Space Tour with Google

Space Tourists are getting their own Ride. Space Adventures, a Virginian Company normally arranges a channel for the wealthy explorers to ride on Russian Soyuz rockets to the International Space Station.

It is appeared on news online and print media that Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google is going to occupy one of the two available seats on Space Adventures' 2011 flight. He made $5 milloin as an investment in the company serving as a deposit for his future travel.

A similar space ride happened with Mark Richard Shuttleworth. Shuttleworth gained worldwide fame on 25 April 2002 as a spaceflight participant aboard the Russian Soyuz TM-34 mission, paying approximately US$ 20 million.

These sought of pleaseure / research rides to the space should happen very often to explore the boundaries on space, and I wish I could make my own trip to space once in my life time to appear on the IHT News. Cheers!

Wikipedia Web Traffic Grows 8,000 Percent

Nielsen Online released an interesting News about some traffic data of Wikipedia on May 14th. Despite the breathless headline on Nielsen’s press release (“Wikipedia U.S. Web Traffic Grows 8,000 Percent in Five Years”), growth of the U.S. audience has slowed quite a bit. Nielsen says Wikipedia had 55.8 million unique visitors in the U.S. in April 2008. That’s up 22% from a year earlier. For comparison, April 2007 was up 77% over the previous year. April 2006 was up 285% over April 2005. Clearly the U.S. audience for the user-generated reference site is maturing. Notable from Nielsen’s findings is the extent to which search engines, especially Google, drive visitors to Wikipedia. In April 2008, 61% of visitors from home and 66% of visitors from work to the en.wikipedia.org site were referred from Google.

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Web Pages for Internet Users

When your goal is to sell more do make users comfortable on your webpage(s) and say what you wanted to say withing first fold of your page. Web users normally hunt for precious content and get relaxed after they gain what they want from their search on the Internet. Users find information on a Website more or less in e following way.

F as in Fast, Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. People read the web pages or a Search Results Page for that matter in this way.
Eyetracking study, recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. It was observed that users' main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:

1. Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F's top bar.
2. Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F's lower bar.
3. Finally, users scan the content's left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F's stem.

After gaining gyan from these Heat Maps, make sure that you workout with the reasearch tips on how users read on the Web Page and how authors should write their Web pages, and give away useful and user friendly web pages. Also check you website's browser compatibility here.