Somewhat surprisingly, the search engine and the antivirus giant have joined forces for a new marketing venture. Ars Technica writes: “Symantec will offer its existing product, the Norton Internet Security Suite, as a 30-day trial download from Yahoo. The product will be branded “Norton Internet Security provided by Yahoo!” and will be available through the Yahoo web site as well … Read More

As you may know, I was in Denver last week, attending the Shareware Industry Conference. As usual, it was a useful, enjoyable and exhausting event, and I had the pleasure of meeting many old friends and new acquaintances. If you're interested in seeing what it was like, here are the photos: Our own photos Sharon Housley's photos Greg Weir's photos … Read More

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that they will be following 12 main principles when developing the Windows desktop platform. Based around three main areas, these principles all focus on choice, opportunities and interoperability. Mainly, this appears to be about things that Microsoft learned in their well-known antitrust battle with the government. Microsoft now claim that they have “learned the importance of … Read More

Everyone's trying to work out how to benefit from the social bookmarking sites that suddenly are everywhere. We keep reading about sites that are “dugg”, and receive tens of thousands of visitors overnight, but how can we tap in to this? Well, there probably isn't a magic formula as such, but this article contains some good pointers that you might … Read More

Lately, there's been an awful lot of talk about net neutrality and the future of the Internet. If you want to know more about this issue and what lies at the heart of it, reading John Battelle's interview with Vint Cerf is a good place to start. Vint Cerf is Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, and is also seen as … Read More

As you may be aware, the Internet has been buzzing with hilarity at the comments of a certain senator Ted Stevens. Together with other senators, he's been busy debating the issue of net neutrality and decided to vote against it. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem overly qualified to do so, to put it mildly. His grasp of what the Internet is, … Read More

At least I know that someone's reading this blog. Bob Gibson from TuCows emailed in, after reading our People ignore banner ads – no, really entry from a few days ago. Bob was very agitated. Okay, not really. If you've met Bob you'll probably find it hard to picture him really agitated. But he did disagree with a number of … Read More

Have you been noticing a decline in the quality of Google search results lately? I myself have noticed an increase in the number of spam results (and I use Google a LOT), although our own rankings remain more or less where they have been for a long time. And the masses are starting to grumble. The gist of the grumble … Read More

ClickZ is reporting on a new eye-tracking study which has discovered that website visitors avoid viewing banner ads. Naming it “banner blindness”, the study claims that people simply ignore bright flashing ads and other irrelevant content. I think anyone who's attempted a banner ad campaign in recent years would have been more than happy to tell them that, without the … Read More

Regular readers of this blog will know that Maxthon is my browser of choice, mainly because I love how easy it makes tabbed browsing. What I didn't know was that it's also hugely popular in China, but for an entirely different reason. CNET News reports: “[Maxthon] has attracted millions of users in China for functionality that can funnel traffic through … Read More