Back in 1994, the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, devised guidelines for web designers that would make their web pages more accessible and usable for people with disabilities.



More than a decade later, Mr. Berners-Lee, the director of the official governing body of the web - the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - is still advocating for better accessibility.

In the United Kingdom, a set of new guidelines, PAS 78, have been approved in hopes to improve web pages for the UK's estimated 10 million disabled people.

The new guidelines are a result of a year-long collaboration between the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) and the British Standards Institution.

Web designers in the U.S. should factor into their work a little extra time to make their web content more accessible to people with disabilities.

As a bonus, your web content will also be more accessible to everyone and can show higher up in search results on the Internet.

In this article from Red Herring, it is reported that Amazon's promising A9 search technology has apparently not lived up to its expectations.

Get expert insight into how Amazon can boost its potential "goldmine" if it acts now and capitalizes on its services targeted at a broader customer base.

Thomas Edison was the first to coin the term "bug" in relation to a malfunction in something expected to work.

"It has been just so in all of my inventions. The first step is an intuition, and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise—this thing gives out and [it is] then that "Bugs"—as such little faults and difficulties are called —show themselves and months of intense watching, study, and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached," he wrote in an 1878 letter.

These many years later, bugs are a common day occurence - a music player suddenly crashes, a calculation in Excel commutes incorrectly or Windows causes those lovely "internal kernel error."

But to a computer programmer, a bug is a real pesk - an infection within the code that impedes or blocks the successful functionality of a software program or command.

For years newsrooms exectutives have wresteld with how to adapt to the Internet age. As circulation and advertising revenue drop year after year, it is evident that news operations need to embrace the possiblities the Internet offers.

A new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism shows a significant increase in new organizations emphasis on creating online content for their readers. Moreover, the study finds that simple migration of news, images and columns from the newspaper to the web is not productive.

The aim for online news is to provide rich and interactive content that is not possible in print - such as blogs, which have literally changed the way news and information is created, deciphered and delivered. The readership has the ability to be actively engaged with their community by simply using common Internet functions to interact with the news - with emails, bulletin boards and of course blogs.

An increasingly popular buzzword on the web these days is "tagging." Basically, tagging is providing information about a piece of content, such as captions, and often refers to user-created keywords.

Panelists at the South by Southwest conference in Austin agreed that the main problems with tagging is that it is still too hard for users to find the information they want or to find a tag they have previously bookmarked.

Because of sites like MySpace.com, social networking and user input about content posted on the web provide yet another way to aid people in finding information ont he web.

Nevertheless, it will be a couple of years before the technology is perfected and catches on -- but once it does, SEO experts, web designers and web businesses will scurry to figure out how to maximize its potential.

The Internet provides businesses valuable opportunities to monitor and respond to trends in a timely fashion.

Niche news, leaked documents, rumors, scandals and entire movements have been spawned via the Internet, jump-starting and ending the careers of athletes, celebrities and corporate CEOs.

Effective online monitoring of trends requires a solid strategy executed by creative professionals who have an intimate knowledge of the power of the Internet. They know how to find valuable information not available off line, and are able to properly respond to complaints, kudos, observations and suggestions from consumers.

For example, by closely monitoring a number of online discussions about snowboards, a snowboard manufactuer discovered that enthusiasts wanted a lighter but more durable material, and would pay to get it.

The company used this information and a year later released a new lightweight snowboard. Workers at the company then used the Internet to spread word about the new snowbard and received an overwhelming response. That year, profits increased 22 percent.

The bottom-line: Don't under estimate the positive impact the Internet can have on your product, service or business.

When television became a staple of American society, experts of all kinds debated the dangers it presented to academics.

Some decades later, with the advent of the Internet, reading and writing habits have changed dramatically. Nowadays, the same concerns have been voiced about the Internet's effect on academics in the U.S.

Recently, some critics have suggested that Google spawns bad writing.

The argument is misguided because Google is not responsible for the enlightenment or demise of writing on the web.