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:

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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

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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:

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

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

name-excised@gmail.com

thank you
Siham

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Hi,

Would you please send me an invitation,

Thanks in advance.

Brahim

EFL teacher, Morocco.

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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 surprise 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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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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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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A friend of mine and fellow web developer informed me that today is nation Comic Sans Day, so in that spirit I have embraced the day and put my loathing of the font aside…

Read about it on John Wilker’s blog.

Oh, and if you want to learn about the origin of the world’s most hated typeface, read up on it here.

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The third annual meeting of the Oncofertility Consortium will be held next week, September 13-15, in Chicago, Illinois. Over 150 participants from the U.S. and abroad will discuss the latest breakthroughs in the science and clinical applications of fertility preservation methods for cancer patients. More information on the event, including a meeting agenda, can be found here.

NUAMPS is doing a three camera shoot as well as broadcasting the conference using Adobe Connect. Mark Skala is directing and Mike Curtis is providing support for Adobe Connect as well as coordinating the presentations.

Tune into the conference using Adobe Connect here: http://nwuniversity.na3.acrobat.com/oncofertility/

For more information about the Oncofertility Consortium check out: http://oncofertility.northwestern.edu or http://blog.oncofertility.northwestern.edu

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All of NUAMPS now have their own personal backup hard drives.  After having two hard drives crash within two weeks we decided that everyone needed to have their own backup solutions for more than just email and documents.

Everyone on our team has at least a 500GB LaCie Rugged drive or a 1Tb Western Digital drive.  Almost everyone is using TimeMachine which is part of OSX 10.5,  but Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper are great backup tools as well!

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