May 3, 1999
Today's Links Story: Tweaking Slate
CMF: Building Web Sites Constituents Will Use.
I participated in the review of a short list of Congressional sites along with David Birdsell a professor at Baruch College and Mike Nelson, Program Director of the Internet Technology Division at IBM.
SJ Mercury: Australian bid all wrong in censoring Net.
Dan Gillmor. But as the U.S. Supreme Court understood when in 1997 it overruled the Communications Decency Act, making the Net absolutely safe for children risks making it useful only for children.
Salon: Pathfinder, we hardly knew ye.
Scott Rosenberg. In the Net era, it's not ownership of wires that makes a company a public resource and forces it to take on public responsibilities -- it's ownership of credit card numbers and markets and minds.
Industry Standard: AOL Needs an Ombudsman.
An ombudsman wouldn't solve these thorny privacy concerns, but at least we'd know our questions were being fired in the right direction.
Byte: Slovenly Traffic Prediction Damages Web.
Do you want to raise your cost of business and keep your customers happy now, or irritate many of them so they'll never come back?
News.Com: How Pathfinder will become Web legend.
Though Time Warner fashioned Pathfinder as the future of the Web, its size, lack of navigability, and repurposed print content made it an example of what not to do online.
CIO WebBusiness: The Bots are Back.
...a new generation of Web intelligent agents—tools that help buyers evaluate products from a diverse set of merchants—is emerging. That's great news for merchant sites that understand how to work with bots, bad news for those that blindly decide to block them.
USA Today: Rewards net cybermarketing results.
Review of Seth Godin's book Permission Marketing. Give customers something they actually care about -- such as a coupon or discount or freebie or even relevant advice -- and they'll give you permission to market directly to them.
Industry Standard: From the Ether.
Or let's do what Postel recommended. He foresaw Web browsers, search engines, and directories dealing with Internet names. He saw DNS plumbing fading back into the woodwork from which it has inappropriately burst.
CIO WebBusiness: Office Depot Clears the Aisles.
For more than 10 percent of visitors, the log-in page was the last page they viewed before leaving the site. Those stats and user feedback made it clear that visitors disliked having to create an account just to browse.
Internet World: Deals, Technology, and Regulatory Frustration Point to Wireless.
Wireless will change how users get data, how sites are designed both visually and architecturally, and how basic services such as messaging and commerce function.
Advertising Age: P&G visionary views Web as mission critical.
Q&A with Denis Beausejour, Procter & Gamble. What we do not want to do is blast 25-second download monsters at people when they're trying to get something done. This is why this medium is so fantastic. But it's also the crux we haven't gotten through yet.
NY Times: Mixed News at Online Ad Conference.
Yet a study to be released this morning by the Association of National Advertisers has found evidence that mainstream advertisers continue to feel uncertain about the medium.
CIO WebBusiness: Don Tapscott: The Opportunity Gap.
Q&A with Don Tapscott. Advertising is not the right revenue model for electronic commerce. We've taken the old paradigm, the banner ad in a newspaper or the equivalent of a 30- second television commercial, and we've plunked that into the new medium.
Wired News: Volunteer Army to Fight Patent.
On Monday, the World Wide Web Consortium began marshalling Net users to help search for previously existing examples of technology underlying the Platform for Privacy Preferences.
Industry Standard: Big Bird and Kmart Do Business on the Web.
[Tina Sharkey, Children's Television Workshop] "We would never integrate editorial and merchandising," she says. "This is a media sponsorship, not an advertorial."
ABCNews.Com: Information Overload.
Billington warns there’s a difference between information — the stuff made so abundant by digital technology, and knowledge — the insight we get when we’ve had a chance to sort through things and figure them out.
ZDNN: Nytimes.com catches the portal bug.
"We will create a quality network, a kind of knowledge portal, where our readers can get access to Times journalists, to outside experts and, perhaps most importantly, to each other..."
News.Com: Merchants pull out of Amazon Auctions.
The merchants say shoppers, confused by auctions for goods that are also available at retail, are bidding too low and complaining that minimum bids, set by the merchants, are too high.
Wired News: Electronic Ink Makes Its Mark.
Based on research from MIT, electronic ink rivals LCD display technology and may eventually lead to thin, flexible books, magazines, and newspapers in which content is updated electronically by a wireless connection.
News.Com: Web sales create export, warranty woes.
...consumers in Dubai or Kiribati can now buy discounted computers and peripherals from U.S. companies directly or through dealers. The problem is that the companies aren't necessarily prepared to handle the situation.
Internet World: Latest Acquisitions Show Amazon Aims To Redefine Retailing.
...viewing the acquisitions through a highly speculative lens provides a science fiction version of retail that promises deep connections between buyer and seller, with broad implications for the nature of sales of all kinds.
Byte: The Inmates Are Running The Asylum.
Review of Alan Cooper's new book. Cooper describes well the tendencies of programmers to keep doing what they have done before, and how time pressure on the programmers can make things truly ghastly for the users.
Industry Standard: Searching for an IPO.
Direct Hit is set to release a full-fledged search engine sometime in the next month, as the company readies for an initial public offering.
Interactive Week: MSN Set To Join The (Online) Club.
The idea, according to analysts briefed by the company, is to use the category-specific sites to build online communities more relevant to users of the niche sites.
Business Week: Can BackWeb Soar Where PointCast Stumbled?
Latter-day push companies are reemerging with "systems-management applications" that use push technology to let client companies disperse timely information and software to their employees, consumers, or business clients.
InfoWorld: MySAP.com anchors SAP's evolving Net strategy.
"You cannot pop up with gray screens in an Internet world," Plattner said. People who are used to looking at Yahoo and other graphically oriented programs, he said, won't stand for ugly screens.
Interactive Week: Online Ad Revenue Doubles In '98.
Web advertising revenue totaled $1.92 billion during 1998 -- a $1 billion increase over the $907 million in Internet ad sales from the year before...
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