December 16, 1999
ClickZ: How To Get Internet Savvy.
Internet savvy comes from free unfettered, unfiltered, burn-risking use of the Internet. If your company is monitoring e-mail, filtering out chatrooms, and reminding employees every day that you own the resource (as well as their time) your people aren't learning. Learning comes from reaching, trying and making mistakes.
Internet World: Please Deposit $1 For The Next 1,000 Frames.
DRM is still a long way from the mainstream, however. Consumers are accustomed to gaining unlimited, relatively unencumbered access when they purchase a piece of content in the form of a book, a CD, or a videotape. Are they ready to buy content that self-destructs like something out of "Mission: Impossible"?
Wired News: A Crystal Clear Web Lesson.
Waterford Crystal is proudly grounded in the past -- it's never discontinued a stemware pattern in its 200-plus years -- and it doesn't give a whit for that foolishness called the Web. Or at least it didn't until this week, when it got a pesky lesson in Webonomics from James Stell, an 11-year-old British schoolboy with a sideline in cyber-squatting.
Internet World: When Your Site Is Ridiculed.
[Scott Moore, publisher of Slate] Moore's reaction to falling victim to the Web's prankish, irreverent culture is instructive: He chose not to assume the role of victim when it wasn't necessary. As more and more intellectual property is held up for ridicule online, it's important that Web publishers keep level heads.
FEED Magazine: South Park's Potty-Mouth Web Auteurs.
Clay Shirky. At a time when the spirit of Christmas means being deluged with dot com ads, the news that another web site has signed another deal with some famous people hardly seems to merit a second look. This deal is a bit different, however, because behind Parker and Stone's return to the net is a hint that companies may be figuring out how content for the web should work.
Red Herring: The top five mistakes of e-commerce design.
Jakob Nielsen. Clueless business models also hurt e-commerce. Some companies still insist on overcharging Web users to protect their legacy channels. Grow up and join the Internet economy, please.
Computerworld: Oracle pushes customers toward its site.
"Ninety-eight percent of Oracle's revenues have been individually negotiated," said Larry Ellison, Oracle's CEO. "That's how we've done business historically. It's been a manual process, not an e-business process. We can't continue to do this. We must push more business through the Web store."
Computerworld: Service needs drive tech decisions at Lands' End.
"One of the great fallacies of the Internet is [that] you'll save on customer service costs because customers would serve themselves," said Bill Bass, vice president of electronic commerce at the $1.4 billion retailer. Lands' End has discovered that simply isn't the case, but it isn't worrying about it.
NY Times: Web Is No Place for Last-Minute Shoppers.
Eight days passed. No CD's. I logged on to Buy.com's online order tracking service, typed my order number and learned, well, not much. My order was "processing." Whatever that meant, I suspected it was not good. Had my credit card been rejected? Were the items unavailable?
News.Com: The push toward better customer service.
Most have tried to build loyalty by building their brands and outspending their competitors. But a company's viability will ultimately be determined not only by its ability to attract and retain customers, but by its ability to do so cost-effectively.
InfoWorld: Internet Domain Registrars increases length of Internet domain names.
The company positioned the 67-character option -- an alternative the standard 26-character limit - as a way to add possibly millions of new domain name combinations.
Forbes: The emperor has no clothes.
[Ben Holmes, IpoPros] "Seeding the press with talk of an IPO that hasn't even been filed for is an attempt to create buzz that the Feds should look into. As soon as you decide materially to do an IPO you're supposed to go into a quiet period." But you can forget about anything material like actual filings, considering that the Web sites themselves have barely materialized.
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