There are quite a few eye tracking studies going on, but a lot of times it’s hard to really put them to work. Christina Laun has analyzed the most recent students and come up with 23 lessons from eye-tracking. Some of the ones that I’m going to pay attention to include…

• Lists hold reader attention longer.
• Clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixation.
• Ads placed next to the best content are seen more often.
• One-column formats perform better in eye-fixation than multi-column formats.
• Users initially look at the top left and upper portion of the page before moving down and to the right.

The Writer’s Guild has been on strike for a couple of weeks now and we are beginning to see the results of the strike as more and more network shows finish their season early, never debut the season or go into reruns. Frankly, I’m a fan of network prime time and late night programming and I’ve been a little upset that my favorite shows are ending their run early this year. Unfortunately, if this strike goes on for a while, I believe we will see the viewer shift away from network TV to cable and the Internet accelerate dramatically. Already, under 30 males spend more time online than watching TV and the elimination of familiar programming will shift that trend to both genders and up the age bracket in the demographics.

I do feel for the writers and understand their demands about receiving more money for the DVD and internet use of their work, but I really do not believe the TV networks are making additional money overall when you include these platforms. The networks overall value is still decreasing from gradual loss of audience, thus the value of the writers work is decreasing as the networks lose audience. If the strike continues, I think the writers are shooting themselves in the foot because the networks will discover that their reality programming helps maintain enough of a audience at a lower cost that they don’t need the writers.

P.S. This post has been bubbling around in my head for a few weeks, but I haven’t taken the time to sit down and write it down until now. The strike info is constantly flowing and changing. I’ve found the LA Times coverage to be the best place to get up to date information.

The 15k circulation Shelby Star has developed the Star Car to make provide their reporters with multimedia tools and make their online presence known. The $60,0000 SUV (lower on the page) features GPS tracking, wifi cloud, wifi camera, dash webcams, video cameras, scanners and multiple laptops. For some reason this doesn’t add up to $60k to me.

As part of the Today show’s ends of the earth broadcast, Ann Curry has been broadcasting this week from Antarctica. I’ve been wondering how they pulled this off with the horrible weather down there, but Lost Remote pointed mentioned their use of IP video to send the signal. The shoot is using a single camera shot using the Ikegami HLV55 with it’s feed hooked up to a laptop computer that runs Qvidium software to stream live video.

MSNBC is showing off screen grabs of their new redesign. It looks like they are dropping their vertical navigation down the page below their top stories module. Also, they are flipping their top story module and listing of top story and within their top story module they are flipping their dominant top photo and headline. The page in general maintains the same look and feel as their pages right now.

The Oklahoman newspaper in Oklahoma City, Okla. has reorganized it’s management structure moving Chris Reen, VP of Sales and Marketing, to Executive VP of the Oklahoma Publishing Group overseeing News & Information, Advertising and Marketing, Audience Development and Community Engagement.

“Harmonizing our business, editorial, Web and technical assets is key to our success as the media landscape undergoes unprecedented change and we morph into a more dynamic business,” said Reen.

The former VP of Multimedia, Kelly Fry, will now oversee the News and Information division combining both the newspaper and the newspaper website into a single department focusing on content development for where ever it may be published.