Usability
Arianna Huffington is keynote speaker at the Decatur Book Festival tonight!
Link: The AJC Decatur Book Festival | Event Schedule.
Sorry for the last minute notice. I'm not too organized these days.
It's at Agnes Scott College, Presser Hall, 8-9 pm.
I've always wanted an excuse to poke around the Agnes Scott campus. It's so beautiful.
Anybody feel like going? I plan to be there. While she isn't directly scheduled to talk about Huffington Post (slated to talk about her book on work/life balance), I expect she'll get some questions about the Post during the Q&A session, if there is one.
I'm a fan of what she's done with the Post, both in its navigation and architecture, and its sense of being a "stable" of a wide range of well-known people. She's given them a forum to blog and unleashed a powerful and now influential collective voice on the blogosphere and beyond.
In particular, I hope to ask her for more information about how she set up her deal with Yahoo! News, both to repurpose content from her site, but also getting primo structural representation in the opinion section of the Yahoo! News page. Did she make the deal the way it has usually been done with newspaper syndicated columnists? Or was there more of a trade or exchange aspect involved? Did she approach Yahoo! News, or did Yahoo! News approach her? I'm just really curious about the business model of the arrangement. Inquiring minds want to know!
Keynote Address
The AJC DBF is proud to announce political columnist Arianna Huffington as its keynote speaker! Join Ms. Huffington as she opens the festival Friday night at Presser Hall at Agnes Scott College with a discussion of her new book, On Becoming Fearless… In Love, Work, and Life.
There's a ton of other events at the conference, plus a festival atmosphere with a book market on the Decatur Square, a barbecue and fireworks among the many things scheduled.
Activities In-Depth:
That grid schedule is just a BEAR to read tho. Wish they'd redesign it. Here's some other events that pertain to blogging:
PANELS – SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2
E-Storytelling: In which we discuss the new form of writing commonly referred to as online fiction, from short stories to comedy pieces to email-text-and-Instant-Message-as-storytelling device. 10 a.m.
- John Warner, editor of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
- Jack Pendarvis, author of The Mysterious Secret of Valuable Treasure, Pushcart Prize winner
- Jamie Allen, editor of The Duck & Herring Co.
Real Writers Blog: In which we discuss whether today's writers need a web site, a blog, a podcast, and/or a MySpace account. 1 p.m.
- Laurel Snyder, poet and NPR contributor
- Tayari Jones, author of Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling
- Touré, contributing editor with Rolling Stone
- Amy Guth, author of Three Fallen Women
I'm also interested in this session by The Atlantic Monthly fiction editor. Gotten a few rejection letters from him over the years! But I think I need special (free) registration, and I haven't heard back yet.
Magazine Fiction: In which Atlantic fiction editor C. Michael Curtis discusses the realities of rejection, cover letters, and other literary matters. 5 p.m.
- C. Michael Curtis, Atlantic Monthly, author of Faith: Stories and God: Stories.
I think you need special registration for this one too, but I know there are comedy writers in this group, so I thought I'd pass it on:
WORKSHOPS – SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2
That's Not Funny: A Definitive Guide to Written Hilarity, Wit, and Mirth, By Prof. Rev. John Warner, Humorologist. 3 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Political bloggers would probably love to be a fly on the wall in the $13 admission brunch with a former editor of The Nation. I dunno if any spaces are still available tho.
And one of the Indigo Girls, Emily Saliers, will also be speaking on a topic with her father.
September 1, 2006 at 11:45 AM in Bloggers, Chris B, Citizen Journalism, Current Affairs, Food and Drink, Interaction Design, Logistics, Marketing, Newspapers, PR, Usability, Weblog Philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Rule of 1%
After our discussions on user-generated conent, I thought my fellow Atlanta Media Bloggers would find this interesting. (I wonder how many will interact with this post?)
***
It's an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.
It's a meme that emerges strongly in statistics from YouTube, which in just 18 months has gone from zero to 60% of all online video viewing.
The numbers are revealing: each day there are 100 million downloads and 65,000 uploads - which as Antony Mayfield (at http://open.typepad.com/open) points out, is 1,538 downloads per upload - and 20m unique users per month.
That puts the "creator to consumer" ratio at just 0.5%, but it's early days yet; not everyone has discovered YouTube (and it does make downloading much easier than uploading, because any web page can host a YouTube link).
Consider, too, some statistics from that other community content generation project, Wikipedia: 50% of all Wikipedia article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of all users, according to the Church of the Customer blog (http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/).
Earlier metrics garnered from community sites suggested that about 80% of content was produced by 20% of the users, but the growing number of data points is creating a clearer picture of how Web 2.0 groups need to think. For instance, a site that demands too much interaction and content generation from users will see nine out of 10 people just pass by.
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READ: What is the 1% rule?
July 22, 2006 at 09:54 PM in Audience, Discuss!, Interaction Design, Jim S, Usability, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Poynter Online on 2006 Online Eyeball Studies from Nielsen-Norman
Link: Poynter Online - E-Media Tidbits Pt 1.
Friday, June 23, 2006Posted by Laura Ruel 7:25:08 AMText 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 AMWhat 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.
June 24, 2006 at 12:29 PM in Advertising, Chris B, Discuss!, Interaction Design, Usability, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
