Traffic by Genre, based on 287,090 impressions across the Chitika advertising network
Digg
Celeb/Entertainment: 18%
How to/DIY: 9%
Other: 26%
News: 18%
Tech: 12%
Video Games: 17%
Facebook
Celeb/Entertainment: 9%
Community: 17%
How to/DIY: 13%
Other: 17%
News: 28%
Shopping: 9%
Tech: 7%
MySpace
Business/Law: 10%
Celeb/Entertainment: 23%
Community: 8%
Other: 23%
Tech: 8%
Video Games: 28%
Twitter
Celeb/Entertainment: 10%
How to/DIY: 4%
Movies: 6%
News: 47%
Other: 23%
Tech: 10%
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
For the Bookshelf: Interaction Design
Designing for Interaction, by Dan Saffer, August, 2009
Four of out five stars on Amazon.com. Recommended by Jared Spool, stalwart in the field of user experience and CEO of User Interface Engineering.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Thoughts about Previous Two Posts
So why did I so carefully pore over and transcribe Michiko Kakutani's article in last Sunday's New York Times?
Because, first of all, it reflects serious thought by serious thinkers. She's a book critic for the Times, and the books she notes are written by real heavyweights. It's so interesting to hear the voice of Jaron Lanier, especially, one of the creators of virtual reality.
But most of all, the article sums up the state of the audience for which we, as content strategists and information architects, need to design and write. Kakutani's words might already be familiar to us, but they represent truth in a real way.
They are words we can point to, words that validate, user research that rings true for all of us, no matter the job title or project.
Because, first of all, it reflects serious thought by serious thinkers. She's a book critic for the Times, and the books she notes are written by real heavyweights. It's so interesting to hear the voice of Jaron Lanier, especially, one of the creators of virtual reality.
But most of all, the article sums up the state of the audience for which we, as content strategists and information architects, need to design and write. Kakutani's words might already be familiar to us, but they represent truth in a real way.
They are words we can point to, words that validate, user research that rings true for all of us, no matter the job title or project.
More from Michiko Kakutani
Now, with the ubiquity of instant messaging and email, the growing popularity of Twitter and YouTube, and even newer services like Google Wave, velocity and efficiency have become even more important. Although new media can help build big TV audiences for events like the Super Bowl, it also tends to make people treat those events as fodder for digital chatter.
More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they're increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show, or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite—never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it's our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven't been properly vetted and sourced.
People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work. Online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
Technology is turning us into a water-cooler culture, with millions of people sending each other (via email, text messages, tweets, YouTube links) gossip, rumors, and the sort of amusing-weird-entertaining anecdotes and photographs they might once have shared with pals over a coffee break.
And, in an effort to collect valuable eyeballs and clicks, media outlets are increasingly pandering to that impulse—often at the expense of hard news.
"I have the theory that news is not driven not by editors who know anything," the comedian and commentator Bill Maher recently observed. "I think it's driven by people who are" slacking off at work and "surfing the Internet." He added, "It's like a county run by 'America's Funniest Home Videos.'"
More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they're increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show, or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite—never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it's our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven't been properly vetted and sourced.
People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work. Online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
Technology is turning us into a water-cooler culture, with millions of people sending each other (via email, text messages, tweets, YouTube links) gossip, rumors, and the sort of amusing-weird-entertaining anecdotes and photographs they might once have shared with pals over a coffee break.
And, in an effort to collect valuable eyeballs and clicks, media outlets are increasingly pandering to that impulse—often at the expense of hard news.
"I have the theory that news is not driven not by editors who know anything," the comedian and commentator Bill Maher recently observed. "I think it's driven by people who are" slacking off at work and "surfing the Internet." He added, "It's like a county run by 'America's Funniest Home Videos.'"
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
For the Bookshelf: Current Thought on Digital Media
These books share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels, and record albums are broken down into bit and bytes; the growing immediacy of real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political websites place on subjectivity.
The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby
"Reading in the traditional sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet. What we are engaged in—like birds of prey looking for their next meal—is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information."
Cyberselfish, by Paulina Borsook
Notes the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Describes tech-heads as having "an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent."
Contends that even older digerati want to think of themselves as "having an Inner Bike Messenger."
Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, by Cass R. Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
The Internet makes "cyberbalkanization" possible. Individuals can design feeds and alerts from their favorite websites so that they get only the news they want, and with more and more opinion sites and specialized sites, it becomes easier and easier for people "to avoid general-interest newspapers and magazines and to make choices that reflect their own predispositions."
Serendipitous encounters with personal and ideas different from one's own tend to grow less frequent, while "views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, cam be found in large number on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible, or bizarre in most communities." Studies of group polarization show that when like-minded people deliberate, they tend to reinforce one another and become more extreme in their views.
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, by Cass R. Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
Explores the effects of the Internet on public discourse.
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr
Suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.
True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, by Farhad Manjoo, Slate's technology columnist
Examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact.
The way in which "information now moves through society on—currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality"—has fostered deception and propaganda and also created a world where "the very idea of objective reality is under attack."
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer in the development of virtual reality
What becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes "metaness" and regards mash-ups as "more important that the sources who were mashed?"
Because the Internet is a kind of "pseudo-world" without the qualities of a physical world, it encourages the Peter Pan fantasy of being an entitled child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood. While this has the virtues of playfulness and optimism, it can also devolve into a "Lord of the Flies"-like nastiness, with lots of "bullying, voracious irritability, and selfishness"—qualities enhanced by the anonymity, peer pressure, and mob rule that thrive online.
"Digital culture is comprised of [sic] wave after wave of juvenilia, with rooms of M.I.T. Ph.D. engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks."
Thanks to Michiko Kakutani and The New York Times for this mash-up
The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby
"Reading in the traditional sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet. What we are engaged in—like birds of prey looking for their next meal—is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information."
The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen, a technology entrepreneur
Argues that Web 2.0 is creating a "digital forest of mediocrity" and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise.Cyberselfish, by Paulina Borsook
Notes the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Describes tech-heads as having "an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent."
Contends that even older digerati want to think of themselves as "having an Inner Bike Messenger."
Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, by Cass R. Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
The Internet makes "cyberbalkanization" possible. Individuals can design feeds and alerts from their favorite websites so that they get only the news they want, and with more and more opinion sites and specialized sites, it becomes easier and easier for people "to avoid general-interest newspapers and magazines and to make choices that reflect their own predispositions."
Serendipitous encounters with personal and ideas different from one's own tend to grow less frequent, while "views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, cam be found in large number on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible, or bizarre in most communities." Studies of group polarization show that when like-minded people deliberate, they tend to reinforce one another and become more extreme in their views.
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, by Cass R. Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
Explores the effects of the Internet on public discourse.
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr
Suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.
True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, by Farhad Manjoo, Slate's technology columnist
Examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact.
The way in which "information now moves through society on—currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality"—has fostered deception and propaganda and also created a world where "the very idea of objective reality is under attack."
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer in the development of virtual reality
What becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes "metaness" and regards mash-ups as "more important that the sources who were mashed?"
Because the Internet is a kind of "pseudo-world" without the qualities of a physical world, it encourages the Peter Pan fantasy of being an entitled child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood. While this has the virtues of playfulness and optimism, it can also devolve into a "Lord of the Flies"-like nastiness, with lots of "bullying, voracious irritability, and selfishness"—qualities enhanced by the anonymity, peer pressure, and mob rule that thrive online.
"Digital culture is comprised of [sic] wave after wave of juvenilia, with rooms of M.I.T. Ph.D. engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks."
Thanks to Michiko Kakutani and The New York Times for this mash-up
Monday, March 22, 2010
Welcome to The Eye That Blinks
Welcome to The Eye That Blinks, a blog about information architecture, content strategy, and the land where the two mingle.
Why does the eye blink? Because it needs to constantly focus and refocus, look and look again, consider and reconsider. It's the process that creates and recreates, refining ideas and possibilities for the best possible solutions.
Information architecture and content strategy are closely aligned. Don't believe me? Then blink, and consider that the Illinois Institute of Technology's Master of Science in Information Architecture "enhances a technical communication core" and offers specialization in technical communication.
Blink again, and look hard at the first word in the term "information architecture." It doesn't say "cool graphics architecture." It doesn't even say "marketing jargon architecture." The word "information" implies meaning, meaning that comes from, well, words.
It always used to get my goat when people said, "Oh, no one reads on the Web." What is it, exactly, that they do, then (aside from watch video, look at images, and listen to music)? Some of us spend most of our waking hours on the Internet...reading (and writing) words.
This blog is about information strategy and content architecture. Made you blink.
Why does the eye blink? Because it needs to constantly focus and refocus, look and look again, consider and reconsider. It's the process that creates and recreates, refining ideas and possibilities for the best possible solutions.
Information architecture and content strategy are closely aligned. Don't believe me? Then blink, and consider that the Illinois Institute of Technology's Master of Science in Information Architecture "enhances a technical communication core" and offers specialization in technical communication.
Blink again, and look hard at the first word in the term "information architecture." It doesn't say "cool graphics architecture." It doesn't even say "marketing jargon architecture." The word "information" implies meaning, meaning that comes from, well, words.
It always used to get my goat when people said, "Oh, no one reads on the Web." What is it, exactly, that they do, then (aside from watch video, look at images, and listen to music)? Some of us spend most of our waking hours on the Internet...reading (and writing) words.
This blog is about information strategy and content architecture. Made you blink.
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