Do you have a client that's made significant changes to its Web site recently? Did anybody follow up to see how effective these changes were? A new survey from Forrester Research says "probably not." The market research firm asked Web professionals at 89 companies whether they measured ROI after making any changes to their companies' site and just 13 percent said they always do. About half said they always measure ROI after making major changes, but most of the rest don't measure the ROI of any changes, due to resource constraints. The overwhelming majority--96 percent--of Web professionals said the changes …

The great city of Boston was admittedly slow on the mark in creating a dialogue about municipal Wi-Fi, but according to TechWeb News, big time technology companies are already vying for the rights to develop the project. Earthlink, Google, and Hewlett-Packard are "extremely interested" in partnering with the local government to construct the proposed system, which is now definitely a go, according to The Boston Foundation, although it's still unclear whether the service will be free or low-cost. Meanwhile, Cambridge, Boston's sister-city across the Charles River, is reportedly developing its own citywide system with technology supplied by the Massachusetts Institute …

By force of technology innovation, the controversial governmental practice of eavesdropping could become a thing of the past. Skype, eBay's Internet calling service, provides encrypted free voice calls and instant messaging between users. "Encrypted" means lots of complicated mathematical operations make it nearly impossible to snoop, though Skype says that's debatable. If that's true, criminals, terrorists and psychos are just as anonymous using Skype as those who want to call their family. Skype calls move through the Web encrypted with "keys," which are very long numbers--256 bits long to be exact, which is double the length of those used by …

American technology's Big Four, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cisco Systems, were grilled by lawmakers at yesterday's human rights hearing, who cited the companies' "sickening collaboration" with a Chinese government that is "decapitating the voice of the dissidents" there. The chief concerns were the companies' willingness to alter their online tools and content to conform with Beijing's requirements, and their offering information leading to the imprisonment of Chinese citizens who spoke out against the government. Cisco, meanwhile, was singled out for selling Internet hardware the government in China uses for online surveillance. In response to the haranguing the Web companies received …

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates talks Internet security and censorship with the Financial Times at the RSA Security Conference 2006 in San Jose. Among other things, Gates discusses building a "trust ecosystem" on the Internet--a standards-based, open system that would allow an individual's information to be shared between Web sites in a credited network. Gates says the open system will become an industry standard. The system would make an individual instantly recognizable to a Web site, with the intended goal of maintaining privacy. Meanwhile, censorship comes into play as governments like China and corporations that store information on the Web try …

It would seem that Google's actions regarding its Book Library Project indicate a belief that the world's information exists in one big collective bin for the company to mine, belying individual ownership of information. Financial Times columnist Richard Epstein says it's like two different readings of the claim that all the people in a given town own their own homes. Does each person own his home separately? Or does every person have open access to each home in the town? The former is more logical, obviously, but homes and information are two different things. Still, Google would have us …

Online retailer Amazon is said to be in "advanced talks" with the world's biggest music companies about a new digital music service. Amazon plans to launch a subscription service as well as its own branded portable digital music player that could either come preloaded with songs or be sold very cheaply alongside a subscription service contract--similar to the way mobile providers sell the majority of their phones. Music execs told the Wall Street Journal they believe Amazon's plan represents one of the only credible challenges to Apple's iTunes. However, it remains to be seen whether the retailer can amass significant …

MySpace is getting into the cell phone business, offering its army of teenagers and twenty-somethings a free cellular service that let its users read and post messages to the site. The service and two branded phones will be rolled out in the next few months by partner Helio LLC, a joint venture of Internet service provider Earthlink Inc. and South Korean carrier SK Telecom Co., which owns a Korean social networking service called Cyworld. Helio Chief Executive Sky Dayton said the MySpace demographic really cares about being connected to their friends and their world all the time. No exact launch …

On any given day, nearly a third of us log on to the Web just to pass the time, a new study says. Compared with tasks like searching for products and services and checking e-mail, recreational surfing ranked third in an online activities study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Thirty percent of Internet users go online for fun in a given day. That's up from 21 percent last year. The research firm credits broadband penetration for the increase in the number and variety of Web sites available, which has led to greater usage of the Web for …

New York magazine has a very long and thorough article about the Web's most popular blogs, how they got there, how they stay there, and how you, too, could possibly start your own A-list blog. Blogging, like Google's Page Rank system, is all about links--the more sites that link to you, the more popular the blog, inevitably. For example, Boing Boing, a curio site for tech community folks, is the Web's most popular blog, according to blog measuring firm Technorati, with nearly 20,000 links. Once you hit that kind of popularity, the traffic will keep coming--and keep coming back, too, …