Rad wrote on Feb 2nd, 2008 at 1:55pm:It's obvious the INtention of the flashing animated graphic *is* to get your ATtention ("Hey, we have new posts here that need your attention/help/assistance")
Except that the legend display showing what the read/unread marks mean that blinking element is always present on the page, harming readability 100% of the time. Blinking is inappropriate for this, full stop.
Honestly, almost anything else - bolding the links, highlighting the background, any one of dozens of techniques - works much better in practice.
By the way NightOwl, with respect to colourblindness it varies but the most common type is red/green, in which (say) orange versus blue is still distinct (I have several friends, and have worked with several people with this form of colour-blindness). The wikipedia page on colour-blindness points to a
tool which can help show how web-based designs effectively look to people with varying kinds of colour perception.
The other thing it's always worth bearing in mind is the blind; the Web has been much better than most modern desktop applications for blind folks because it's historically emphasised text. A good introduction to the experience of blind users is
Darren Fittler's presentation at Webstock '06, which you can watch (and more importantly, hear) a recording of.