EYES ON EYETRACK

Jay Small at Small Initiatives is urging a little common sense when it comes to Poynter's groundbreaking Eyetrack III study of how people "read" web sites.

The risk, of course, is that the design community &mdash apparently both inside and outside newspaper-based Web sites &mdash will look at a deliberately broad piece of research and draw from it specific conclusions about individual site designs. In absence of primary research on specific projects, designers may fall back on secondary research, such as Eyetrack III, to justify assumptions and decisions.

(Paragraphs snipped.)

Designers, I urge you to read and understand the Poynter reports, but use them to prompt the asking of more questions about your own work, not as answers in and of themselves.

Great advice: It's not for nothing that Small's web site is subtitled "Sensible Internet Design."

Any research on readership (whether dead-tree or pixel) is a snapshot of reaction to specific publications and pages. And quite often the publications being studied are already at or near the top of the line. We can draw broad lessons from broad trends, but we cannot blindly apply them to the work we produce.

Eyerack III is valuable. There's good stuff there. But only if we approach the findings and analysis as suggesting guidelines, not creating rules.

8:04:59 PM    

AND STILL IT GROWS

Wow. According to cyberjournalist.net:

NBCOlympics.com attracted 12.2 million visitors, a 230% increase over Internet traffic for the Sydney games.

The post links to a Business Week article.

7:50:16 PM    

SCOOPED!

Before mainstream media could get images from the bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta onto the Web, photos were already available through Flickr, the on-line photo sharing site.

Ranwar posted four photos from the area around the embassy. None of them are what we would consider journalism, but all of them showed some of the extent of the damage.

According to an entry by Caterina Fake at the Flickr blog:

Citizen reportage is on the rise, as we've seen here on Flickr with Hurricane Frances and the RNC in the past few weeks.

Flickr users posted 143 photos of Hurricane Frances and 620 from the recent Republican National Convention.

SOURCE: Hypergene Mediablog.

7:21:22 PM    

WHEN?

At this particular moment in time...I mean, presently...or currently...

Nicole at A Capital Idea digs into the use of presently, currently or now and some of the arguments for and against each.

Her choice? (I'll give you a hint: it's not one of the ones that make you sound "more sophisticated.")

BTW: A Capital Idea has a great tagline: Covering grammar and newspapers like they're going out of style.

6:49:45 PM