Mobile Computing at Meetings—Think Twice!

Sounds of beep-beep, swaaaaak, and tap, tap, tap assault my ears. Lights are flashing around me. Sounds like a busy city intersection, right?

Not even close. This describes a recent meeting I attended. And none of that noise and light came from the speaker's presentation (too bad).

Instead, it came from people attending the meeting. These distractions arose from cell phones, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), and portable, wireless computers.

This is an editorial comment, folks: “Think twice about it.”

Multitasking is a way of life these days. But no one said:

* You have to multitask 24/7/365.
* It’s okay to disrupt the speaker.

For most meetings, a phone can be turned off or put on vibrate. That’s simple (if sometimes hard to remember).

But PDAs and laptops are different. Often, we use them to take notes. That’s constructive. They can instantly call up visuals and documents that can be projected on an overhead screen during the meeting. That’s also constructive.

But man (and woman), with the computer or PDA on, it’s really tempting to work on that big assignment or surf the Web when the meeting gets a little boring and all you hear is “blah, blah, blah.” That’s not constructive.

There’s no right or wrong answer here, but you should think about how these new ”toys“ affect the quality of a meeting. When you use them you stand a good chance of:

* Being rude to the speaker and distracting others at the meeting.
* Missing something important, especially if the speaker is less than riveting.
* Not contributing valuable insights.

Don’t stop using the technology. Just remember that you are contributing to the development of standards by which we use them at meetings. Put yourself in place of the speaker. That might be a good rule to follow.

By the way, the next time you see me writing on a piece of paper at a meeting, I am taking notes (that’s my story). Well at least I am not interrupting anyone’s blah, blah, blah.

Steve Cain [ cain@purdue.edu ]

Hits, Views, and Visits

Web traffic is tallied in three main ways.

Hits

“Hey our page received 30,000 hits last month!” That certainly sounds impressive, doesn’t it? What you need to know, however, is that the number is an inaccurate count of the actual visitors to your Web page.

Most Web pages are made up of a vast array of text and visual elements. The Purdue Extension home page, for example, is made up of one HTML file, one JavaScript file, and many JPEG and GIF image files. If the total of all of these files is 24, then every time a user visits that page in a Web browser, 24 hits are counted.

Thus, counting hits greatly inflates visitor count. In the example above, the Web site may have only had 1,250 actual page views for the month. That's some difference.

Views

Counting page views is the method I like to use for judging how many people have loaded my Web page into their browser. If 105 people visit my Web page once, then 105 page views are counted for that particular page.

What isn’t apparent with this method is redundant page views by a single user. If 33 of those 105 people were to reload my Web page during their visit, my number of page views would be 138. Did 138 different people view my Web page? No. At best, 105 did.

While page views may be the single most accurate way to calculate exactly how many people have viewed your page, there’s still a lot of guesswork involved. Making an accurate count is not entirely possible.

For example, some of those 105 page views may be attributed to “bots,” programs that hit pages scanning for information. I’m not surprised when I see up to 20% of traffic attributed to bots. Following our example, perhaps only 84 humans actually viewed the page content.

Visits

Page visits are defined by a set length of time, usually 30 minutes. If someone goes to your home page, another page, back to the home page, and then somewhere else in a 30-minute time period, all of that activity is reported as one visit.

What’s interesting is to compare page-view and page-visit numbers. Say, during one hour, you had 105 page views and 78 visits. That can roughly be interpreted to mean that each visitor viewed 1.4 pages.

Web traffic comes in many forms. When you look at your Web statistics, keep these methods in mind so that you can make an intelligent assessment of who or what is hitting your Web page.

Mike Atwell [ maatwell@purdue.edu ]

Grammar Trap: Earth vs. earth

This is a simple one, folks.

You use “Earth” when you are referring to the proper name of our planet.

Example: Some people believe that aliens have visited Earth.

You use “earth” in all other cases.

Examples: What on earth are you talking about? She is a real down-to-earth gal. He clutched a piece of earth in his hand.

Thanks to my Ag Comm colleague Olivia Maddox for suggesting this topic.

Do you have a grammar (or usage) trap you’d like to see discussed? Do you have a tip that will help the rest of us avoid one? If so, please let me know.
Visit our archive for past “Grammar Traps.”

Laura Hoelscher [ email ]

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