February 1, 2000
Salon: Last train to Cluesville. Review of the Cluetrain Manifesto. "The Cluetrain Manifesto" is unique, however, in its refreshingly humanist orientation. Whereas many books attempt to analyze Internet phenomena in economic or cybernetic terms, the authors of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" take an unabashedly narrative approach...

Business 2.0: The Cable Cartel. Clay Shirky. Competition is a bitch, and no matter how much lip service people pay to competitive markets, there will always be investors who salivate over the prospect of backing a cartel, and that is exactly the promise cable holds. It will fail, for the same reasons CD-ROMs are not neck and neck with the Web this year...

TechWeb: Cannibalistic Strategies Needed For Internet. [Masayoshi Son, president and CEO of Softbank] Son illustrated that point with two extremes -- zero and infinity. In the Internet, he said, it is possible to think of business models based on zero time-lag and variable costs, plus infinite access to stocks, to information and to customers.

• Net Company: From Fall 1999; Time for Zero Time

Industry Standard: Senators, Privacy Advocates Spar Over FIDNet Plan. But perhaps the most controversial part of the plan calls for a federal intrusion detection network, or FIDNet, to monitor 22 government computer systems for signs of cyberattack. The administration has suggested FIDNet would watch for computer system anomalies that might signal an attack.

NY Times: Lobbying and Confusion Over Internet Taxes Escalate. The two groups battling over whether or not to tax Internet sales contributed nearly $3 million to members of Congress last year, according to new spending reports. And lobbying on the issue promises to intensify as the November elections near.

USA Today: Businesses warm to Net deal-making. Faceless business deals are expected to spread beyond the high-tech industry and become increasingly accepted as a new mode of forging partnerships and contracts. Already, some companies are cropping up to help automate deals that once were made in person.

News.Com: Amazon moves into home services with Living.com. As part of the deal, Amazon will pay cash for an 18 percent stake in the Austin, Texas-based Living.com. In addition, Living.com will pay Amazon $145 million over five years for a permanent "tab," or store location, on Amazon's home page.

Washington Post: Medical Web Sites Faulted on Privacy. The report, an advance copy of which was provided to The Washington Post, compared consumer health care sites on the Internet to gawky adolescents--with plenty of abilities but little self-control...

• NY Times: From January 14, 2000; Editorial Content on Drugstore Sites Draws Questions

CIO: Into the Future, Without Wires. Between the ongoing 3G standards battle and the reluctance of many carriers and equipment makers to ditch their current—and very profitable—mobile phone technologies in favor of a new and untried system, it may be years before 3G becomes a household word.

February 2, 2000
Salon: Friends don't let friends use AOL. So, like lots of people I know, I found myself on a mission to convert a friend from AOL to a standard-issue ISP. I wanted him to have unfettered access to the Net. "Why are you sticking with this teeny window to surf in, with all these ugly colored buttons?"

Business Week: Brian Kelley: Getting Ford into High Cyber Gear. The young manager, who just arrived at Ford in July, has become Chief Executive Jacques Nasser's top general in the battle to put the 96-year-old industrial giant in the forefront of automotive e-commerce. Says Kelley: "What we're beginning now will reverberate through the company for decades."

News.Com: Ford taps UPS to track vehicles. Ford said it will team with a unit of UPS to track the millions of cars and trucks it produces annually, using bar codes and the Internet. The companies expect the new system to reduce by up to 40 percent the time required to deliver vehicles...

Freedom Forum: Arrests won't stop Net threat to governments, corporations. Jon Katz. China and the Motion Picture Association are both about to learn the hard way what American educators, religious leaders, law enforcement officials — even politicians — are just beginning to figure out: The Net isn't censorable.

Red Herring: Pattie Maes fires up new ratings venture. According to Ms. Maes, the technology helps solve a problem many new online exchanges are grappling with: a lack of trust between unknown buyers and sellers. "It's a huge concern. You have all these buyers and sellers but little information about the trustworthiness of the sellers..."

• MIT Software Agents Group: Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce
• Useit.Com: From September 5, 1999; Reputation Managers are Happening

Salon: Stop the "personal" spam. Now, though, many online journalists -- who stand to profit from their publication's financial success -- seem to augment their reporting jobs with something more akin to sales and marketing.

• Industry Standard: From November 11, 1999; Online Journalists Keep Their Eyes on Daily Numbers

News.Com: Amazon gets a face-lift. "It's a test," Amazon spokesman Bill Curry said. "We'll see how people react to it, and what they do with the different interface." Amazon began trying out the format today, Curry said. Many customers may still see Amazon's old design because the company is serving up the test page at random...

InfoWorld: Mobile world readies for IP-based future. Leading wireless service providers and equipment suppliers at the 2000 GSM World Congress in Cannes, France on Wednesday announced the formation of an industry group aimed at speeding up the adoption of open, mobile Internet standards.

Editor & Publisher: Web Users Also Watch TV - At the Same Time. Steve Outing. If you've got the attention of an Internet user with your online service, that person also may have the television on in the same room. Web news publishers should already be thinking about services they can provide to users who are watching TV and interacting online at the same time.

Mappa.Mundi Magazine: A Map of Yahoo! But what would a map of Yahoo!'s hierarchical classification of the Web look like? Would an interactive map of Yahoo!, rather than the conventional listing of sites, be more useful as navigational tool?

February 3, 2000
FEED Magazine: The Constraints Of The Wireless Web. Clay Shirky. WAP, by contrast, is being pushed commercially from the jump, and it is fenced in by a remarkable array of patents which will affect both producers and consumers of WAP content. These differences put WAP's development on a collision course with the Web as it exists today.

Salon: This e-mail brought to you by ... a bad idea. The idea, while simple, is incredibly insidious. As if your inbox weren't already stuffed with enough spam, commercial solicitations and e-mail newsletters stuffed with text ads, now your friends get to send you huge banner-type ads, too?

Salon: MP3 free-for-all. Despite its rather humble beginnings as a college freshman's software project, Napster represents a new paradigm in online music distribution -- much like its predecessor MP3.com, which is also embroiled in a lawsuit with the RIAA.

Business 2.0: Learn from the Libraries. Jim Griffin, CEO of Cherry Lane Digital. Essentially, we are learning that the answers lie in new business models, not technology-based solutions. The video industry that once emphasized control now sees greater value in growing the crowd. The best forms of copy protection are new business models that destroy the motive to copy, not its mechanism.

Internet Week: Auto Dealers Take Web Offensive. Rather than resist the Web revolution, auto dealerships are starting to embrace it--to improve interactions with both consumers and suppliers. They are taking on their fledgling online competitors and improving dealer-to-dealer communication.

Business 2.0: Lessons From the Rust Belt. Evan I. Schwartz. Who would have guessed that the rust-belt dinosaurs would be among the first to use the Internet to obliterate an age-old business model and replace it with a shiny new one?

Business Week: The Online Beauty Biz Is Looking Pretty Ugly. In fact, the exclusive online strategies of the leading cosmetics companies may hasten the shakeout in the market segment. With the top brands off-limits, beauty products e-tailers are left to battle over less prestigious products.

CIO: Sticky Business. The idea of "stickiness" is one of the most important ideas in electronic commerce—and business in general. In e-commerce, it's a measure of how much attention a website receives over time.

• PC Magazine: From May 24, 1999; The All-Things Approach. John C. Dvorak.

News.Com: Virgin Atlantic limits auction to Windows users. "We are really using this as a test to see how our inventory sells," said Bill Danylko, interactive marketing manager at Virgin Atlantic. "If we choose to move forward with it, we will make it compatible for the Mac (and other systems)."

News.Com: Sony pushes PlayStation in e-commerce deal. He said e-commerce using existing retailing networks like convenience stores are seen as a stop gap until consumers are able to simply download games from the Internet. Japan's more than 50,000 convenience stores, many of which open 24 hours a day, already offer consumers a wide range of services...

Wired News: Moveable Media: Stick or Card? A fledgling organization of technology and consumer electronics companies wrapped up their inaugural meeting Wednesday with the promise that their proposed Secure Digital Memory Card for portable music players will soon be ready to do battle with Sony's Memory Stick.

News.Com: Winery sues over Net sales. A Virginia vineyard is hoping to put a cork on state laws that restrict Internet wine sales by challenging a New York law that makes it illegal for out-of-state wineries to ship to consumers.

February 4, 2000
Salon: The Napster files. Scott Rosenberg. Who is the music industry going to sue? When it gets mad at companies that provide warehouse-like servers, like MP3.com, it can sue (and has) -- and if it wins, it can shut those servers down. The brilliance of Napster is that, like the Internet itself, it lacks any center...

@New York: The Big Boys (Still) Don't Get It: It's About Databases, Stupid. Jason Chervokas. At its heart, this is what the battle over "Instant Listening" is about -- a true paradigm shift in the music business away from a product-based economy and towards a database-driven one, a service business that will reduce the recorded music industry's ability to milk consumers with newer formats and repackaging of content every few years.

Computerworld: Who's Controlling Cyberspace? Q&A with Lawrence Lessig. We need to resolve this very quickly, because there will soon be a whole slew of patents claiming the space of e-commerce. Then, anyone engaging in e-commerce will be forced into this licensing game before they can turn on their Web site. That's an extraordinarily high cost.

ClickZ: The Solution to Email Deluge. Here's a radical idea: When you get an email from a prospect, rethink what's on your web site. In other words, if your company gets an email, then your web site has failed. That's because most people only resort to email when they can't find information quickly and easily.

• Forbes: From December 27, 1999; Santa Flaws

• USA Today: From January 26, 1999; Web shoppers look for ease of use
• Interbrand Press Release: From June 9, 1999; IBM and Interbrand Rank Top10 Bank Brands on Internet

SJ Mercury: Dot-com film critics are shut out. In a last-ditch effort to keep Internet critics from revealing whodunit in ``Scream 3'' (opening today), Miramax Films ``disinvited'' 20 local cyber-critics -- and 80 more nationally -- to a Wednesday screening of the second sequel to the 1996 sleeper hit.

LA Times: Software Makers Aim to Dilute Consumer Rights. But in dozens of ways, large and small, the bills tip the balance of power toward software companies, according to law professors, consumer groups, more than 20 state attorneys general and some corporate software buyers that are beginning to organize an opposition to the UCITA campaign.

Forbes: Wise load: B2B hits the road. NTE is the newest on a long list of business-to-business Web-based marketplaces promising to boost productivity by slashing the time and cost of transactions. In this case, what's for sale is the extra room in the back of the commercial trucks that collectively travel some 166 billion miles every year.

PC Week: Coming soon: Faster wireless Web access. Lucent is the latest wireless LAN hardware provider attempting to team with ISPs (Internet service providers) to offer full-fledged access to the Internet. "Wireless LANs will help people who are going to public hot spots and allow them to actually Web surf to content media sites..."

NY Times: Ford Offers Workers PC's and Internet Service for $5 a Month. Envious of the high stock market valuations of computer and Internet companies, Ford officials have begun a concerted effort in the last year to portray their company not as a stodgy manufacturer but as a maker of consumer products actively involved in electronic commerce.

EE Times: Trade associations scramble to keep up with Web. Seeing the writing on the wall, many of the associations serving the electronics industry are revamping operations to make better use of the Internet. Indeed, some say that deft use of the Web can actually bolster membership rolls.

ZDNN: eBay under DOJ investigation. The preliminary investigation by the department's antitrust division is still at an early stage, and there is no indication that it will result in legal action against eBay. But a team of investigators is examining the online-auction market and has met with two smaller auction sites...

February 5, 2000
NY Times: Online Revolution's Latest Twist: Computers Screening Job Seekers. Dozens of big-name retailers, including Target, Hollywood Video, Macy's and Longs Drug Stores, are replacing paper applications and in-person interviews with computer kiosks in the initial screening of applicants.

Advertising Age: Expedia puts up $50 mil to build travelers' trust. Expedia recently dropped its registration requirement, a move it believes will spur growth. Many travel and e-tailing sites require registration and passwords, a step Jupiter found deterred 40% of consumers from using them.

Wired News: 'Whois' Is Safe At First. But what about the database's name -- can anyone own that? That was the question raised in the discussion forums of Internet infrastructure professionals when someone discovered that Internet service provider Verio had applied for a trademark on the term.

Computerworld: Tweak this! One yellow box. A measly 150 by 72 pixels on the QuickenLoans.com home page. Fifteen minutes of coding on a Tuesday afternoon. Yet it boosted Quicken Loans Inc.'s user return rates from 2% to 11%. Talk about an inexpensive way to recapture customer loyalty.

InfoWorld: Viral marketing goes one step too far -- to a place where friends spam friends. One of the latest buzzwords in e-commerce is "viral marketing" -- the basic idea being to use the power of the Internet to spread the good news about a product like an epidemic. OK, but is it a good idea for your friends to be paid to infect you?

February 6, 2000
Useit.Com: Novice vs. Expert Users. Web usability has focused on ease of learning for the new visitor. While learnability remains important, it is time to also consider expert performance.

Internet World: To The Point. It began with Compton's attempt to patent searchable multimedia, and it has gone downhill from there. Today, it's fair to say that Internet patents are turning into a means to attract venture capital or to punish a competitor instead of a way to reward innovation while preserving openness.

Internet World: Distributing the goods Now, the Hard Part. While many commerce startups turn to outsiders to pick, pack, and ship their merchandise, other Internet companies are handling distribution services in-house. It's a decision that could have long-term implications for a company...

Internet World: Pitches at your fingertips PDAs as Ad Vehicles. The PDA market is one of the next beachheads for advertisers. Personal digital assistants, such as Palms and devices running Windows CE, certainly present advertisers with challenges: There's a serious lack of screen space, and content delivery is slow because of narrow bandwidth.

The Economist: Tearaway Tesco. Despite the gloom that has descended over some of online shopping’s best and brightest, there is one big "e-tailer" whose star shines more fiercely than ever. The surprise is that this is no Silicon Valley digital hotshot, but a dull old British grocer.

February 7, 2000
Welcome to viewers of Jakob Nielsen's webcast show, The Practice of Simplicity on Oracle.Com.

USA Today: E-purchasing saves businesses billions. In a matter of months the Internet has become a sharp tool that is on the verge of carving more than $1 trillion from the $7 trillion companies spend on components, supplies and services worldwide, analysts say.

Forbes ASAP: 5 Habits of Highly Effective Revolution. Hal Varian. But the same patterns of behavior occurred in the development of earlier technologies, including steam engines, telegraphy, automobiles, airplanes, and radio. Investors who know something of the history of these eras can extract valuable lessons to help them understand how the Internet economy is likely to evolve.

Forbes ASAP: Voices of the Revolution. Forbes ASAP gathers Jim Clark, Esther Dyson, Michael Lewis, Ira Magaziner, John Markoff, Charles Van Doren, and others to sound off about the digital revolution.

Internet Week: The Business Lessons Of The 19th Century Internet. The entrepreneurs that helped set up and exploit this global e-commerce network were amassing wealth beyond their dreams. Meanwhile, others were developing new means of stealing money or secrets electronically. And, as Tom Standage explains in his compelling book "The Victorian Internet", it all began happening more than 150 years ago.

• Byte: From September 13, 1999; The Victorian Internet

Information Week: State Farm Banks On Online Financial Services. The Internet is key to allowing the company to quickly roll out banking services to all of its customers, says Stan Ommen, State Farm Bank's CEO and president. "It gives us the opportunity to go nationwide sooner than if we waited to train all 16,000 of our agents...

• Business Week: From November 22, 1999; Insurers Step Gingerly into Cyberspace

MSNBC: Home builders begin to learn the benefits of Internet business. At last month's annual International Builders’ Show here, Internet companies were out in force touting services for everything from shortening supply lines between builders and their suppliers to getting rid of unsold inventory.

NY Times: Critics Press Legal Assault on Tracking of Web Users. Privacy advocates, though, have never been comfortable with the fact that few consumers realize they are being monitored, and that when they do realize it, they often find it difficult to opt out -- that is, to instruct DoubleClick not to track their online activities.

Interactive Week: Health Sites Seek Ethics Code. The alliance comprises 20 health-related sites, including AmericasDoctor.com, Drkoop.com, Mediconsult.com and PlanetRx.com, that are trying to agree on a basic set of ethics for the online medical information industry.

Interactive Week: Web Site Usability Tests Arrive. But against the advantages of tapping into human intelligence and frailties, rival firms are pitting the economy, speed and persistence of machines, in the form of software agents that try to mimic the efforts of people slogging their way through sites.

• Useit.Com: From December 12, 1999; Voodoo Usability

Industry Standard: UPS Tests its Peddle's Mettle. United Parcel Service announced that it has spearheaded a new group, UPS e-Ventures, that will act as the research, development, and incubation arm of UPS's e-commerce initiatives.

Industry Standard: Trade Groups: The Next Roadkill? Trade associations tend to move cautiously to avoid offending their members. While they lumber across the road, hundreds of startups loaded with tons of venture capital money are attempting to position themselves as hubs for information and commerce in every conceivable niche industry.

USA Today: Keeping up with the dot-coms. McGuire said his firm, which counts Lycos, Inc., among its clients, didn't want to risk losing its associates to up-and-coming Internet companies. Judging by the grateful e-mails that flooded management last week, the strategy created some pretty content employees.

February 8, 2000
Washington Post: In Japan, the Internet Without the PC. But the Japanese--among whom 7 in 10 households use a mobile phone--are much more likely than Americans to go wireless. While nearly everyone in the United States logs on over a computer, nearly 6 million of Japan's 17.5 million Internet users--fully 34 percent--gain access through mobile phones...

Forbes ASAP: Japan: The Maybe Restoration. Web phone mania is one sign that Japan is a nation on the brink of a big change, Internet-style--a change that could ultimately allow the country's long-languishing economy to leap past ours, at least in one arena. To understand how this could happen, consider the drivers of a Japanese online revolution.

Industry Standard: FTC Investigates Amazon's Alexa. The FTC wants to determine whether Amazon's Alexa Internet subsidiary has engaged in unfair and deceptive trade practices. Additionally, both Amazon and Alexa have been named as defendants in two pending private lawsuits.

USA Today: 'Database Nation:' Big Browser's watching. Review of Simson Garfinkel's book Database Nation. But Database Nation goes beyond simple anecdotes to synthesis -- a unified, sweeping indictment of how America's failure to establish privacy laws is rapidly concentrating power in the hands of governments, insurance companies and dot-com billionaires.

visualLogic: Are your pages upside down? Patrick J. Lynch, co-author of the Yale Web Style Guide. The top four vertical inches of your home page are the most valuable real estate in your Web site, and should be the most dense area in your site in both visual and functional complexity.

Boston Globe: Law firms up salary ante to fight associates' flight to dot-coms. ''We've lost, so far, four to five people in the past year to some very high-quality dot-coms,'' Maguire said. ''So, we decided to take salary off the table. We'd like people to focus on the quality of our training and the collegiality of the firm and not get lost in dollars and cents.''

Infoworld: Government wants sharper look at e-commerce impact. The U.S. Commerce Department again this year is asking the U.S. Congress to provide money that would fund the first detailed picture of the impact of electronic commerce on the U.S. economy.

SF Chronicle: Kana Acquires Silknet in Deal For $4.2 Billion. Kana Communications, a Redwood City company that helps firms manage their e- mail, unveiled plans yesterday to spend $4.2 billion for Silknet Software, a New Hampshire firm that uses Web software to help businesses field questions from customers.

CIO WebBusiness: When It Absolutely Has to Get There Today. By providing warehousing and delivery services to online retailers, sameday.com says that items ordered by 2 p.m. arrive by 8 p.m. in Los Angeles, San Francisco and metropolitan New York, areas where sameday.com operates regional distribution facilities.

MIT Technology Review: Fiber Optics to the Home. I named our futuristic family after Hugo Gernsback, a technophile and writer who published America’s first science-fiction magazine in 1926. But in just a couple of months, some residents of Palo Alto, Calif., will get a taste of these powers when their homes are wired directly to optical fibers.

News.Com: Palm extends hand to Adobe document technology. Adobe's PDF format, which is widely used to recreate text-based documents online, will bring e-book capability to the Palm, according to a statement from Palm Computing vice president Mark Bercow.

Industry Standard: The Innovator's Advantage. Review of Michael Schrage's book Serious Play. How does Schrage relate his theories to the Internet Economy? Unfortunately, he leaves it up to them to draw their own conclusions. However, it's not hard to see Schrage's culture of rapid prototyping happening all over the Web.

February 9, 2000
Fortune: Why This Fan May Say Sayonara to Sony. Stewart Alsop. I quote from the manual: "The OpenMG technology allows you to enjoy digital music while maintaining the copyrights of its holders." Who cares? Maybe some copyright lawyers buy the thing because of its great copyright protection; I bought it to enjoy music. Silly me. Sony seems so concerned about copyright that it has made getting music onto the Clip a pain.

NY Times: Regarding Customers as Business Collaborators. Of course, businesses have always tried to figure out their customers. But the Internet world allows customers to take initiative, to talk back, assert preferences and flow quickly to the most responsive sellers. The new task for business is discovering how to channel that power.

Fast Company: Clued In? Sign On! Review of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Rather, it offers the potential to reframe some fundamental questions about business. Don't just ask, "How should our company interact with its customers?" Ask instead, "How can our people join conversations about products, markets, and value that are already taking place?"

News.Com: Andersen details its protégé plan. The plan underlines the growing trend of the privately held "Big Five" accounting firms, as well as more conservative management consulting firms such as McKinsey, to take equity in lieu of payment from cash-strapped start-up clients.

SJ Mercury: NTT bows to pressure for cut in Internet fees. Japanese telecoms giant NTT said on Wednesday it plans to cut its charges for unlimited Internet access by half as early as May, bowing to criticism both at home and abroad that its hefty fees are stifling Internet use in Japan.

Business Week: The Privacy War of Richard Smith. Last fall, Smith quit his job at Phar Lap to take a sabbatical and devote himself full-time to privacy issues. He says he's alarmed by the steady erosion of personal privacy online and wants to raise consumer awareness of the threat.

Upside: CBS MarketWatch Bolts. While the Wall Street Journal dickers around with its Web site -- What should be free? Does Dow Jones News count? How do we keep from cannibalizing our newspaper subscriptions? -- CBSMarketWatch.com has been forging ahead, becoming the Web site of record for business and financial news.

Editor & Publisher: Online Content Is Getting Commonplace in Print. Steve Outing. Where once print editors distrusted content originating from online content companies, now there is much more acceptance that online content can be every bit as good, if not better, than content acquired from traditional media sources.

CNNfn: Oil data moving online. [Ian Miller, president of EDS' Energy Industries Group] "It's going to be infinitely cheaper for these companies to buy this information online rather than go out and find it on their own," he said, noting that the average petroleum engineer now typically spends 60 percent of their time trying to find the information they need rather than evaluating it.

• Net Company: From November 19, 1999; Digital Decisions

Upside: Should We Protect Our Data? Today, fully 70 percent of databases are produced by the private sector -- a testimony to the profitability of compiling and disseminating databases. Given the amount of money to be made by compiling and disseminating data, it comes as no surprise that Congress is considering two different database protection bills.

News.Com: Borders.com will upgrade site behind closed doors. Borders.com, the Net division of the Borders Group and the third-largest bookseller online, today said it will close its site beginning at 6 p.m. EST on Friday and will reopen sometime Monday morning.

February 10, 2000
Salon: The Net scare. Scott Rosenberg. Most of the press has reported the wave of site shutdowns as a terrible sign of the deep vulnerability of the Internet. How can we build a new information economy on a structure that's so open to attack? Somebody should do something, immediately!

• Salon: From August 3, 1998; The great e-mail scare. Scott Rosenberg.
• News.Com: From November 8, 1996; New York Times site hacked. The New York Times Web site, among the most popular online news outlets, this week became the latest victim of an attack from cyberspace that led to a slowdown in service.

• Useit.Com: From September 19, 1999; User-Supportive Internet Architecture

USA Today: Census forms can be filed by computer. But rather than flaunt "e-census,'' the Census Bureau is rolling it out without fanfare because officials say they haven't done enough tests on the new secure Internet site. In fact, they prefer that people fill out the form the old-fashioned way, with a blue or black ink pen, and put it in the postage-paid envelope that will arrive with the form next month.

NY Times: Companies Won't Say if They Were Insured for Net Attacks. One of the main selling points of the insurers is that their coverage is not just passive recovery of losses, but helps customers correct security problems to prevent future attacks.

• Wired News: From January 20, 2000; Trouble Indemnity for Web Sites

News.Com: GE to launch B2B Web site for airplane parts. Kennedy said air carriers can now receive up-to-the-minute service bulletins from GE that detail industry research and provide recommendations on how to maintain and service GE engines. It used to take months to distribute the bulletins to customers.

NY Times: Making Monitors Pass the Screen Test. For those who want to do simple reading or tasks like detailed drawings, the computer screen's performance lags well behind paper. Computer manufacturers would like to see that change. Both International Business Machines and Toshiba have different technologies that each says may soon lead to high-resolution computer screens for the masses.

Industry Standard: IBM Marries Cash Register, Net. International Business Machines Corp. unveiled on Thursday what it said was the first Internet-enabled cash register to bring together online and in-store sales activities and provide store managers with more up-to-date information.

Computerworld: Does disabilities act apply to cyberspace? U.S. House of Representatives committee heard conflicting arguments today over whether the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to virtual space in much the same way it now applies to physical spaces.

NY Times: Getting Colors Right With New Technology. True Internet Color, as the technology is called, adjusts a Web site image's colors so visitors ordering clothes or home furnishings, for example, will see them exactly as they were intended to be seen.

February 11, 2000
SJ Mercury: This isn't the end of the Internet. Dan Gillmor. Meanwhile, we could do without the misleading accounts and rampant fear-mongering. One of the least savory parts of this mess, apart from poorly reported news stories, has been the almost gleeful noise from the companies that sell security products.

FEED Magazine: The Dark Side Of Corporate Home Computers. Clay Shirky. ...if the legal barriers to privacy on a home PC are weak now, and if a large number of workers' PCs will be on loan from their parent company, the freedom of speech and relative anonymity we've taken for granted on the internet to date will be seriously tested...

Forbes: Hidden agenda. Vividence's technology collects user feedback, without bothering customers. Instead, it uses a pool of 85,000 testers who volunteer for the job in exchange for rewards such as gift certificates. The testers log on to a site using a special browser that feeds them questions while they surf and inquires about specific actions.

News.Com: RealNames' customer database hacked. Internet naming company RealNames is warning its users that its customer database has been hacked, and that user credit card numbers and passwords may have been accessed.

• Salon: From September 21, 1999; Domain name dunces. Scott Rosenberg.

Industry Standard: Boo Founder: Don't Cry for Me. Boo.com's chairman has split for Stockholm, and its staff members are reeling from a large layoff. So from releasing sales figures, to redesigning its graphic-heavy pages, the nascent e-commerce site is taking steps to combat criticism.

@New York: After failed IPO, Deja.Com Attempts to Reanimate. But, since pulling back from a planned IPO last June, Deja.Com has been in a state of suspended animation. Although Phillips said last spring's makeover produced strong revenue growth, user growth essentially flat-lined, Phillips admitted.

ZDNN: Connectix bests Sony in legal dispute. In April a District Court judge agreed, ordering Connectix to stop shipping its product pending the outcome of the case. However, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that preliminary injunction, saying Connectix's reverse-engineering efforts were protected under the fair-use tenet of copyright law.

NY Times: Judge May Be Hollywood's Friend in Fight Over DVD Code. Its creators say they wrote the software so they could watch DVD movies on computers running the free Linux operating system. But what is significant about Judge Kaplan's decision is that he said it really does not matter why someone would use DeCSS -- the software itself is illegal.

Good Experience: Accepting the Newbie User. Lydia's story is a refreshingly honest description of the "insidery" attitude that the Web industry grew up with. People wear a badge for having been on the Net in the early days, braving the difficult interfaces, before AOL came and ruined it.

Red Herring: Lab Rat: Inside Microsoft. Using a stylus and speech combination -- or "tap and talk," as X.D. calls it -- helps get around many of the problems that have traditionally made speech technology slow and speech software prohibitively huge.

• IBM DeveloperWorks: From October 1999; Will voice interfaces replace screens? Jakob Nielsen.

February 12, 2000
Washington Post: AOL Ends Lobbying for Open Access. This week, the Dulles-based company took no action as two bills mandating open access died in the Virginia General Assembly. It has told its lobbyists in other states, including Maryland, not to advocate similar legislation.

Chicago Tribune: Upset Workers take their Case to Cyberspace. Trouble is, some firms take it seriously when their employees flame them on-ine, and a growing number have retaliated in court, tracking down Web site whiners and in some cases firing them.

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

Advertising Age: Capita taps brain waves to study Web ads' potency. Web advertisers can see if banner ads connect with users by connecting to users' brains. Employing brain wave-tracking technology licensed from NASA, Capita Research Group will measure how effective banners are in causing an emotional response in Web users, and how that translates into click-throughs and brand recall.

• Useit.Com: From July 11, 1999; Web Research: Believe the Data

Industry Standard: John McCain's Internet Explosion. McCain's Web money has proved better than other kinds of money for all the reasons Eve Gerber explained in this column a few weeks ago. As McCain told me on the bus, it's cleaner money, because the donor isn't shaking your hand and reminding you about a bill he wants you to vote against.

February 13, 2000
Salon: Studio technician. Q&A with MPAA president Jack Valenti. Q: What about yourself: have you ever downloaded an MP3 or heard one? A: No, I haven't done that, but I have people on my staff who have done it. And just because I haven't done it doesn't mean -- you know, I haven't excavated King Tut's tomb, but I've seen some of the things that came out of it.

News.Com: eBay discourages banner ads. In an open letter to customers yesterday, eBay said it would begin enforcing its long-standing policy that prohibits the use of banner ads in areas reserved for auctions. The letter, which appeared in eBay's "community" area, told users that because eBay had refrained from littering the site with ads, it "expects the same" from users.

Interactive Week: How Are Your Users Using Your Site? Usability labs such as this one are quickly becoming a standard tool of the trade for Internet consulting companies. Not only are they being used in the initial design and launch phases of Internet projects, companies are looking to run follow-up surveys long after a site has been operational.

February 14, 2000
NY Times: Mergers Threaten Internet's Informal System of Data Exchange. Denise Caruso. The global Internet is still defined by the exchange of data between networks. But today, in place of back-scratchy handshakes are book-size contracts drawn up by phalanxes of corporate lawyers.

• Red Herring: From August 1999; Equinix aims to be the Switzerland of Internet traffic exchanges

SJ Mercury: Technology need not be impenetrable. Q&A with Alan Cooper. And the thing is, the tools are incredibly weak. What happens is, nobody will mess with it. Even when you have something like the Palm Pilot, which has a whole new platform, what they did was pretty much cloned e-mail.

Information Week: Usability On The Web Isn't A Luxury. Donald Norman and Jakob Nielsen. Providing a customer-centered organizational architecture is important, but it can be surprisingly difficult. It means that competing lines within a company might have to cooperate in the structure of the Web.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: A UCLA Professor and Net Pioneer Paves the Way for the Next Big Thing. Mr. Kleinrock and Mr. Short are paving the way for what they say will be the Internet's next big thing, what Mr. Kleinrock and many others call nomadic computing -- and the next big thing after that, which is ubiquitous computing.

SF Chronicle: Up Close, Personal. But a new technology called microdisplay could change all that soon if the companies developing it can work out the kinks -- and if users prove willing to put on glasses or peer through a microscopelike eyepiece to get the big picture.

NY Times: Investor Quandary for an Internet Magazine. So how will The Industry Standard cover the foibles, failures or successes of Flatiron and the other companies Flatiron has invested in?

Wired News: DoubleClick Plan Falls Short. Privacy advocates are not impressed with DoubleClick's new multi-point consumer privacy plan. Experts say the Net ad agency's opt-out approach does not provide an adequate solution to the privacy risks inherent in their practices.

Industry Standard: DoubleClick Strikes Back. But on the issues that matter most to privacy advocates, Ryan didn't budge an inch. He declined to list the members of the Abacus Alliance that contribute consumer data collected on their sites to the Abacus Direct offline database.

A List Apart: Cutting the Cheese. What if the single feature that separates E-commerce sites from glorified card catalogues – their content – has been a complete bust?

• NY Times: From February 9, 1999; A Swedish Model for Sales: Hold the Content

CIO Web Business: Patent Play. So should every chief strategist of an e-commerce business get in line at the Patent and Trademark Office, submit a patent application for the software brainchild of some 20-year-old employee and wait for the gravy train to roll in?

February 15, 2000
SJ Mercury: Tech hypocrisy running rampant. Dan Gillmor. The giant online media company ordered its lobbyists to tone down, if not turn off, the open-access rhetoric and persuasion. Now, AOL says piously, the marketplace should take care of the situation.

MSNBC: General Electric mentoring program turns underlings into Web teachers. Through the program, which he dubbed reverse mentoring, Mr. Welch hopes Web mentors will help his managers "know what competitors’ sites looked like, experience the difficulties of ordering their own appliances online ... become more savvy and get a real feel for what the best sites are doing."

Business Week: Amazon's Joseph Galli: "There's No Limit To What We Can Offer". Amazon.com is synonymous with e-commerce. We want people to think that anytime they're going to shop for anything online, they just come to Amazon.com. It's the only place they need to go.

News.Com: Barnesandnoble.com enlists host of online allies. The Web arm of book superstore Barnes & Noble said that it will link to 1-800-Flowers.com, Expedia.com, Jcrew.com, L.L. Bean, Petsmart.com, PlanetRx.com and VitaminShoppe.com in exchange for equal promotion on their respective sites.

Wired News: Open-Access Lawsuit Closed. A federal judge has dismissed most of a cable company lawsuit challenging Broward County, Florida's requirement that they share their cable TV lines with competitors offering high-speed Internet access, industry officials said Tuesday.

InfoWorld: Virginia House passes UCITA bill. The Virginia House of Delegates on Monday unanimously passed a controversial bill backed by Microsoft and other leading software vendors that proponents say will bring uniformity to software licensing regulations.

Industry Standard: Pac-Man the Retailer. Vendors can tailor games to reflect your company's products, content and customers. But they're not a casual advertising decision: Customized games start at $10,000 and can exceed $100,000 for a series of games.

• USA Today: From July 15, 1999; P&G lathers online ad revolution

Advertising Age: Marketers harvest Web communities' concealed treasure. Participate's employees glean customer feedback by representing a client in chat rooms, message boards and through e-mails. They also integrate community aspects throughout a site's content, trying to spur more user involvement.

• TechWeb: From May 13, 1999; Amateurs Lead Web Community-Building

February 16, 2000
Internet World: The Myth Of Synergy. Forget the dubious claims of synergy that are always made when these mega-mergers are announced: These deals are attempts to tighten an already constrained distribution system so that regardless of where the large audiences want to go, they end up with you.

Editor & Publisher: Conference Post-mortem: Where's the Pizzazz? Steve Outing. A news company "gets the Internet" when it allows (as an option, not a requirement) its customers to conduct all of their interactions via the Web and/or e-mail. The company that does that truly "gets the Internet," and is prepared to profit from it.

NY Times: Portrait of a Newer, Lonelier Crowd Is Captured in an Internet Survey. The nation's obsession with the Internet is causing many Americans to spend less time with friends and family, less time shopping in stores and more time working at home after hours, according to one of the first large-scale surveys of the societal impact of the Internet.

• Salon: From September 3, 1998; Sad and lonely in cyberspace? Scott Rosenberg.
• Stanford Report: From January 13, 1999; Nie to head new institute studying impact of technology on society

• SJ Mercury: From September 4, 1999; You need to exhale when debating addiction to the Internet.

PC Week: Symbian previews design for communicator-phone. Hill outlined Quartz's specifications: a 10-centimeter color screen with 320-by-240-pixel resolution; a pen-based design with single-tap access to applications; support for the Bluetooth wireless spec and infrared; Web browsing using both WAP and HTML; and support for both CompactFlash and SD memory cards.

Salon: Dot-com addiction. That kind of thinking, which has caused corporations to snap up every domain that sounds remotely like their name, combined with the finite number of dot-com addresses and more than a few cyber-squatters who snatch up catchy-sounding names, has led to a perceived shortage of Web addresses...

Forbes ASAP: Dot.Con. Take Amazon.com's decision to start featuring "buying circles" on its megabookstore Web site. What seemed a relatively benign move, to track and post the books IBM employees were buying, turned ugly when Big Blue's chairman and CEO, Louis Gerstner, learned of the practice. Gerstner saw the buying circles as a gross invasion of his employees' privacy.

• Today's Links Story: From August 20, 1999; Thousands of new bestseller lists for Amazon

PC World: If You Buy It Online, Will It Come? Sure enough, something similar (although less comical) is happening online. With the explosion of e-commerce, there are plenty of online retailers who know how to take your order, just not many who know how to fill your order.

Internet World: 'Registered User' Is a Fiction. Because the connection to reality here can be so tenuous, we view registered-user figures as a "desperation metric," often invoked when it's the largest number available.

Builder.Com: User Testing. These low-fuss tips could be called discount usability. Collecting this feedback doesn't require any fancy technology, and you can gather it from a small-sized sample in about a single day of evaluation.

February 17, 2000
MIT Technology Review: Digital Land Grab. Technologists have touted new automated enforcement mechanisms that allow owners to ferret out infringements, and digital watermarks for tracing the precise origins of appropriated images. Yet we rarely ask whether such tight regulation of intellectual property is in the public interest. Who speaks for the fans? No one.

USA Today: It's media vs. Web in digital copyright war. Creation of the so-called Copyright Assembly was announced Wednesday at a congressional hearing. It includes a who's who of modern media. Among them: CBS, NBC, ABC/Disney, MGM, Paramount, Sony, Time Warner, Universal, the Directors Guild of America, the Writers Guild of America and all major sports leagues...

MIT Technology Review: The Value of Content. Leonardo Chiariglione. That is why protection technologies applied to digital content are destined to play such an important role in the future of our networked society. When content can no longer be indiscriminately copied, it recovers its lost value.

News.Com: Start-ups lead push to manage digital rights. Industry giants such as Microsoft, Sony and Adobe Systems are closely involved in DRM. But that hasn't squeezed out a host of smaller players, such as privately held Reciprocal, which recently lined up some heavy corporate backers.

Industry Standard: Financial Sites, Covering Themselves. Once upon a time, media companies focused primarily on reporting the news. In today's thicket of media-companies-as-investment-properties, though, entire days can be filled with media companies becoming the news by reporting on other media companies.

USA Today: Net use survey slammed as 'non-science'. Fienberg suggested a more random selection of survey respondents studied over a longer period of time would produce more accurate indicators of Internet use and social effects.

Upside: E-Tailers: Bring Back the Humans. There's only one problem: If you happen to be a customer, the experience sucks. Poking into the world of these Webfronts gives you a clear picture why the notion of "bricks & clicks" is the new mantra.

SF Chronicle: NextCard Nears Approval on Key Patent. The government notice covered one of a series of patent applications San Francisco's NextCard has filed connected to selling credit cards over the Internet. Company officials said their aim is to gain the sole right to take applications online, in effect crippling rivals on the Web.

MIT Technology Review: Software Patents Tangle the Web. In the highly legalistic and precedent-driven view of the patent system, the lack of clearly defined “prior art” in emerging technological environments makes almost anything seem like fair game for an ownership claim.

Information Week: The Art Of E-Biz. To highlight specific aspects of effective Web-site design, we asked some experts to study and analyze six popular E-commerce sites--Alaskaair.com, Amazon.com, CDNow.com, E-Loan.com, Gifts.com, and KBkids.com--and point out design elements that, in their opinion, work well--or don't.

February 18, 2000
Salon: Lonesome Internet blues, take 2. Scott Rosenberg. As with the widely discredited 1998 Carnegie-Mellon study that claimed Internet use made you sad and lonely, the findings of this new study -- by the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society -- are highly questionable. But that hasn't stopped its conclusions from being reported as big news.

Online Journalism.com: Stanford Internet study paints the wrong picture. On Tuesday, the day after Americans completed their regular love affair with each other (I mean, of course, Monday-morning water cooler meetings, not Valentine's Day), new research from Stanford University cast a disheartening look on the lives of the modern wired citizen. Fortunately for all of us, their findings were, in a word, wrong.

• SJ Mercury: From October 18, 1999; Online polling experiment stirs excitement, skepticism

The Economist: E-cash 2.0. Despite that sobering experience, a second generation of financial firms is now giving e-cash another go, online. Hardly a week passes without a start-up venture—usually American—announcing a new form of electronic money. And this time, the prospects look rather better.

Editor & Publisher: APBNews.com Continues Fight for Judges' Records. While APBNews.com continues its fight for access to federal judges' financial records, the New York-based online news outlet recently learned that USA Today was granted a request for the same information in February 1999. In fact, the newspaper requested even more information than APBNews.com.

• Salon: From January 27, 2000; Why don't judges want their financial interests revealed online?

Upside: Webvan: Return of the Milkman. To outsiders, this may have seemed like another case of Internet hoopla run amuck. But since September, it's become clear that online grocer Webvan is the leading contender in what could be a very lucrative market: personal courier services.

Red Herring: Come see the online side of Sears. Mr. Gordon says Sears is learning from the experience of others as it lumbers online. "Folks who don't have to be early entrants get to learn from the mistakes of those who are forced to work quickly," he says. "Think of all the money they saved by not wasting it on banner ads a year ago."

• CIO WebBusiness: From February 1, 1999; Jakob Nielsen on Dinosaurs

February 19, 2000
InfoWorld: If America Online and Time Warner merge, they must unplug their cable. He wants content unbundled so that the Internet will allow anyone, not just huge media conglomerates, to get their content out there. Frankston thinks it's reasonable that anyone should be able to run content servers in their homes.

• Bob Frankston: From February 10, 1999; Content vs. Connectivity

NY Times: Australia Using Law to Go After Objectionable Sites. Australian legislation intended to restrict access to online pornography took effect on Jan. 1, and, slowly but surely, Web pages that officials deem objectionable are disappearing from their Australian Internet hosts.

NY Times: The Assault of the Salonistas. Talbot grabs a red marker and starts drawing a chart on a white board that stands beside his desk. It is a routine that he has probably performed countless times, but he does it with enthusiasm and vigor. He lists the key components of Salon's business, and, conspicuously, Print Content is merely one of five.

USA Today: Net firms lose workers to newer start-ups. For years, Internet companies have built their workforces by going after employees at traditional corporate firms. Now it's their turn. Successful high-tech companies are finding their workers are being lured away by even newer start-ups in search of proven talent.

February 20, 2000
Useit.Com: Does the Internet Make Us Lonely? Studies of the social impact of the Internet must consider the changing lifestyle of the new economy and not relate solely to industrial-age concepts.

SJ Mercury: Platform battles should benefit the consumer. Dan Gillmor. The mass-market computing platform has evolved, and new kinds of ecosystems are coming alive. And the people who are responsible understand, too, that a thriving platform is in large part about the people who support it -- and not just customers.

InfoWorld: Europe sees wild flurry of WAP for mobile phone services. WAP allows mobile phones to access text information over the Internet and is quickly becoming the hottest product feature across Europe. There were no fewer than a dozen company announcements over a two-day period about new WAP products or features in Europe.

Washington Post: In Touch With a Wireless World. But if the cataclysmic prosperity of Qualcomm Inc. reflects the gold rush mentality of our times, it also signals where much of the gold lies: at the intersection of two of the fastest-growing phenomena in history, the Internet and mobile telephones.

February 21, 2000
Industry Standard: Cyberspace Prosecutor. Lawrence Lessig. It is neither the tradition of copyright law, which in its embrace of fair use and individual rights has never granted owners perfect control; nor is it the tradition of the Net, which was built to facilitate a free flow of information. Before district courts race to join the control freaks' chorus, they should pause to consider the other side in our tradition.

Business Week: At Ford, E-Commerce Is Job 1. It was just last June, when a Ford Motor Co. task force made a presentation to Chief Executive Jacques A. Nasser and his top managers. Originally assigned to study how the Internet could improve manufacturing, the team had gone all out, showing Nasser a computer simulation of the auto company of the future.

NY Times: Internet Reshapes the Construction Industry. Many construction executives complain that their industry has been among the last to embrace the Internet, even though the medium offers a ready solution to their thorniest problem -- how to coordinate the efforts of what sometimes amount to hundreds of separate teams...

News.Com: The most powerful Internet metric of all. Any serious company on the Internet should have an absolute awareness of conversion rate. Small gains on low conversion rates can have unbelievably powerful effects on a company's performance.

• Useit.Com: From August 1, 1997; Loyalty on the Web

NY Times: Thomson Jumps Head First Into an Electronic Future. Thomson plans to put some of the $2.5 billion these 130 papers could fetch into expanding its electronic databases. These subsidiaries already account for half of the company's $6 billion in annual sales -- albeit through companies the public may know little about.

Boston Globe: Fortune Tellers. Companies like the Yankee Group, Forrester Research of Cambridge, International Data Corp. of Framingham, and Jupiter Communications Inc. of New York earn millions for providing businesses with forecasts on the high-tech future, and strategic advice on how to prepare for it.

Interactive Week: Bn.com Starts Trading On Its Good Name. Now, Bn.com is trading on its brand name, using its "post-transaction page" - the page customers see after they make a purchase at its book and music store - to link its 4 million credit card-paying customers to seven other online retailers.

Forbes: Brown's Law. Review of John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's book The Social Life of Information. To do so means that technology designers must start from first principles. Instead of just connecting individuals, engineers need to think about communities.

Chicago Tribune: Pervasive computing. But even the engineers who are inventing this new world are a bit perplexed about just where they're taking us. Many gathered just outside Washington, D.C. last month to trade ideas at a federally sponsored conference on pervasive computing in Gaithersburg, Md.

Wired News: It's A Wireless Extravaganza. Although it will be a while before devices like the wireless-networked-refrigerator or the super-fast-Internet-enabled cell phone hit the mainstream market, wireless startups and established companies are working furiously to flesh out standards to speed their introduction.

February 22, 2000
Business Week: Chile's Copper Giant Finds Gold on the Web. Now, instead of having to page through outdated reports to piece together an idea of future production, copper traders can open a Web page and get all the data they need -- in real time. At Codelco, all employees have access to the network and are responsible for keeping their division up-to-date.

Industry Standard: Customers Know Best. It was a bit of a firehose, but you could feel reasonably confident that if something you were looking for was on the Web, AltaVista would locate it. Now, two owners later, I have no idea what AltaVista is selling.

SJ Mercury: Vertical technology markets returning as info appliances. Dan Gillmor. Yet the vertical market in technology isn't dead. In fact, it's coming back in an interesting way, in the form of information appliances that handle one or a few chores simply and reliably.

MSNBC: GM retools to sell cars online. Mr. Kutner launched a blitz-like study and on the 89th day delivered this answer: Everything. Vehicle design would have to change to make cars easily buildable. Factories and suppliers would have to be wired together via the Internet. Shipping times would have to be whacked in half.

Forbes: Homegrocer delivers the dough. Homegrocer's $60 million deal to be AOL's exclusive grocer is a hefty price when you consider it won't be able to access the majority of the portal's 22 million subscribers. The Web-based grocery delivery service is only operative in Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles and parts of Orange County, Calif.

Editor & Publisher: Newspapers See Top Talent Leave For Dot Coms. Lucas' story is emblematic of the brain drain facing newspapers across the country. In San Antonio and such high-tech markets as Silicon Valley and Seattle in particular, papers have seen their business writing talent head to Web sites.

Wired News: AOL Ups German Access Ante. AOL said it would give all German schools free AOL accounts -- and also talked up the benefits of its parental control system for screening out content deemed inappropriate. Students will also be eligible for special AOL accounts that include the cost of local phone charges, up to 30 hours per month.

FEED Magazine: Blurring The Work/Home Boundaries. Clay Shirky. As the internet continues to blur the distinction between being at work and away from work, with personal email accessible at your desk and work email accessible from everywhere else, the workers of the world may find themselves in a Faustian bargain.

USA Today: Sony seals a deal to sell custom CDs. More than 10,000 Sony Music tracks will be made available to Net music marketer CustomDisc.com's users by this spring, the companies are expected to announce today. The deal allows for CustomDisc to sell custom CDs directly to consumers.

PC World: Internet2 Team Seeks Speedy Apps. The Internet2 effort is sponsoring a Land Speed Record competition "for the most demanding end-to-end, bandwidth-intensive Internet applications in the world." Internet2 representatives will announce the winners at an Internet2 meeting March 29 in Washington, D.C.

News.Com: Webvan adds bookshelves to grocery site. The online grocer, based in Foster City, Calif., has added cookbooks and best sellers, among other books, to its Specialty Shop, where it sells nontraditional supermarket goods such as flowers and office supplies.

February 23, 2000
Upside: Storming Fort Business. David Weinberger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Yes, your centralized corporate intranet has eliminated some paper and is making management feel vaguely cool. But that's not the Web that's going to shake the foundations of your fort.

Freedom Forum: Newspapers squandering chance to make a difference in Digital Age. Jon Katz. The challenge for newspapers is the same one it's been for nearly a half century. It isn't technological. It's creative. In the midst of the greatest information revolution in human history, it's hard to point to a single newspaper that has radically altered its mission, content and appearance.

SF Chronicle: Teamwork the Name of the Game for Ideo. To align everyone around the common goals of creating the best products and getting them to market quickly, Guidant restructured around business units where research and manufacturing teams had to work together and were measured by getting products to market and having them accepted.

Wired News: Making Spam Costly. An IBM researcher Wednesday suggested combating the increasing spam problem by using a combination of encryption and digital cash to guard mailboxes against unwelcome intruders.

• Useit.Com: From September 19, 1999; User-Supportive Internet Architecture

Builder.Com: A Builder's Edge. Dan Shafer. Ultimately, I believe future Web sites--at least those that today are following outmoded publishing models, which includes ezines and content-centric sites run by editorial teams--will morph into pure community plays. WeTalkSports.com is a laboratory to prove the idea.

ZDNN: Permanent Net tax ban in jeopardy. The panel has had a fierce debate over new tax measures, and for most of last year a deadlock seemed likely. But a consensus is beginning to form around a recommendation to give state and local governments an opportunity to reform their unwieldy sales-tax structures.

Red Herring: Lab Rat: Inside AT & T Labs. Making all of that come together simply is the hardest part of the services that AT & T Labs is developing. AT & T is a phone company, and its customers hold it to that standard: the stuff it tries to sell had better be just as easy and intuitive as the telephone.

BBC News: PC BC: Old computer threat to records. Studies in York have revealed that in fact data stored on computers could disappear in little more than a decade. "The irony is that archaeological information held in magnetic format is decaying faster than it ever did in the ground," warns William Kilbride of the Archaeology Data Service at the University of York.

Wired News: Unwiring the Wireline World. While most users are not currently contemplating replacing the standard tangle of cables and cords, engineers speaking Tuesday at the Wireless Symposium held here expect wireless networking technology will start taking off later this year.

February 24, 2000
FEED Magazine: Crowd Control: The FEED Dialog Designing Online Communities. Steven Johnson, Jeffrey Veen and Eric Liftin. SJ: How do we design more enriching communities? What kind of communities do we want online anyway? Let's start with the front page of the New York Times. Yet another study has appeared that argues that heavy users of the web are a disconnected, anti-social bunch.

Wired News: Net Event Shuts Out Press. Despite the Internet theme of the gathering, many online journalists have been denied credentials, sparking widespread protest by reporters and exhibitors. CeBIT officials confirmed Thursday -- the first day of the weeklong event -- that only an estimated 100 online reporters had received credentials.

• Online Journalism Review: From July 23, 1999; The Mythical Press Box

ZDNN: Quartz: The Palm-killing PDA? With the unveiling of Symbian consortium's Quartz devices at the CeBIT computer show in Germany this week, analysts say current handheld devices, such as the Palm, face competition from a new breed of integrated hand-held device that packs telephony, streaming multimedia, Web browsing and Palm-like computing.

Wired News: EBay Unscathed by Attacks. [Meg Whitman, president and CEO of eBay] "What happens with eBay is that if a user comes on and the site isn't functioning perfectly, they'll often come back three or four hours later and list their item [for sale] or make a bid," she said. "It's not like an airplane seat where after the airplane leaves that seat has gone wasted..."

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

PC World: Sony's Memory Stick Gets Stickier. The proprietary Sony format counts Smart Media, Compact Flash, and the recently launched Secure Digital card among its competitors. New licensees of the Memory Stick include Acer Laboratories, Compaq, Mitsubishi Electric, Samsung Electronics, and Texas Instruments...

• Salon: From October 27, 1999; Sony's $900 picture frame

February 25, 2000
Salon: You said what?! And eNow's first product, ChatScan, promises to shake up the world of chat the way DejaNews initially shook up the world of Usenet -- by making the evanescent and scattered medium permanently archived, loggable, searchable and, hopefully, meaningful.

TechWeb: Amazon Associates Plan Wins Patent Protection. Patent No. 6,029,141, issued Tuesday, is granted for "an Internet-based referral system that enables individuals and other business entities ('associates') to market products, in return for a commission, that are sold from a merchant's website," according to the patent office website.

• ChannelSeven: From December 7, 1999; Affiliate Marketers Score at the Patent Office

Internet Week: New Page For Web Marketing. Spearheaded by Barnes & Noble.com and seven partners, some of the Web's most popular companies are seeking reciprocal marketing deals that link them with one another at no cost to either party. These links give site visitors incentives to buy from a partner site as soon as they're finished buying from the first.

PC Magazine: Microsoft's Mission to "Mars". John C. Dvorak. The higher up on the ladder you are, the more pixels you get on the home page for your pet project. In fact, the new MSN.com Mars home page appears to be an incarnation of the MSN.com corporate org chart.

News.Com: IBM plans a direct-sales assault. [Rick Thompson, director of IBM's consumer direct and relationship market division] Thompson, who previously worked on the Tide brand for Proctor & Gamble, believes e-commerce Web sites should be more like their retail counterparts. "If supermarkets were designed like Web sites, milk and bread would be at the front of the store..."

Wired News: Nonexistent Auto Site Unveiled. The venture, which the three companies touted in their Friday announcement as "the world's largest virtual marketplace," does not yet have a name. Nor does it have a chief executive, a Web site, or any set amount of investment money from the three big automakers who are forming it.

Internet Week: Big Three Auto Manufacturers To Combine On New B-To-B Exchange. "Our suppliers were asking, 'what the heck are you doing? You're going to make us support three standards?' They did not want to operate four or five different standards and exchanges," said Peter Weiss, vice president at DaimlerChrysler.

The Economist: In their dreams. Past experience of the Internet suggests that if Sony waits for broadband to become widespread before turning its network visions into reality, others may get there first. And investors who have re-rated Sony as an Internet share may lose patience.

February 26, 2000
Wired News: Pundits Ask: Who Owns Music? Intellectual property protection in the age of digital music has few options -- three, to be exact. And if you ask Harvard Law School Professor Terry Fisher, only one is truly viable: the unfettered release of intellectual property, with profits distributed fairly among all interested parties.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of ICONOCAST's calculation of cost-per-visitor for commercials run during the Super Bowl. With a conversion rate of 2% (generous), the cost per customer would be almost $2,000. A clear indication that it is a failed strategy to prioritize name recognition above user experience.

Red Herring: Bluetooth gleams at CeBIT. Bluetooth is a new standard aimed at making it simple for handheld devices, phones, PCs, and other computing devices to talk to each other wirelessly. The systems communicate via a tiny, 2.4 GHz radio embedded on a chip.

Freedom Forum: Newspaper reporters defecting to dot-coms. Veteran newspaper reporters as well as journalists just starting out are finding greater opportunities with dot-com publications, resulting in what some call a talent drain on traditional newspaper organizations.

February 27, 2000
NY Times: 10 Employees. No Headquarters. $45 Million Payoff. But earlier this month, this 10-employee company found itself worth $45 million in stock when it was bought by Lycos Inc., a leading Internet portal with some 900 employees. And Lycos, which will use Valent's technology to expand its network of online clubs, did not seem to care one iota about Valent's incorporeal existence.

SF Chronicle: ExciteAtHome Does an About-Face on DSL. The move marks a sharp shift in strategy for ExciteAtHome, which has long derided rival technologies as inferior to cable. Its executives, for instance, often insist DSL is several times slower than its cable service and fraught with installation problems.

Industry Standard: Behind the Numbers: Which E-Commerce Site Rankings Should You Believe? Analysts can test and evaluate every aspect of the e-commerce experience – and even watch for new features that consumers may not be aware of yet. Shoppers, on the other hand, may not test all features, but they buy products and may do so often...

February 28, 2000
NY Times: Coming Soon to a Coffee Shop Near You: Parcel Pickup. And in such arrangements, customers might also be able to return Internet goods to the stores. Package handling companies like Mail Boxes Etc. are already starting to handle returns and exchanges on behalf of Internet retailers.

Industry Standard: Learning to Let Go. Other e-commerce sites get stuck on stickiness. Some sites design an online maze in the hopes of keeping customers so long that they might actually buy something. Basic functionality suffers: Too many extraneous steps or pages can irritate customers whose idea of fun isn't sitting at a computer all evening.

SJ Mercury: Business-to-business is BIG business. Cisco, which takes in more than $1 billion in orders online each month, estimates it saves as much as $70 million a year by processing orders on the Net. Cisco has been able to reduce staffing in its order-entry center to about 300 people, from the 1,000 it would need without the Web...

Salon: Do they know where you live? But the regional indifference of the Web is a quality some entrepreneurs and technologists are eager to upend. Several firms are developing software that could create "borders" on the Net -- allowing sites to serve different content to different regions.

Salon: Where in the world? Q&A with Ruann Ernst, CEO of Digital Island. What TraceWare does is let you know right off what language the interface should use and which top 10 clips to present. It also helps you determine delivery time, the right payment method to use and much, much more -- all without putting the customer through very much.

Industry Standard: The Real Victims of Fraud. The real risk belongs to merchants, which can find themselves – as Casio and Netrageous did – stuck with the tab, with no one to turn to for help. Merchants bear the brunt of the responsibility for fraudulent credit card transactions online.

• Wired News: From April 2, 1999; Credit Card Fraud Bedevils Web

SJ Mercury: Southwest Airlines says online ticket sales will reach $1 billion. Kelly said Southwest spent less than $5 million to build its Internet site and relatively little to operate it. In the fourth quarter of last year, he said, the airline sold $250 million worth of tickets online.

Business Week: Welcome to 2010. To focus its own future, IDEO recently launched Project 2010, a six-month program to evaluate current trends in technology and visualize products 10 years out. Based on a continued evolution of these technologies, a big "if" to be sure, IDEO designed products for work, entertainment, medicine, and sports.

DaveNet: No More Pesos for Senor Bezos. We know that if we don't keep moving, because our customers have choices, we will lose. That's how the technology market has always worked, and how it should continue to work. It's how users are guaranteed that if I fail to innovate they will have choice.

Industry Standard: The Law of Recombinant Growth. Hal R. Varian. The Web's components – URLs, CGI scripts, HTTP protocols and the HTML language – hold the seeds of similar innovation. In the fertile grounds of research labs and startups, people are taking apart and recombining these basic elements to forge new products, services, processes and business models.

NY Times: ICANN Launches Site for New Membership. In an unprecedented and daunting effort to build an international Internet democracy, the nonprofit organization charged with administering the global network on Friday launched a Web site where any Internet user with an email address can apply to become a voting member.

Editor & Publisher: Chicago Trib Plays Corrections Prominently. The Chicago Tribune is weaving corrections into stories run on its Internet site or stored in electronic archives to ensure that future users will get the straight story and not a repeated error.

• Online Journalism Review: From March 4, 1999; The Corrector: Slipup.com

Interactive Week: Palm's Future Is In Its Own Hands. Yankowski will have to teach his company to walk a tightrope - and fast. It will have to ramp up two businesses basically from scratch - software licensing and wireless Internet services - while not taking its eyes off the hardware business that has enabled Palm to define what handheld computing ought to be.

February 29, 2000
Wired News: Time Running Out on Kid Email. In October 1998, Congress passed the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. It says that as of 21 April, Web sites must get a parents' consent before they can collect, use, or disclose personal information from children under 13. At least one email service has solved the problem by dumping all the accounts it has with children under 13 years of age.

Online Journalism Review: ChicagoTribune.com: the Windy City as it happens. At a time when most newspaper's online offices have all the energy of a morgue as a skeleton crew of editors funnel print and wire stories onto the Web, chicagotribune.com's newsroom pulses with adrenaline. Five days a week, six news reporters and six editors race to get original reporting onto the site as fast as local news breaks.

• Editor & Publisher: From September 1, 1999; Washingtonpost.com's 'Afternoon' Web Edition. Steve Outing.

ZDNN: Hatch skeptical of AOL's openness. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch Tuesday questioned the value of America Online Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s pledge to open their cable TV systems to other Internet service providers, a key factor in their planned merger.

TechWeb: Cyber Guru Favors Regulated Open Access. "If we don't adopt this policy now, there is no doubt that down the road, just as we have seen with cable previously, Congress will have to revisit whether certain bundling should be permitted, or if certain content discrimination should be permitted, or certain market concentration is too great," Lessig said.

Upside: Online cybersleuth. The CyberFacts engine scans more than 50,000 chat rooms, Internet newsletters, and websites, keeping track of any information that might adversely affect a company's stock price or brand image. Human agents then rank the results and deliver a concise summary to client companies.

• NY Times: From October 14, 1999; Incognito Spinmeisters Battle Online Critics

InfoWorld: Wireless predictions abound at conference. Coming out of the Amazon.com Anywhere division of Amazon.com, the www.amazon.com/phone. address is intended to broaden the availability of the popular site. "WAP is a fantastic standard, but if there are other ways to access still out there, we want to make ourselves universally available," Bezos said.

Industry Standard: Southwest Sites to Top $1B in Bookings. "It took our customers awhile to get comfortable with the concept of purchasing their airline tickets on the Internet, but their acceptance has increased and now they want more," said Southwest chairman Herb Kelleher in a statement.

• Today's Links Story: From July 2, 1999; Southwest Airlines' pencil hits the Web

NY Times: Ford Campaign Will Combine TV and Online Media. Ford is overhauling a highly visible element of a big campaign for an important new car line as the company seeks to become part of a hot trend: transforming television advertising into a hybrid of the TV and online media that could be called dot-commercials.

Wired News: Mapping Out a Brand New World. Nobody knows better than cartographers how quickly the world is changing these days, and -- thanks to technological advances -- they have never been able to document those changes so quickly.

Salon: A bad bet. For more than a year now, Cohen, 32, has also been battling the U.S. government, which claims that his Web site is illegal and wants to put Cohen behind bars for five years. His fight has also become a cause célèbre for Internet gamblers who fear that their favorite wagering sites will be taken away.