Monday I got to hear Randy Covington, Director of the Ifra Newsplex at University of South Carolina, speak at a new media workshop that I organized for the Air Force and Army. He showed us a lot of great examples of some of the new media techniques that Websites (particularly news sites) are incorporating to keep material fresh. A lot of the more memorable examples incorporate a nice mix of the Web 2.0 applications we’ve learned about, without going overboard.

One part of the workshop that I found fascinating was when he showed us graphics of how the human eye reads a Website. I found this particularly helpful as a Web developer and even used it today during a Webpage re-design. The Poynter Institute does a project called Eyetrack, which tracks how people view Websites. They use headsets to see what we see. I found it pretty surprising. The graphic below shows how the eye starts at the top-left quadrant and then takes a z-shaped trajectory before exiting up and to the top right. The Website has tons of great information that can be really helpful if you work in Web design, or just want to understand more about Webpages and viewer habits.