Internet Psychologist
The latest articles from Internet Psychologist and Business Academic, Graham Jones
People who use the Internet for personal things during work time are actually doing companies more good than harm. Called “cyberloafing”, the act of looking at YouTube, or doing some shopping on eBay during office hours can make people happier in their work. According to a new study of cyberloafing …
Your eyes do funny things when you look at a web page. Eye tracking technology shows us that they tend to follow an F-shaped pattern of eye movement across the screen. But new research could bring this into question. The new research shows us this may be down to the …
Web site owners the world over want more traffic. It’s highly unlikely that you want less traffic for your own web site, or that you are happy with the traffic you get. No matter how many people who visit your web site, you probably want more. You want crowds of …
Are you in the middle of your Easter break? Having a nice relaxing time? Eating lots of chocolate and maybe going to church? That’s great – but take care; while you are off on your four-day break, your competitors are grabbing your customers and getting them to spend money with …
Product developers often want to ensure that the “baby” they have lovingly produced for the world is as complete as it can possibly be. They want the design to be right, the features to be perfect and the testing to be so thorough that no-one will find fault at launch. …
Increasingly vocal criticisms of Google suggest that its halo is slipping. In psychological terms, it is teetering on the edge of falling victim to the “reverse halo effect”. The “halo effect” itself is whereby we judge a brand, a company, or a person based on just one fact we know …
People searching for restaurants online will now be shown localised results with maps to potential eating places, thanks to the latest innovation from Google. Indeed, if you are looking for anything that could be found locally, Google will now insert a map into the search results for you, largely by …
Bloggers are wasting millions of hours of productivity around the world – and it’s getting worse. Just over two blog postings are made every second of every day – and that’s only for the regularly active blogs. According to the latest figures from blogwatcher, Technorati, around 3m blogs are updated …
Google is in the final stages of negotiations to buy Twitter, according to “people close to the negotiations” who have informed TechCrunch. If this turns out to be true, it could be a disaster for Twitter users. Google’s virtual monopoly position online means it will be able to do almost …
Facebook users are better employees. According to new research from the University of Melbourne, people who are allowed to use Facebook at work are more productive than people who don’t have access to the social networking site. The study shows that in offices where people are allowed access to Facebook …
American psychologists working in London have teamed up with French educationalists to produce a new social network that understands your motives and intentions based upon what you type in. They hope to use the new system to eliminate the considerable amount of time wasting that goes on as a result …
Last year, in the USA alone, advertisers “invested” some $21bn in online advertising. No wonder we are in an economic mess – most of that money is being thrown away since almost no-one is looking at online adverts. Banner advertising has long been known to attract few people; current click-through …
Twitter is full of liars; honestly. In fact, so is the big wide world. It may come as a shock to you, but people often don’t tell the truth. Twitter is no different – except for one thing. In the “real world” you are able to spot liars using subtle …
Despite the fact that billions of pounds worth of business is done each year online, it’s still pretty apparent that many companies don’t exploit the Internet to make even more money. Indeed, a quarter of British companies don’t yet have a web site and now it seems that the FTSE100 …
Facebook is to be used by the British Government in a bid to deal with terrorism. People often ask “who is looking at my Facebook page?” – well now we know, Gordon Brown’s henchmen. They plan to monitor every conversation on Facebook because it is “needed to tackle crime gangs …