links for 2009-03-06

Love this post, and the graph is brilliant. This is my favourite paragraph: "To HMRC, then, for a lesson in beer duty: 'Beer duty is charged at £16.15 per hectalitre (100 lt.) per per cent of alcohol in the beer,' said an HMRC spokesman. In other words, on a pint (568mL) of 4.2 per cent strength beer, the duty is calculated thus: 16.15/100*.568*4.2 = 38.52p". Who knew the formula was so obtuse? In those budget summaries in the newspaper it always just says 3.2p has been added to a pint of beer. Hectalitres never come into it!

I'd substitute "some types of unexpected news" for "news" in this headline from the esteemed and accurate journalistic source TechCrunch.

"Usability guru Jakob Nielsen wrote on his useit.com site recently: 'Mobile-phone users struggle mightily to use websites, even on high-end devices. To solve the problems, websites should provide special mobile versions'. He's wrong. Making two or even three mediocre sites, designing and user-testing them, then trying to keep them in sync is a waste of time and money". I'm not so sure Jakob is wrong. I think mobile and desktop are very different contexts of use, and it makes sense to arrange their information architecture very differently.

"It's simple. Research to see who links to your competitor, get those same links AND a lot more. There, you just won the ranking game."