May 27, 1999
FEED Magazine: The Web's Dying Metaphors.
Steven Johnson. All of which leads us to the great irony of the web's war on metaphor: even as the ad sales departments and the evangelists rumble about the web's legitimacy as an entertainment medium, the brand names regress into ever-more banal variations on a Yellow Pages theme.
Red Herring: eBay makes strategic shipping investment.
...as eBay grows it will need to expand its role beyond introducing buyers to sellers, to other services involved in facilitating transactions, such as handling payments.
Internet Week: The Logistics Of E-Business.
A growing number of established retailers are either reconstructing their logistics and fulfillment processes or segregating their bulk delivery systems from their one-to-one Internet channels to compete with dotcom rivals.
SF Chronicle: Siebel and House trumpet the virtues of e-commerce.
Q&A with Thomas Siebel and Pat House, Siebel Systems. It's not about reducing costs. It is about applying information and communication technology to establish and maintain customer relationships and provide much, much higher levels of service.
PC Week: Lycos slices data to smooth operations.
"We need to measure what people are looking at and what their interests are and go out and collect more of that information. Right now, we have 100 million URLs or thereabouts, and we're not really monitoring the results of what they're clicking on..."
News.Com: Study: E-commerce sites pricey, tough to build.
Gartner said that its research found that the average $1 million in costs to build an e-commerce site will increase by 25 percent annually during the next two years.
W3C: Web Characterization Terminology & Definitions Sheet Working Draft.
The Web has proceeded for a surprisingly long time without consistent definitions for concepts which have become part of the common vernacular, such as "Web site" or "Web page".
Industry Standard: Who Rules the World Wide Web?
Because e-commerce is evolving on a daily basis, it creates unique problems for those who make government policy. Words like "jurisdiction," "product" and "law" have to be redefined.
WebWord.Com: Information Architecture Revealed!
Q&A with Louis Rosenfeld. ...a well developed IA means that users will spend less time finding information, and are are less likely to miss finding what they need altogether.
Newsweek: The New Digital Galaxy.
It's a combination that could change our lives by doing what the PC, for all its virtues, never managed to accomplish: making things easy.
Online News Association: Membership Information.
As the Net becomes a primary source of news for a growing segment of the world's population, it presents complex challenges and opportunities for journalists as well as the news audience.
Online News Association: From May 13, 1999; Panel Discussion: "Online News: What Is It Good For?"
RealAudio.
RCFoC: Innovation Drives Everything!
Could commodity bandwidth change your business? Might it enable vast new businesses that weren't feasible under today's telecom pricing structures?
Forbes: Bricks to bits.
Guy Kawasaki. The time for "interesting experiments in Web stuff" is over because the Internet is a tsunami: You can either retreat or jump on the wave, but staying still means you'll drown.
TechWeb: Seiko Builds TCP/IP Into iChip.
Although fixing the protocol stack in hardware means it cannot be upgraded, Seeman noted that TCP/IP has remained unchanged for several years...
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