February 19, 2001
NY Times: Online Companies' Customer Service Is Hardly a Priority.
But they are also motivated by the bottom line: providing phone support is expensive, so Internet companies under mounting pressure to achieve profitability are adopting more economical automated systems. Critics say customers may be the losers.
MIT Technology Review: Owning the Future: IP's Bleak House.
Have you ever read Bleak House, the Dickens classic in which lawyers fight incessantly over a disputed inheritance until they gobble it all up in legal fees? With the U.S. Patent Office now handing out a staggering number of patents on various methods of doing business it looks like we're in for a modern-day remake.
DaveNet: Internet 3.0.
Internet 3.0 will realize the groupware vision of the late 80s which was really Doug Engelbart's vision of the 60s and 70s. Shared writing spaces with good boundaries. Structures that link to each other but are capable of managing greater complexity than the page-oriented metaphor of the Web.
Context Magazine: Sense and Censor-Ability.
John Perry Barlow. It’s still true that cyberspace exists as a data cloud through which any packet may travel by multiple, unfiltered routes to any destination. But, increasingly, those routes are being channeled and filtered, while message origins and destinations are being monitored and placed under legal constraint.
Strange Connections: Software for Information Architects.
Peter Morville. And of course, the vendors and their products are multiplying, merging, and mutating at a terrific pace. Given this fluid, ambiguous context, here is an early attempt to define just a few of the product categories that information architects will need to work with in the coming years.
Lighthouse: Content management systems: short-lived satisfaction.
Just five years ago, it was almost impossible to waste a million dollars building a Web site. But modern, twenty-first century Internet technology means that any medium-sized organisation with Web ambitions can now pour a seven-digit sum of money straight down the hole almost instantly.
USA Today: Software turns Web into easy-to-use data map.
"Why should we organize it as pages? There's no reason," said associate director Alberto Canas. "It's just that we're used to it." Canas heads a team that took a learning tool called concept mapping, developed with paper and pencil in the 1970s, and turned it into a pageless method of browsing Web sites.
MSNBC: Microsoft invades the airwaves.
Stinger will be 30 percent smaller than an average phone in Europe or the United States; will weigh less than 100 grams; have a color or gray-scale display (up to 208 by 240 pixels); and provide up to 100 hours of standby time with the screen and personal information management functions running...
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