So I belong to a bunch of listservs as part of the ongoing communication aspect of my job as media architect. One of the listservs I have been on for years is “Calico-L” or the CALL (Computer Aided Language Learning) list. Wednesday after noon at the end of the day a message was sent out to the list:

————————————-
If there are any CALICO members who also have Google Wave accounts and would like to start one or more CALL waves, please send my your wave address and I will add you to my CALL wave.

Cheers,

Scott

——————————

This has prompted an avalanche of messages from people looking to get invited to Google Wave. For those that don’t know, Google is seeding accounts to this service, by handing out invites to users with accounts, to send out to new people. The bulk of the messages look like this:

————————–

Hello,
An invite to Google Wave would be appreciated:
name-excised@gmail.com
Thanks
Khalid
IUP-class’02

————-

…. me too
would u please send me an invitation to Google wave .

name-excised@gmail.com

thank you
Siham

——————

Hi,

Would you please send me an invitation,

Thanks in advance.

Brahim

EFL teacher, Morocco.

————————

My inbox looks like this:

I have an account,  harlanwallach@googlewave.com, and frankly I have no idea what to do with this service, or why all these people want it. Never the less, it is something, apparently very much in demand. Google has really promoted and driven a web based promotional campaign for a new service, that is frankly, astounding. No real suprise there I guess.

If anyone want to share a wave with me, or whatever, feel free.

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I just read an interesting article about the eye movements of users reading websites, check out the article here. (Thanks to Matt Forcum of Robot Beach and the House of Move)

F for fast. That’s how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.

In our new eyetracking study, we recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. We found that users’ main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F…

I’m not sure what the overall implication of this are.  The test group was relatively small, I’d like to see if the results hold up with 1000 or 5000 people.  I imagine that they would.

To me the question becomes, how do design a website to take advantage of the way people are actually reading the content?

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To all of our faithful blog followers, I have updated the URL of our blog to be:

http://blog.nuamps.at.northwestern.edu

All of your old permalinks will still work and they will automatically redirect you to the new clean URL.

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At the Digital Humanities Conference today.

20 foot high Keynote Speaker Stephan Wolfram presenting from England via video conference.

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In one week, 20,000 downloads of Wordpress for the iPhone. So, I figured I should try it out.

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If you would like to have your Login and Admin sections on a Drupal site use HTTPS there is a very simple and easy solution. Open your settings.php file that is located in drupalroot/sites/default/settings.php.  If you have set up the $base_url variable replace it with the following PHP code.  If you haven’t set this up, use this code and replace the base URL with your site’s URL.

if (!strcasecmp(substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],0,5),'/user') && !isset($_SERVER['HTTPS'])) {
header("Location: https://" . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
exit();
}
if (!strcasecmp(substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],0,5),'/user')) {
$protocol = "https";
}
else {
$protocol = "http";
}
$base_url = $protocol . "://www.example.com";


Enjoy!

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Thomas Lee, graduate from Northwestern University, a student in one of my web design classes, ex-NUAMPS student employee, has been dedicated to becoming a top photo-journalist since leaving NU. This week, his work is featured on line and in the magazine with his photos about the tuna industry and the impending population crash and environmental disaster from eating and harvesting too many Bluefin Tuna. Congratulations to Thomas on the great feature on a very important topic.

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From Dries Buytaert:

Whitehouse.gov using Drupal

Big, exciting news! The flag ship website of the U.S. government, Whitehouse.gov, just relaunched on Drupal. This is a big day for Drupal, and for Open Source in government, and something all of us in the community should be very proud of.

The Dries Buytaert site make a pretty broad linkage to Drupal and the Obama administrations dedication to”open and transparent government”.

I guess I’d rather say they are using Drupal because they are really smart.

A tip of the hat to NUL’s Bill Parod for alerting us to this .

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One of the numerous web projects that NUAMPS has been working on has officially launched!

We’re Northwestern University’s newest online publication for research computing.  We’re here to bring you information and stories regarding the wide range of computational science activities that are underway at the University.

Check us out!   The quality of research done at Northwestern has been recognized around the world for many years running.  The degree to which Northwestern’s research advances often depend upon innovative computational practices…well, that has often been overlooked.   Not anymore.

Check out the site here, and if you have a NetId at Northwestern, login and post in the forums.

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This short clip, edited and shot by the NUAMPS video team can currently be seen on the main University web page, with other video, audio and written articles about the great series of events staged for Mortie Schapiro’s inauguration as the incoming 16th president of Northwestern.

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