by Karen on August 5, 2009
How Americans Spend Their Day
Maybe it’s the scientist in me or maybe it’s the communicator (because isn’t raw data the very building blocks of communication), but I love data. Data on just about anything: animals, web trends, weather, etc. And put that data into a colorful, interactive package and what could be better?
The NY Times did just that with an interactive graph of the results of the American Time Use Survey:
How Different Groups Spend Their Day
Beautiful graph, well implemented on the web. I can rollover it and see that when I go to sleep (between 8:30 and 9 pm) only 8% of Americans are sleeping. And I can look at what just women are doing by clicking one of the buttons on the top or I can break out an activity by clicking on it. Very well done.
by Karen on April 17, 2009
Whenever a client wants to have a blog on their website, I caution them that they need to set a schedule for posting to that blog because one of the first things I look at on a website is the date of the last blog entry. Theoretically, if that date is well in the past it’s an indication that the website is stagnant (and possibly the business is dead or dying).
Trying to keep up with my own blog when I’m very busy made me re-think what a stagnant blog may really mean. I haven’t felt like I had the time to post because I’ve been working so hard.
But it hasn’t changed my mind about needing a regular schedule of posting to the blog. I still think that people will look at the dates of the blog entries and even if it means that the company is busy with off-line work, it can still be used to indicate whether the information on the website is up to date and accurate. If they haven’t had time to post, they probably haven’t had time to update their hours or put up their newest specials.
So, you still need a regular schedule for blogging. It keeps you hooked in to the world wide web, it puts more stuff out there for Google to index and people to find.