May 26, 1999
USA Today: Anthropologists adapt technology to world's cultures.
Like everyone else, anthropologists and ethnographers increasingly are finding jobs with high-tech companies, using their highly developed skills as observers to study how people live, work and use technology.
Industry Standard: Home (page) on the Range.
Today, the Internet is about to bring more sweeping changes to U.S. farming – which, while depressed, is still a $250 billion industry.
InfoWorld: Andreessen singles out consumers as key to Web future.
"You can't determine whether to build a bridge by counting the number of swimmers," Andreessen said. "Consumers don't care about technology at the end of the day."
Forbes: Internet Alchemy.
Compaq wants to reduce the time it takes to funnel customer inquiries to the right individual from ten days to 24 hours.
NewMedia Magazine: Strengthening Your Weak Links.
Both online and brick-and-mortar companies need to look at how they can improve every point of contact they have with the customer.
Information Week: Slow Down Transactions.
...E-commerce requires real-time transactions at certain points. But at other points, it also requires browsing, shopping, mulling over, and trying out nonbinding "what if" scenarios on the way to a full-fledged commitment.
NewMedia Magazine: Think Globally, Act Locally.
A successful international Web project first requires top-notch translation. Second, it has to be appealing and useful in a foreign market--a taller order.
Useit.Com: Spotlight of USA Today's use of different headlines in their printed newspaper and on their website.
There is an odd dual goal of attracting readers to the article while still protecting users from clicking on anything they won't be interested in...
InfoWorld: Microsoft pushes standards for electronic books.
Now, several members of the authoring group are abandoning their own proprietary formats for book content, hoping that e-books finally will take off commercially.
News.Com: Intel molds chip mindset for Web thrust.
Intel's $200 million investment yesterday in Williams Communications is the chip giant's first tangible step toward becoming a Web hosting firm...
PC Week: IT.com supersites.
All elements held equal weight, except for one--customization--which really makes or breaks the user experience. "There is a difference between a site that is pushing products and a site that is trying to serve the customer..."
ZDNN: When is a hit not a hit?
Analysts don't know whether the portals are drawing interested users, or simply harvesting clueless surfers who left their browser on the default home page.
Wired News: Australia Poised to Bury Porn.
Australia is close to joining the ranks of China, Iran, Burma, and other nations that censor a broad range of adult-oriented material on the Internet.
NY Times: Australia to Vote on Internet Curbs.
Passage "would put us out of sync with our major information economy trading partner, the U.S.," he said. "Content regulation is effectively the same as commerce regulation."
PC World: Cerf's Up for Net Entertainment.
Q&A with Vinton Cerf. You can't stop technology. It just doesn't work. So you have to figure out how to live with it. And so in this case, the way in which producers of music are compensated [in future] may be very different than the way it has been done.
Wired News: Music for the Masses.
The foundation called the meeting to refine a platform, develop educational and legal strategies to protect open standards in the digital music space...
Upside: Agents Cater to Your Needs.
The key to Cheyer's approach is open agent architecture (OAA), a high-level framework that aids communication among far-flung programs.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: A Virtual Environment Will Let Brown U. Researchers Walk Through Their Data.
Humans, he says, also have "a tremendous capacity for detecting even small visual patterns. That's what we're leveraging when a scientist tries to visualize data," he says.
New Media Magazine: Ask Jeeves Answers Corporate Needs.
The editors are critical to Ask Jeeves' power. "Humans are very good at cognitive decision making," says Warthen. "When we designed our system we were very conscious of how to get human value added."
PC Week: Microsoft's Vizact 2000 creates dynamic documents.
...Vizact 2000 uses HTML+Time, a specification developed by Microsoft, Compaq Computer Corp. and Macromedia Inc. that adds XML tags to HTML for activating type, graphics, video and audio based on time.
NY Times: Encryption Company to Enter Market for Assuring Web Transactions.
John Ryan, the president of Entrust, said this week that Entrust would charge about 15 percent less for its certificates than VeriSign.
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