IE empty div height problem.

I am working on a design at the moment in which I use empty divs to contain design elements through the use of css background images. It's not the best solution code wise, but it works and if used sparingly, it won't have any massive negative implications.

However I was scratching my head when I had some empty divs with a height of 6 pixels specified. Fine in Firefox, fine in Opera, NOT fine in ie. The heights were way more than 6 pixels.

Luckily I found the solution to the empty div ie problem in two seconds using Google!

The solutions given were as follows (I used method 2):

1) Put a comment inside the div:

2) Put   inside the div and add this to its style: font-size:1px;
line-height:0.

Fight the Bull - Why Business People Speak Like Idiots

Fight the Bull - Why Business People Speak Like Idiots

Worth a look. Found this through Scoble's blog.

Check out the 'bull blog' which has some funny bullshit examples and anecdotes. The site is by the author of a book called "Why Business People Speak Like Idiots" and the site includes a downloadable piece of software which helps you keep your bullshit in check when writing word documents.

The Daily Show - I love it.

Fantastic clip on the state of Iraq as described by Bush, his generals and Rumsfeld.

Two for the price of one: incredible tv reporting of floods and Bush's impromptu discussion with soldiers

Hearings about US government response to hurricane Katrina.

More Daily Show clips here.

Ning Content Agreement

I signed up with Ning, and got developer status. However my idea for an app was thwarted when I read the user agreement on content.

It seems you have to grant a license for commercial use of any content you upload to Ning.

You must be joking me.

I posted the details over on the BifSniff site, because the app was going to be a cartoon battle.

Read all about it on my cartoon blog...

Findability - help people find your site.

I was asked to have a look at someone's site with a view to giving some pointers on findability today. I was reminded of a post I put together which was rather badly titled "Blogging tips for optimum findability".

The article is relevant to findability in general, I should really revisit and republish it for general consumption, not just regarding blogging.

It touches on the following tips:

• Write relevant content often
• Use a web standard compliant blog template
• Start your content early in your code
• Key Words and Phrases
• Outward Links

Jarhead - Trailer

Jarhead - Trailer - Medium

I really liked enjoyed the book 'Jarhead', so I was interested to see they had made a film of it.

It's got a great cast and looks like a film I will go to see. However I worry that the film will only capture the entertaining and funny aspects of the book and might miss the gritty realism so well communicated in the book.

I read the book a good while ago now, but I seem to remember the book giving an incredibly real feeling of what it must be like to be thrown into a warzone. Despite seeing very little action, from what I remember, the book describes the inability to prepare for a warzone, the insane orders that come down from the top, equipment that is unsuitable for the environment, no understanding of geography or culture of the area, and the generally scary reality that these are not altogether the brightest sparks who have been let loose in another country with firearms and little or no understanding of objectives...

iTunes volume control usability

I just stumbled upon a blog entry about sliders in user interfaces - such as volume sliders. The author points out a Hidden Gem in the iTunes user interface that I have to admit I had never noticed.

Simply place your mouse over the volume slider and you can use the scroll wheel to control the volume.

This is nifty, because it's true - sliders are awkward to use.

The amazing Apple design brand

Robert Scoble, talking about the Xbox 360, said the fact that Engadget said it was "going to be only game in town" was evidence of the brand damage done to Microsoft by shipping products which were not done as well as the Xbox 360. In other words, Microsoft have it in them to release incredible goods, but often don't take the care to produce them.

The really interesting quote though is the following:

How deep is that brand damage? Well, when the team showed me the Xbox for the first time they said "looks like something Apple designed, huh?"

Apple have always been strong on design, and have always had a coherent brand, but this is an incredible vindication of that approach: to have the Microsoft team proud of a product and refer to is as 'looking like somethink Apple designed'. Wow.

Of course Scoble's reply was 'No, it looks better'.

Even if it does though - it'll take more than one product to redress the gap between MS's design ethos and Apple's...

Dave Winer's Subscribe button...

Dave Winer advocates the use of the word 'Subscribe'on buttons which lead to RSS feeds rather than 'XML', 'RSS', 'ATOM', 'FEED' or any other term. He says, straightforwardly:

The button should be white on orange and it should say, boldly, SUBSCRIBE.

However his own feed button says 'XML'.
Is this because he advocates a solution which results in an easy subscription process for anyone using any feed reader, and is waiting for the solution before changing his button?

After reading his post, I thought it made absolute sense to go with 'subscribe' (rather than 'XML' as I had at the time). But I had concerns that it was too soon and it it would be perhaps better to wait until a user friendly solution was in place before making the leap.

But in the end I decided 'subscribe' WAS better, right now. And so I changed my button to subscribe and I also added a help button to help inform users about RSS. I posted the results of my research and decisions in the form of a four step plan for making RSS feeds more user friendly.

Yahoo, Blog Search, RSS, Subscribe.

Myself and Tom R were just discussing Yahoo's 'blog search'. I have it in inverted comments because it is actually Yahoo's news search, which now happens to display results for blogs on the right hand side of the page.

As Tom already pointed out, it is a pretty odd place for them - especially as many Google users are used to that spot being reserved for paid-for results.

It's a Beta, so let's hope for some improvements in the near future - but not only are they on the right hand side, but why are they only in news? Or why in news at all? Why not in the general search area?

Another issue, both Tom and Robert Scoble point out, is the poor search results this 'blog search' returns. But again, I hope this is due to a rushed launch or some such and will improve.

However, in my opinion they get one obvious thing almost right. In the blog results you get:

• Post name
• blog name
• date posted
• snippet of post
• 'my yahoo' features: 'add to my yahoo' and 'save'

It is the Yahoo features I think are of most note here. Each result has a link to subscribe to the blog's RSS feed. Fantastic. It's a pity it's tied only to 'My Yahoo' but that's hardly surprising.

Imagine a world where you do a search on Google and when a result has a feed associated with it a 'subscribe' option is given for that result. This subscribe button, when clicked, would add the feed to your own OPML file (or some such solution) which in turn would result in that feed being added to any and all feed readers you happened to use, desktop or web based.

I'm tired of having to do so many different things to manage so many third party solutions. I'm tired of having to consider putting hundreds of little buttons on my blogs ('subscribe using this', 'subscribe using that') - surely it's not necessary?

I realise Yahoo WANT to have, if possible, a little button with their brand on it on as many sites as possible - but if all RSS subscription buttons resulted in the same predictable and easy to use actions the uptake on RSS would most likely improve massively. According to Yahoo's white paper on RSS:

Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of users are aware of RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS.

I believe it makes sense to drive forward towards a solution where RSS feeds can be managed without major technical know how on the part of the content publisher or the common or garden variety end user.

Tom R tells me that Microsoft are headed this way with their developments in Windows... perhaps he will give us some links to explain further... :)

I just hope Microsoft don't just make this yet another third party solution (albeit a better one) but that they encourage and nurture a new standard.



If you have been reading my blog (which is unlikely, I know) you will realise this post springs from, and owes a lot to Dave Winer's post on Subscribe which I wrote about previously quite a bit as I figured out how best to present my feeds..

Context sensitive search

Rick Segal on Scoble's search ideas - ScobleSearch.com

Essentially Rick Segal feels it's all about context. Which is fair enough. Rick thinks we should be able to highlight a word in our browsers and right click for context sensitive search option.

I think it sounds great. But it doesn't answer all of Scoble's issues really. After all Google suggest could be seen as a prototype for this type of solution - I know it's not exactly the same, but it's similar enough to use as an example...

Do a search for 'HDTV' in Google suggest, and pretend it immediately suggests 'HDTV manufacturers' and you search for that (in fact you have to type 'HDTV ma' before it suggests manufacturers). The manufacturers still aren't listed. So context isn't everything I'm afraid. You still have to figure out how to weight content differently to the way it is weighted now.

On the other hand a search for 'Robert' in google suggest is a little more promising. It immediately suggests several different Roberts, including Robert Frost and Robert Redford. Interestingly Robert Scoble is not the first Robert suggested. But the real issue here is that there are too many Roberts to list them all in context. So a context sensitive search, to work properly, would have to categorise all the Roberts and suggest something like:

• Robert (actors)
• Robert (poets)
• Robert (companies)
• Robert (musicians)

and so on... which means you would potentially need a second tier of suggestions after that, making the interface a little unwieldy.

I don't mean to knock Rick's idea - it's a good one. But in thinking about it I think it's deceptively simple sounding.

Scoble pointed out a quote from John Battelle who says 99% of search users never clicked on advance search. Scoble seems surprised. I'm not surprised really given that we already new most searches are one word searches and don't go past the first few results returned.

Creating an interface to a better search to cater for the average searcher will be a challenge.

Blogger comments - I apologise.

I feel pretty stupid. I only just realised that emails sent by Blogger to my account when someone comments DO include a link to the precise post they commented on. Why did I never notice? Because the link at the bottom of the email only has the name of the blog as the link text. Therefore I assumed it was a link to the main page of that blog. It is actually a link to the exact post the comment was left on. I can't believe I have been using Blogger over a year and only discovered this now. Yes, I am pretty stupid, but also shouldn't the link indicate in someway that it links to a specific post??

I have to assume that it was always a link to the specific post, and therefore must apologise to Blogger for spreading nasty rumours that comment notification emails did not specifiy which post.

I feel stupid. But I also feel very happy that I no longer have to go trawling through my blog for comments left.

This was a big issue for me and one I often moaned about to anyone who would listen. D'oh!

Now if only Blogger would implement trackbacks and the ability for visitors to subscribe to comments... :)

Search - for a better way

WARNING - BRAIN DUMP AHEAD!

This post is rather long, unwieldy and scattered, not to mention incomplete... Read it at your own risk! ;)

I dont have time these days to blog about all the things I would like to... this subject has been on my mind the past couple of days. A couple of blogs that I have been checking recently are talking about search. The key personalities involved are Robert Scoble, Dave Winer and Seth Godin.

Dave Winer posted that he thought Google were being careless with their search, making some errors in judgement and not focussing where they should be. Interestingly (to me) his brief comment on Google's blogsearch (trying to segregate RSS instead of embracing it) would seem to be in line with my own views on it; as I posted in Tom R's comments

Do we really need a seperate blog search from Google?
Why not just integrate it into the regular search? After all the so called 'blogosphere' is not really distinct from the 'interweb' it's just a way of publishing to it.[...]I guess that your point that it's a feed search and not a blog search is probably the real issue, but you see where I'm coming from...

To me, whether a site/page has a feed or not is a seperate issue to be worked out by searches, not whether it's a blog or not

But the main point here was that Dave Winer was one of several people who seem to be becoming critical of the lack of forward progress on the search front.

I noticed that Scoble was discussing search, and it was interesting - at first I thought it was baloney, but the more I thought about it the more I... went around in circles.

My interpretation of Scoble's argument

Scoble's argument seems to have two key points, illustrated by the following.

1. Do a Google search for HDTV: where are the manufacturers?
2. Do a Google search for Robert: why is scoble more relevant than, say, Robert Redford?

Where are the manufacturers?

This point is based around search engines not returning links to sites which a human would consider highly relevant.
The manufacturers example is interesting. Certainly you would imagine they would be important results in a search for HDTV. Scoble points out that users search using 1 or 2 words generally. It is difficult to find the manufacturers using 1 or 2 word searches. However I tried 'role-playing' some HDTV research and by modifying Scobles search to 'buy hdtv' (which I felt was closer to what he wanted) I was able to get manufacturer information in two or three clicks, by doing a search, following a relevant looking link from a reasonably trustworthy source and then following the navigation in that site through to HDTV models endorsed by that site.

Interestingly, when I later I read Seth Godin's ebook, his new internet venture is based on the fact that this is how searching on the internet works... more on that later!

So search had worked for me in my role-play through logical use of it. And as I commented on Scoble's blog, if I were buying a HDTV the manufacturers would not be my most trusted source. I would rather research and then go to manufacturers. And as Scoble pointed out, part of the problem with Sony's site was that they developed an unfindable flash site.

Is this an integral part of the problem? Search engines search the internet. If companies fail to understand the nature of the internet and how sites are best constructed to allow content to be found and accessed easily, how can search engines be expected to return them as relevant matches for searches?

Would better adherence to web standards in development of all websites show an improvement in search results. Most likely. Almost certainly if coupled with enough meaningful content to demonstrate that your site is an authority on a particular subject.

Is this a utopian vision of the internet? I don't think so. But surely web standards and valuable content are the only problems here? Why don't the manufacturers come up on a search for HDTV? We'd have to ask Google and they tend to be pretty secretive.

Is it fair to lumber the search engines with trying to decipher what it is we want from a search? Yahoo Mindset begins to implement a way to narrow down your results by allowing you to quantify whether your search results should be for research or purchasing purposes.

But to do this properly, I believe, could result in a fairly complex search interface - and I love the simplicity of Google. As must everyone considering their market share.

However, having done some work on Hotel search engines, I am willing to admit there may be a nice solution. I just haven't had the time to even begin to consider what it might be. For example look at Kayak.com and do a hotel search, it has a similar interface to yahoo mindset but with more options. What would the options be on a generic search in order to return more valuable results?

Which Robert is more relevant?

This point revolves around search engines giving higher priority to sites which are of lesser relevance to the searcher.
This is also an interesting point. If you do a Google search for Robert, Robert Scoble's site comes back as number one. Why? I assume because the people publishing content these days, especially with the advent of blogs, are technical types and they have an interest in Robert Scoble and link to him a lot and so Google interprets Scoble's site as being important. Which is fair enough, but you can see how this skew isn't going to suit everyone.

On the other hand, do a Google search for 'Robert actor' and you get a Robert Redford relevant result back as number one, followed closely by other Roberts who are actors such as Rob Lowe and Robert De Niro.

So being a little more specific about what you are looking for helps. I use search a lot and have become quite good at finding what I want by refining my search as I go. But Scoble maintains that educating users is not viable. And I understand where he's coming from, but if a user wants to find Robert Redford related material, and they can't remember his second name, surely they know he's an actor and would know to add that to their search? If the don't, what are the chances they could use a more complex search engine interface?

And how can one develop a more relevant search without making the interface more complex?

How can you discover whether a user wants HDTV manufacturers from a search for 'HDTV' or whether a search for 'Robert' is looking for a friend, an artist, a musician, an actor or a technologist?

Is it all in the algorythm?

Maybe I'm on the wrong track... maybe the answer is not in the interface but in the algorythm. Now, to date people seem pretty impressed with Google's algorythm. But Scoble brought up another interesting point a couple of days after his initial point. He said:

I think bloggers aren't looking at search critically because we LOVE the traffic that Google brings! Translation: we're addicts and we don't want to turn the drug off. Well, I want a better search engine. I don't care anymore if I'm at the top of the list.

Interesting point. After all bloggers have managed to leverage Google's algorythm to their benefit - this is one likely reason why Scoble is number one as he points out. But he wants a better search he says. So the algorythm would have to change.

Well, fair enough. I am not about to start into arguing algoryhtms, but I often find material on the web by searching, finding a blog that posted about the material I am looking for, and am then able to follow a link from that blog to the material I wanted. Often the actual page I am looking for is not as findable as the blog that pointed to it.

Scoble would argue, I'm sure, that a search engine should be built that could find the page I'm looking for directly - and I'm not going to argue that (it would be lovely) but I wonder how you do it. If the page I'm looking for is a flash based page with no search engine optimisation how do we determine that page is relevant? A web standard blog entry which has an amount of relevant content to my search query and points me to that flash page is a life saver to me in this situation.

What about NOT changing algorythms or interfaces?

All this brings me to Seth Godin. As I was thinking about search and whether it needed to be improved and whether the current algorythms gave users relevant results, I downloaded Seth Godin's latest ebook from his blog.
As I read it I was surprised to find it was bizarrely tied into all my thoughts on search! Read this edited extract:

You go to Google. And you type in “buy espresso machine." [...] Of course, you're not ready to buy an espresso machine right this second. [...] Right now, you're just looking. You just want to learn about what's going on. [...]

A few sites down the list, I found that Engadget.com, a site I know and trust, has an article. So you click on it.
It's a pretty worthless article. But you notice that there are literally hundreds of comments [...]

about five comments down, you discover a long, thoughtful post by someone who knows all about espresso
machines. Not everyone is seduced by rational textual argument, but you are, so you get excited. Finally! You're
starting to understand. [...]

So you go to www.coffeegeek.com , which you find through another comment. Nirvana! This is the site that
should have been #1. But alas, it's disorganized and hard to follow. So you spend three hours (I'm not kidding,
three hours) reading up on espresso. Now you're informed, you know what's out there and you've read a few
reviews of different machines. Finally, you know enough to think about buying. [...]

So you go back to your original Google search. And now you click on an ad. You look at that site for a while, hit
Back, click on another ad. After you've clicked on six ads, you decide to go back to coffeegeek and buy a $1,400
espresso machine.

This is how Seth describes the current search cycle during research on the web. Which is at once both similar to my defense of current search engines AND highlights the issues Robert Scoble brings up.

Seth Godin's response is similar to the bloggers response: leverage on existing search algorythms to point to relevant material on a subject and therefore (hopefully) improve search results.

Seth's approach is either genius or idiocy. I don't know whether to admire his solution or jump up and shout that the emporer has no clothes! he advocates a new type of website or web page called 'a lens'. It is basically a one pager on a subject you hold dear to your heart where you provide relevant links and rss feeds. That's it.

UNLIKE A BLOG, just about every single item in a lens is connected to something on the Web. Lenses don't hold content. They point to content. And like all good guides, they comment on what they point to.
So your lens can point to blogs or to predefined Yahoo! searches or to a MapQuest map to your favorite restaurant. Your lens can point to the weather report or to treasured books on Amazon or to your wedding pictures on Flickr. A lens isn't filled with content. It points to content.
And your lens also points to other lenses. Lenses on similar topics. Lenses by people you know and trust. Lenses that are highly rated by Web surfers, and lenses that a lot of other people have linked to.

Seth plans to make it easy to build a lens by providing a service called Squidoo.com. By building this network of lenses with it's own search, Seth hopes people can leverage of the research of their peers to find relevant information.

I hope it works because Seth also hopes to raise a lot of money for charity through this venture - and that I applaud. And it could be the driver to make this crazy idea work too.

Conclusion

Are you crazy? You think I concluded anything? I warned you this was a brain dump!!
I think it's great people are pushing for more search development. I would love to see a better search, but we need to identify the problem with the existing search engines first. Some of the more obvious paths being discussed will, I fear, result in horrible search engines. I do worry that the user trend is to do a one word search and only look at the first couple of results returned. It is not surprising that many techies call for user education rather than changing the search! All in all Google does provide me with the tools to do a good search I think, but in order to do it I have to be willing to refine my search using longer phrases and look beyond the initial page of results. This is not typical searcher behaviour it would seem, but how do you develop a search that caters for such a limited user input while delivering better results?

Ok, ok so my conlusions are as follows:

• I am willing to concede that, like all things, search could be improved.
• I don't think anyone has identified the exact problem yet.
• I don't think the solution will become available until we identify that exact problem.
• I believe that web standard implementation of ALL websites will help create better search results.
• I worry about making search engines over complex
• I worry about pandering to lowest common denominator in user behaviour

Ok... I have to leave this for now, I am just going around in circles and boring anyone who chose to read this to tears. Perhaps I will come back in a few days, read this and clarifiy some of my thoughts.