Unfortunately, due mainly to the slump in online advertising, the extra traffic means little but higher costs for many websites.

Just at the time you'd expect online publishers to be rubbing their hands with glee -- many of them are working hard to find new sources of revenue to fund their ballooning bandwidth costs.

The Cookie Crumbles
Many people, including some legislators it would seem, are paranoid about cookies.

The EU has voted to tighten up on the use of cookies and this will require any website issuing them to first obtain the user's permission.

Just imagine how irritating it's going to be if, every time you go to a new website hosted or operated by someone from an EU country, a little Javascript box pops up and says "may we send you cookies?"

It's even worse news for the advertising networks such as Double Click. They make heavy use of cookies and the prospect of every EU site on which they have a banner being altered to obtain the necessary permissions would be a major nightmare.

Readers Say (updated hourly) Nothing Yet Have Your Say

One report has suggested that such a move would cost British companies around NZ$600m -- and they're just part of the EU.

And what do you do if someone refuses to give permission?

As anyone who has disabled the cookies on their browser knows, some sites just refuse to give you access if you don't have cookies enabled. Without some fairly significant changes, those sites might as well roll up and hide their welcome mat.

Now, given that most browsers already have the ability to enable and disable cookies -- why is their any need at all to legislate website operators?

Have the lawmakers gone a bit overboard on this one?

Save The Aardvark Fund
Yes, I have had several donations to the Aardvark fund and I thank those who put their money where their mouse is :-)

If guilt is gnawing away inside you then there's still time to donate.

Just drop by and hand over your loot.

Add Aardvark To Your Own Website!
Got a moment? Want a little extra fresh content for your own website or page?

Just add a couple of lines of JavaScript to your pages and you can get a free summary of Aardvark's daily commentary -- automatically updated each and every week-day.

Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using the RSS format. More details can be found here.

Contact me if you decide to use either of these feeds and have any problems.

Did you tell someone else about Aardvark today? If not then do it now!

There are new Vacancies Last added 2 Oct In The Job Centre

There are 14 Domain Names for sale