WWW Wednesday – 26 June 2013

WWW Wednesday is a reading game started by MizB at Should Be Reading. A simple game of telling (every week) about the books you have read, are reading and wish to read. To play along, you just have to answer the following three (3) questions…

1. What are you currently reading?
2. What did you recently finish reading?
3. What do you think you’ll read next?

While avid readers play it every week, I’m a bit slow and I usually stick to one a month. My answers for this month are:

What are you currently reading?

I’m currently reading You Can Heal Your Life by Louise L. Hay. It was gifted to me by a friend during one of our awakin sessions. Like with every self-help book, I was, at first quite hesitant to start the book. I took it be another of the kinds where the author preaches and the reader is supposed to understand and incorporate the teachings. Since it came from a dear friend with lots of recommendation, I started on the book and slowly realised something in me identifying with what she says. Feeling the burden of past, resisting change, getting aware of our past etc…The book is meant to be read slow, taking time with each chapter. Each chapter is with affirmations and exercises to look within. So far as much as I have read I like it and I feel this one is for going back to again and again.

What did you recently finish?

I recently finished The Art of Travel by Alain De Botton. Beautiful essay on how we travel and how we should travel. I should actually write a book experience of my reading the book. But a couple of points that really ran home with me were:

Whenever we travel, we are busy clicking pictures or buying souvenirs. De Botton says that’s a way we try to possess the beauty of the place – by taking pictures, buying souvenirs or carving ones name on a monument.

But the most effective way is by attempting to describe beautiful places through art, through writing or drawing them, irrespective of whether we happen to have any talent for doing so.

We come back with 1000s of pictures in our digital camera and not one image so sharp in our minds that we could almost paint it from memory, because we see the place and not notice it!

Another point that De Botton makes is that the pleasure we derive from a journey is perhaps dependent more on the mind-set with which we travel than the destination that we travel to. But he urges: Notice the place you have already seen. On a Paris street, we find the road side crepe maker interesting and we click pictures of him; while back at home, we fail to notice the road side eatery. Can you recall what is the color of the first shop in the market closest to your home?

I also finished reading The Immortals of Meluha by Amish Tripathi. Didn’t find it as exciting as it has been portrayed. It’s a regular fiction novel involving a more human form to the Hindu God Shiva. It’s interesting but I haven’t been able to pick the second one in the series yet.

What do you think you will read next?

Next I would most probably read The Monk who sold his Ferrari by Robin Sharma. Found it tucked deep inside while cleaning the book case and it kind of found its way on my bed side table immediately. I didn’t even know we had the book!

WWW Wednesday – 22 May 2013

Here goes my 2^nd WWW Wednesday post! I think it’s doing the trick. I’m actually more regular in my reading because I want to post about it! :).

WWW Wednesday is a reading game started by MizB at Should Be Reading. A simple game of telling (every week) about the books you have read, are reading and wish to read. To play along, you just have to answer the following three (3) questions…

1. What are you currently reading?
2. What did you recently finish reading?
3. What do you think you’ll read next?

Many play it every week! But since I’m a fairly slow at reading, I’m more of a monthly player. My answers are:

WWW Wednesdays – May 8

When I first saw this post for WWW Wednesdays on Dreamz and Clouds blog, my first response was what is this ‘world wide web’ Wednesday about. But only after a few lines I realized it was more of What, What and What Wednesday :).

Started by Should Be Reading, WWW Wednesday is a simple game of telling (every week) about the books you have read, are reading and wish to read. I found it a great way of discovering new books, so I decided to play along. Now I love reading and I would love to write about the books I have read, which I why some time back I started writing about my book experiences but then it slowly came to an end. Not that I had not read books, but I didn’t get time to write about the book immediately after finishing it and later the experience was lost. So this game is perfect for me! At least I would write a few lines if not a whole post about the books! 🙂 But I am a particularly slow reader, so my list won’t change on a weekly basis, hence I have decided to play it every month. Here’s how it goes:

We read in a F or an E?

Reading pattern: F? E? C?

I’m sure content managers must be aware of this fact, but for me it was an interesting find! I have recently started working on a blog on volunteering and I was reading a few articles on what and how do people consume content online. I didn’t quite care about SEO for Lime ‘n’ Lemony or even Weekend Kitchen but for Volunteer Weekly I wanted to know at least some basics. Keywords, meta-description, analytics, web master tools etc were all bizarre buzzwords until now! Anyway one of the studies that fascinated me was that we read a website in a F!

It comes from Neilsen Jakob’s eye-tracking study. What it means?

1. We first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area – forming the letter F’s top bar
2. We then move down a bit and read across in a second horizontal movement which is typically shorter than the first one – forming the lower bar of the letter F.
3. Finally we scan the left side of the content vertically, thus forming F’s stem.

I was relating it to the way I read all the academic papers also. Most often we used to read the introduction and conclusion and would scan through the rest of the article, reading the heading and sub-headings and would read another one or two sections that would have the analysis. I guess that would make it like an E! and if time was really short we would entirely skip the middle.. making it a C pattern! 😀

Anyway however we read, I guess the point is to put important things right in the beginning! 🙂

Another interesting thing which a web-designer friend of mine told me was on the width of a website – he told me that 980px (or 960px) is the ideal width for a webpages, because that is the width the eye can read without moving from left to right. Any bigger than that and you can’t read it in one go.

Isn’t it interesting how different fields bring out human behavior! Do you know of any other such study? would love to read about them 🙂