Brian Livingston

The importance of search engines in sending traffic to highly ranked Web sites has led to the development of an entire industry of consultants specializing in search engine optimization or SEO. These hired guns promise to attract more visitors to your company’s site by moving your rankings higher in the search-engine listings. But how effective […]

I wrote in this space last week that some Web sites had doubled or tripled their sales results after learning what visitors were actually seeing on their pages. The company that makes studies like this possible is called Eyetools Inc. This San Francisco-based firm uses sensors atop computer monitors to record what people actually look […]

You may think visitors to your company’s Web site are carefully reading every word on your home page. But they’re not. People glance at a fragment here, a fragment there, and decide within a matter of seconds whether to stay or leave. Now a remarkable study has measured this hummingbird-like effect that your site’s visitors […]

Forget about using Microsoft Excel to try to analyze your corporate data. And don’t bother struggling with Excel’s formulas and ranges to make charts of your figures, either. By the end of March, a new product will be announced that will make those frustrating tasks seem just a bad dream. The application’s name is Tableau […]

A new take on an old idea may help you speed up your access to search-engine results and other pages you commonly use on the Web. The idea is called prefetching. It might save you a lot of the time you now spend opening and closing browser windows. How To Get Ahead On The Web […]

You probably know that a program called Microsoft AntiSpyware is currently being given away by the Redmond company in a public beta program. What you may not know is that the program started out being co-developed by another software company — which happens to own the rights to Microsoft’s spyware database for the better part […]

The way things are going, it looks like spam will make up 99.9% of all e-mail before too much longer. The onslaught of spam (and the viruses and spyware that it often carries with it) is turning a significant number of people away from the Internet. In a survey of U.S. consumers conducted by Osterman […]

There’s a new way to print visible information on recordable CDs or DVDs, and it might be just the thing for you if your business stores music, videos, or data on disc. Actually, the technology was “new” when it was first announced by Hewlett-Packard in January 2004 at that year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). At […]

As I roamed the halls of the Consumer Electronics Show Jan. 6-9, I felt a twinge of pity for the place personal computers have been consigned to in CES’ sprawling vision of the future. With the demise of the other large computer trade shows in the U.S. — Comdex, PC Expo, CeBit America — CES […]

Someday soon, you’ll be able to forget your passwords and still access all the secure servers you use now. In fact, no one will have to remember any passwords at all. That’s the future that’s quietly being developed by an important but little-known organization called OATH, the Initiative for Open Authentication. This group — which […]