April 30, 1999
Red Herring: My model's better than yours.
[Michael Bloomberg] "You can't charge $1,200 a month for communications; you have to charge for content..."
Useit.Com: "Top Ten Mistakes" Revisited Three Years Later.
Nine of ten mistakes in Web design identified in May 1996 still cause severe usability problems and should be avoided in modern websites.
Internet Week: Sites Must Serve Customers.
What's needed instead, said Truog, is a total architecture enabled by a scenario server which more seamlessly manages the information flow in reaction to how customers want to interact with a commerce site.
Slate: Michael Kinsley on Typos and IPOs.
Michael Kinsley. Slate will be launching a new design in a couple of weeks. The changes are less aesthetic than functional.
Web Review: Taking Portals Personally.
...interface designer Harris Kravatz compares the personalization features and interfaces of five top portals with an eye to what can be learned from their efforts about designing your own sites.
Wired News: Deja News Backtracks on Tracking.
[Deja News CEO Tom Phillips] "We've used none of this information for any purpose other than to better understand aggregate usage patterns..."
TechWeb: Outpost.com Absorbs Shipping Charges.
Shipping costs have been controversial on Internet sales sites as an additional cost that can confuse comparison shopping or other methods of price comparison like shopbots.
TechWeb: Little Harmony Found Among Net-Music Players.
Initial work at SDMI may produce confusion, at least in the short term, as a gaggle of potentially incompatible players using different codec, compression and encryption technologies all claim to be "SDMI-compliant."
Web Review: Portal Tipsheet.
These metrics should give some idea of the relative popularity of each of these six portal networks.
News.Com: Glassbook lends e-books a hand.
Glassbook, too, is making a push to turn its proposed Open Electronic Book Exchange industry standard for copyright protection and distribution.
TechWeb: NSI Plans New Directory To Fight Rivals.
Furious that NSI would name his company as a partner when it had no choice about working with a monopoly supplier, Pope went on to say NSI did not support partners well.
PC Week: New visualization products take a deeper look into data.
...provides users with a new way to query and explore the vast amounts of customer, product and market data generated by electronic commerce and customer relationship management...
Internet Week: Tools Keep E-Content In Sync.
The new tools promise similar benefits: ensuring new Web data is distributed quickly and simultaneously to all Web servers without affecting site availability or response times.
Freedom Forum: New U.S. law requires Web sites to become 'handicapped accessible'.
The new rules will apply within a few months to all Web sites operated by government agencies and by anyone who does any business with the federal government...
ChannelSeven: Pathfinder — The Death of a Brand.
But Pathfinder offered Netizens only a limited portal to the World Wide Web, when users wanted the whole wide world. Even early Internet users quickly got past the notion that this incredible wealth of knowledge should be seen through TimeWarner-colored glasses.
Web Review: Too Simply Palm.
The user interfaces in PDAs and MP3 players and set-top boxes and smart phones all limit the user severely. You can feel the compromises.
News.Com: Calendars key to portals' progress.
The second advantage, more specific to calendaring, is the treasure trove of detailed personal information that a calendar can provide for the purpose of targeting ads.
AtNewYork: Will Online Calendar Start-up Find its Moment in the Market?
The space seems to be shaking out much as the free Web-based mail did, and players seem to be learning from the experiences of the e-mail providers.
Upside: The Art of Naming.
The best name in the world won't help you if you do not execute well. But if it's a close game, it has to make a difference.
News.Com: RealNetworks to launch download product.
Jukebox is a client-side application that converts, or "rips," compact discs and translates them into a digital file format...
Wired News: Faster Notes for the PalmPilot.
Perlin, a computer science professor at New York University, has developed Quikwriting, an alternative to the Graffiti software that comes with every PalmPilot.
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