News digest for July 20, 2006

US SEC sues ex-Brocade CEO Reyes on stock options
In the first civil charges to emerge from the unfolding options timing scandal, the SEC alleged that from 2000 to 2004, Brocade concealed millions of dollars in expenses from investors and overstated its income by falsifying records relating to employee stock option grants.

Abandoning The “Couric Clause”
I have the feeling that I’m in the minority on this one, but I think it would be a bad idea to scrap the nonexecutive pay disclosures. Sorry, Katie. Sorry, Howard Stern. If your firm’s managers are concerned about the effect that disclosure of your pay would have on morale within a company, then maybe they need to polish their management skills. Or negotiate in a more disciplined fashion.

Casey Sworn In as 88th SEC Commissioner
Prior to being appointed commissioner, Casey spent 13 years on Capitol Hill, most recently as staff director and counsel of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee for three and a half years.

Storytelling, not journalism, spurs most blogs
The survey found that almost one in 10 Internet users are bloggers and the audience for this group of online diarists is growing. Almost four in 10 of the approximately 147 million adult Internet users in this country say they read blogs.

Pew: Bloggers Hungry For Online News
95 percent reported reading news online, compared to 73 percent of Internet users at large. The majority of bloggers–55 percent–said they read e-mail newsletters or listservs, compared to 29 percent of all Web users; and 47 percent of bloggers reported reading other blogs for news, compared to 9 percent of all online users.

Bosses put pen to paper to adhere to ASX rules
The study found that companies were providing more information about how they handled risk. It showed that 95 per cent were now providing descriptions of their risk-management systems and 50 per cent were disclosing their risk profile.

Google for the blind
The biggest point of contention? Those squiggly words you see on a Web page that act as a security measure to keep out spammers. Known as “captchas.” They work great, if you can see them. Google finally added audio to their word verification system in April. It also has tackled other problems such as making map directions more accessible to the visually impaired, Raman says. Next up: Making Google mail and Google Talk more accessible.

Google Adds Accessible Search for Low Sighted Users
It’s a bit ironic that Google’s own Accessible Search results don’t conform to W3C practices for accessibility; for example, the WCAG says “use the CSS ’font’ property instead of the HTML FONT element to control font styles,” yet Google uses the deprected font tag in results (which don’t even include a doctype).

Please Support Our Work
Email your friends about us. Subscribe to our paid publication Online IR Trends Quarterly. Get us to recommend improvements to your IR website (we're really good at it).