Fixing IE's CSS fits, social sharing of sales, and other alliteration

Not the most exciting week in Vancouver. We’re being hammered by wind rain and darkness which seems to have set the city to sleep. Or maybe just me.

This week we have fixes for IE’s horrid CSS handling, modeling communication, social sharing of sales, and other alliteration.

• We start the week with Out of My Gord, and how we’re all succkers for sales. Specifically it’s about the FEED 2009 report which showed that people were far more interested in sending deals around than they were in otherwise interacting with brands, and the role of branding amidst social media age.
• The EU is passing a new law that will require opt-in for third party cookies. Others have said the same, but I’ll still hop on the bandwagon and say that this is a very, very bad idea.

• A great one from nettuts today: 9 Most Common IE Bugs and How to Fix Them

• Google announced this weekend that they’ve implemented campaign tracking variables on feed burner links in order to help you track them in Google Analytics.
• From Omniture, the top 5 mobile implementation “gotcha”s. These are common mistakes people make when trying to quantify mobile visitors.

• From UX Matters, some very cool Visual Methods of Communicating Structure, Relationship, and Flow.
• From User Experience and Design, how to replace form buttons with images. I kinda wonder about this one, since I have to agree with out own Michael Stralker that often you should avoid getting clever with icons, and just say it! Of course, this doesn’t preclude using images for search, but I have to wonder sometimes just how well understood a triangle is next to a search box.

• This week Youtube is implementing a skip button in pre-roll ads. This just goes to support the idea that Google is thinking about next generation advertising seriously: only making advertisers pay for ads people watch—and likely using skip data to modify quality score-esque metrics.
• A very fun one from Six Revisions this week: The History of the Internet in a Nutshell.
• More fun stuff: Noupe has a great big list of ugly government websites. I’m always amazed by how ugly these are, especially given that cities within these states often have very nice web pages.