Atlanta Media Bloggers

Takin' the blame

Yep Art, you can blame me for your first blog and the many other voyages we are going on.

For those who do not know me, I am Sherry Heyl, Founder and Idealist of What a Concept!. My personal/business blog is www.mindblogging.typepad.com

What a Concept! focuses on helping our clients understand and integrate emerging technologies such as; Blogs, Wikis, RSS, Video, Podcasts, Social Networks and Social Bookmarking.

I have a degree in Marketing and a degree in Creative Writing (one for each personality) from FSU and several years experience in consultative sales roles for technology services.

I collaborated with Andrew Lunde to keep this group going. The Atlanta Media Bloggers Group was started by Kevin Howarth, over a year ago, as a way to create a blogging presence in Atlanta.

James Harris sent me an article recently, The Rise of Corporate Blogs. Corporations are rapidly joining the online conversation, which is a fun experiment to watch, as there is a huge learning curve when it comes to a landscape that has no restrictions, a conversation that anyone is able to join in, and a #1 rule of transparency and authenticity.

The changing landscape of communication and commerce and the rapidly expanding ways of sharing ideas and influencing others is causing an acceleration of change unlike any in history.

At Atlanta Media Bloggers Group - we sit around, eat, drink, and try to make some sense out of all of this. There are a lot of exciting ideas for the future of this group that are currently being developed. 

There are no membership fees or a charge to participate. So feel free to join in the fun!

I Never Blogged Before

Chris,

I gladly accept your invitation to be apart of the Atlanta Media Bloggers. I am sure you know Sherry Heyl. I blame her for this! (Sherry - I am going to get you! Do you hear/read the words that are coming out of my mouth and skinny fingers?!)

I never blogged before but I guess I will start now.

Art Hall

About us

The Atlanta Media Bloggers group meets the third Thursday of every month at a location to be announced from 7:00PM-9:00PM.

Most recently we've begun meeting at the Armchair Media conference room, where there's a projection screen and wifi.

Send an email here to get added to the meeting Evite list.

Howdy, y'all!

How do you like our cool clubhouse?

One of my UMontana students, Denny Lester, did the cool artwork. We'd used it on a private site we built, but when its time was up, I thought, "This is too nice not to use it again." I asked his permission, and he said go for it. So with a few tweaks, we have a treehouse and plenty of media to play with, so come hang out any time you like! Don't be shy about posting. Burps, gurgles, and "Me toos" are always welcome.

I'll eventually map the atlantamediabloggers.org and .com URLs to this site, once I get a handle on where they're registered.

How many of you are on Flickr?

Here's what I'd like you to do, when you have a minute. Since we're just starting out, why not post a little introduction, say hello and who you are? Stick in some links to your blogs, so I can add them to the side blogroll. And then also, if you would, grab the code for your Flickr badge like the ones at the right, and paste it in the post also.

That way we can build up our side blogroll and learn who everyone is and snoop out blogs at the same time. And look at pretty pictures.

OK, I'll start (although my Flickr badge is already at the side):

My name is Chris Boese, and www.serendipit-e.com is my core domain. I'll be your host today! [grin]

I just joined the group a couple of months ago, so I haven't met many of you. Sure, new member gets stuck with all the work! Our wiki on the conference idea is still going strong, so head on over there if you want to brainstorm some ideas and add to the knowledge base we're working from.

I'm currently a writer at CNN Headline News, and I used to write a cyberculture and a technology column for the Headline News web site and CNN.com. All those back columns are archived and linked on a side menu off my blogs, my main one being "Chris Boese's Weblog" (creative name, don't you think?) www.serendipit-e.com/blog.

That doesn't really describe who or what I am, so if you really want to know, take a look at my portfolio blog. I'm feeling self conscious these days, but it's a long story. I first went online in 1989 or so, got my first regular Internet account as a journalism professor at Valdosta State in 1991, and went to grad school to study what happens from an HCI standpoint where interfaces meet cybercultures. I went to a fun engineering school (I don't know why more people don't think engineering schools are fun, but then I didn't study engineering!) and had a front row seat at the birth of the World Wide Web.

So, long story short, I put up my first home page in early 1994, and in 1998 finished the first "born digital" dissertation to be accepted in the U.S., which is online and still getting hits. It's a cyberculture community ethnography and rhetorical study of the online fans of the TV show "Xena: Warrior Princess," looking at how the community constructed its own virtual landscape in cyberspace and grew so powerful it influenced the mass media product it was supposedly following. I was also looking at how the democratizing power of interactive media either works or doesn't.

People used to get mad because I had too much fun writing my dissertation too. I can't help it. Xena rocks!

That is more than enough about me, I think, except maybe some more URLs.

I was sorta involved with the warblogging movement. Am also now hosting a foreign news blog for a freelance correspondent I'd worked with in Iraq, www.joshuakucera.net. We just launched about 2 weeks ago.

I have a site for beginning bloggers, which also is a bit of a fan site for innovative teaching online, to highlight good work teachers are doing. It's called "So you want to start blogging but you're shy..."

I have a blog devoted to poetry. Cat blogs eat your heart out!

There's lots of other fun and serious stuff tucked away in hidey holes on Serendipit-e, but you'll have to hunt for that. I've taken up too much space here already, and I feel an attack of shyness coming on...

Chris

p.s. Don't hang back now! Jump in and post your introduction, URLs, and Flickr badge. Don't forget to set the category to Introductions.

Poynter Online on 2006 Online Eyeball Studies from Nielsen-Norman

Link: Poynter Online - E-Media Tidbits Pt 1.

Friday, June 23, 2006

Posted by Laura  Ruel 7:25:08 AM

Text Ads Get the Most Looks

Here at the Nielsen/Norman Group's Usability Week in San Francisco, Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice Coyne yesterday presented results from their first use of eyetracking to evaluate Web design.

Similar to the results in Poynter's Eyetrack III study, their research on ads shows that people do not look at static ads with graphic treatment.

Users seem to "zone out" (with their peripheral vision) ads and other site elements that have clearly distinguishable ad features such as graphics and colors that make the ads look different from the rest of the site, or animated ads.

Nielsen/Norman's study found that people spend, on average, less than one second viewing display/graphical treatment ads. Users did look at animated ads when they preceded content and were forced. However, in these cases the user had nothing else to view.

[...]

When users DO look at ads with graphics, those ads usually have:

• Heavy use of large, clear text
• A color scheme that matches the site's style
• Attention-grabbing proprieties such as black text on a white background, words such as "free" and interactive (UI) elements.

Here's a follow up of what came out of the conference...

Link: Poynter Online - E-Media Tidbits Pt 2.

Friday, June 23, 2006
Posted by Laura  Ruel 11:25:09 AM

What Makes Web Images Attractive

More from the Nielsen/Norman Group's Usability Week in San Francisco. (Previous coverage) Yesterday Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice Coyne presented the results of their first use of eyetracking to evaluate Web design.

They offered one interesting and much-discussed observation: Task-oriented users really don't pay attention to images on Web pages.

[...]

Both Eyetrack III and the NNG study found that faces in images tend to attract users' focus. NNG mentioned to the dangers of using images as "an obstacle course." Images that appear unnecessary, at least peripherally, can be erroneously tuned out.

According to NNG, images that do NOT attract attention share these traits:

• Generic/stock art
• Off-putting, cold, fake, too polished or "set up"
• Not related to content
• Look like advertisements
• Low contrast in terms of color -- not crisp

Meanwhile, images that DO get attention share these traits:

• Related to page content
• Clearly composed and appropriately cropped
• Contain "approachable" people who are smiling, looking at the camera, not models
• Show areas of personal/private anatomy (Men tended to fixate on these areas more than women -- really!)
• Items a user may want to buy.