This guy is sketching everyone in New York City. All 8 million of them.

Very cool.

Need to track where your users are pointing at, but don’t want to pay an arm and a leg? Want to record movies of what your users are doing? Looking for something that’s a bit more than Google Analytics, but not Omniture?

Then try out ClickTale, a new analytics tool that I test drove a month ago.

ClickTale gives you a good idea of what your users are doing so you can correct site issues fast. It records complete sessions, allows you to throttle usage so you don’t record every session, and gives you those nifty heat maps that wow and amaze executives.

The price is about right — $99 a month gets you started — but the only complaint I have is that their freemium levels don’t give you enough of a taste of what the tool can do (really, I need a better idea if the heat maps are worth it.

Enough said.

One of the way cool, nifty things that you get by working for an online marketing education company is access to great tools that are just a bit beta. That’s just the sort of thing we needed over at Online Marketing Summit as we do usability testing and other analysis work.

Enter Attention Wizard. Attention Wizard is a tool that shows possible eye tracking without the human part. The smart folks over at Site Tuners (Thanks Tim, for the invite) have written an algorithm that produces an “attention heatmap”, a way of saying here’s some possible areas that the users are paying attention to based on color and Gestalt theory. All you have to do is upload a screen shot, and in five minutes, it gives you results of what it could look like.

I did it with Online Marketing Summit (click on the thumbnail) to show you what one of their results are.

Their sales points

• Can be used with actual screenshots or page design mock-ups
• Instant results – no eye-movement or mouse-tracking data collection needed
• Tells you what people are paying attention to, and what they ignore
• Easily identify landing page problems & increase your conversion rates

Our take aways

• People’s eyes go right to the schedule tab, which is a good thing.
• We have this photo image in the first paragraph of text that does nothing. It’s providing no value to the user while attracting a lot of attention.
• The testimonials are getting a lot of attention.
• I think Attention Wizard is giving too much weight to the photo.
• Overall, the eye is scanning the page well.

We’re going to make more changes, but the goal is to get results quickly and increase conversion rate on the site, and that’s what we got with Attention Wizard.

My honest opinion about Attention Wizard?

I wouldn’t take this as gospel science (is eye tracking that now, anyways?), but it’s a good first cut at “well, let’s see what we have.” They claim a 75 percent rate of matching eye and mouse tracking, and that’s good enough for me. It’s much better to do several tests with this tool (which would be great as a subscription model site) than spending $5,000 for an eye tracking system that no one’s going use because, well, it’s hard to use.

It’s a great tool that’s only going to get better once they work out the kinks.

Okay, it’s more than that, because I don’t want to write it in the headline. Not safe for work. Still low-tech. Still funny.

Did you even know there were a million words in the English language? I vote for bangster. Whatever that means.

From Twitpocalypse:

“The Twitpocalypse is similar to the Y2K bug. Very soon the unique identifier associated to each tweet will exceed 2,147,483,6471

For some of your favorite third-party Twitter services not designed to handle such a case, the sequence will suddenly turn into negative numbers. At this point, they are very likely to malfunction or crash.

When will this happen? Check here often, and we will tell you how close we are to the Twitpocalypse.”

Props out to ShortFormBlog for finding this one.

I’m a sucker for print, and the New York Times is one of the best journalism web properties. They released a photo viewer of their best photojournalism work, and it’s very, very cool.

I’m kind of conflicted about Open Source, but at least for fonts The League Of Movable Type has a cool website. Maybe for true typography on the web, they can advance the cause.

Their manifesto:

We are Caroline and Micah, the founders of The League. As designers on the web, we have a calling to raise the standards of the web-design world. We’re not the only ones who value good design, and it’s time for the web world to catch up with it. We understand the challenges that comes with the internet, but with our recent discovery of @font-face, we started getting excited. For those who aren’t up to speed, @font-face is a fairly new addition to web styling, letting a designer specify the location of their own font files. Instead of having to design with just a handful of web-friendly fonts, we’ll be able to use any typeface we desire. Well, that’s our vision, anyway.

Wufoo is a very effective and easy to use form building tool that allows normal people (i.e. marketing managers and other non-techies) to build web forms quickly and easily without knowing programming. The form entries are collected in a database, and can be exported out to Microsoft Excel.

Or, isn’t Excel the marketing manager’s best friend?

You can have your designers make design changes with a CSS editing area, but the forms are designed to be very usable (I was impressed), and for short term form management, this is a great tool. For a longer term project, it’s better to go with custom programming.