When reading text online, do you ever hilite bits that you find interesting? Call me crazy, but it's a habit of mine. Probably left over from the way I underline or write in books that I read.

I was curious if anyone else did this, and if this would be interesting information. So I created a little selection-tracking-widget and stuck in on this blog about a week ago.

You can see the results in real time at http://wanderingstan.com/selections. (It filters out selections from that page, so try hiliting text on other pages of the site and then going back.)

It seems that not too many other people share my habit, but interesting data nevertheless.

As I find little bits of free time, I'd also like to track scrolling on the page--it certainly would be interesting to know when people scrolled past the first page of a long post. And lastly, it would be interesting to track all the mouse movement on the page. (Above the mere clicktracking provided by, eg, ClickHeat.) I strongly suspect that mouse position correlates to where people are paying attention, though I don't know of any studies to prove this. (Anyone else?)

So I'll end with pics of me participating in an eye-tracking attention study in Osnabrück last year. Those are little cameras under my eyes, tracking the pupil movement. The study was about comparing eye movements in natural vs. urban vs. fractal imagery.