Giraffe Forum

Out of 18 choices, why does one piece of content get 49 percent of the vote while another gets 0 percent?
Over the last six years, I have tested a range of headings and summaries. The tests were carried out in 14 countries with almost 3,000 people. People were asked to scan 31 headings and 18 […]

Senior managers don’t take content seriously because people who write content don’t come across as being serious. If content professionals want more respect, they need to present content as a science, not an art.
I have spent most of my adult life writing content, or else advising people on how best to write and manage it. […]

In the design of physical products, the use of words is often seen as a sign of a flaw of the design. On the contrary, in web design, without words, there is no design.
“If a design depends upon labels [words], it may be faulty,” Donald Norman writes in his book, The Design of Everyday Things. […]

Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, writing for Time:
Perhaps Internet actions speak louder than survey answers. Take the cost of gasoline. Despite gasoline prices reaching an all-time high this month, searches for “gas prices” during September 2005, when gas prices breached the $3/gallon mark, were six times greater than last week when […]

Being customer-centric is about understanding the language of your customers. But language is changing at a dizzying pace on the Web. A Business Week article takes an interesting look at the phenomenon:
Making judgments about terms related to new Web technologies and activities is particularly difficult. Online, tech industry, and marketing jargon easily spreads from the […]

The most surprising finding of upcoming Eyetrack 2007 is this, according to the researchers: A much larger percentage of story text was read, on average, online than in print.

77 % online
62 % in broadsheet
57 % in tabloid

These findings could of course be used as an excuse by lazy editors (or their managers) for not writing […]

Tag clouds are the bubbles of words used by sites like flickr.com to show the popularity of tags. Now a site called TagCrowd lets you create Tag clouds for any text you like. The resulting pictures can speak volumes about the content, exposing when organisation centric words dominating a passage of text or a page […]

Interesting comment by Nora Ephron in the UK Guardian 3rd March.  The scriptwriter of films like Sleepless in Seattle. She has become an avid blogger on Huffinton Post, she has some interesting comments on how to write for a blog - “the function of a blog is on some level to start a conversation that […]