Fav Daily News: Reading is fastest on paper

July 5, 2010 by Cathy Healy // Leave a Comment

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CH Note: (Jakob) Nielsen-Norman ranked National Geographic’s Intranet as one of the 10 Best in the World in 2007. For us, this was winning the Oscar, so I’m always eager to read his studies.

Personally, I haven’t noticed a decrease in reading speed on my Kindle or on my iPad, although the virtual-book look with “real” pages in iPad’s e-book makes it easier to read. Also, I was wasting time on the Kindle by clicking to the next page before I finished the last two lines and then I’d have to click back, read and click forward.

Reading on Paper is Faster **than iBooks on the iPad (PC World)**

It will take you longer to read a book on an iPad or Kindle compared to the printed page, according to a recent study. Dr. Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group–a product development consultancy that is not associated with Nielsen, the metrics company–compared the reading times of 24 users on the Kindle 2, an iPad using the iBooks application, a PC monitor and good old fashioned paper. The study found that reading on an electronic tablet was up to 10.7 percent slower than reading a printed book. [Note: Kindle was 10.7 percent slower; iPad 6.2% slower.] Despite the slower reading times, Nielsen found that users preferred reading books on a tablet device compared to the paper book. The PC monitor, meanwhile, was universally hated as a reading platform among all test subjects.

Complaints about the Kindle 2, iPad’s iBooks, and PCs were predictable, says Nielsen, and I agree. It’s hard to tell where you are in a Kindle because there are no pages and lack of color; the iPad is heavy to hold [even at less than 1.5 pounds]; and it is lousy to read on a PC. Test participants complained that it felt like work.

Wrote Nielsen:

This study is promising for the future of e-readers and tablet computers. We can expect higher-quality screens in the future, as indicated by the recent release of the iPhone 4 with a 326 dpi display. But even the current generation is almost as good as print in formal performance metrics — and actually scores slightly higher in user satisfaction.

More on Reading and Tablets

The qualitative findings on users’ reactions to reading from screens are presented in our 2-day seminar on Writing for the Web at the annual Usability Week conference.

The conference also has a full-day seminar on designing touch-screen user interfaces , including mobile phones and tablets.

UC Workshop Report: Five Easy Multimedia Tips

June 30, 2010 by Cathy Healy // Leave a Comment

One can never get enough of “easy” tricks to improve multimedia reporting.

Dr. Susan Currie Sivek, a mass communications professor at Cal State Fresno, has blogged about her recent Multimedia Storytelling Workshop at UC-Berkeley, which was sponsored by the Knight Digital Media Center in the Graduate School of Journalism. [The Knight Foundation has been funding initiatives at a number of universities to retrain print reporters and journalism professors in multimedia. Cal and USC are prominent recipients, with Cal specializing in bootcamp skills.]

Sivek detailed five easy tips. One was obvious — the damn tripod (“damn” is my word — easy to use for interviews, but hard out in the world, especially since a tripod makes people in public places nervous, and evokes security guard attention. By the way, ditto video cameras. Guards put my video camera into a locker at the entrance to the Taj Mahl, but still cameras, which of course shoot video, passed through with no take-over.]

Here are briefs of what I learned from what Sivek learned–her full stories are worth reading.

1) Audio: Don’t have “constant loud noise, include ‘breathing room’ so the viewer could relax into the experience.”

2) In Front of the Camera: Limit gestures when you’re being taped. Use only one gesture to accentuate only a main point. While gesturing hands look normal when you’re talking, they are distracting onscreen.

3) Tools: iPhone has limits but you can get reasonable pix and video and the iTalk app records decent sound if you put the phone right up into someone’s face during the interview. Sivek quotes instructor Richard Koci Hernandez, Cal professor, and links to his page on the tools you need for good video with an iPhone (and this was before the 4.0 came out with a better camera.) Hernandez’s page includes links to buy such gadgets as grips to hold your phone/camera steady and little tripods with wrap-around arms. Wonder if they’d work with my new still camera (Panasonic’s Lumix, which has a Leica lens) which I bought to use for video.

4) “Storytelling: It’s worth getting slightly injured to get an element of the story that grabs the audience and makes them persist through the rest of the story.” Um. Maybe ;-))

Fav Daily News: Cheap, legal music copyrights for personal videos

June 28, 2010 by Cathy Healy // Leave a Comment

NYTimes: For $1.99, a (Legal) Song to Add to YouTube Videos
June 27, 2010

FINALLY! We non-commerical music makers, including teachers, family archivists, and video artists have an affordable way to buy a license to use the full version of a copyrighted song for a soundtrack, and edit it as well.

No longer will we Mac-ers have to create our own songs with Garageband loops — although that’s been creative fun, and I’ll probably continue to do it on occasion, but Friendly Music sounds far, far, far more efficient.

The music licensing company, Rumblefish, will launch Friendly Music Tuesday.

[The service] offers access to more than 35,000 songs, although none of them come from the four major labels,” according to the Times. “The company says that it hopes to have deals with what it is calling name artists in the coming months. Mr. Anthony [chief executive of Rumblefish] said that the service hand-selected the songs added to the service, picking only those it thought would work well for film. Users can search the music in a variety of ways, including by genre or by mood (like love or warm summer day) and can eliminate songs with vocals…”

Being able to skip vocals in your search is invaluable. As we digital storytellers know, vocals must be used cautiously because the words can detract or contradict your narration. For instance, in a recent video I created about Peggy and Jerry’s 40th wedding anniversary after marrying at a Texaco filing station, I wanted to use either “Walk the Line” or “Folsom Prison Blues” for the Texaco scene, our crowd’s favorites at the time, but I didn’t want Johnny Cash’s words, because they had nothing to do with the story. Friendly Music hasn’t gone live yet, so I can’t check whether those songs are available without JC.

Low-Cost Graphics/Image Copyrights

Last winter I discovered Big Stock, which gives access to nearly five million images and graphics. I probably paid about $35 for copyrights to use photos and graphics, especially graphs, for the presentations I gave for the U.S. State Department in Chile in March. Again, like Friendly Music, the copyrights aren’t for commercial purposes.

Big Stock made the difference for me between trying to draw graphics — I’m lousy at it — and quickly searching for the concept, and if that concept didn’t work, then finding another that did. Sometimes a drawing worked, sometimes a stylized graphic-photo did. Sometimes, a photo.

Previously, I’d looked longingly at Flikr, et al and wishing to use some pix, but being righteous, I didn’t steal them, especially when I was modeling good behavior to teachers to use with their students. Now, I don’t have to worry.