@Publish

USC's report also showed that while nearly 50% of Internet users never click on Internet ads (with 70% finding them annoying), only 55% would prefer Web advertising to paid content, surprisingly

Um dos casos mais citados por diversos agentes é o da Estónia - que adoptou um plano estratégico, o Creative Estónia, inspirado no modelo inglês -, onde existiu uma aposta decidida do poder político

não é apenas a Estónia", diz Costa, "regiões irlandesas ou holandesas também

a Espanha já passou à acção em 2009 com o plano para a promoção e o fomento das ICC

For headlines -- especially longer ones -- it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers if you want to capture eyes.

The same goes for blurbs -- perhaps even more so. Our findings about blurbs suggest that not only should they be kept short, but the first couple of words need to grab the viewer's attention.

Average blurb length varies from a low of about 10 words to a high of 25, with most sites coming in around 17.

Eyetrack III found that people do typically look beyond the first screen. What happens, however, is that their eyes typically scan lower portions of the page seeking something to grab their attention. Their eyes may fixate on an interesting headline or a stand-out word, but not on other content. Again, this points to the necessity of sharp headline writing.

Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best -- that is, it was seen by the highest percentage of test subjects and looked at for the longest duration.

It might surprise you to learn that in our testing we observed better usage (more eye fixations and longer viewing duration) with right-column navigation than left. While this might have been the novelty factor at play -- people aren't used to seeing right-side navigation -- it may indicate that there's no reason not to put navigation on the right side of the page and use the left column for editorial content or ads.

Most news sites run articles with medium-length paragraphs -- somewhere (loosely) around 45-50 words, or two or three sentences.

Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones. Our data revealed that stories with short paragraphs received twice as many overall eye fixations as those with longer paragraphs. The longer paragraph format seems to discourage viewing.

the standard one-column format performed better in terms of number of eye fixations

What about photos on article pages? It might surprise you that our test subjects typically looked at text elements before their eyes landed on an accompanying photo, just like on homepages. As noted earlier, the reverse behavior (photos first) occurred in previous print eyetracking studies.

Finally, there's the use of summary descriptions (extended deck headlines, paragraph length) leading into articles. These were popular with our participants. When our testers encountered a story with a boldface introductory paragraph, 95 percent of them viewed all or part of it.

When people viewed an introductory paragraph for between 5 and 10 seconds -- as was often the case -- their average reading behavior of the rest of the article was about the same as when they viewed articles without a summary paragraph. The summary paragraph made no difference in terms of how much of the story was consumed.

The first thing we noticed is that people often ignore ads, but that depends a lot on placement. When they do gaze at an ad, it's usually for only 0.5 to 1.5 seconds. Good placement and the right format can improve those figures.

We found that ads in the top and left portions of a homepage received the most eye fixations. Right side ads didn't do as well, and ads at the bottom of the page were seen, typically, by only a small percentage of people.

Close proximity to popular editorial content really helped ads get seen. We noticed that when an ad was separated from editorial matter by either white space or a rule, the ad received fewer fixations than when there was no such barrier. Ads close to top-of-the-page headlines did well. A banner ad above the homepage flag didn't draw as many fixations as an ad that was below the flag and above editorial content.

Text ads were viewed most intently, of all the types we tested. On our test pages, text ads got an average eye duration time of nearly 7 seconds; the best display-type ad got only 1.6 seconds, on average.

Size matters. Bigger ads had a better chance of being seen. Small ads on the right side of homepages typically were seen by only one-third of our testers; the rest never once cast an eye on them. On article pages, "half-page" ads were the most intensely viewed by our test subjects. Yet, they were only seen 38 percent of the time; most people never looked at them. Article ads that got seen the most were ones inset into article text. "Skyscraper" ads (thin verticals running in the left or right column) came in third place.

Our world is getting more complicated by the second. Every day your readers are trying to get a handle on what happened yesterday, what’s happening now, and what will happen tomorrow. If you connect the dots for them, you can get popular in a hurry.

Giving your reader’s these “aha” moments is a great way to keep them reading a so-called boring topic and have them asking for more.

280 Slides:

LovelyCharts:

Curators help navigate readers through the vast ocean of content, and while doing so, create a following based on several factors: trust, taste and tools.

Building trust is important to validating curation as an evolutionary form of journalism, and many curators believe they should be held to the same standards as journalists.

more often than not, reporters stay within the confines of their beat. Curators don’t have to.

Curators also seem to fall into one of two categories: Aggregation and reblogging content without any editorializing, or providing additional thoughts as part of their reblog, retweet, etc.

Even though curators share certain characteristics of editors, they don’t enjoy the exact same role. When a curator gathers information for their community, the content is something they are passionate about. Reporters, as we’re taught, are not supposed to be passionate and interject opinion into their story.

Many news organizations, for example, are on Tumblr acting as curators, reblogging not only their publication’s content, but also other news sources that are relevant to their audience.

"Publishers seemed to have this fantasy that iPad would allow them to call time out on the Internet," Gene Liebel, a partner at the interactive agency HUGE, tells Fast Company. The idea is that for 10 years, publishing suffered from the Internet and its indignities, but that all of a sudden, thanks to the benevolent Steve Jobs, "now we're back, now we're gonna call a time out, start over, sell magazines at full price with immersive ads," and so on. But the tablet isn't some new digitally enabled omnibus magazine. "The tablet in the home is really one more Internet device," says Liebel. "Safari is still by far the biggest app. So the idea that everyone would go home and have 20 paid content apps and that's their new lifestyle is not even close to true."

With that battle won (at least according to Priebatsch), the next battle is over gaming. But we're not talking about simple video games and the like - we're talking about a "game layer on top of the world."

"The game layer is he next decade of human technological interaction," he explained. "Unlike the social layer, which trafficked in connections, the game layer traffics in influence. The game layer seeks to act on individual motivation - where we go, how we do it and why we do it."

Priebatsch says that the game layer could be 10 times as large as the social layer and that, used correctly, could help to solve the world's problems.

To prove his point, he then ended the session with a game - a massive game involving the entire several hundred member audience. As each person entered the room, they were given anywhere from one to three cards with different colors on each side. Each card had one of three colors on each side and were handed out randomly. To win the game, each row of the audience had to self organize to show only one color by trading with the audience members around them. That is, the entire room had to move from chaos to order, with each row only showing one color, within 180 seconds. If they did this, he said, SCVNGR would donate $10,000 to the National Wildlife Federation. One minute after he started the clock, he stopped it. The audience had self-organized, despite a variety of problems, in just one minute.

Priebatsch compared the various rules and problems faced by its players into ones the world population might face in solving global issues. There was a lack of communication, there were micro-trading issues, different allocations of resources from player to player, restricted movement decentralized leadership, and even different "countries," as aisles served as "oceans" between the rows. The audience did, however, have two things to work with - a countdown and a common goal. Despite these various factors, and through the proper motivation, a large problem was solved quickly through applied game mechanics.

Internet Service Providers have claimed that they need to be able to control the growing traffic online, and content creators fear that the result could be a two-speed internet.

The key to creating hyper-timely emails is planning and being nimble, says Christopher Stemborowski, associate communication strategist for marketing agency Oxford Communications. “Seeming timely can be the result of preparing multiple emails or just one email and waiting for the right time to send it.”

Build multiple versions ahead of key events: In the same way that shirts are made ahead of the Super Bowl declaring each team the champion, you can design two versions of an email to respond quickly to the outcome of major events.Plan an email for an event that has an unspecified date: Snowstorms will happen each winter. Will you have an email ready to go out the moment it happens? With a little planning, you can.Track trending online memes: In 2011, we have seen a #winning Charlie Sheen and a really excited Rebecca Black ready to have fun, fun, fun. Smart brands can tap into these memes in email blasts. You can keep track of these popular memes by viewing the trending topics section on Twitter.

Blasting irrelevant content to your email subscribers is one of the biggest email marketing mistakes you can commit.“For example, if a salon sends an email to men that highlights services solely for women, it shouldn’t be a shock when the men unsubscribe,” Stemborowski says. “To avoid this, the salon needs to know who in its database are males and who are females and then avoid sending irrelevant messages.”

“Self-selection means subscribers willingly receive emails that are in the categories they asked to get,” Stemborowski said, adding that it’s vital to keep the screening short so users don’t abandon the process.

More than ever, people are reading emails on their mobile devices. Mobile email usage increased 36% in 2010, according to comScore.

The first line of your email should never read, “If you are having trouble reading this email click here,” he adds. “Remember, the first line of the email is what shows up as the preview on smartphones. For this reason, the first line is premium real estate and, with this in mind, you should put your most important message first for a well-crafted call to action.”

Under-promise. Don’t commit to anything you can’t deliver. It’s better to lose a project by leaving yourself room to over-deliver than to boast of your prowess only to find yourself in the weeds later. Managing expectations is critical to having happy clients.

Have a template, but don’t be a slave to it. Reuse language about your company, but focus on making the parts unique to this project shine. Proposals ought to be preceded by a period of getting to know the client. Use that knowledge to shape the language, tone, approach, and content. This proposal may be shown to people you haven’t met personally, so make sure it conveys who you are without your presence.

Shorter is better. Superfluous examples, references, and blathering on about “capabilities” are easily identified as boilerplate and possibly even a bit desperate. Make the client feel special.

Why should you be selected for this project? Because you’re the cheapest? The quickest? Because you promise to do more than the other guys? Maybe. Sometimes those are the reasons, but they’re also the levers you least want to rely on pulling. Website design and development are services and not, on the professional level, commodities. Providing a commodity is an exhausting, unsatisfying, deadening experience.