OJR article: Balancing Act: How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories

OJR article: Balancing Act: How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories

This article claims that Google news searches seemed politically biased as searching for John Kerry yielded a lot of negative press while searching for George Bush yielded more balanced journalism... part of this article explores why.

Here's the rub:
" 'I think what you're seeing is an odd little linguistic artifact,' said Zuckerman, former vice president of Tripod.com and now a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society who studies search engines. The chief culprit, he theorized, is that mainstream news publications refer to the senator on second reference as Kerry, while alternative news sites often use the phrase 'John Kerry' multiple times, for effect or derision. To Google News' eye, that's a more exact search result.

A second possible factor, Zuckerman said, is that small, alternative news sites have no hesitancy about using 'John Kerry' in a headline, while most mainstream news sites eschew first names in headlines. The inadvertent result is that the smaller sites score better results with the search engines."

I did a couple of quick searches based on this article on google news and found lots of negative press for both (more in fact for Bush on first glance) however the article is still interesting... it shows how factors you can't anticipate can have very interesting effects - especially in a purely technological solution like this one. Human editors in mainstream media, as observed in the article, make an effort to provide balanced reporting.

How popular is your name?

Check how popular your name has been over the last 100 years

My name has been steadily losing ground since the 1900s... is that a good thing or a bad thing...

SWAPATORIUM

SWAPATORIUM

"A Journey Through Junkland"

I have no idea why I like this site... a load of pictures of various interesting(?) junk the guy pickes up on his travels through thrift shops, skips and antique shows!

The Code Project - Ten CSS tricks you may not know - HTML / CSS

The Code Project - Ten CSS tricks you may not know - HTML / CSS: "Vertically aligning with tables was a doddle. To make cell content line up in the middle of a cell you would use vertical-align: middle. This doesn't really work with a CSS layout. Say you have a navigation menu item whose height is assigned 2em and you insert this vertical align command into the CSS rule. It basically won't make a difference and the text will be pushed to the top of the box.

Hmmm... not the desired effect. The solution? Specify the line height to be the same as the height of the box itself in the CSS. In this instance, the box is 2em high, so we would insert line-height: 2em into the CSS rule and the text now floats in the middle of the box - perfect!"


This tip is pretty much the only interesting one in this article... if you do read the whole article be sure and also read this one which includes corrections!

Clearing a float container without source markup

Clearing a float container without source markup

Further to the Eric Meyer article mentioned on Sept 02, here is a further article about ensuring that floated elements are contained properly within container elements which are not floated.

This is another approach to the issue, one which does not require any changes to the html. This method is regarded as a better solution as it does not require bloating the html and also because some browsers have issues with the first method.

I personally found that Opera came up with some intersting visual effects using the Eric Meyer method so I will try this method instead. I haven't yet though so can't vouch for it!

Thanks to Keith Gaughan for alerting me to this article...

Usability and Social Software

Interesting article forwarded to me by Joe Smyth...


It's Not Just Usability

CSS - Containing Divs, floats

Sometimes floated elements within a container div don't sit properly in the container div...

Eric Meyer has written a very clear and concise article explaining why this is the correct rendered layout and how to work around it to achieve the visual effect you actually want.