Has the world finally gone completely mad? Michael Jackson still moonwalks among us, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are engaged, milk is bad for you (see ranting lactose intolerance post below), and cookies might be good for you. A story in The Wall Street Journal this morning (hooray! This link is part of the Journal’s free content) says that a number of online marketers and publishers are trying to change public perception about cookies—the computer kind—since a lot of computer users are now routinely deleting them, helped along by anti-spyware programs which get rid of cookies while they are also getting rid of the really malicious stuff on people’s hard drives. The marketers pitch for cookie preservation? According to the story: “That cookies serve plenty of useful features consumers may not realize—such as automatically filling in a username on a site that requires logging in, or helping a weather site remember a ZIP code so that it can show a local forecast on return visits.” That’s nice to know, but it doesn’t strike us as very compelling.

—Posted by Catharine P. Taylor

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