Dooley Online

Speaking of Tufte ...

Each year several of our staff are mailed promotional material about Edward R. Tufte's annual presentation on visualizing information.

In my office, we tend to display information through maps, charts, figures in various media including print, powerpoint and online.

So the question we always ask is -- is Edward Tufte's message relevant anymore or has he become a curmudgeon? For my part, I've always enjoyed his presentations which often stretch my mind beyond just what I produce in the office.

We generally agree that if you haven't been to a Tufte seminar, it is worth going -- particularly if you are someone who produces graphical displays of information on a regular basis.

Shortly after this year's Tufte discussion, I came across this cool cartoon on about Tufte posted on Trendsspotting ...

'Nuf said.

On Being a Web Craftsman

If you're a web programmer/designer this is for you ...

| View | Upload your own

Amen.

April Fool's Posts

There were a lot of April Fools posts circulating through the Web -- even on trusted sites.

A few of my favorites:

• Inhabitat's post, Energy Crisis Solved by Harvesting Rainbows, includes graphics which depict arrays collecting rainbow power.

• Celebrate "Energy Wasting Day!" Enjoy these videos.

• Jenny Cisney shares some of the April Fools Day at the Office pranks performed over the years -- truly inspiring!

• Tufte joins SlideShare board of advisors; No more bullet points on SlideShare. According to this SlideShare.net post, "Special algorithms based on Tufte’s groundbreaking work will parse the PowerPoint file and remove all bullet points, deceptive “chart junk”, and other elements that distract from a presentations effectiveness." It should be noted that SlideShare started out the day with the SlideShow of the Day featuring a bulleted PowerPoint purportedly by Edward R. Tufte. That was taken down at some point and replaced with this blog.

• Announcing Google Weblogs (beta). If it sounds too good to be true -- it is! According to this Google Buzz Blogger post, here’s what you can expect:
  
  • Don’t limit yourself to “reverse chronological” publishing. Our advanced Google algorithms put your best content at the top of your blog. Even if your later work goes downhill your previous posts will still shine.
  • No more template languages to mess with or sidebars to get right. Our advanced Google algorithms automatically populate your blog’s sidebar with the most relevant possible content.
  • Stop worrying about your PageRank or your search engine optimization. Post directly into Google search results for maximum visibility.
  • Save your readers time and effort. We’ll automatically extract the most relevant sentence from your post for the index page, along with any necessary ellipsis. We'll also put some words in bold!
  • Your blog’s header will stay fresh with new images from our team of artists, each and every anniversary of a scientific achievement.
  • Unsure of what to post about? Just click “I’m Feeling Lucky” and we’ll “take care” of the rest!

What April Fool's postings did you find?

Importance of Writing for the Web

The post Ten Practical Tips for Writing in English (Jarkko Laine) is a gem of an article which comes from a Finnish author wrestling with how to write more effectively online.

She provides the following simple tips with lots of links to online resources:

1. Read in English
2. Listen to native speakers
3. When writing in English, think in English
4. Write
5. Trust your gut
6. Proofread
7. Have English-speaking friends who are not afraid to correct your English
8. Study spelling and grammar
9. Commas and hyphenation -- the tricky buggers
10. Relax

I wonder if these tips translate to writing in other languages?

I also thought about how these might be transmuted into a howto list for blogging/web writing in general (isn't everything worth reading a blog these days)?

1. Read blogs
2. Read and apply howto's on blogging
3. When writing a blog, think about your purpose and your readers
4. Write (every day)
5. Trust your gut
6. Proofread (okay, we all agree that typos are part of blogging, but they do distract and you take a hit in the area of expertise)
7. Read (and respond to) your comments
8. Read and apply howto's on writing for the web
9. Use short paragraphs, short sentences, bulleted lists and avoid over-punctuation
10. Relax and enjoy the ride

This, however, doesn't address the need for incorporating images or other multimedia to better express your media. So I might add the following.

• Use graphics to express complex information (a picture says a thousand words)

The Importance of Network News Continues to Decline

Blogs and other online media continues to chip away at the popularity Network News once enjoyed.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media 2008: Annual Report on American Journalism offers the following display of Evening News Ratings in decline since 1980.

Above version of chart published on Slate.

You can also view other charts or build your own charts online.

The full report is available online for reading or printing (in HTML only).

The Importance of Color

So, I'm setting up a new blog and when it comes to choosing templates, it gets very difficult.

Viewability and usability aside, the colors and layouts available are overwhelming when trying to select what will eventually become part of your personal brand.

According to  www.brandmarket.com:

• color increases brand recognition by up to 80 percent.

• color improves readership as much as 40 percent.

• color accelerates learning from 55 to 78 percent.

• color increases comprehension by 73 percent.

• color ads are read up to 42 percent more than similar ads in black and white.

• color can be up to 85 percent of the reason people decide to buy.

According to Trendspotting, the color blue is dominating the web. Blogger Taly Weiss predicts that innovative companies trying to achieve attention will use more “daring” colors to compete with the dominating blue. The new MySpace/ Facebook ought to be more of a fusion of colors as some of the web experts suggested here.

The article concludes by pointing to the following useful links on color:

• Color and psychology http://psychology.about.com/od/sensationandperception/a/colorpsych.htm

• Color and marketing http://www.precisionintermedia.com/color.html

• Color and culture http://www.sibagraphics.com/colour.php

• Color dedicated websites: colormatters.com, colourlovers

With this in mind, I've decided to stay with the blue color palette with blue links. While parochial from a designer's point of view, I'm guessing that anyone viewing my content will be satisfied.

The Importance of Digg.com in Online Marketing

I really like Digg -- particularly when it offers up additional articles related to what I'm trying to post.

I wish the method for putting in links was a little easier -- having to go through so many screens gets tiresome. But maybe that's the point. If you are willing to navigate through so many screens to make a post, you must really like the content.

Aside from wanting to share content with others, why do I bother with Digg.com?

According to  Social Media Optimization:

Digg is the most popular and notable of the social bookmarking sites. Quantcast estimates that that Digg has about 25 million unique visitors a month.

• Digg attracts more users than all the other social bookmarking sites combined.

• Digg’s demographics have hanged as it has become more popular (mainstream). (... the typical social bookmarking site user is male, between the ages of 35-54 with a household income of $60k or more a year.)

• Social media topics that do well on Digg include interesting photos, anything anti-Microsoft and lists (top 10, etc).

If you are trying to reach this audience, then you have to include Digg in your marketing efforts, simply because the audience is so large, relative to everyone else in this space.