At times it worries me that my children by growing up in the Twin Cities don't really know how to properly talk Minnesotan. Could this be one of the reasons Molly and I recently built a house in our home town of Duluth (i.e. up north)? By having the children come visit it is my hope they will learn proper diction! Thus, I give you "yeah", or is it "yah" … or finally "ja". Watch and you decide. Uff Dah!
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This is a repeat post, and is NOT original research on my part. Last week I published a link to the history of the nerd. A peer of mine while connected at work followed my link, and was blocked due to the site's less than admirable rating. Quite frankly I don't understand the rating; Bron's site is respectable, if perhaps off beat. However, if the world was always wrapped in a plain brown paper bag, life would be boring. Thus, I give you the "History of the Nerd … Part 2"!
It's two days till Thanksgiving in the United States, which is the official start of the holiday season. Stores are gearing up for "Black Friday" (Wikipedia link). However, if you're trying to ignore rampant commercialism and have combined technical /musical leanings, what better way to spend some free time over the holidays than watching some free engineering lectures from Academic Earth's Video Reading List: The Sound of Music?! While your friends worry about which new video game to purchase for their sweetheat, you could be learning … from Stanford, MIT and Berkeley:
Ah yes, I mentioned love in the title. Assuming you can't handle music and engineering, escape to Yale University and watch: Evolution, Emotion, and Reason: Love
As always, Academic Earth (and all of these lectures) is part of my Engineering Learning Portal, complete with many custom built Google Search Engines. Happy Thanksgiving!
Take a 47 second ride around the world via Google Earth and LinkedIn. If you ever doubted the increasing power of professional social media, watch this short video recorded at 3:47 pm Central Standard Time in the USA on Wednesday, November 10th. You may be amazed to see all the people who were joining LinkedIn listed by name, job title and location. Given the time of day, it was quite late in Europe, and Asia was asleep. You'll see that there were quite a few night owls awake on the other side of the the Pacific and Atlantic from North America! My recording was created using NewIn from LinkedIn Labs.
The short video should also help you understand why I am so high on LinkedIn. The demographics contained in their database is amazing. See my post about Signals which explains with annotated screenshots how you can use this power to listen to the conversation …
I've included both a screenshot, and my 47 second video tour! Clicking upon this link will take you to Vimeo where it is easier to read each new LinkedIn member's name and details than in the embedded video given below
47 Seconds of LinkedIn via GoogleEarth from Rich Hoeg on Vimeo.
Last weekend I blogged about mouse movement analytics. As opposed to traditional web analytics which just measure your web traffic, Clicktale actually records the movement of your visitor's mouse as it interacts with your web site content (Clicktale is available without charge for smaller web sites like my own).
For instance, where do people on your site …
In my earlier post I promised some results, and shown below is an initial heat map for one page on my site, Engineering Learning.
Although the numbers of visits reflected in the heat map is not yet statistically significant, the data is already making me wonder if I need to take a different approach to my right hand column content. Other than my RSS feed, there is almost no mouse movement in the right column. Darker "fire colors" in the red spectrum indicate strong movement; colder "blue colors" indicate lesser movement density.
Click for an expanded view.