- FTC’s Q&A Guide

- Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising (PDF). These Guides offer more than 35 examples of how they apply in practical settings.

- FTC’s Guide about Online Advertising (PDF)

“The Guides address the application of Section 5 of the FTC Act (15 U.S.C. 45) to the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising. The Guides provide the basis for voluntary compliance with the law by advertisers and endorsers. Practices inconsistent with these Guides may result in corrective action by the Commission under Section 5 if, after investigation, the Commission has reason to believe that the practices fall within the scope of conduct declared unlawful by the statute.”

What’s an endorsement?

“Endorsement means any advertising message (including verbal statements, demonstrations, or depictions of the name, signature, likeness or other identifying personal characteristics of an individual or the name or seal of an organization) that consumers are likely to believe reflects the opinions, beliefs, findings, or experiences of a party other than the sponsoring advertiser, even if the views expressed by that party are identical to those of the sponsoring advertiser. The party whose opinions, beliefs, findings, or experience the message appears to reflect will be called the endorser and may be an individual, group, or institution.”

What about testimonials?
“The Commission intends to treat endorsements and testimonials identically in the context of its enforcement of the Federal Trade Commission Act and for purposes of this part.”

Besides explanations about your messy code, HTML Tidy will clean up characters not allowed with your encoding, incomplete tags, redundant tags, unknown tags, invalid character codes and so on. The output is ready to be copied and pasted. One thing the tool is lacking is line numbering, which would make it easier to identify where your errors are.

If these examples won’t do it for you, maybe Cedric Laquieze’s floral skeleton sculptures will get you to stop for a second and behold:

The site has thousands of pictures of LA, many (maybe most?) without cars, all sorted by many different criteria which makes this a great resource for anyone interested in Los Angeles architecture or in need of inspiration for their project. Tourists will appreciate the fact that all images come with an address. The idea of taking all these images without cars is what makes this site special. How often have you seen an image of LA or any metropolis for that matter without any cars in it?

This geographical database is available for download free of charge under a creative commons attribution license. It contains over 10 million geographical names and consists of 7.5 million unique features, 2.8 million populated places and 5.5 million alternate names. It also offers some population and area statistics. According to the site Geonames users include Ubuntu, Apple’s SnowLeopard, Bing Maps, The New York Times and more.

This keyword editing tool lets you auto de-dupe and edit to broad match, “phrase match”, [exact match], -negative match. It also has sorting functions such as sort by match type, URLs and bids and features a very useful find and replace function. The Ad-Maker lets you create ads and preview them in different formats for your AdWords campaigns.

The site offers paid options to create the barcode in high resolution, batch processing, save your codes and more. Click here for more info on QR barcodes.

Here some sample searches:

- Views of Google+ article in July 2011
- Views of 405 freeway article in July 2011
- Views of Harry Potter article in July 2011

Spelling makes a difference: when you use harrypotter instead of Harry Potter, the statistics are different, even though the article is the same.

The site states that it “is very much a beta service and may disappear or change at any time.”

So you can’t remotely delete the photos and you can’t destroy the camera. The next best thing is to use stolen camera finder. All you have to do is drag and drop one of the images you had taken with the camera previously onto the page and the site will show search results of other images that have been taken with the exact same camera. This service works by using Exif data embedded within your photo to search the web for photos taken with the same camera.

If you don’t have any photos handy that have been taken with the stolen camera, you can also type your camera’s ‘internal’ serial number if you have it (usually not the one on the box) into a search box to see who’s posting pictures with your camera. Exif is a standard used by digital cameras and other electronics and may also include your camera’s ‘internal’ serial number. This may be a long shot, and if your camera isn’t listed, this tool won’t work. It also won’t work searching on Facebook or MySpace because they scrape the Exif info from the photos according to the site.

(To see the actual data your current camera embeds within your photos, try Jeffrey’s Exif Viewer.)

See what can happen if you have an Eye-Fi card installed in your lost/stolen camera.

Simply put, accessibility means making resources usable by the largest number of people possible. Techniques used to make the Internet and Web accessible can range from very simple, like adding the ‘alt’ or ‘longdesc’ attribute, to the more complex, like changing scripts, navigation and structure of a site.

When we used the web accessibility checker to test our site the results resembled a to-do list with instructions. Changing the ‘alt’ attribute for images came up several times. This is a reminder that a text equivalent for every non-text element should be provided and the use of the word ‘image’ or ‘.jpg, .gif, .bmp, .jpeg’ within the text should be avoided, which makes sense because it’s not descriptive of what the image actually is. The text used within the ‘alt’ attribute should also be shorter than 81 characters.

Applying these techniques will help a visually impaired person access the content of a web page with software which will read text and describe the images it encounters on the page.

Other suggestions that may come up when you test your site are that redundant text links should be provided for each active region of a server-side image map; and that row and column headers should be identified for data tables for example.

For resources on making your site more accessible, including a Section 508 checklist, visit the ICDRI’s accessibility primer page.