Best of ECT News

Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook provide a means for many people to share their lives with others, but are they and other Webposts that are turning the free content of their subscribers into economic gain, a new form of sharecropping? It certainly seems that way, according to Nic...

In the early days of the Web, smart small Internet businesses could compete with just about anyone by working to make sure their Web pages were found first on search engines. Fast forward 10 years. Search engines have become increasingly sophisticated. Paid search listings have exploded into the pic...

As personal technology goes, Digital Video Recorders are more than just a replacement for tape-based VCRs: They're a boon to TV watchers and the enemy of the traditional 30-second television advertising spot, for decades the single most powerful and lucrative form of brand advertising. Devices such ...

By all accounts, the e-commerce sector is poised for another blockbuster holiday season, with forecasters calling for another year of double-digit growth and sales of about US$27 billion for the fourth quarter, according to Forrester Research. Most retailers are already well underway with plans to c...

In the never-ending quest to differentiate themselves from competitors, online retailers often turn to content to set themselves apart and enhance the quality of their Web contact with customers and would-be customers. The need to automate the distribution of content has given rise to a fast-growing...

Looking for a Web hosting service provider? All vendors are not created equal. A little consumer education goes a long way toward ensuring you get a host that offers the right combination of products and services -- and at the right price. "There are so many Web hosting providers out there today," s...

Casinos in Nevada might become the first to explore a new area of the Internet gambling frontier, enabling users to gamble on mobile devices while they're in and around casinos. A recently passed law makes Nevada the first state in the U.S. to allow the use of hand-held devices for gambling at casin...

Web surfers are annoyed as hell and they're doing something about it. That's the thrust of the findings in a survey to be released next week by Hostway, a Chicago-based Web site hosting service with more than 400,000 global clients. According to preliminary information from the survey, obtained by t...

One of the long-feared results of Internet security problems -- its potential effect on consumer behavior and eventually, spending -- might be starting to materialize, according to a new report. The Pew Internet & American Life project says that a survey that it conducted found that 91 percent o...

Not long ago, it sometimes took Web pages 30 seconds to load, thanks to slow, dial-up connections over-burdened servers and inexperienced Web design. Now, with high-speed connections and rapidly evolving technology, the days of slow-loading pages are gone. However, users might want to get used to wa...

Some 72 percent of the businesses evaluated by a Boston-based research firm scored poorly on their policies for re-using their customers' personal data for marketing purposes, but the researchers maintain that more companies are sensitive to privacy issues than ever before and are acting on that awa...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission took action against spyware this week by asking a U.S. District Court Judge to halt an operation that allegedly plagued users who clicked for free file-sharing software with performance-slowing, private-information-gathering software that also altered search results...

Long after they became fixtures in the hands of businesspeople and teenagers alike, mobile phones still hold a unique and unenviable position in the world of technology, a device that's loved and hated as intensely as any. Anyone who's ever been forced to listen to half a conversation held on a phon...

Recently, while replying to e-mails from readers of my book, The Design of Sites, I came across a comment from a designer who claimed that my recommendation to use pop-ups was hopelessly out of date. Did this reader not understand me, my recommendation -- to use pop-ups primarily in situations when ...

Governments at both the state and federal level in the U.S. are getting serious about addressing the void in the legal framework for fighting "spyware." To begin with, we need to define the term "spyware," due to the fact that this term has been used to describe everything from keystroke loggers, to...