Spannerworkers blog digest

In gaps between lusting after Apple products, Antony Mayfield has been blogging this week about the new Radiohead album, the price of which will be decided by its purchasers. He’s also been discussing the merits of Creative Commons (CC) attribution licensing, which has been in the news after the New York Times reported that an advertising agency had used a photograph published under CC in a hurtful way.

Antony concludes that in spite of the benefits:

“There can be a downside to Creative Commons and one we should maybe think about carefully when putting the licence to one’s own content.”

Meanwhile, Nilhan Jayasinghe has been talking about the possibility that BT Broadband customers will get free public WiFi, and wondering what the implications will be for mobile carriers. He’s also been discussing a recent eye-tracking study, which examines where we look first on a page of Google search results. The introduction of images to search results pages seems to have an influence on our eye movements, and Nilhan summarises the study’s findings:

“While the first reaction is to head to the top left corner of the results, seeing the image, people are moving very quickly to the image, checking the copy next to the image first and then making the choice from the listings above and below the image.”

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for our eyes to get used to the new images on Google, and whether we return to old habits of reading the highest search results first.

There’s a lot of dissatisfaction over at Dax Hamman’s blog. He’s been getting quite worked up about an apparent renaissance of pop-up and pop-under advertising on websites, vowing not to return to Moneysupermarket until they get rid of annoying adverts. He’s also talked in detail about the ‘dissatisfaction index’ in email marketing, which is calculated based upon the numbers of people unsubscribing from email newsletters.

Finally, journalists Charlie Peverett and Simon Handby have started blogging about their ‘adventures in online journalism’ at hackbash, including an interesting entry about whether we write in, on, or at, our blogs.