For those of you who are wondering what a favicon is, here’s a quick explanation.

Some websites have a little picture that is displayed in your browser’s address bar next to the URL. If you look at your bookmarks list, you’ll probably see a whole collection of these. These are favicons (pronounced fav-eyecons.) The intention behind them is partly ambient branding, but mostly improved usability — your eye will spot the icon in a list of browser bookmarks (called “favorites” by Internet Explorer – hence “favicon”) much faster than it will a string of text.

Victoria was so irritated by my homemade favicon (she tells me that she “cannot keep looking at your head cropped that way…”) that she has just sent me two new ones. I’ve installed one of them, but can’t be sure I’ve chosen the better of the two. So please take a look at the following and tell me what you think.

Sunday February 1, 2009: I’d say it looks like it’s going the way of the initial — while I’ll keep the poll open for the rest of the week and make appropriate changes — I’ve now switched to the “m”