The Washington Post set up and recorded an ingenious social experiment.
Joshua Bell is one of the world’s greatest violinists. His instrument of choice is a multimillion-dollar Stradivarius. If he played it for spare change, incognito, outside a bustling Metro stop in Washington, would anyone notice?
The results are thought-provoking, and the story beautifully told. It’s a long piece and I’m not about to spoil the ending. So enjoy the read. Includes video of the experiment.
If you haven’t taken a speed-reading course, maybe it’s time to consider it, because keeping up with the blogosphere is getting tougher all the time.
The latest report from Technorati chief executive Dave Sifry shows the number of blogs increasing by about 120,000 per day, although that’s a slightly lower rate of growth than six months ago.
Here are highlights of Sifry’s State of the Live Web report (formerly the quarterly State of the Blogosphere):
A few days ago I blogged about the Poynter Institute’s latest EyeTrack study, which claimed that online readers of news stories read more of each story than print edition readers. [online 77%, broadsheet 62%, tabloid 57%]
I found the analysis unconvincing and commented in this blog that there was no comparision provided of typical story lengths. I followed that up with this comment on the Poynter site:
Interesting study. I am wondering how the online stories compared in length to those in broadsheet and tabloid papers.
Perhaps they were shorter, due to the online practice of “chunking” – breaking information into more digestible pieces.
On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of online stories that were longer than their print counterparts. This can happen when a story originating in a newspaper is enhanced and updated for the online edition where space is virtually unlimited.
Could story length have affected the amount of each story that was read?
Rick Edmonds, Media Business Analyst at the Poynter Institute, has responded to my comment as follows:
Good question. During some editing/deeper digging this week, we have found that short stories were more frequent in online and that likely had some influence on the overall result.
However if you back short stories out and analyze results only for medium and long stories, those are read, once selected, as thoroughly online as in print.
So, rather than saying that online readers read more, Poynter is now saying they read as thoroughly as in print. That’s a big difference.
And describing stories as “medium” or “long” really doesn’t solve the problem. The percentage of each story read ought to be judged against the length (word count) of each story. The story-length issue isn’t just important for comparing online versus print reading patterns, but also for comparing broadsheet versus tabloid.
Readers of online news read much further into stories than readers of print news, according to the latest Eye Track study by the Poynter Institute.
The 600 readers in the study, which was conducted in four US cities, were each given 15 minutes to read whatever stories they wished, while their eye movements were electronically recorded and analysed.
Researchers found that online readers read, on average, 77 per cent of the way through each story they chose to read. Readers of tabloid newspapers read 57 per cent of each story they started, and broadsheet readers 62 per cent.
[It would be helpful to know how the online stories compared in length to those in broadsheet and tabloid papers. It is possible that they were shorter, due to the online practice of chunking content – breaking it into more digestible pieces. On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of online stories that were longer than their print counterparts. This can happen when a story originating in a newspaper is enhanced and updated for the online edition where space is virtually unlimited.]