Follow the pattern

Jacob Nielson found that readers of websites use "an F-shaped reading pattern: visitors would start at the top left, scan straight across, return to the left, drop down, and scan to the right again. Then they'd return to the left side of the page, going straight down."
- Writing for the Web 3.0

I never realized how I read a website until I read this idea that Jacob Nielsen researched. Try it. Go to a new website and see how you react to it, how do you read the page? I definitely read the page in an F-shape. Interesting. 

What else is interesting that Eyetrack III observed was that 

larger type encouraged scanning;

smaller type encouraged careful reading.

Readers also paid attention to blurbs, which later Kilian explained was defined as a sexy cover art, if they were on the same line as the headline. Blurbs were only read if they were short and the first two words grabbed the attention of the reader. You know when you log on to Facebook, the news feed, well, I think of them as blurbs and I only really look at the "blurbs" that either sound funny or interesting or if they look intriguing. Don't you?

In section 2.2, they took a look at hook, links, and blurbs. While reading this section I thought to myself, "Don't we do this when we compile our blogging portfolios?"

We do. We compile our blogs into an entry, write a hook for a reader to actually open the blogging portfolio, we include many links to our blogs and comments on other blogs and at the same time, we write blurbs about the blog entries that will catch the eye of the readers.

So, in a way, I thought the information in this chapter wasn't anything new, it just reiterated what we have already been doing and what we already know.