January 1, 2000
Happy New Years and good luck in 2000!

Web Informant: Buying a car online. There are many car buying web sites these days. What I liked about CarsDirect is that you see the price before you provide any personal information -- such as your phone number or credit card. This is a very different process from say, Cars.com, where you first pick a dealer and then your information is transmitted to them before you can get a price quote.

NY Times: Technology Sprints, but Users Set Their Own Pace. Initially, investors swarmed to the idea of pushing information onto computer screens throughout the day. If you left the computer idle for a few minutes, headlines or stock prices or weather maps would be pushed onto your screen. You could choose to pay attention -- or to click the whole mess away with mounting annoyance.

Web Techniques: Toward Successful E-Fulfillment. However, the "back-office" subsystems of e-commerce sites -- those that provide the link between the user experience and the actual physical delivery of goods to the customer -- continue to be a challenge. These parts, which include inventory management, order capture, and management and reconciliation, often prove to be more difficult than the construction of the site itself.

• Business 2.0: From September 1999; No ExSKUses. Glenn Fleishman.

• Useit.Com: From August 23, 1998; The End of Legacy Media

January 2, 2000
SJ Mercury: Internet activists, business face off. Dan Gillmor. The legal wrangling is no surprise, either, because it goes to the heart of some of the knottiest issues of the emerging Information Age, including intellectual property, fair use and free speech. In the end it may help define the limits of political and economic power.

NY Times: A Trying Season for Many Net Retailers. As in politics, advertising can help a Web site get noticed, but it is not enough to win. The top 10 television advertisers among the online stores averaged four times the traffic of the next 40. Below the top 10, advertising did not correlate with traffic or sales.

Microsoft Backstage: What I Learned Running microsoft.com, One of the World's Largest Web Sites. Like a lot of other people running Web sites, we started out by doing things on instinct. And we managed pretty well. But today our site is better and more effective at serving the needs of our customers because we've worked hard to put to use the lessons we've learned - some of them the hard way.

SJ Mercury: ZixIt suit claims interference from Visa. Electronic security company ZixIt Corp. said on Friday it filed suit against Visa U.S.A. Inc. and Visa International Service Assoc., claiming the financial powerhouse used online message boards to disparage the smaller competitor.

• Business Week: From October 27, 1999; The Cyber Wailing Wall Where Lockheed's Soul Is Exposed

January 3, 2000
Internet World: Q&A with Tim Berners-Lee. It's not for the consortium to do something about that; it's for the existing political process. It's for people to take to the streets, if necessary, to do something about that. When it comes to, for example, the fear about vertical integration--the fact that you'll end up with a biased IP supply--the bias is for consumers to do something about.

Information Week: Goodbye Problems, Hello Benefits. Donald Norman. We've been at this IT stuff long enough. It's time to forget about exciting, cool technology with its concomitant breakdowns, frustrations, and bugs. Instead, let's focus on the benefits, services, and results of all this technology.

Internet World: Burning Cash In Prime Time. Does any dot-com service--as it is being presented to an undifferentiated mass consumer audience--really present a compelling case that each individual consumer has a problem that can be solved by going to a Web site? This may sound nitpicky, but I think it gets down to a fundamental problem with the way mass advertising and the Web are converging.

NY Times: Manufacturers Grapple With Online Sales. Traditional retailers and distributors are not above reminding their suppliers that they can choose not to carry their products, for instance, or can relegate their products to the bottom shelf, and thereby eliminate the riches manufacturers hope to gain from the Internet.

SF Chronicle: Catalogs Thrive in an Online Age. [Bill Bass, senior VP for e-commerce and international Lands' End]``If you look at our sales, there's a sawtooth pattern and the peaks are all around catalog drops,'' said Bass. Bass expects catalogs to continue to be important for remote sellers, but their primary function will shift from selling to advertising.

• NY Times: From December 1, 1998; Catalogue Companies Slow to Set Up Shop Online.

SJ Mercury: Moving toward a `mobile information society'. Q&A with Nokia President Pekka Ala-Pietila. And that's what we are developing. We call it the mobile information society. We see that is going to not only influence our normal day-to-day activities, but then, in later stages, it's going to influence society.

Business Week: Whisking Your Money across the Web Will Soon Be a Snap. Dozens of startups are racing to fill the void, and already several companies let you zap payments to people over the Net. The rapid proliferation of this technology is going to add a convenient new dimension to our financial lives on the Web.

Information Week: Learn At A Distance. Businesses have done the math. They know, for example, that conventional classroom instruction costs hover at about $75 an hour, with full-week programs costing $3,000 to $5,000. Computer-based training, by comparison, costs about half that.

InfoWorld: Wal-Mart ups e-commerce bid with Web site relaunch. Wal-Mart is also taking advantage of its diverse product base to cross-sell a number of items. For example, while shopping for a novel in the book department, a bookshelf or desk from housewares may be marketed to the customer as well.

SJ Mercury: Newsstands facing e-competition. With international news available on the Internet and 24-hour cable television networks, old-fashioned newsstands are dwindling fixtures in big cities across the country. ``I've lost 50 percent (in sales) in the last four years,'' said Fred Cohen, the manager of the Harvard stand. ``The Web is killing us.''

• Useit.Com: From June 1, 1997; The Fallacy of Atypical Web Examples
• Palo Alto Weekly: From December 11, 1998; Printers Inc. will shut down in March

January 4, 2000
SJ Mercury: Netizens unite against Big Business over DVDs. Dan Gillmor. Only the early battles have been fought in this war, which ultimately could help settle key questions about the nature of intellectual property and free speech in the Digital Age. But it's already clear how the Net is changing some traditional rules of engagement -- and perhaps the nature of power itself.

Upside: AOL's Curious Approach to Spam. [Tricia Primrose, AOL spokeswoman] Why is AOL risking its customers' ire by offering them a "service" that they've already said that they don't want? AOL admits that the potential for increased revenue is a major factor. "It's very attractive from a marketing viewpoint to be able to reach over 19 million subscribers," Primrose says.

• Salon: From December 1, 1998; The birth of an Internet network? Scott Rosenberg.

Time Digital: The RIM Pager: Wireless Internet Done Right. The same problems afflict the Internet-enabled phones that Sprint and other mobile phone companies are starting to roll out. The current crop are standardizing around a dumbed-down version of the Web called WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) that is supposed to make the Internet look O.K. on a cell phone display.

Industry Standard: The Myth of Scalability. Whether size will create similar advantages on the Web is a critical question right now. We're entering a phase of consolidation in many Internet businesses, with competitors rapidly buying up one another in the hope of building and bolstering margins.

Business 2.0: 501 Blues. And while the Levi's saga may weave paranoia into the psychic fabric of other offline apparel manufacturers whose ecommerce operations are far from proven, it points to weaknesses within Levi Strauss far more than it does to the industry as a whole.

Forbes: Theory of Relativity. Relativity's core technology addresses one of the most important needs of companies trying to take part in the Internet revolution: converting legacy system data and business logic into information that can be accessed through a Web front end.

Business 2.0: Pipe Dreams. Rather than a company-specific Website or product marketplace, Transport4 is a centralized order-processing system that collects customer shipping requests through the Web, and then translates that order information back to each pipeline company's own internal system.

USA Today: Some dot-coms back out of Super Bowl. [ScreamingMedia.com and Angeltips.com] With less than four weeks to go before the Super Bowl, dot-com advertisers are starting to bail out of ABC's telecast. Picking up the slack: big companies with lots of money and a story to tell.

NY Times: States to Consider Flurry of Internet Bills. A total of 44 states are scheduled to convene during 2000, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. During those sessions, the Internet Alliance predicts that there will be more than 2,000 Internet-related bills that will result in a flurry of policy making at the state level.

ZDNN: E-Ink writes its future on e-paper. While the idea isn't brand new, big companies have only recently thrown their weight behind the technology. Electronic paper aims to display electronic text on thin, flexible sheets that look and feel like paper.

January 5, 2000
FEED Magazine: RE: Lawrence Lessig. Code necessarily defines and constrains the function and properties of the internet, just as government regulation would. For Lessig, the true choice is between regulations that software companies legislate by fiat, and regulations which are imposed on code by democratically elected representatives.

Editor & Publisher: A Word of Advice for the 2000s. Steve Outing. In a nutshell, stop thinking of your company as a newspaper, TV station, magazine, wire service ... whatever you have been up until now. Because what you will become in the coming years — assuming you want a business that's growing and that takes advantage of the profit opportunities that the Internet of the future represents — is an information company.

ClickZ: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wal-Mart? It's very insistent that you use the "My Wal-Mart" personalization system and, thus, that you input personal data. Amazon, by contrast, begins personalizing with the first click, and only after you become a buyer there does it greet you by name. Walmart.com expects this trust up-front.

Forbes: Business plans trampled in Internet gold rush. In their rush to get funding, would-be captains of industry are hurriedly cobbling together business plans that lack critical elements. As never before, they are omitting such basic things as the names of their competitors, the background of their management team and their proposed channels of distribution.

Information Week: GM's Goal: Net Gains. Despite eGM's low head count, forming a dedicated group to drive Internet initiatives within a big company is an increasingly popular business model. For instance, Procter & Gamble Co.'s P&G Interactive is an internal "center of excellence" that helps the consumer-products company's product groups jump-start Internet business-to-consumer initiatives.

News.Com: Excite@Home to launch free ISP tomorrow. Excite@Home executives are betting they can persuade many of their new dial-up users to eventually sign up for the company's high-speed cable Net service, a goal that none of the other portals have.

Internet Week: Web Site Development Comes Back Home. Most companies, feeling the "Internet-speed" pressure to get their sites up fast, need the experience and resources of outside vendors. At the same time, however, these end users are taking charge of those sites as soon as possible.

News.Com: Lucent sues porn site Lucentsucks.com. Lucentsucks.com is likely to cause confusion with Lucent's 'Lucent' marks, because those accessing the pornographic Web site…will believe it is legitimately affiliated with Lucent," the suit claims.

• Internet World: From December 15, 1999; When Your Site Is Ridiculed

January 6, 2000
LA Times: Online Auto Firms in Drive to Amend Restrictive Laws. Internet firms have been gently prodding motor vehicle officials across the country for favorable interpretations of existing laws, and industry watchers expect to see bills introduced this year to address online car selling.

PC Week: A stake in the future. For an increasing number of companies, the answer is clear: Take financial stakes in your e-business service and technology providers. More and more e-business-bound companies—including Office Depot Inc., Paccar Inc. and Delta Air Lines Inc.—are making equity investments in their e-commerce partners.

Wired News: Apple Co-Opting the Internet? In announcing the new suite Wednesday, Jobs said the company had looked at the fact that it owned proprietary software on both ends of a Web visit to the site. "We realized we could take unfair advantage of the fact," Jobs said.

• DaveNet: From November 16, 1996; If It's Boring, Buy In
• News.Com: From July 2, 1999; Are portals slaves to Windows?

TechWeb: The Apple Of The Internet's Eye. [Steve Jobs, Apple chairman and CEO] A crucial factor in these applications is Apple's status as one of the last remaining vertically integrated computer companies -- the same business model that has made the company the object of criticism.

Industry Standard: Wal-Mart Teams Up With Accel. Wal-Mart bet its e-commerce future on the tech savvy of Silicon Valley late Thursday, announcing it will join with blue-chip venture firm Accel Partners to spin off its online retailing operations into an independent company, to be headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.

SJ Mercury: Shanghai tells Corp. Internet users to register. The city's Public Security Bureau placed an advertisement in a local newspaper and at least one district had issued a directive ordering companies using the Internet to register with police by January 30, officials said on Friday.

RCFoC: Visions of Futures Past. Now, think about the Internet: it changes the balance of power by bringing information, and divergent views, to the masses. As an enabler of telecommuting, the Internet is certainly beginning to change geographies and demographics.

USA Today: IRS banner ad ruling calms Net firms. The IRS issued a notice Wednesday saying it wouldn't require Web site owners to report any bartering transaction involving property or services worth less than $1. That's designed to calm industry fears about tax reporting requirements for banner ads.

News.Com: Excite@Home launches free ISP. In order to receive the free service, users will have to provide some demographic information and allow their movements online to be tracked. Ads targeted to subscribers' interests will be displayed in the FreeWorld window.

NY Times: To Boldly Go to the Supermarket With Captain Kirk. The Priceline grocery service is the opposite of most Internet conceits, which sound really cool in the abstract but fall far short in the execution. With Priceline, the biggest hurdle was embracing the headache-provoking concept. After that, the service performed beautifully.

SJ Mercury: Microsoft to offer 'pocket PC''. The biggest difference between the Pocket PC and its predecessors is that the new devices will be more oriented towards storing and using different kinds of media, from electronic books with easy-to-read type to video and audio clips in Windows Media and the popular MP3 digital formats.

Forbes: Hand wringing at Handspring. Still dogged by shipping lags that have forced some customers to wait more than three months for the device, the company has stopped accepting Canadian orders and says it won't resume until after Handspring begins international shipments sometime early in 2000.

NY Times: Domain Names Revoked Over Extra Character. ICANN's president, Mike Roberts, said that the more than 800 revoked addresses violated a long-standing policy of Network Solutions Inc., which long held the monopoly on registering names, that prohibits any character but a numeral or letter at the end or beginning of a domain name.

January 7, 2000
Salon: The wrong stuff. Scott Rosenberg. But as the recent future-tense media orgy subsides, a look back over the technology predictions of the past decade may prove useful -- as a humbling reminder of how regularly wrong the conventional wisdom has been.

NY Times: DVD Lawsuit Questions Legality of Linking. Others say that in certain cases -- such as knowingly linking to a stolen text or secret formula posted online -- the practice has to be discouraged, lest private property become a meaningless concept in cyberspace. Both sides agree that the issue is a crucial one for the Internet, which relies on links.

AtNewYork: Critical Mass or Critical Condition: Can Today's Net Companies Get There? Jason Chervokas. Because if the target for critical mass for start-ups today is 133 million pageviews a day (and Yahoo did 385 million a day in the third quarter last year), then Internet mass media is a game only the biggest of the big boys are going to be able to play.

News.Com: Apple reaching out to Web for visibility and profit. Apple won't create a parallel Mac universe with the gamut of sport scores, weather updates and chat rooms that established portals or ISPs provide. Instead, the company will offer select services that will show off its graphics technology or other features of the Mac operating system, according to Peter Lowe, director of Mac OS worldwide product marketing.

Forbes: The last 50 feet. While Web merchants recover from the Christmas shopping season, a company called MentalPhysics is busy trying to solve those companies' biggest problem. The Vienna, Va.-based startup launched in May and aspires to create an entirely new package home-delivery system.

PC Week: Rapid service is just the ticket. As vice president, Internet systems, at Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch Inc., in Pasadena, Calif., Moriarty is charged with making sure that customers trying to buy tickets or merchandise on the Ticketmaster site see the Web pages load in the blink of an eye.

Industry Standard: Finland: Where the Wireless Are. The hope here is that when the WAP infrastructure is in place, the rest of the world will come looking for expertise in wireless applications. Already, Helsinki is starting to raise interest from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo and other multinationals that have an interest in the proliferation of wireless devices.

SF Chronicle: Battling the Startup Lure. Even though numerous surveys have shown that 70 percent of startups don't even make it to an IPO, much less command high stock prices, employers know that the high-profile success stories lead to a Gold Rush-style exodus among workers.

The Economist: A thousand ills require a thousand cures. Evidently, a new approach to computer security is needed. And two groups of researchers believe they have found one. To prevent computers from succumbing to viruses and other network-borne horrors, they are borrowing ideas from immunology, and building digital immune systems.

• NY Times: From June 14, 1999; Illness Is Fast Becoming Apt Metaphor for Computers

Internet Week: E-Retailers Balance IT, Marketing. It may look like Internet retailers have unlimited cash to spend on both marketing and technology. But in the wake of the holiday rush, e-retailers realize that mastering the balance between demand generation and order fulfillment is the greatest dotcom test of all.

InfoWorld: Broad-based group forms to fight proposed UCITA. An alliance of businesses, trade coalitions, and other organizations mobilized on Friday to fight the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act, a proposed law that the group says will give software vendors many powerful -- and alarming -- licensing rights.

CIO Radio: Q&A with Tim Berners-Lee. MP3 audio file. Part 1 of an interview with the inventor of the World Wide Web, reviews its history.

January 8, 2000
InfoWorld: Overcoming information overload. The Web has presented users with huge amounts of information, and some may feel they will miss something if they do not review all available data before making a decision, Cascio says. But professionals need to recognize that they will not have every bit of information available.

South Coast Today: It's Sony vs. Sony in Web battle. As both an electronics company and a top record label, Sony wants to capitalize on any musical revolution online, making the latest in listening gadgets for it. But the Japanese giant has also had to referee a potential conflict with its own music label which fears losing out to illegal copying.

InfoWorld: The war over a single letter -- eToys vs. etoy and civil disobedience protests via the Web. I'm not going to be facile enough to say that the etoy struggle is comparable to the struggle for human freedom. But the Internet is changing everything in our society. And the techniques of real-world social change will find an analogy online.

InfoWorld: UCITA threatens rights of consumers in the new age of electronic commerce. Nonetheless, at the recent prelegislative hearings in Virginia, it was clear that proponents of the bill have adopted a strategy of positioning UCITA primarily as an e-commerce bill; and it's a strategy that, so far at least, seems to be working in Virginia.

January 9, 2000
Useit.Com: Is Navigation Useful? Web users go straight for content and ignore navigation areas. Limited structural navigation and local navigation still help, but general navigation should be avoided and generic links minimized to the truly useful.

NY Times: Welcome to the Internet, the First Global Colony. "If the United States government had tried to come up with a scheme to spread its brand of capitalism and its emphasis on political liberalism around the world, it couldn't have invented a better model than the Internet," said Don Heath, president of the Internet Society, an international organization.

• FEED Magazine: From September 23, 1999; Why Ecommerce Won't Save The British Pound. Clay Shirky.

January 10, 2000
Salon: AOL and Time Warner's marriage of insecurity. Scott Rosenberg. Time Warner, the ungainly media conglomerate, needed a credible way to salvage its Internet strategy after a decade of failure in the digital realm -- from the colossal flop of its "Full Service Network" interactive television experiment to the spectacular flameout of its misconceived Pathfinder Web portal.

Industry Standard: Time Warner, AOL to Merge. [Steve Case, Chairman and CEO of AOL] "We are looking forward to being on the cable platform, and we expect to have many competitors on the cable platform." He predicted that both AT&T and Time Warner, the nation's largest and second largest cable companies, respectively, would commit themselves to open access.

• Salon: From January 20, 1999; A corporate game of Internet Monopoly. Scott Rosenberg.

ClickZ: It's Their Network, Not Yours. The bad news is that it's not your network. Not yours to own. Not yours to mine. Not yours to control, sell, swap or manipulate. This comes as something of a shock to offline marketers who are used to owning, mining and thoroughly controlling customer lists and databases.

Interactive Week: The Everywhere Web. The Internet is spreading like wildfire into the lives of individuals and businesses around the globe. Twenty-five years into the new millennium, it likely will be part of the landscape, a tool people take for granted, like today’s telephone networks or highway systems.

Forbes: Stuck in the slow lane. In the near term, manufacturers can't do much about that thanks to government regulation, so instead the nation's number one and two car makers are trying to build direct relationships with existing consumers.

AIGA: Advance for Design. The objective of this 'Advance for Design' is to establish a new community of design practitioners who are challenged to design for a world that is increasingly digital and connected.

Computerworld: Wireless Web access will be vital. Technology exists now that can automatically convert HTML pages into information that can be viewed from a cellular phone. But most experts agree that this isn't a promising approach. Wireless users expect a different experience: no scrolling, easy click-through and a high degree of personalization.

• Useit.Com: From October 31, 1999; Graceful Degradation of Scalable Internet Services

NY Times: Government Figures Will Shed Little Light on Holiday Online Sales. An entire industry has developed around the Internet sales forecasting arena, with firms like Forrester Research, Jupiter Communications and others vying for statistical pre-eminence. But the inconsistency of those numbers is what rankles executives and policy makers.

News.Com: Wal-Mart's Net spin-off to provide tax relief. "As a separate stand alone company, Wal-Mart.com will not collect sales taxes except where it will have a physical presence which is in California, Arkansas, and Utah," Wal-Mart spokesman Les Copeland said.

Industry Standard: Europe's Killer App: Financial News. The latest move comes courtesy of two Financial Times reporters, who have resigned to launch a site called Breakingviews.com. The move only adds to the pressure on their former employer, which is struggling to relaunch its own site.

SJ Mercury: DVD suit detours new legal ground. As often happens in heated court fights, the presiding judge in the DVD case may not have to deal with some of the larger constitutional and legal principles at stake, according to legal experts, who for the most part are puzzled by the industry's tactics.

Red Herring: Online music distributors blast Realnetworks deal. Liquid Audio and other digital distribution systems were vocal about their unhappiness with the Realnetworks/ Universal deal. Not only does it mean missed revenue for them, it keeps the recording industry's solutions fragmented, they say.

January 11, 2000
SJ Mercury: Merger is not a good deal for consumers. Dan Gillmor. Yet from its earliest days, AOL's strategy has been to support open computing standards, on which the Net is based, only when they would help the company gain customers. Once those customers were signed up, AOL's goal was to trap them behind a wall of proprietary technology and content.

Salon: The Net on AOL's Time Warner deal. Q&A with Martin Nisenholtz, Howard Rheingold, Tim Berners-Lee, Jamie Zawinski and others. We surveyed a number of geeks, new-media savants and technology critics to get their take on the century's biggest mega-merger (at least so far). Here's what they had to say...

Freedom Forum: AOL-Time Warner merger raises questions about journalism, concentrated ownership. But whether bigger media companies lead to better journalism was a question strongly debated after yesterday’s merger announcement. Much of the criticism was aimed specifically at America Online, which traditionally has presented itself as a packager and presenter of news, not a newsgathering organization.

ClickZ: The Dumbest Merger Ever. Time Warner is doing this mainly for bureaucratic reasons. Vice Chairman Ted Turner was in line to run the company after the current chairman, Gerry Levin, retires, and the suits in New York couldn't stand that. Also, they didn't have an online strategy because they'd frittered it away in meetings.

• Salon: From May 4, 1999; Pathfinder, we hardly knew ye. Scott Rosenberg.

Webmonkey: Click Here, You Idiot. Jeffrey Veen. We, as users, see so many ads that we simply ignore them. And that's not something advertisers can afford. Therefore, some advertisers will go to any means necessary to get your attention. In fact, some will go as far as deception to gain your click.

• Net Surf: From July 16, 1997; Web ads: Nothing says click here like "click here". Joey Anuff.

ZDNN: Delivery service Kozmo gets Amazon boost. But in the general ebullience about the Internet and its impact on traditional ways of doing business, Kozmo has become somewhat of a darling among strategists thinking about new ways to get goods to consumers.

News.Com: TheStreet.com to offer some free news content. TheStreet.com, which has 100,000 subscribers, expects the free services to increase traffic to the site and allow professional users to get specialized services at premium prices, said Sean McLaughlin, a spokesman for the Web site.

Business Week: Harris Interactive: A High Opinion of Online Polling. But Harris's foray onto the Web has triggered some scathing criticisms from traditional pollsters, who question the credibility and accuracy of online poll data. The problem they have is this: Net users aren't representative of the general population.

January 12, 2000
Forbes: Wireless warriors picking the wrong battle. That's because the remaining slices of spectrum--the ones that high-tech firms are free to buy--will come with some very large strings attached. After spending billions of dollars to acquire spectrum licenses and build networks, the wireless Internet providers may be slapped with huge new taxes and regulatory requirements.

NY Times: In Europe, Media Companies Are Seeing Phones as the Future. This European zest for mobile communications has not escaped the notice of the media companies. In fact, the mobile phone is increasingly seen as a bridge between the converging worlds of traditional media and the Internet.

Freedom Forum: Why we should worry about AOL Time Warner. Jon Katz. The AOL-Time Warner merger — already being gushed over by business writers as the dawning of a new media age, and joyously celebrated by Wall Street analysts — is a civic and journalistic issue as well as an economic one. It is also a nightmare for those who believe in historic notions of a free, diverse and independent press.

USA Today: Europeans address U.S. Net dominance. Indeed, as the politicians ruminated endlessly over EU directives, reports and studies, some Americans were unimpressed. "Silicon Valley is not a product of a commission coming together and deciding innovation ought to come about," says Dag Syrrist, a Vision Capital venture capitalist.

Industry Standard: The Race for Office Space. It's almost easier these days to secure venture capital than to find office space – and some landlords are learning to scrutinize business plans as well as previous rental referrals. One tenant broker tells her clients that they need to approach the job of finding office space "as seriously as pitching venture capitalists."

Industry Standard: MP3.com's New Tools Break Rules. The first of the new features, "Instant Listening," lets you buy a CD from one of MP3.com's three CD retail partners, in such a way that the CD's tracks instantly show up as MP3 files in your My MP3.com music collection.

Editor & Publisher: The Race to Extend Print Circulation Digitally, Globally. Steve Outing. If you stay at select high-end hotels, you may be able to order your hometown paper when you check in, and have it delivered to your room the next morning. Two companies are working to make it possible for newspapers' "circulation departments" to expand into hotels (and retail outlets) around the globe.

Internet Week: The 10 Savviest E-Businesses (You've Never Heard Of). These largely undiscovered hotshots all satisfy two key requirements: They all solve an important business problem using Web automation; and they emphasize a wholly new e-business model.

USA Today: Nike: Just click it. "Continued at whatever.nike.com," the ending says. Viewers intrigued enough to drop the remote and grab a mouse can choose seven endings at whatever.nike.com. "We're trying to take a 30-second experience and turn it into a 15- to 20-minute experience," says Wieden & Kennedy creative director Hal Curtis.

Business Week: GM's Jack Smith: Next-Day Delivery to Dealers, via the Net. Today, every auto dealer has about 80 days of inventory on his lot. That's a huge amount of waste for all car manufacturers. But with Net capability, a dealer could have five models out there. We could get popular models to the dealer the next day.

USA Today: Official holiday Net sales estimates delayed. Meanwhile, Internet research companies have sniffed opportunity. Massachusetts-based Forrester Research, for example, is analyzing the new economy for clients that range from Sprint to Bank of America by asking more than 131,000 Web users about their buying habits.

News.Com: AppNet to take product bar codes online. UCCnet and AppNet will work to update the UPC data so that retailers can move to almost "real-time" updates of product prices and information, using the codes. At present, the codes can take up to 10 days to update using existing database technology...

Time Digital: Get Paid to Surf the Web. Malcolm Maclachlan, an IDC e-commerce analyst, says the recruitment incentive amounts to a license to spam everybody you know. "I've got a new name for this service: FriendLoser.com," he says.

January 13, 2000
Today's Links Story: Update on Industry Standard's Sidebar

FEED Magazine: Why AOL Thinks Its Stock Is Overvalued. Clay Shirky. Although it was worth almost twice of Time Warner on paper, AOL stock holders will take a mere 55% of the new company. This is a brilliant way of backing down from an overvalued stock without causing investors to head for the aisles.

Red Herring: The once and future king. Tony Perkins. But Mr. Case was smart enough to get in early, while his stock was still skyrocketing, to take advantage of the Internet bubble and buy some real assets, real products, and real revenues before his time runs out. Mr. Case has made it to the top of the real media world, and he did it just in time.

NY Times: U.S. Removes More Limits on Encryption Technology. The new rules were cautiously applauded by industry groups, who argued that regulations issued by the administration in September were still cumbersome and put them at a disadvantage when competing with foreign companies, especially from Germany, that have no such restrictions.

Newsweek: A Portable Web. WAP is the result of three years of negotiations between the big mobile-phone makers, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia, and a single, 500-employee Silicon Valley start-up, Phone.com. Three years ago, Phone.com persuaded the much larger companies to collectively develop WAP...

PC World: Applying Moore's Law to Mobile Phones. Petersen says that while mobile phones with the capacity for Internet functions like those using the wireless application protocol will by 2002 quadruple available memory and double signal speeds, power consumption will remain low. He says mobile phones will retain their consumption of around 0.1 watts...

Motley Fool: Stuck on You.... The Wall Street analyst's comments, especially the ones about the "stickiness" of Amazon's website, left me amused and unconvinced. What was this "stickiness," and could it really be considered a viable barrier of entry for Internet companies?

• Useit.Com: From March 7, 1999; Trust or Bust: Communicating Trustworthiness in Web Design

Upside: Net Taxes: When, Not If. And, with all deference to the governor of Virginia, it is lunacy to think that any politician will have the guts to use two-thirds of the excise tax collected on Grandma's phone service to subsidize some yupster's online purchase of a DVD player.

NY Times: Better Digital Images in Smaller Files. The committee must tread a fine line. If the format has too many patented pieces and requires too many license fees, no one will adopt it. But if it is too open, the companies that paid for the research behind the standard will not get any revenue.

Atlantic Unbound: Alternate Realities. Review of new books by William Mitchell and Douglas Rushkoff. If the movement appears to have faded away since its much-publicized debut, this is not a result of any punishing defeats; it's more likely because the initial statement of technorealistic principles was simply too noncontroversial.

NY Times: Rules of D.S.L.: Location, Location, Confusion. But while cable television providers generally offer, or don't offer, cable modem service in broad service areas, and satellite links are widely available, D.S.L. service is spottier. Your phone company may provide it, but you may not be able to get it. And that has confused consumers.

January 14, 2000
Salon: The geeks vs. the marketroids. Scott Rosenberg. Neither the horse-race handicappers nor the media-monopoly hand wringers focused on the issue that matters most to Internet users like me, and those of my readers who've corresponded with me this week. They and I still harbor hope for the Internet as a new medium with an unprecedented openness...

NY Times: Editorial Content on Drugstore Sites Draws Questions. But some consumer watchdog groups and industry analysts say the separation between electronic commerce and editorial content is not as clear as it should be and, more troubling to them, articles are not always written by experts.

• Online Journalism Review: From December 7, 1999; From Doing Good to Doing Well. So before Cioe decides when the article will run, he does something that would make most journalists shudder: He checks with the warehouse.

Salon: Does AOL Time Warner spell trouble for new-media companies? To be "chosen" by AOL, is to land the golden goose of traffic -- even if it is a paid privilege. For many online media companies that live on the open Web, the traffic that comes from "placement" before AOL's eyeballs is a big part of their bottom line.

• Business 2.0: From September 1999; Portal Pretense

Internet Week: Sites Give Virtual Reps A Try. "What vReps allow us to do is have a real-time, immediate and personal response to basic questions," said Andrew Swinand, director of marketing for Reflect.com. He added that studies have found 80 percent of all customer service inquiries are basic questions that can be easily handled by a knowledge base.

Industry Standard: Airlines' Ticket Comparison-Shop Site Cleared for Takeoff. Under that model, while the airlines are free to turn down any bid, the service takes some pricing control away from the airline. By putting their Web fares in one place at the new site, the airlines are naming prices and taking some of that control back.

Internet Week: Instant Messaging Takes Off: Mail Free-For-All. Just as millions of end users once took it upon themselves to download Mosaic to gain Internet access, they're turning to free instant messaging clients from America Online, Microsoft Network, Yahoo and others to collaborate in real time with workgroup and other colleagues.

Wired News: Nike Toys with TV Junkies. Yolles confirmed that the networks were concerned about drawing viewers away from the TV set. That's why two networks have refused to run the "continued at whatever.nike.com" conclusion to the spots. Instead, the ads will simply display the whatever.nike.com URL.

TechWeb: Dow Chemical Commits To The E-Market. Dow purchasing totals about $2 billion per year. Between 15 percent and 30 percent of that could move to Net markets such as ChemConnect within a few years, said Dennis Merens, Dow's director of venture capital, who helped put the ChemConnect deal together.

Detroit Free Press: Ford won't block upstart Internet site. Ford spokesman Jim Cain said company lawyers decided Dec. 27 not to appeal because Lane had stopped using Ford's logos on his Web site. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit approved the motion Jan. 5.

SJ Mercury: GM offers `honey' of deal on Net service. ``We're using the free access, the free e-mail, as the honey to attract the bees,'' said Mark Goldston, NetZero's chairman and chief executive. The technology is ``like a GPS tracking system. The minute you come on, it knows who you are, it knows where you go.''

January 15, 2000
Internet World: Deconstructing Boo.com. Jennifer Fleming and Jakob Nielsen. After a year of hype and six months of delays, Boo.com arrived this fall to a chorus of-well, boos, most of which had to do with crashes, lost shopping carts, and alienated Mac users. Boo.com has fixed its most obvious bloopers, but it still has some tweaking to do.

Advertising Age: Dot-coms prep for Bowl traffic jams. Dot-coms advertising during the upcoming Super Bowl hope to make a big splash, but avoid an image-damaging crash. To ward off problems that ads before and during Super Bowl XXXIV could bring to their Web sites, some dot-coms have spent "millions" to ensure their online properties remain open for business on game day and beyond.

Wired News: Trying the E-Friendly Skies. Not everyone gets the warm fuzzies from all this competitor collaboration, however. "We have stayed away from those sites," said Southwest Air spokesperson Beth Harbin. "Our core philosophy is to develop a direct link with our customers. We don’t want there to be barriers for our customers."

Advertising Age: Critique of a Driveway Corp banner ad. Even beyond all of this, however, is the problem of yet another start-up.com failing to tell the consumer in its banner ad what it has to offer. Although the name Driveway and giving away a car suggest it, this site has nothing to do whatsoever with anything automotive.

SF Chronicle: Wal-Mart Poised to Swoop. One element of Wal-Mart's decision to spin off its Internet operation that hasn't gotten much attention is the fact that the new firm will be able to avoid sales taxes for most of its online transactions. Companies are now required to collect sales taxes for online and catalog purchases in all states where they have a physical presence. Wal-Mart has more than 2,400 outlets nationwide.

January 16, 2000
NY Times: How Blind Alleys Led Old Media to New. Despite a longstanding commitment by Levin to digital technology, Time Warner was stymied by corporate politics, distracted by other, more profitable ventures and unrealistic about how quickly it could harness the technology to suit its needs.

• Salon: From May 4, 1999; Pathfinder, we hardly knew ye. Scott Rosenberg.

NY Times: At Graduate Schools, a Great Divide Over E-Business Studies. At issue is whether the online selling, buying, marketing and distribution of products -- known collectively as e-business -- should be taught as a separate academic subject or as an inseparable part of a general business curriculum? Money, prestige and the ability to attract the most desirable students hang in the balance.

January 17, 2000
NY Times: A Marriage of Convenience -- and Control. Denise Caruso. Whether that is their sole intention or whether there is some new gambit that the strategists haven't come up with yet will reveal itself as the AOL-Time Warner merger proceeds. But suffice to say there are likely to be far greater and deeper implications to this deal than we have heard about so far.

NY Times: How to Lure Prestigious Beauty Goods to Cyberspace. Although Clinique and Lancome sell their goods through their own Web sites -- and Estee Lauder is expected to do so this year -- all three companies forbid retailers to sell their brands online. That has left online retailers to choose between selling more obscure prestige brands or mass market brands...

SJ Mercury: High-speed Internet delivery. As online retailers fight for market share, some are taking control of more than what shoppers see on their computer screens. They're convinced that whoever owns the ``last mile'' from the warehouse to the doorstep will control a big chunk of the future of Internet shopping.

Industry Standard: Amazon.com: More Than a Merchant. But some investors are wondering if these companies are putting too much faith in their Amazon alliances. Some compare it to the early days of e-commerce, when startup companies exchanged huge portions of their marketing budgets for an anchor tenant position on AOL.

Industry Standard: CoolSavings.com Settles Patent-Infringement Suit. The war over the electronic-coupon patent is part of a industry-wide movement to protect intellectual property. Microsoft has more than 1,000 Net-related patents; AOL has 11 and Amazon.com has seven.

Columbia Journalism Review: Wanted: A Way of Counting That You Can Count On. And yet: try to get a single answer about how many visitors a Web site has and you will encounter dissembling and dissent. Do you want to determine whether more people read Slate or Salon? Good luck. Even knowing how many people visit a single company’s site can be difficult.

• Salon: From February 5, 1999; Reach for the hits. Scott Rosenberg.

Adweek: What's in a Name? Meanwhile, established online businesses are changing their names at a pace that's breathtaking, even by Net standards. But why would Computer Literacy, an online book and content store in Silicon Valley, change its name to Fatbrain.com? What's the rationale?

CIO: Furniture.com. But executives say that vast selection is secondary to the company's underlying mission: revolutionizing a shopping experience that's almost as stressful and time-gobbling as buying a new car.

Interactive Week: National Retailers Mull E-Tax. The din of whether to tax Internet commerce is destined to become louder Jan. 18 when the 99 member board of the National Retail Federation votes to take a position on the issue.

January 18, 2000
Industry Standard: Ideas to Watch. Evan Schwartz, Tim Berners-Lee, Andrew Shapiro and others. ...The Standard asked 20 Internet experts what they thought the Internet Economy would produce over just the next year, in areas like e-commerce, technology, policy and business strategy.

Industry Standard: Markets are Conversations. Doc Searls and David Weinberger. The first markets were markets. Not bulls, bears or invisible hands. Not battlefields, targets or arenas. Not demographics, eyeballs or seats. Most of all, not consumers. The first markets were filled with people, not abstractions or statistical aggregates.

News.Com: IBM customers buy $1 laptops in site snafu. IBM blamed the discrepancy on a data error and said it has begun notifying customers that it can't honor the discounted price. "We can't sell these for a dollar," a company representative said. "We'll work something out with our customers."

• NY Times: From December 13, 1999; Pricing Errors on the Web Can Be Costly

Industry Standard: Rx For Success. Health sites have come up with a treatment for visitor-deficiency syndrome. First, learn people's ailments, their nutritional concerns and their preferred practitioners. Then add focused content partnerships, marketing campaigns and timely information.

• NY Times: From January 14, 1999; Editorial Content on Drugstore Sites Draws Questions

Forbes: Everybody's asking Jeeves. Indeed it's actually Jeeves' very lack of sophistication that's behind its ascention in the Web-based customer service marketplace. "It may not be the most robust technology," says Forrester Communication's analyst Paul Hagen, "but Jeeves solves a business problem that high-end solutions can't."

News.Com: Ask Jeeves grapples with question of sex. The company is considering plans for separate sexually themed search results, possibly under the auspices of a different character, Web site and brand altogether.

Red Herring: Furniture retailers want a home online. While consumers spend an annual $125 billion on home furnishings at the mall, they are still reluctant to spend money online -- which has prevented retailers from making bold, strategic, e-commerce initiatives.

NY Times: New Encryption Rules Leave Civil Libertarians Unhappy. And they are vowing to continue pushing their assertion that the regulations make encryption software and technology more cumbersome to publish or send on the Internet than for the same items published in other media.

Industry Standard: Future State. Review of the new book The Rise of the Virtual State. However, he feels that national governments and politicians have less and less agency in an interconnected world in which global financial markets have increasing power.

• FEED Magazine: From August 11, 1999; Why China's Internet Problem Is A Lot Like South Carolina's. Clay Shirky.

• Inktomi Press Release: Web Surpasses One Billion Documents

January 19, 2000
Today's Links Story: Google's Text-Only Banner Ads

MSNBC: Online news sites face an event-access crunch. As the number of online news outlets proliferates, sites such as San Francisco-based eStar are finding themselves out in the cold as movie studios, music companies and event sponsors begin limiting the number of online reporters, often to a single, exclusive outlet.

• Online Journalism Review: From July 23, 1999; The Mythical Press Box. So what is the myth of the press box? The myth is that all working journalists get equal accreditation and access. Not everyone who wants to get in does indeed get in.

TechWeb: FedEx Woos E-tailers With Cheaper Service. While FedEx's overnight delivery service is offered as an option by most of the big e-retailers, it is not the leading choice among consumers because the service can cost twice as much as rival ground delivery options.

Industry Standard: Search Firms Argue Whether Bigger is Better. [Dennis McEvoy, senior VP of Inktomi] "The biggest catalog (index) does not equal the best search experience," says McEvoy. "Relevance matters much more because people don't want to page through thousands of results."

CNNfn: Netting Web customers. Q&A with Mary Modahl, VP at Forrester Research. The Web is not a one-time investment. It's not about gilding your corporate headquarters and moving in with a big bow on the front. People have to learn what makes a decent site and what doesn't, and stay abreast of the technology.

NY Times: Consultants Are Putting A New Price on Advice. In the last year and a half, unable to resist the lure of the Internet economy, McKinsey has taken small stakes in more than 50 clients, in exchange for lower fees. Across Europe and North America, the firm is opening eight "business accelerators," where consultants will spend up to nine months helping start companies in which the firm could own a stake.

• InfoWorld: From June 26, 1999; Hardware vendors trade systems for revenues

Industry Standard: Not Available in Stores. Carl Steadman. So what does it take to make serious money in online marketing? Not much: Donna Karan or Hugo Boss, a taste for microbrews and an almost inhuman lack of dignity or shame as you follow this simple step-by-step guide.

USA Today: Sales smarts rule Internet. So it goes in the wacky world of the Internet economy, where technology smarts and financial acumen are still important, but not as important as a strong background in marketing. Venture capitalists are now insisting that the management team of a start-up include a marketing heavyweight.

SJ Mercury: DVD decision may come down soon. A Santa Clara County judge on Tuesday indicated he will decide soon whether the DVD industry is entitled to a court order that would shut down Web sites distributing the software keys to unscrambling DVD technology.

Editor & Publisher: LATimes.com Tests Online Copyright Permissions. LATimes.com has decided to charge 20 cents for every e-mailed copy of a story. However, there is nothing to prevent a reader from copying the text of a story on a Web page and pasting it into an e-mail without paying the fee.

USA Today: States move to protect online privacy. States are considering an unprecedented number of laws to protect online privacy. Governors, attorneys general and key legislators are pushing measures -- and in some cases constitutional amendments -- to stop the spread of government, financial, medical and Internet records.

Industry Standard: A Shoe-In for Success. ...but some networks aren't happy about advertising that might get potatoes off the couch. While ABC and Fox have agreed to let the commercials' cliffhanger say "Continued at whatever.nike.com," other networks have agreed to show only the URL – without the "continued at" teaser.

January 20, 2000
Internet World: The Vital Net Brand. But more important, at this stage of the Web, it exemplifies how important building a strong Internet brand is to a business. Having a solid brick-and-mortar reputation isn't enough to ensure success in the Web world, and floundering on the Web can only tarnish an overall brand.

• Industry Standard: From February 12, 1999; The Net's Brand-New Brand

Salon: E-book makers sold to a TV-centric company. In a strange twist for the emerging electronic book field, the two leading e-book makers, NuvoMedia and SoftBook Press, have been acquired by Gemstar International, which only a few months ago acquired TV Guide. The all-stock deal was completed last week and announced on Tuesday.

Business Week: Dot.Com Advertisers Could Get Sacked on Super Sunday. The panel, which debated the issue of whether dot.com ads work on prime-time TV, pointed to a shifting environment for Internet advertising and released survey data indicating that TV ads are among the least effective ways to generate traffic to a site.

ClickZ: Customization: Does It Really Fit? Such experimentalists deserve admiration for their patience and pursuit of Internet marketing knowledge. Hopefully the Levi's example won't discourage such pioneering or lead potential players to the conclusion that learning from experience doesn’t pay off.

Wired News: Trouble Indemnity for Web Sites. It was inevitable: Cyberspace is starting to look more and more like the real world. Insurance for e-commerce Web sites, protection against loss from malicious crackers and unstable equipment, is an acknowledgement that digital disasters can cause as much damage as any physical calamity.

NY Times: Turning a Map Into a Layer Cake of Information. Information is displayed in layers, with each succeeding layer laid over the preceding ones, like transparent sheets on an overhead projector. The resulting maps often reveal trends or patterns that might be missed if the same information was presented in a spreadsheet.

Internet World: Recruiters' New Tastes. In 1999, 48 percent of professionals at major tech companies had non-computer-related majors, according to a survey conducted by IntelliQuest Information Group on behalf of Hewlett-Packard. Many Internet companies want psychologists, linguists, and artists.

• USA Today: From May 26, 1999; Anthropologists adapt technology to world's cultures

LA Times: Web Firms Score Big Audience in Sports Fans. So most sports-oriented firms give away their content and depend on advertising and electronic commerce--just like legions of other Web sites. Their hope is that the detailed information they provide will eventually translate into profits from subscription fees, syndication or increased advertising and e-commerce.

Business Week: Can FedEx Get Up to Net Speed by Slowing Deliveries Down. Until now, customers wanting to ship via both ground and air services had to deal with two salespeople, call two different numbers to order a pickup, and go to different Web sites to track shipments. UPS, on the other hand, can offer customers all of those services in a package deal...

Wired News: DVDs That Self-Destruct. SpectraDisc, a spin-off from Spectra Science, a Providence, Rhode Island developer of laser technologies, is working on a special material to coat DVD discs, which start to self-destruct from the first moment of play.

Information Week: In-Memory Databases Aid Web Customization. In-memory databases can perform data retrieval many times faster than traditional disk-based databases, because data retrieval isn't hindered by the innately slower process of pulling information off disk drives.

January 21, 2000
NY Times: @Home Puts Speed Limits on Uploads by Subscribers. He said he can see the abusers on a display of a node's users, with one or two showing huge usage spikes. Although @Home turns this information over to its cable partners, that may be as far as the policing goes. The alternative to going after individuals is an upstream speed cap for everyone.

• News.Com: From June 28, 1999; Excite@Home speed caps draw fire, prompt new plans

Good Experience: The Web's Identity Crisis. Yes, there are designers and marketers with different goals, but the customer's goals can unite both sides. It's the customer experience, not market interests or designers' egos, that should guide Web development.

• A List Apart: From November 19, 1999; Where Have All the Designers Gone?

Interactive Week: Eudora Free, Thanks To Advertisers. Advertising network Real Media will handle ad sales on Eudora's behalf, marking the advertising firm's entry into the market for selling space in software applications. "Consumers will pay for software with their cash, their attention or by supplying information about themselves..."

• Useit.Com: From June 21, 1999; Spotlight of recent product placement deals by portals. Who owns my home, my office, and my tools? There is an unfortunate tendency for outsiders to buy preferred treatment in our tools.

News.Com: Profit squabble mars wireless Web future. It's the first time that one of the members has publicly sought profit from the others--but unlikely the last. Analysts say it's a sign the industry's quick growth could be slowed as other companies owning the technology seek to boost their own share in the wireless Net's profits.

Industry Standard: Does Geoworks Have a License To Print Money? Unlike Qualcomm, Geoworks does not control the technology – just an important piece. However, Dave Grannan, president and CEO of Geoworks, does expect to earn tens of millions of dollars over the next couple of years from this windfall.

Wired News: DVD Hackers Take a Hit in NY. After hearing three hours of argument, federal judge Louis A. Kaplan granted the MPAA's request for a preliminary injunction against three Web site hosts who had distributed the DVD decryption utility.

Industry Standard: Planet Web: The Language Gap. The enormous task of plugging in China, on its own, won't clear the way to smooth communication online. That's because language – and specifically, written language – is the stubborn barrier to life online for the Chinese.

• Feed Magazine: From July 7, 1999; How 19th-Century Politics Determined The 21st-Century. Clay Shirky.

Business Week: What If the Internet Ran Out of Power? At a recent conference at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington, D.C., Mills predicted that "half of all electricity within the next decade will be devoted to computers and the Internet."

FEED Magazine: The NBC/CBS Image Controversy. Clay Shirky. The brand-building skirmish has already led to a larger controversy about whether the whole equation of "image = truth" is newly threatened. But why should an ad pasted on the side of a building take precedence over an ad pasted in a video stream?

January 22, 2000
Infoworld: Wireless Web whirlwind. Although most experts agree that Web sites are not likely to lose their relevance, the trend toward sending personalized data directly to wireless devices and enabling users to conduct transactions based on the data they receive has far-reaching implications for those sites.

NY Times: The Future Is Now -- or Never. The company devoted $2 million to these alliances -- paid for through either a flat fee or one based on sales -- for a simple reason: "To be where people are shopping online means being on the portals," says Peter Baltaxe, RedEnvelope's senior vice president for business development.

Infoworld: 'E-warranty' services extend sales options. Now several Web-based services are emerging that claim to make it easier for e-tailers -- and the IT staffs that serve them -- to peddle extended warranties for a wide variety of goods. They'll also help consumers buy, track, and take advantage of the agreements online.

• NY Times: From December 27, 1999; Web Merchants Discover Extended Warranties

Wired News: RIAA Sues MP3.com. The lawsuit, filed in a district court in New York on Friday, seeks to prohibit the company from providing the Instant Listening service which offers customers instant access to digital copies of CDs that they buy through MP3.com partners.

January 23, 2000
Useit.Com: Saying No: How to Handle Missing Features. If users frequently look for something on your site that you don't have, then it is best to tell them no up front. Otherwise you will antagonize them by forcing them to waste time rooting around for something that's not there.

Internet Technical Group: An Ecological Model of Web Usage. In contrast, most would agree that the Internet is evolving at an extremely rapid pace. Consequently, the Internet offers unique opportunities to develop and test ecological hypotheses within a reasonably brief time frame using a large-scale, dynamic system.

• NY Times: From April 14, 1999; Searching for the Essence of the World Wide Web

SJ Mercury: Daimlerchrysler forms alliances with Web sites. [Gary Diltz, VP of retail strategies DaimlerChrysler AG] Diltz said DaimlerChrysler has invested $15 to $20 million in the ``front end'' of its Web sites, the part consumers see, but hundreds of millions of dollars more over the last three years in the back end computer systems to support the Web sites.

Internet Technical Group: Managing Errors in Transaction-based Web Applications. ...guidelines for preventing and/or minimizing some of the errors listed above; client- and server-side approaches of capturing errors; and design guidelines for communicating error messages to users.

January 24, 2000
Industry Standard: Patent Problems. Lawrence Lessig. While the old problems with patents remain – for example, can the patent office keep up with the pace of change – there is a new kind of patent that is sweeping technologists in the Valley. Yet we know nothing about the effect this patent will have.

Interactive Week: Building A Stronger Economy. The Orchard will make its money the traditional way, by separating tourists from their money. But the contractor building it will make money a new way: by using internetworking technologies to bring down the cost of construction and increase its bottom line.

Salon: Brand builder. Q&A with Lycos CEO Bob Davis. All of the leading media companies operate a number of products. Why? Because [you] can take individual interest types, segment them -- either demographically or by interest -- and package that and sell it to an advertiser.

• Web Informant: From May 26, 1998; There is no demand for messages. Doc Searls.

Wired News: Outpost Leaves Data Unguarded. "You can see someone's email address, their billing address, their shipping address, type of credit card they used, their order history -- everything they bought, everything they received, everything they're currently waiting for," Wynne said.

Washington Post: Sorting Out Mail's Place in Internet Age. ...Postmaster General William J. Henderson juggles the present and the future. He estimates he will need to chop U.S. Postal Service costs by $1 billion this year to avoid red ink. But he also needs to find a strategy, at whatever cost, to expand the agency into the new world of e-mail and e-commerce.

SJ Mercury: E-mergers trigger privacy worries. So what's left of the e-commerce company that had grand aspirations of becoming the Internet's superstore? For one thing, a huge database stuffed with intricate details about the items more than 600,000 members looked at on its site...

Industry Standard: A Word-for-Word Imitation. It's a bland, bland, bland, bland Web world. That's the word from cutting-edge, New York-based online pub Word, which traded in its award-winning online aesthetics this week for the sanitized look-and-feel of Yahoo. In fact, it practically is Yahoo, right down to the jumpy red letters and the exclamation point.

Industry Standard: (Serious) Playtime. Barksdale's witticism – or was it analysis? – proved far more clever than he knew. In fact, it's become the overriding innovation ethic of the Internet. Ambitious Web entrepreneurs and desperate Fortune 1000 firms promiscuously plaster their prototypes on the Net all the time, just to see what sticks.

NY Times: Creating Marketplaces for Business-to-Business Transactions. The first site, for the food and packaged goods industry, will be a relatively modest version of an Internet marketplace, in that it will not support transactions. Rather, it will allow suppliers like Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo's Frito-Lay to automatically notify retailers like the Kroger Co. on changes made to the suppliers' product catalogs.

Infoworld: Consortium to power up broadband. The race to deliver broadband services directly into businesses and homes will heat up this summer when a new nationwide network created in secret by an alliance of utility companies and computer industry giants will offer voice, data, and television services.

LA Times: More Firms Are Willing to Work for Stock Options. Trading services for stock has been taking place on a small scale for decades, but now professional firms are increasingly employing the practice--especially since clients are vigorously competing for their services in this super-heated economy.

Wired News: Pollster Sheds Old Ways. Harris is the first company to rely entirely on the Internet in the high-stakes game of predicting election outcomes. Polling online has been considered particularly risky because of the thorny issues involved in using Internet samples to extrapolate results for the general US population.

Industry Standard: When the News Is Us. If you want clear-eyed coverage of this deal, CNN probably is not the place to look. By the same token, disclosing every conceivable conflict at all times can be a misleading distraction.

January 25, 2000
USA Today: Activists charge DoubleClick double cross. DoubleClick Inc., the Internet's largest advertising company, has begun tracking Web users by name and address as they move from one Web site to the next, USATODAY.com has learned.

Wired News: Fast Talk for Everybody. Millions of adults are now flocking to IM. They use it for business negotiations, real-time reminders, medical emergencies, or any time email isn't fast enough. And the new craze will only keep spreading, as IM becomes available 24/7 on pagers, televisions, and handhelds.

Salon: "Excuse me, are you human?" Simson Garfinkel. Ironically, if Grandma did write an e-mail about poor service, it's increasingly likely that her message might be read and replied to by a machine -- a machine engaged in the elaborate deception of pretending to be a human being.

• MIT Technology Review: From January/Febuary 2000; Dr. Email Will See You Now

Industry Standard: The Importance of Being Earliest. And it's an unavoidable part of launching a Web site, argues Greg Terk, Guru's public relations director: "Getting it all done at once is a fantasy," he says. That's the thinking at a lot of dot-coms these days: Better buggy than late. But there are cautionary tales of companies that jumped now and regretted it later.

News.Com: Webvan adds brand names to service. Webvan said it hopes to gain knowledge in merchandising, marketing and managing its supply chain from the alliances. The food companies will be able to test and develop strategies for online merchandising and increase awareness of their brands.

Industry Standard: Ask Jeeves Targets Direct Hit in Acquisition. While Ask Jeeves relies on human editors to help determine the relevancy of many results, Direct Hit's technology is fully automated and covers more of the Web, executives from both companies say.

Wired News: British ISPs Crack Down on Hate. Internet service providers in Britain announced new self-regulatory content policies aimed at removing racist material from the Internet on Tuesday. The Internet Watch Foundation, an industry-funded self-policing body, said it will begin cracking down on "potentially criminal" hate content.

ABCNews.Com: In China, The Net Grows Up. "Big Mamas" are Web site employees who lead armies of volunteers patrolling chat rooms and bulletin boards, zapping risky political commentary, foul language and unwanted ads. The intricate system shows how Chinese users are taking it upon themselves to keep the Internet orderly...

USA Today: Companies put Web to work as recruiter. It's no longer enough to post jobs on the Internet. Employers today are attracting candidates with such tactics as downloaded video and audio feeds, online employment tests and real-time chats with recruiters.

TechWeb: Animated Ads Take To The Non-Virtual World. Jeffrey Harrow. Similar to the huge daylight electronic displays you might see atsports stadiums, these billboards will be connected to the Internet, and advertisers will be able to log in to them and update what they display in real time.

NY Times: Ticketmaster Will Permit Home Printing of Tickets. Ticketmaster said the system would spare consumers delivery charges and give them a respite from lines at will-call windows. In addition, customers would receive coupons for local restaurants or parking, as well as directions to the event.

January 26, 2000
NY Times: Senate Lobbying Data Is Going Online. The United States Senate is trying to close that gap. The Secretary of the Senate, who handles the Senate's administrative functions, is introducing a system that will let lobbyists file their reports electronically. The information would be available on the Internet immediately.

• NY Times: From September 29, 1999; Senate Campaign Data Trapped in the Microfilm Era

• USA Today: From September 27, 1999; Web sites promise better storm info. Next time a hurricane looms, some major Web sites hope to do a better job of letting travelers know if their flights have been canceled.

News.Com: Copyright defendant Napster on other side in property dispute. Software maker Napster, which stands accused of facilitating illegal music downloads, saw the tables turn this week as a college student posted documentation of how its software program works.

Forbes: Attention shoppers. But most analysts who follow packaged goods companies don't see e-tail as a means of addressing the toughest issues these firms currently face. "What's currently plaguing the packaged food companies now has more to do with the fact that consumers have to eat more of these products every year for them to achieve sales growth.

InfoWorld: World Wide Web Consortium combines HTML, XML into XHTML. "[Rewriting those documents] is a lot of work, and it also can sometimes lead to having a Web for one kind of device and a Web for another," Daly said. "The W3C aims to ensure universality for the Web so that it's one universal information space in which all devices can be equal participants."

Interactive Week: Net Accounting Comes Under Scrutiny. Over the next year, the FASB will be examining about 20 accounting issues, grouped loosely as "the Internet issues." The practices to be examined by the board are not new. In some cases - such as barter advertising - they've been used by brick-and-mortar companies for years.

Salon: Taste-testing Aqua. Scott Rosenberg. One of those questions, curiously, is whether Aqua's emphasis on "fizz" is part of a move on the company's part toward the general consumer market -- and away from its hardcore user base among graphics and design professionals.

• Salon: From September 30, 1999; A worm in the Apple?

ZDNN: Net retailing shakeout hits Boo.com. The Internet retailer shakeout continues. Officials at high-end clothier Boo.com confirmed Wednesday that the company was laying off employees and revamping its Web site -- the latest online retailer to feel the pinch after the holidays.

Editor & Publisher: Spam Filters Also Catch Opt-in E-mail Newsletters. Steve Outing. Trouble is, even legitimate e-mail publishers sometimes get lumped in with junk e-mailers, and their opt-in e-newsletters get blocked by anti-spam filter technology.

Business Week: What Makes Cybershoppers Click? TV Ads Come in Third. Andersen conducted a nationwide survey of nearly 1,500 experienced Net users in November. One in four said banner ads drove them to try online shopping, beating out newspapers or magazine ads (14%), TV commercials (11%), radio spots (4%), and billboards (4%).

January 27, 2000
NY Times: It's Not Big Brother, It's Customer Service. What the shopper may not have realized was that her every mouse click was being observed by Johanne Torres, a 23-year-old employee of icontact.com, sitting at a terminal at the company's nondescript offices in Fairfield, Conn., some 500 miles away from the shopper's home in Morrisville, N.C.

ZDNN: Does DoubleClick track too closely? DoubleClick's plan is to take the names of people registered at Web sites, match them up to the purchasing behavior collected by Abacus and then use it to show people ads that would be of interest to them whenever they visit an alliance site.

ZDNN: GO.com recasts portal strategy. Now Disney is recasting GO in a way that it hopes will reflect the strengths of Disney itself. The revamped portal will focus on four main areas: entertainment, recreation, leisure and lifestyles.

• Salon: From May 4, 1999; Pathfinder, we hardly knew ye. Scott Rosenberg. But at its heart, Go is a latter-day Pathfinder -- a leviathan Web site built around a meaningless new brand name and organized according to a corporation's ownership structure rather than a user's needs.

NY Times: Boxed In: Exploring a Big-Box Store Online. What I couldn't understand, as I wandered around in confusion on the Wal-Mart site, was why anybody would ever buy anything there. I tried, believe me, I tried. But every time I thought I had zeroed in on a potential purchase, I encountered problems.

ClickZ: The Future of Retailing. It will be impossible for bricks-and-mortar businesses to compete on price and selection. But where retailers can compete with the Internet is by offering what the Internet can never make available: the metaphorical test drive.

News.Com: Amazon buyers choose Barnes & Noble for returns. Barnes & Noble representatives said they are aware that people often return books purchased elsewhere to its more than 500 superstores scattered across the country.

SJ Mercury: China censors Internet. Another reason for the absence of panic in the industry, she said, is the widely held perception that the government wants to -- and needs to -- find a way to accommodate the Internet if it hopes to continue to modernize and grow the economy.

Detroit Free Press: Internet may alter ways carmakers quote their prices. U.S. automakers might change their pricing to reflect what dealers pay for cars rather than the typically higher "manufacturer's suggested retail prices" because of competition from on-line car-shopping sites.

SJ Mercury: Japan's Matsushita steps into Internet age. Japan's Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd, the world's largest consumer electronic maker, said on Thursday it was phasing out using telephones and faxes for ordering components and instead would use the Web.

News.Com: Yahoo-GeoCities shadowed by Web publishing woes. Instead, the real benefit in acquiring GeoCities, analysts agree, comes down to traditional portal metrics. "That deal was clearly about using (GeoCities') valuation to buy reach and traffic," said Chris Charron, an analyst at Forrester Research.

January 28, 2000
Salon: Why don't judges want their financial interests revealed online? Either way, the crazy thing about this legal battle between APBnews and the judges is that the information in question is already publicly available -- by written request. The thing the judges are resisting is putting it online...

• USA Today: From December 15, 1999; Judges' data won't be released online

News.Com: Sony aims to push more products through the Net. As a result of those discussions, Sony authorized six retailers to sell Sony's audio and video products over the Internet late last year. Now, for the first time, Sony is clearly stating that it intends to take the next step--selling its own products directly to consumers.

• News.Com: From June 17, 1999; Sony may expand direct sales on Web

ChannelSeven: 7 From Seven with George Bell. Q&A with George Bell, CEO Excite@Home. I think the most viable is permission email and the least has to be untargeted banner ads. Just from a click-through and conversion factor, opt-in email promotions generate a lot more customers and we see these numbers for Excite.

Motley Fool: Son of DIVX: DVD Copy Control. But attempting to use laws to prevent the natural commoditization of previously proprietary products and the resulting transition to a service-based industry... It's like prohibition in the 1920s.

Editor & Publisher: E Ink raises $37 Million. The development of "electronic ink" continues to attract attention from the publishing industry, as E Ink Corp. announced $37 million in second-round financing to further its development of re-printable books and newspapers. Several newspaper companies are among the investors.

USA Today: New Web addresses still a year away. So far, the most forceful and successful arguments against expanding Internet addresses, called ''domains,'' are from the world's most powerful corporations. Some jealously guard their trademarks and complain that the current system already is too awkward to police.

January 29, 2000
NY Times: Even Offline Publications Try Giving It Away. In fact, some print magazines are using the Web to help them adopt some sort of free model. Unlike free alternative newspapers, these publications are not being given away on the street or at newsstands. Rather, the goal is to build a subscriber base that is attractive to advertisers.

Advertising Age: Automakers involve consumers. General Motors Corp. recently started real-time, online clinics to gather consumer reaction to upcoming products, said Mark Hogan, president of the carmaker's e-commerce unit, e-gm, which was formed in August. "The days [when] we brought in 1,000 people over a weekend to look at our products will soon be a thing of the past..."

InfoWorld: An Interview with Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. A healthy and sometimes heated debate over the definition of information architecture continues to this day. These debates are a good illustration of the ambiguity of language and of the political and emotional implications of information architecture design.

WebWord.Com: Who is Jakob Siegal? Q&A with Vincent Flanders. I said "Web design is about money" long before it was acceptable. I've taken a lot of hits for that concept, but it's true. 95% of all Web design is about making money.

Wired News: Web Changing Politics? Not. The reasons are simple: The Net just doesn't have the centralized viewership, and any presidential hopeful's ambitions are better served by an appearance on Nightline instead of a clunky Web broadcast.

• Freedom Forum: From September 21, 1999; Is 2000 the Net's big election year? Don't believe it. Jon Katz.

January 30, 2000
USA Today: AOL, MCI drafting Net tax compromise. The core proposal involves a five-year extension on the Internet tax moratorium, analysts say. This would give states time to simplify their sales taxes in exchange for being allowed to collect sales taxes on Internet, mail order and other remote sales.

FEED Magazine: The Mega-Buck Marriage Of Servers And Desktops. Clay Shirky. In this "content at the edges" system, the old separation between desktop and server vanishes, with the PC playing both functions at different times. This is the future, and Microsoft knows it.

SJ Mercury: AP, CNET to share content, News. Jai Singh, Editor of CNET News.com, said the agreement was unprecedented in that ``it aligns an online news organization three years young with the oldest and largest news organization in the world.

January 31, 2000
Today's Links Story: newmedia.com: a DHTML revolution?

NY Times: Not-So-Subtle Engine Drives AOL Profit Forecasts. From the first pop-up ad to tiny text links on obscure pages, America Online has found more ways to sell more pieces of its service than any other online company. And its ad sales force, now more than 400 strong, is widely considered the toughest, most aggressive team of deal makers in the industry.

NY Times: Convergence Raises Concerns About Access. Denise Caruso. Combining the world's largest Internet service provider with the world's largest news, entertainment and cable television megalith has set off increasingly urgent discussions about the future of broadband and how best to ensure that no single company abuses its control of the Internet's infrastructure.

Salon: M is for mobile. Q&A with Alain Rossman, CEO of Phone.com. There's no doubt in my mind we've won the standards war. When you have that many companies with that much power representing that much of the world market all agreeing on one way of doing things, that way is the way.

Upside: Wireless Craze. The one constant is that application developers are hedging their loyalties with multiplatform compatibility, designing programs that run on both phones and PDAs. That's because nobody can say which devices will spring triumphant out of today's cluttered marketplace.

SJ Mercury: Psion to put the Internet in your pocket. ``The intention is to put the Internet in the user's pocket,'' Chief Executive David Levin told reporters. ``This will be full Web browsing as we understand it.''Full remote access at present requires a laptop computer linked to cellphone at best...

NY Times: A.P. to Carry Web Service's News Reports. The deal with Cnet, which specializes in coverage of the Internet and related industries, is The A.P.'s first with a nontraditional news organization and provides another validation of Internet journalism -- a genre sometimes associated with gossip and scandal-mongering. 88

• Salon: From January 6, 1997; New news in old bottles. Scott Rosenberg.

ClickZ: Selling Online Means Always Having to Say You're Sorry. How can saying that you're sorry make such a difference? Because apologizing is a uniquely human thing to do. Computers don't say they're sorry. Customer Relationship Management Solutions don't say they're sorry.

Information Week: Putting The "E" Back In Business. Still, the acceptance of the Internet is propelling business toward a stage in which every process or transaction--from product development to supplier negotiations to volume sales--will use online communication in some form.

Interactive Week: Can Webvan Deliver? Webvan is in hot pursuit of the Holy Grail for online retailers: same-day or next-day delivery of everything from groceries to videos to appliances. It wants to be the company that conquers the other "last mile" problem of the Internet...

Industry Standard: Hold the Mortar. Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster, authors of Blown to Bits. Like cold fusion or the Laffer Curve, clicks and mortar is an idea that a certain constituency simply craves. If clicks and mortar didn't exist, somebody would be working feverishly to invent it.

NY Times: Investors Ask if Beijing Can Enforce All Its New Internet Rules. With the number of Internet users here more than quadrupling, to 8.9 million in 1999, and with new online ventures proliferating, they think that the government will have neither the resources nor the ingenuity to monitor every chat room or to vet every business plan.

Industry Standard: Reebok Stumbles. So after only four months, the ShopReebok.com site is on its way down, just one of many anticipated casualties. Pant says Reebok will rely on its top retail clients – from Just for Feet to Sports Authority – to sell Reebok products on their sites.

• Industry Standard: From April 15, 1999; Reebok to Give the Boot to Renegade Vendors