Tag: web
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‘Bit Culture’ and the Benefits of Distraction
The information consumption habits of many in the younger generations–one feature of the ‘Internet information culture’–has many merits, despite its many detractors. So says Ban Casnocha in an article for The American that acts as both a review of Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy and a fairly positive and comprehensive overview of the “bit…
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A/B Testing Case Studies
Paras Chopra, founder of the fairly self-explanatory A/B testing company Visual Website Optimizer, provides an introduction to A/B testing that is as useful for newcomers as it is old-timers. In the article, Chopra provides a few dos and don’ts, an overview of some A/B testing tools, a fantastic list of resources and a collection of…
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Web Marketing Lessons from Cialdini’s ‘Influence’
No marketer should be engaging with people online without having read Robert Cialdini’s much lauded Influence, says SEOmoz co-founder Rand Fishkin. To this end, Rand presents his Illustrated Guide to the Science of Influence and Persuasion. The six main principles illustrated: Reciprocation: “The power of reciprocation relies on several conventions. The request must be “in-kind,”…
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Media Consumption and Current Events
As part of their series on ‘media diets’, The Atlantic Wire is asking a number of media luminaries how they manage the deluge of information we all encounter online. Some names you’ll recognise include David Brooks, Ezra Klein, Tyler Cowen and the following from Clay Shirky discussing his distaste for ‘breaking news’: In general, there’s no real breaking…
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HTML5 Forms: A Fun Guide
It’s been a while since I’ve read a technical(ish) article that is as accessible and fun as Mark Pilgrim’s guide to using new HTML5 markup in web forms. I’m not sure if it’s the doing of ‘Professor Markup’ or this slightly nerdy quip, but I fell in love with Pilgrim’s style: Asking for a number…
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Steve Jobs’ View on the Web and Creativity (1996)
In 1996, while he was still the CEO of NeXT, Steve Jobs was interviewed by Wired writer Gary Wolf. The result was a sometimes quaint, occasionally prophetic and often pessimistic exchange. In this far-reaching (and somewhat lengthy) discussion with Steve Jobs, the two discuss the forthcoming ubiquity of “the web dial tone”, how technology doesn’t change…
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Hypertext Comprehension and Delinkification
Deciding whether to click on links while reading material in hypertext form gives rise to an additional cognitive load and additional distractions, goes a theory championed by Steve Gillmor and Nicholas Carr. In certain circumstances this is an argument for the “delinkification” of text, they suggest, as this will hopefully bring about increased comprehension. While…
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Text-Only Ads are the Most Effective
Advertisers are “often wrong about what attracts our attention” is the conclusion of a usability study looking at how users interact with online advertising. The study, published in the report Eyetracking Web Usability by the Nielsen Norman Group (a usability consultancy firm from Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice), suggests that text-only advertising is the most…
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Journalism Online and Internet Entrepreneurship
In profiling a number of ‘online journalism entrepreneurs’, The New York Times does a good job of providing a relatively cliché-free, high-level overview of the current state of online news publishing. The article looks at the “new breed” of blog-based journalists, a few business models, and the problems associated with advertising online. There’s nothing new…
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In Praise of Self-Tracking: The Data-Driven Life
It is a natural desire to strive for self-improvement and seek knowledge about oneself, but until recently it has been difficult or impossible to do so objectively and quantitatively. Now, through self-tracking systems and applications that are becoming prevalent in many of our lives thanks to a number of technological advances and sociological changes, we can,…