August 2, 1999
Business Week: Excite@Home May Be Back on the Market -- and Yahoo! Is Looking.
One scenario, according to those familiar with the discussions, is for Yahoo! to absorb Excite and spin out @Home into an independent company in which Yahoo! and AT&T would have sizable stakes.
NY Times: As Hotel Bookings Move Online, So Do the Middlemen.
At the Hotel Reservation Network, a Dallas-based service that books hotel rooms nationwide, the phones are not ringing off the hook the way they used to, and the company's president, Robert B. Diener, is downright pleased by the development.
Internet Week: Web Site Availability: Pay Now Or Pay Later.
But outages are just the most glaring site problem. Slow response times, hard-to-navigate pages and bandwidth-hogging graphics will also discourage customers whether consumers or businesses-from doing business online with your company.
CIO WebBusiness: Complex Commerce.
"In the past, you had an engineer or a sales rep doing [configuration] for the customer," says Satterthwaite at GartnerGroup. "Their time was measured in hundreds of dollars per hour. The difference is, your Web site's time is measured in terms of cents per hour."
CIO WebBusiness: Seth Godin: Feeding the Gorilla.
We call that "Where's the banana?" When a gorilla goes into a psychology experiment, all he wants to know is, Where's the banana? If you look at most sites and ask, What am I supposed to do now? it's not instantly obvious.
AskTog: How Programmers Stole the Web.
We have cut off all the doctors, lawyers, artists, mechanics, architects, teachers, psychologists, historians, philosophers, salespeople, farmers, film makers, and journalists who are those most likely to break new ground.
Industry Standard: What's Wrong With Recruiting Sites.
Employers have to focus on making their sites easy to use. But not too easy, warns Creative Good, or else they'll end up with thousands of resumes – from the wrong candidates – in their in-boxes.
NY Times: Online Digests Help Readers Cope With Information Avalanche.
"What I find especially in the coverage of technology is that there is such a scrum of journalism today," said Scott Rosenberg, managing editor of Salon and a longtime technology reporter. "There is such a pile-on. It's almost impossible for a single human being to monitor it all."
LA Times: Take My Site, Please.
Search engine companies such as AltaVista, Yahoo and Excite@Home have become ensnared in a kind of arms race, trying to discover and defeat the latest tricks of what is now broadly known as "spamdexing"...
News.Com: Fast Search insists that size matters.
The larger base may be good for researching scientific or obscure topics, but it won't alleviate the frustration many users experience when their searches result in thousands and even millions of seemingly irrelevant Web sites...
- Useit.Com: From July 7, 1999; Spotlight of the NEC report on the size of the Web.
The study is widely cited for finding that search engines don't index all of the pages, but this focus on search recall is misguided: the larger the Web gets, the less important it becomes whether a search can retrieve all info about the query...
Interactive Week: Marimba Patent Challenges Novadigm.
In what appears to be an about-face in policy, Marimba has decided to use a recently issued patent as a weapon against one of its competitors.
AskTog: Making the Right Technology Decision.
...you can develop your own SuperBrowser, a weblication (web application) that is fast, efficient, and capable of hiding from the user much of the onerous latency and sluggishness of today’s network connections.
NY Times: Hewlett-Packard Sees Its Future as an E-Commerce Revolutionary.
But HTML and HTTP alone are unable to support electronic bazaars that can allow for transactions between thousands of independent buyers and sellers, who may have had no prior contact and want to do business on a single, one-time basis.
Internet World: Deconstructing Feed Magazine.
Jakob Nielsen and Roger Black. JN: The Web deserves better. We need to drive new forms of expression that use links to build narrative environments instead of simply relegating the link to being a simple page-turning device.
Internet World: True to Her Word.
Word editor-in-chief Marisa Bowe. While Bowe counts herself as an admirer and avid user of online text sites like Slate and The New York Times on the Web, she says they only scratch the surface of the Net's potential.
PC Week: Ease of use, part 2: Exploring new directions.
The time learning these methodologies comes back a hundredfold in systems that are easier to develop, require less revision and generate more user satisfaction.
ZDNN: TV? PC? How do you get your Web?
"If you’re splitting your attention between media, it’ll be harder to get people’s full attention with a TV commercial," says BBDO’s Gray. "We’ll have to think of multi-tasking as another dimension of ad clutter."
USA Today: Net firms luring seasoned execs.
Executives declined to talk about their compensation packages, but headhunters say the best are taking salary cuts from nearly $1 million to $200,000 for options that could grow to $50 million in five years.
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