MFI and Woolworths – websites on the brink
On the day after the two emblematic retail groups Woolworths and MFI had gone under in the UK, their websites showed the signs of disaffected (and potentially jobless) web staff - and who can blame them.
At Woolies they couldn't be asked, so the website simply reported that the site was "undergoing essential maintenance", which is a euphemism for "we took the servers down for now, buy us out, let us keep our jobs and we might be back.".
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At MFI, there was a nice letter from the administrators telling customers what to do. A lonely "<div>" tag at the very bottom was the only sign of employee apathy:
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Daily Star bombs The Sun newspaper (but is an in-joke really a good campaign strategy?)
With bingo bringing in high revenue streams for online newspaper editions, it is little wonder that the Daily Star chose to hit The Sun where it hurts with its bingo advertising campaign - but bombing The Sun's Wapping HQ with Bingo balls?
I'm sure the Sun's staff in Wapping will see the hilarity. After all, James Murdoch has recently decided to postpone the move from the Wapping site to a new venue, at least until financial conditions improve.
Whether any Daily Star readers will understand the in-joke is quite another matter.
“One fewer” or “one less?” – A definitive answer
"One fewer person" or "one less person"? It's one of those nagging questions you only come across rarely. I did, when I had to translate a line from Dutch for my previous article. It went: "Een cadeautje minder, een friend meer" or (literally) "one fewer/less present, one friend more".
My head says "one fewer present" is correct grammatically (if you can count it, it's usually "fewer"), but my gut says "one present less". So what should it be?
Determined, I set out to find a definitive answer.
I tried the BBC news style guide, and The Guardian style guide, both of which were utterly unhelpful.
Some websites gave sensible answers, an excellent example of which is the Arrant Pedantry blog, stating quite rightly that "less and fewer illustrates quite well virtually all of the problems of prescriptivism," and opting for "one less" as the better option, on the grounds that no one recommends the use of "one fewer". Another well sourced article here explains why this is not the sin some call it, and The Grammar Logs considers the example "there is one fewer student" and says: "we use "less" with uncountable quantities and "fewer" with countable. You really can't count one student. Well, you can count him or her, but "one student" cannot be pluralized (forget cloning!), so "one student" is a non-count noun. This means we want "less" in that sentence."
Of course there are those who are incensed by the growing use of "one less". Their argument takes a purist view of the rule (if it is countable use "fewer", if it isn't use "less"), and that too makes perfect sense to me. I don't like it when publications display ignorance, but I wasn't sure about this one.
To resolve this question once and for all, I wanted to find out how the rules are treated in the media, which isn't always grammatically pure, but is a good representation of accepted modern use, especially in places like the BBC that strives to uphold high standards of language, whilst staying current. I ran a set of searches on six major news websites and on Google News (that aggregates news articles).
And here are the results of my survey, which counts usage of the "one fewer" and "one less" on each site, presented in percentage rates for comparison:
Although "one fewer" is used some of the time, "one less" is the most common. Interestingly the BBC makes an effort and its hacks use "one fewer" the least, while the New York Times uses it the most.
"One less" wins. Overwhelmingly. If it was ever a rule, then its time is up.
Geeky entry over.
15,000 shoes cover Dam Square in War Child campaign stunt
Dam Square in Amsterdam was covered with 15,000 single shoes on Monday (17 November) as part of a campaign run by the Dutch chapter of charity War Child.
War Child is a network of independent organisations, working across the world to help children affected by war. The Dutch campaign is running with the slogan "one present less, one friend more" (concerned grammarians click here).
The campaign encourages people in Holland to give up one present from their Christmas list and donate the money to the organisation's efforts instead. This specific campaign highlights the plight of 250,000 child soldiers around the world.
Three-click rule defunct, says Nielsen Norman usability group
The rule that Internet veterans have sworn by for years, that a website should be designed so that a user finds their content within three clicks is not a valid principle, Hoa Loranger told the audience at the NNG usability workshop in Amsterdam.
The workshop was led by Jakob Nielsen, who has developed the most widely used set of rules (“heuristics”) in website usability, and who is principle at the NNG group.
Ms Loranger told the audience that the leading usability company often gets asked if the three-click rule still applies.
The number of clicks is not important, Loranger explained, as long as the content flow makes sense and is logical, leading the users in a way that they understand and expect to the information that they need.
We absolutely need to understand from an information architecture perspective what the user’s requirements are, and build the flow to address them, she added. If we do that properly the number of clicks is no longer that important.
It is probably worth noting that the three-click rule has been increasingly questioned by design and usability experts, but it is still very prevalent with internet executives and web departments. A statement of this sort coming from NNG is therefore another weighty view taking us closer to its abolition.