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10,000 words :: where journalism and technology meet ::

Eyetrack studies: What we've learned and how to conduct your ownYesterday

As webmasters and site designers, it's easy to fall into the trap of being so familiar with a site's interface that we disregard the notion that navigating does not come as easy for visitors. Often web users have different viewing habits than we do and eyetrack studies have worked hard to determine what they are:


1. Users will skip anything that looks like an ad

Banner blindness is real, according to this 2007 study. Web visitors don't read websites as much as they scan them, which means ignoring ads in both the header and rail of a web page, as evidenced in the heat map on the right.


2. Readers like "F"s

In a further explanation of the above study, it is revealed that web users read in a pattern that looks like a capital letter F. "At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. "Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored."

QUIZ: How new media are you?January 6

Are you a self-proclaimed media geek? Are you a social networking butterfly? Put your techno savvy to the test with this 12-question quiz

Essential resources for panoramic photographyJanuary 5

You've seen panoramas used to illustrate the wondrous beauty of the world such as the interactive landscapes of Australia available at Panedia, the beautiful 360º images at Virtual Africa and the hundreds of images available at 360Cities.net (including this stunning image of London on New Year's night).

In fact, panoramic technology has grown so rapidly that many long-existing tools for creating virtual images have grown in popularity even in the last few months since this last post on panoramas. Here are some of the useful tools and resources for those interested in visualizing their own interactive corner of the world:


Software

Image editors can take their pick from any of the available panorama programs including WPanorama,

Out with the old, in with the new!December 31 2008

In celebration of the new year, here is a word cloud of the text of every 10,000 Words post this year (click the image for a larger view). As you can see, a variety of topics have been covered in the past months.

Thank you, grazie, obrigado, danke, gracias, köszönöm to the top blog referrers this year. If you like this blog, please check out these great resources as well:


New Media

Mindy McAdams
clickblog
Ponto Media
Multimedia Shooter
Martin Stabe
kockablog
Journalism.me
Journerdism
Faz Caber
sans serif
médiablog.hvg.hu
Andy Dickinson
journalism.co.uk

Sports arenas: How to put a multimedia twist on traditional coverageDecember 28 2008

The sports section is often the most popular, yet most homogeneous, part of most online news sites. Most online sports coverage is an unenthusiastic mishmash of stats, photos and blogs, with the occasional podcast thrown in. Online sports fans demand more sophisticated coverage and news organizations can provide it by covering the fans' home base: the sports arena.

Ballena Technologies takes advantage of online technology by offering virtual tours of a variety of American sports arenas — from basketball to hockey and everything in between — including one for the Oakland Coliseum, home of the Oakland As baseball team (pictured below). In each Flash-based tour, users can hover over a seat and find out the price for that section or click to check out the view from that seat.

The New York Times has taken the idea of a virtual tour and pumped some adrenaline into it with its tour of the Hahnenkamm downhill ski course. The two minute-long computer-animated simulation is narrated by champion skier Doug Lewis and brings some