL like this: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0029947 show up in my referer log?

I just double-checked, and the page for Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby does not have a link to my page on it, the best I can figure out is some browser out there is kind of sticky in holding onto a page, and just offers it up when queried for the referer page...

Mind you, it is a favorite film of mine, and I wouldn't mind having that kind of link-juju going on, but really now...

12:44:54 AM  [] blah blah blah'd on this