For many years, instant messaging (IM) has been a wildly popular communications tool for home users, whether it's Time Warner's AOL division's popular AIM service or another version. Employees are now taking this tool to work as a way to increase communication efficiency and as a replacement for the watercooler. Some companies try to squelch IM use, some tolerate it, and others embrace it. Either way, it translates to corporate IT spending on the technology.

Americans are overwhelmingly responsible for spewing junk e-mail, a recent analysis of spam origins by Sophos Inc. researchers showed.

When Kelly Dyer first considered requiring readers of the Oklahoma news site NewsOK.com to fill out a form in exchange for access to articles, she had plenty of reservations. Chief among them: Users might object to submitting personal data, and traffic to the site would decline. Nearly a year into the experiment, Dyer has few regrets. Registered users currently top 277,000, exceeding the weekday circulation of the site's parent newspaper, The Oklahoman.

The future visited Monterey, Calif., last week, promising fewer woes, many smiles and breathtaking technological advances.

InterActiveCorp is getting into the social-networking business. The owner of several popular Internet companies said it bought ZeroDegrees, one of the many social-networking startups that are the latest rage for entrepreneurs and consumer Internet companies alike.

Internet media company Yahoo Inc. said on Tuesday that it would enhance its search services by tapping into richer content such as audio, video and reference information.

Advocates for electronic voting say paperless ballots save money and eliminate problems common to old systems. But the technology brings a new breed of security concerns, like software glitches or hackers that could make the results unreliable.

Google Inc., which provides lists of Web search results for users around the world, relies on its own brainstorming list to keep innovation at the top of the firm's agenda, Google's co-founders said.

And the winner is... The hype for Sunday night's Academy Awards telecast is in full cry on the Web. Visits to Oscar.com are up and the term "Academy Awards" ranks fifth among most popular searches on Yahoo.

Interactive marketing is gaining more influence on consumers' buying decisions and television's influence on awareness is decreasing, according to a study released by DoubleClick Monday.