April 1, 2000
Internet World: A Glimpse Into Our Future, When The Net Is Everywhere. The boxes exemplified the kind of immersive Internet experience those at the conference are seeking to build in the future, even as today's mobile Net products and services remain as unpolished as the metal boxes slapped together for the conference.

Internet World: Deconstructing Entertaindom.com. Peter Merholz and John Shiple. The home page confuses three very different tasks - reading stuff, watching stuff, and doing stuff - with a single overarching interface, making it unclear what to expect when you click a link.

InfoWorld: Vendors don't want you to sell used software as you would used books or CDs. I've talked about cancelled eBay auctions here before, but in each of those cases the software publisher said it had reason to believe the copy being auctioned was pirated. In this situation, however, both eBay and Caere seemed to be telling the reader he was breaking laws even if he had legally acquired the copy of Pagekeeper.

Business Week: Battle of the Biz-News Dot-Coms. Lagging revenues and slow subscription growth at TheStreet have plagued the company. In a model shift, TheStreet recently began offering big chunks of its content free to Web surfers, including some commentary from its vaunted columnist lineup.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of an ICONOCAST report on two estimates of the amount of time spent on the Internet. Empirical measurement of actual user behavior: 13 hours. Users' subjective responses to a survey: 23 hours. This is a great example of why one should not rely on surveys or other user-reported "data."

April 2, 2000
Useit.Com: The Mud-Throwing Theory of Usability. The assumption is that speed is everything. If the initial design has weaknesses (i.e., drops off the wall), then they can always be fixed in the redesign. Well, speed is indeed important, but it is not everything. Customer satisfaction is everything.

• Industry Standard: From January 24, 2000; The Importance of Being Earliest

SJ Mercury: 7-Eleven logs Japanese onto the Net. [Toshifumi Suzuki, chairman and CEO of 7-Eleven Japan] ``We are different from the Americans in terms of the maturity of our telecommunications,'' he explained recently to a Japanese newspaper. ``The Japanese customer wants to make sure he gets the products at the store -- and wants to pay there.''

NY Times: Filling Seats With Online Discounts. The rapid growth of online ticket sales makes it much easier for sports teams or entertainment companies to gather data and set prices according to demand.

• Useit.Com: From March 5, 2000; Profit Maximization vs. User Loyalty

April 3, 2000
Industry Standard: Battling Censorware. Lawrence Lessig. But the DMCA admits no such limitation. The question the anticircumvention provision asks is simply whether the copy protection can be avoided. Therefore, code that cracks a protection device is criminal under the DMCA even if the use of the copyrighted material that the code enables would be fair use.

CIO: End Game. Q&A with David Weinberger. Imagine that you had a TV set that allowed you to engage in conversations with everybody else who's watching the same ad. Now when you see an ad that makes some stupid, ridiculous claim, you can hear the rest of the country laughing at it along with you. You can hear the rest of the country saying, "Nobody believes this. How dumb do they think we are?"

NY Times: Pepsi Takes the Plunge With an Online Campaign. "A number of us have made commitments to Internet advertising," said Dave Burwick, vice president for marketing at PepsiCo. "We've all tried different things, and we're all trying to learn from each other, because nobody's cracked the code."

LA Times: Internet Guru's Theory of Evolution. Q&A with John Patrick, IBM VP for Internet technology. Most people think about [changes in the Internet] as speed alone. Speed is important and we all need more of it... But as I think about the evolution of the Internet, I think about seven characteristics: fast, always on, everywhere, natural, intelligent, easy and trusted.

Interactive Week: MIT Readies Net-Generation Bar Code. Sun Microsystems will join The Gillette Co., International Paper, Procter & Gamble and the Uniform Code Council, which administers bar codes, in sponsoring the center's work to catalyze the creation of open technical standards for electronic product codes.

NY Times: Columbia in Web Venture to Share Learning for Profit. The goal of the company, Fathom.com, will be to provide knowledge in its broadest form -- classes taught by prominent academics like the historian Simon Schama, reference books like the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, interviews from Columbia's oral history archive...

• Industry Standard: From October 22, 1999; Ivy Online

Business Week: Ticketmaster Drops the First Round vs. Tickets.com. Still, some signs show that Tickets.com may be bowing to Ticketmaster's demands. Virtually all Tickets.com's links to Ticketmaster now go to the home page rather than to specific event listings. "We've gone to linking to the home page because it's less taxing on our resources," claims Andrew Dunkin, senior vice-president for marketing at Tickets.com.

CIO: Is This Any Way to Build an Intranet? Beveridge had been grinding since 8 a.m., and the high-spirited manager of Motorola's E-Strategy was ready to go another eight hours. After all, he thought, how many times in his life would he get to try something as radical as this: Gathering 58 people from various offices and keeping them holed up for four marathon days and three nights in an effort to build a brand-new intranet.

Wired News: Random House Makes Web Deal. Random House Ventures, a division of New York-based book publishing giant Random House Inc., announced it has taken a significant minority stake in Xlibris.com. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

visualLogic: The Web and enterprise identity. The next phase in the development of the Web will be a conceptual shift from the design of individual Web sites to the design of comprehensive Web-based communications systems that organize and link hundreds of smaller sites into a coherent and navigable whole.

Wired News: Smart Methods to Spot Fraud. Neural nets are being used for fraud detection at Visa International, Fidelity Investment, Citibank, and American Express. The networks learn to spot fraudulent activity by comparing data on legitimate card usage against known cases of fraud.

ZDNN: Credit-card firms squeeze porn sites. Adult site operators are smarting under stricter rules from MasterCard International and Visa International that require merchants to keep their charge-back rates to a minimum or face stiff fines.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: In Revamped Library Schools, Information Trumps Books. Today, students seeking master's degrees in information at Michigan represent more than 50 majors, and only about a third of the program's graduates will become traditional librarians. A growing number of them are preparing for jobs with newfangled titles like information architect and intelligence manager.

NY Times: Web Privacy Group to Offer a Seal of Approval. An assortment of 26 Internet companies involved in advertising will soon announce yet another organization to tackle the prickly issue of consumer privacy on the Web.

April 4, 2000
Salon: Software outlaw roams the streets! Scott Rosenberg. As long as the antitrust case is wending its way through the courts, and whatever happens at the end of that road -- whether the appeals judges exonerate the company or the government succeeds in busting it up -- Microsoft will have years more to fight these battles.

LA Times: Nevermind Microsoft; What About AOL? Robert Scheer. Surely the reason for breaking up huge companies ought to have something to do with the power those companies wield over our lives. But if that's the concern, AOL has amassed a power that Bill Gates can only dream about.

• Online Journalism Review: From November 24, 1998; Portals are Power

PC World: Can Net Infrastructure Protect Civil Liberties? As the world grapples with how and whether to control the Internet, a model surfaced at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference held in Toronto this week to let control--and individuals' civil liberties--flow not from legislation but from the Net's infrastructure itself.

• Industry Standard: From November 14, 1999; Architecting Innovation. Lawrence Lessig.

Wired News: Crypto Regs Challenged Again. Privacy advocates won a preliminary victory when for the second time a federal appeals court questioned restrictions on data-scrambling encryption software. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals suggested Monday that President Clinton's restrictions on distributing encryption products might be unconstitutional.

First Monday: The Social Life of Information. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. Arguing elegantly for the important role that human sociability plays in the world of bits, this book, and the chapters published here in First Monday, gives us an optimistic look beyond the simplicities of information and individuals.

Mappa.Mundi Magazine: Mapping the Global Spread of the Net. This virulent diffusion of the Internet was tracked by Larry Landweber in a series of maps. He produced twelve maps over a period of six years, providing us with a useful and fascinating visual census of the spread of international network connectivity.

April 5, 2000
Business 2.0: Content Shifts to the Edges. Clay Shirky. The real import of Napster is that it is proof-of-concept for a networking architecture which recognizes that bandwidth to the desktop is becoming fast enough to allow PCs to act as servers, and that PCs are powerful enough to fulfill this new role.

• FEED Magazine: From January 27, 2000; The Mega-Buck Marriage Of Servers And Desktops. Clay Shirky.

inc.com: Mentor FAQs with Jakob Nielsen. They are reluctant to divulge personal information. They feel like they are being sold and suckered, not informed. You need to give your Web users a good experience without trying to corner them into a sale. People will return to a site that is valuable for them.

Interactive Week: ICANN Under Siege At Conference. "ICANN has shown us the road to be avoided," said Karl Auerbach, a Cisco Systems engineer and early Internet innovator. "I'm concerned we are moving too quickly to put the Internet under regulation."

Business 2.0: Value of a Bundle. Evan I. Schwartz. When you understand value bundling, the debate over whether you can charge for content on the Web looks silly. Slate, Salon, and other Webzines haven't been able to charge a subscription fee, since they are not packaging a wide range of digital goods and services that keep expanding over time.

• Useit.Com: From January 25, 1998; The Case for Micropayments

deseretnews.com: Lab eyes Web sites' efficiency. It's not the eye-tracking that provides the major boon to the businesses for whom they consult, according to co-founder Ron Hendricks. Quite a few companies have the technology, which isn't expensive. Where Lab6two4 makes a difference, he said, is in the data analysis.

Wired News: MPAA Sues to Stop DeCSS Linking. On Wednesday, the MPAA filed a complaint in district court in New York requesting a second injunction against Corley, this time to stop the his 2600 Enterprises websites from linking to hundreds of sites with the DVD encryption-busting DeCSS program.

Salon: Throbbing e-mail. Reducing in-box obesity may sound like a Holy Grail for time-starved, information-overloaded Internet users. But though Zaplets may help reduce the number of clicks between us and the information flowing toward us, they won't necessarily reduce the volume of that information.

April 6, 2000
Internet World: The Net's No Place To Play It Safe. The idea that the internet is an "entertainment" medium is one of those weird artifacts of business history that springs up every once in a while--kind of like the idea that computers will make paper obsolete or that nuclear power will make electricity too cheap to meter.

Marketing Computers: A Call to Action. Michael Schrage. The size of dotcom ad budgets barely correlate to effectiveness. The majority of dotcom ads reflect a pathetic, creative paucity about what the web means as a medium of technology, pop culture and, yes, brand.

AtNewYork: Justice Department Saves the Internet, Film at 11. Tom Watson. But following the case as I have for the past two years, it's very clear that none of the lawyers involved -- prosecution, defense, judge -- understands what's happening on the Internet. They simply don't get that the structure of the Net itself is a robust antitrust guardian.

Marketing Computers: Money For Nothing. The web brings us many great new ways to interact with customers and provide them with "value," and most marketers still focus on giving away money. I just don't get it. Must be that dollar-based relationship-building programs are fairly easy to execute. Just send an email to customers with a give-away notice.

digitalMASS: Wanted: Idiot-proof Web sites. Today's software and customer service reps are like the European craftsmen. They're a stop-gap. And an expensive one. The ultimate goal: Web sites that are so comfortable, so easy to use, that any idiot can drop in, find everything, spend a few bucks and want to come back.

USA Today: Should all public info be posted online? In a speech Wednesday, Judge Thomas M. Cecil of the California Superior Court said easy access to court records could subject former convicts to discrimination long after they serve their time. Such records are now public in the United States, but Cecil said they are essentially private because they are difficult to obtain.

Internet Week: Virtual Teams Light Up GE. General Electric Co. is rapidly rolling out real-time collaboration tools to all 340,000 employees in a program executives say will change the way the conglomerate works internally and interacts with customers and suppliers.

News.Com: Privacy standard to get New York audition. A long-awaited technology standard allowing Net surfers to negotiate how much personal information they are willing to reveal to Web sites is slated for testing next month in New York.

Wired News: Studios Influenced by DVD Sites. The growing power of the Internet has led some studios to openly embrace these DVD-related websites. When The Digital Bits held their first annual Bitsy Awards, it named Dreamworks the "best DVD studio." Soon after, Dreamworks issued a press release touting the awards.

LA Times: Beyond.com Ends Marketing Pacts. Beyond.com Corp., an Internet software retailer, said it ended marketing agreements with America Online Inc. and others and will have a first-quarter restructuring charge of as much as $14 million as it shifts from consumer to business and government sales.

Computerworld: SEC vows hands off e-mail, chat rooms. In response to concern about the agency's plans to monitor the Internet for illegal activities, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission has promised that the commission won't snoop on electronic conversations and e-mail.

April 7, 2000
NY Times: Legality of 'Deep Linking' Remains Deeply Complicated. These comments appear to suggest that linking has a green light, at least as far as Hupp is concerned. But viewed in the context of the entire ruling, the statements are quite limited. For one thing, Ticketmaster did not claim in its complaint that deep linking was copyright infringement, so the court's comment in that regard was not greatly meaningful.

SJ Mercury: Librarians are heroes of Net censorship fight. Dan Gillmor. Librarians help us find things. They help us read. They help us learn. And lately they've been fighting the good fight for their patrons' right to have access to the unfiltered resources of the newest information resource -- the Internet.

O'Reilly Network: Jon Katz: Book Publishers Still Don't Get It. Q&A with Jon Katz. Publishing houses don't even link their Web sites to anything else on the Web. They think their secrets are going to spill out. I think interactivity involves many, many things. It involves the way the company is structured.

Salon: Missing the point on Microsoft. Despite the attention given to Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's ruling this week, we are in danger of missing one of the main lessons the Microsoft trial could teach: that the state is deeply implicated in helping to create the new digital monopolies as well as in trying to subvert them.

ZDNN: Intellectual property laws in flux. Citing cybersquatter legislation in the United States, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other company-backed attempts to protect property, the panelists worried about the effects such restrictions could have on free speech and the Internet.

Web Review: Branding: The Most Misunderstood Word In Marketing. Banner ads—even with flashing graphics and fabulous animation—never established a brand and never will. Click-throughs don't establish branding. Publicity alone will not establish branding. Email alone will not establish brand recognition and acceptance.

Industry Standard: E-Coke – It's the Real Thing. Coca-Cola said today that it will sell its branded merchandise on a new Web site by early summer. It's the first of many online ventures that the company has planned in order to extend what is already one of the world's strongest brands.

Internet Week: 'A 24-Hour Focus Group'. Search engines aren't only a way to empower site visitors with quick access to information. They're also increasingly giving e-businesses insight into what customers want. Sites have begun scraping and analyzing the questions customers ask in natural-language searches in an effort to fine-tune marketing and product development.

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

USA Today: Firms dread creation of gripers' portal. WhiteHouse.com founder Dan Parisi has spent about $100,000 to register the domain names of more than 500 of the world's largest companies plus the sucks.com suffix, a traditional Web addendum to identify a site for complaints, as in YourCompanysucks.com.

April 8, 2000
NY Times: Microsoft Plans a New Strategy for the Internet. The new strategy, pursued under the awkward rubric of Next Generation Windows Services, or NGWS, is to translate many of the features of the Windows operating system into free-floating utilities available to users not just on the desktop but on the Internet and accessible from anywhere.

News.Com: Net companies go to extremes to be noticed. Despite the spending, many Net companies have yet to break through the ad noise and make an impression. "So much is being spent on advertising that it's getting so difficult to stand out above the crowd." Slack said. Some campaigns make their advertising dollars work directly for the potential customers.

Washington Post: Plan to Keep Internet Tax-Free Advances. The panel Congress created to mull Internet taxes won't turn in its report until next week, but lawmakers already are moving forward with a legislative proposal--and opponents already are calling for its rejection.

April 9, 2000
SJ Mercury: Telecom for the masses. Dan Gillmor. Few government bureaucracies have played such a pivotal role as the agency Kennard leads. For better or worse, FCC decisions and rules have outsized impacts on the future of telecommunications, which is increasingly central to our economy and culture.

Industry Standard: The Code Is the Law. Lawrence Lessig. The future of Net regulation will be more West Coast Code. More and more, those with interests to protect (copyright holders, for example) or interests to exploit (feeders on personal data) will use code writers of Silicon Valley rather than Congress to secure their interests.

Seattle Times: Mike Eisenberg teaches UW's doctors of data overload how to recognize what's valuable. What's happened in Seattle is Mike Eisenberg. In two years, he's turned the UW's School of Library and Information Science into one of the most important departments on campus. Almost shelved from neglect, this program - and its new umbrella, The Information School - someday could be the best in the world.

News.Com: Tellme starts talking with new Web service. Tellme Networks tomorrow will announce a service that lets consumers dial a toll-free phone number and use spoken commands to connect with or find restaurants, airline information, news, weather conditions, and stock quotes.

April 10, 2000
Information Week: Consumer Centricity. Despite all the hype and rhetoric about the new economy, there's a fundamental and revolutionary transformation of the industrial system that has gone largely unnoticed. This is the transformation of the role of consumers--from that of passive audience to active players in co-creating value.

Suck: Skin Cancer. Long relegated to the back seat of the software development process in favor of ever-more useless features, usability has recently been chloroformed, hog-tied and stuffed in the trunk. Exhibit A: the newly prereleased Netscape Nagivator 6. The tyranny of the skins has begun.

• FEED Magazine: From August 8, 1999; This Year's Skin. Steven Johnson.

NY Times: Historians Take a Longer View of Net Battles. They say the patent battles looming on the Internet horizon have historical precedent in those that arose with other innovations in communication, including the telegraph, telephone, radio and television.

News.Com: Microsoft story pulled from WSJ online site. A spokesman for the paper, Dick Tofel, said the story, which first appeared in the Journal's Internet edition late last night, was never meant to be published. The story was "up there for only a few hours," Tofel said, and never appeared in the Journal's printed editions.

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

Industry Standard: The Business Logic of Site Architecture. Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster. Williams-Sonoma brings catalog-centric sensibility to the Web, just as Wal-Mart has done with its stores' charmless industrial efficiency. Perhaps each of these sites is exactly right for its target customers and the products it sells. But, at least in part, each reflects a legacy mindset.

NY Times: Media Museum Starts an Internet Collection. It will announce Monday that it has formed a partnership with RealNetworks, an Internet company whose products deliver audio and video content over the World Wide Web, to create an archive of Internet content and data.

SF Chronicle: Free Web Services Are Struggling. EFax chief executive Ronald Brown said Wall Street is no longer willing to award giant valuations to companies just because they have millions of users. ``Last summer, everyone was talking about (attracting) eyeballs and building an installed base of users,'' Brown said. ``Now the market is very much looking for tangible evidence of developing revenue.''

News.Com: Sony to ban sale of online characters from its popular gaming sites. Sony is banning the real-world auctions of virtual-world characters and goods from its popular online game EverQuest, a fantasy world where tens of thousands of players don alter egos and interact with one another.

• Freedom Forum: From July 5, 1999; Video games hit mainstream with advent of virtual property. Jon Katz.

InfoWorld: Group blasts Internet Explorer 5.5 for lack of Web standards. Microsoft has angered the Web Standards Project for what the group says is the software giant's about-face on a pledge to support Web standards in its upcoming version of Internet Explorer.

April 11, 2000
USA Today: AOL to newspapers: Your future is online. [Bob Pittman, president of AOL] ''You should be able to do better online news than anybody else,'' he said. ''The question is how ubiquitous is your reach going to be?'' Those who try to hunker down and keep tight control of their online content, he suggested, will fail. ''What the Internet has done is taken control away from the gatekeepers.''

News.Com: Napster suit tests new copyright law. A decision is expected as early as this week on a defense motion to throw out the suit under the DMCA's so-called safe harbor provisions, despite claims that the service facilitates rampant music piracy by allowing music enthusiasts to swap digital recordings, called MP3s.

InfoWorld: Sony teams up with high-speed wireless Internet firm. The Sony investment is designed to help speed the deployment of a new ArrayComm technology expected to bring high-speed Internet access, online gaming, and multimedia content to a multitude of portable devices.

SJ Mercury: Inventor of personal cell phone promotes wireless Internet. As chairman of the San Jose-based ArrayComm Inc., Cooper is promoting cellular technology that promises to deliver wireless Internet access to small devices as simple and portable as cell phones, and at speeds equal to DSL or cable connections.

Industry Standard: ClickZ Kicks Out the Jams. It seems kind of quaint today, but founder/owners Handley and Bourland actually make money on their company – right now, this month, this year. Starting with an investment of nothing more than time, the pair saw profitability in their third month of operation.

SF Chronicle: Web Makes It Hard to Hide `Secret' Facility. ``Protecting the anonymity of the facility is a key concern,'' said Equinix spokesman Dave Fonkalsrud. He compared the security at the site to Fort Knox. But some of the security measures might be over-hyped. A Chronicle reporter was able to find the site's address on the Internet within an hour.

News.Com: Web companies take sales into their own hands. A crop of e-commerce service providers such as Vitessa, Escalate and Iconomy are telling some content providers that they are losing money by sending customers to another site.

• Useit.Com: From July 11, 1999; Affiliates Programs

SJ Mercury: Cultures merge as auto parts dot-com slowly takes shape. Dan Gillmor. This dot-com, however, is materializing in the heart of the Rust Belt. At the end of May, if all goes as scheduled, three huge automakers and two Silicon Valley software makers will kick off one of the most ambitious Internet ventures to date -- an online marketplace for auto parts and components.

News.Com: Fujitsu unit digs into online customer service. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based start-up said it will provide customer relationship management software, which will let customers ask questions online and get a real-time responses from Trustedanswer's database.

April 12, 2000
Upside: Rushing the buy. The step of actually buying something -- as opposed to shopping for it -- is a big one, and a much more committed action than finding something you like. When it comes to actually forking over the dough, people take their time. But in e-commerce, it's assumed that buying is instant.

NY Times: Governors Criticize Internet Tax Panel. More than two-thirds of the nation's 50 governors today will deliver to Congress a scathing bipartisan attack on the Internet tax commission, denouncing it as a forum for special interests seeking tax breaks while threatening the system in which states set their own tax policies...

USA Today: In twist, Amazon accused of patent violation. Amazon.com, the world's largest Internet retailer, was accused by Intouch Group Inc. of infringing patented methods for consumers to preview pre-recorded music samples over the Internet.

NY Times: When Success on the Web Is a Bad Thing. Not only have these cases meant that lackluster products and services have disappointed customers. They also indicate that the customer-service systems designed to catch slip-ups and rectify problems are also failing, a problem one analyst says was two years in the making.

digitalMASS: An inalienable right to link? Long-time Web initiates take as bedrock the right to link to any URL they please. Lawyers assume no such right, however. So since the earliest days of the commercial Web, numerous lawsuits have been filed. In each case, one party's perceived right to link has collided with another's desire to prevent indiscriminate linking.

Wired News: Odd Privacy Ratings Exposed. "Enonymous doesn't have a clue. It doesn't even have close to a clue about evaluating a privacy policy," Rotenberg said. EPIC isn't alone in finding bizarre errors and odd oversights in enonymous' database, designed to tell anyone using the company's "advisor" software what the privacy practices of websites are.

New York Law Journal: Jurisline.com Presses Battle With Lexis. The First Court ruling to come out of a fledgling Web site's battle with Lexis, the nation's pioneer in electronic legal publishing, could spell trouble for the upstart's efforts to provide the nation's case law free over the Internet.

Builder.Com: Seth Gordon on Careers in User Experience Design. Q&A with Seth Gordon, principal experience designer of Zefer. The UX design team plays a critical role in a site's needs assessment as well as its planning and building. The tone and success of the project depend on the groundwork the UX team lays, so professional service firms are aggressively recruiting talent in this space.

Dallas Morning News: Irving firm helps companies help Web customers. Friendlier design is the goal at Usability Sciences Corp. in Irving, which is helping businesses look more critically at their Web sites, seeing them through their customers' eyes instead of through the design guru's.

News.Com: Outpost.com offers same-day electronics delivery. Because the company's Wilmington, Ohio-based warehouse sits next door to Airborne Express' shipping hub, Outpost has struck an agreement with the company. When Outpost receives orders, it can pick, pack and run it next door to have the overnight shipping company deliver it in a matter of hours.

Upside: Southwest flies alone. ...Southwest claims to know its customers better, since tickets are primarily booked through Southwest telephone agents or online at SWA.com. That's why Kevin Krone, director of marketing automation for Southwest, sees little reason for the low-fare leader to consider joining the new multi-airline portal site known as T2...

News.Com: Estee Lauder buys Gloss.com. "Our specially designed modules and sites--the only authorized outlets for our brands on the Internet--will maintain the strong brand equity we have built over the years," Fred H. Langhammer, chief executive of Estee Lauder, said in a statement.

April 13, 2000
ClickZ: E-tailers: Only One Chance to Survive. The study's results clearly indicate that e-tailers only have one chance to survive. One bad experience almost guarantees a customer won't return for more. Not so for bricks-and-mortar businesses, which can sometimes get away with bad service repeatedly without losing a customer.

The Guardian: Not just a pretty page. Q&A with Brenda Laurel, Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman and Ben Shneiderman. [DN] ...you also have to get the backend of the company to work right. That is where we have to work hard, because what we're really arguing for is the end experience the user has. But people often think what we're doing is merely making the screen easy to read.

FEED Magazine: Napster's Death Knell. Clay Shirky. As we've seen with the distribution of print on the Web, efficiency trumps legality, and RIAA needs to be developing new models that work with electronic distribution rather than against it.

Upside: What it will take to shift the Net. Q&A with Vint Cerf. Well, you know, the reason that people want the bandwidth is not because they have a continuous demand, and it's not because they want to suck in huge amounts of stuff. What they would like is to get responsiveness.

• Useit.Com: From March 1, 1997; The Need for Speed

MSNBC: International Paper and Motorola agree to use ‘smart packages’. International Paper Co. and Motorola Inc. agreed to a groundbreaking deal to put microchips in the packaging concern’s boxes, a big step toward eliminating bar codes and ultimately bringing the entire manufacturing supply chain online.

digitalMASS: Bar code redux: These lines can talk. Right on schedule, in 1999, the Uniform Code Council -- the group that oversees the bar code -- joined with MIT, Procter & Gamble and Gillette to form the Auto-ID Center. The center's mission is to develop "a UPC for the new age of the Internet and e-commerce.

Salon: Twilight of the crypto-geeks. It was as if some tipping point had been reached, in which a critical mass of people involved in technology had suddenly looked up and found themselves to be older, grown-up, and in need of social supports -- grown-up like the Net itself.

Industry Standard: Where Do Ideas Come From? Carl Steadman. Make printouts and cut out whatever "clicks" with you – a nav bar here, an online poll there. Don't forget your logo! Then, apply a little Scotch tape to assemble your own vision of the future. Congratulations, you've got a prototype!

MSNBC: Job hunting in Japan means battling employers’ Web traps. The most popular companies, far from realizing efficiencies, are flooded with applications. To fight back, they are setting up Web roadblocks to make it harder to apply. That only inspires students to even greater heights of deviousness to get around them.

• NY Times: From November 3, 1999; Rewriting the Résumé Rules of the Road

Online Journalism Review: What the Pulitzers Missed: What makes a Newspaper a Newspaper? In the wake of this year's Pulitzer awards and the various complaints and gripes about who should have been recognized, we would like to suggest a dig deeper into the psyche of the Pulitzer policy: the question of why online news publications were not allowed to submit applications.

Red Herring: Terabeam scores Major League alliance with Lucent. Terabeam announced Wednesday that it is starting a new company with Lucent to make and sell equipment needed to provide its fiberless optical Internet service. The new company will be called Terabeam Internet Systems.

Forbes: The Hidden Brainpower Of AT&T Labs. While AT&T Chairman Michael Armstrong has dominated headlines with his bid to turn the company into the world's biggest provider of Internet over cable, AT&T Labs scientists are quietly developing technologies that may change the way people use the Web.

April 14, 2000
Fast Company: Adventures in Polymerland. Why has Polymerland been able to come so far so fast? One big reason is that Foss and his colleagues focused their Web efforts on what the Net could do for their customers, not on what it could do for Polymerland itself.

NY Times: Auction Dispute Centers on Question of Control Over Data. The decision, which is expected in the next few weeks, could help determine what kind of control an Internet company can maintain over non-copyrighted information that is publicly available on its site. Perhaps more important, the court's ruling could represent a choice between the competing metaphors or visions of the Internet that are at the heart of the case.

News.Com: eBay, Bidder's Edge face off in court. A U.S. District court judge said today that he is leaning toward issuing an injunction that limits the ability of Bidder's Edge to search eBay's auctions and to display the results on its Web site.

Salon: The insta-business plan re-strategizer! Don't feel bad, you're in good company with that delayed IPO. Think of this as an opportunity. While your S-1 filing is in a holding pattern, now is the perfect time to perform some cosmetic surgery on your story.

Forbes: B2Bluster. These days B2B companies are all the rage, just as B2-consumer sites were only a year ago. So outlets like Beyond.com, MotherNature.com and Fatbrain.com are leaping to B2B like chimps swinging from vine to vine to stay ahead of a raging forest fire.

MIT Technology Review: Freedom—Or Copyright? Richard Stallman. Readers who made use of their computers to share published information were technically copyright infringers. The world had changed, and what was once an industrial regulation on publishers had become a restriction on the public it was meant to serve.

InfoWorld: High-speed wireless networks to proliferate. The promise of mobile wireless broadband to create more e-commerce sales channels and decrease connectivity costs may soon be fulfilled, as major network carriers advance 3G (third generation) wireless technologies in the United States.

ZDNN: Amazon sued for patent infringement. Intouch Group Inc., which filed the suit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco earlier this week, alleges that Amazon, as well as four other firms, violated a patent governing the way consumers sample music online.

A List Apart: Language: The Ultimate User Interface. Why do we—as web-builders—overlook even the most basic aspects of language so frequently when we build our sites? Is language so transparent in our lives that we fail to recognize its importance?

MIT Technology Review: Speech and Vision. Michael Dertouzos. Speech and vision are the two principal means we have used to interact with other people and the world around us for thousands of years. That should be enough of a clue to steer our attention to these two modes of interaction.

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

April 15, 2000
Salon: Reactions to stock carnage: "The bubble has burst". The Dow Jones industrial average declined 617.78 to 10305.77, a loss of 5.66 percent, while the NASDAQ composite index went down 355.49 points, a loss of 9.67 percent. Here are some reactions to the bloodbath.

Internet World: The Truth About Patents. Internet innovation, however, is measured in weeks or months. With this in mind, experts identify five reasons why Internet patents, although important, will only have a modest impact on the evolution of the Web and e-commerce.

Interactive Week: Such A Deal! What is eFaust.com? We are a fully integrated Internet Experience Provider for high-income Net consumers. The eFaust.com service enhances your temporal digital existence with unique, personalized, e-commerce up-selling opportunities you can't get anywhere else, in exchange for your eyeballs.

April 16, 2000
Useit.Com: Reset and Cancel Buttons. Reset clears away the user's input on a Web form, but why would people want to do that? The Web is characterized by frequent movement between pages and users rarely encounter the same form twice. Thus, a Web form almost always cleared when the user sees it.

SJ Mercury: Patent office faces a changing tech world. Q&A with Q. Todd Dickinson, director of the U.S. Patents and Trademarks Office. When I talk with examiners, they are passionate about their role in this process. They understand very clearly how necessary it is not to let things out into the patent world which will be broader than they should be, which will impede the progress of technology.

USA Today: German court: AOL liable for music piracy. In a ruling that could give the music industry a weapon against Internet piracy, a court said Wednesday that America Online is responsible when users swap bootleg music files on its service.

April 17, 2000
Business Week: From One-Way Marketing to Cyber Dialogue. Yet companies that may be geniuses at the one-way marketing of television are just downright lousy at the art of conversation. And it shows. Take www.fooddialogue.com, the latest Web effort of Monsanto, a company that has invested billions to create bioengineered foods.

MSNBC: Kimberly-Clark sets Web site for parents to promote products. The site, called Parentstages.com, acts as a navigational tool to help answer parenting questions by directing users to partner sites, including iVillage.com and CBSHealthWatch.com. By saving users time navigating the Web, Parentstages.com aims to build loyalty to Kimberly-Clark’s brands.

Washington Post: The Perils of PR Pressure. Technology reporters say that Alexander and a handful of other publicists are helpful in connecting them with the right executives. But for the most part, they say, the relentless hyping of Internet companies is driving them nuts.

• Red Herring: From July 14, 1999; Heads up

News.Com: Can Napster be stopped? No! Could we create a new type of CD or encrypted file type that couldn't be copied? The potential certainly exists to do this. One fundamental irony exists, however. As long as you can listen to the music, it will be extremely easy for someone to rerecord it into a digital file--no ifs, ands or buts.

Wired News: Napster Takes a Nap. The vulnerability of Napster’s servers points to an advantage that distributed software like Gnutella may have in the long run -– no single IP destination controls the operation of the file-sharing.

ChannelSeven: The Secret of Web Branding: Go Back in Time. "The message these sites put out to the media, be it TV or print, may get people to the site, but branding happens during the experience, not during the message," says Jared Spool, founding principal of the consultancy User Interface Engineering.

USA Today: Net privacy rules for kids coming. Under the law, which takes effect Friday, sites that attract children under 13 must get parental permission before collecting personal information from those kids, and disclose how they use the data. Some sites are finding it easier to stop asking questions or restrict minors from the sites altogether.

LA Times: Web Firms May Vastly Inflate Claims of 'Hits'. As a result, the sites beyond the 2,000 or so most frequented destinations simply tell advertisers or investors what their visitor traffic is based on what their in-house computers automatically record. And to a large extent, what those logs reveal is a matter of interpretation.

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

News.Com: Analysts see Amazon deal as shift in strategy. The Drugstore.com deal allows Amazon to move toward the model pioneered by companies such as Yahoo and eBay. Instead of getting paid to deliver products, Amazon sells access to its customer base to other vendors.

New York Post: No 3-Letter .Com Names Left. Well, unless it has more than three letters, turns out you're out of luck - at least for now. As of last week, all possible three character combinations had been registered, without exception.

Interactive Week: Backbone Bottlenecks Burst Broadband Bubble. Despite the fact that the Internet is in part a collaboration between network providers, carriers and service providers have no economic incentive to devote valuable resources to these network-to-network handoff points.

USA Today: Analysis couched in secrecy. The next time you're conversing in a chat room or posting messages to an online bulletin board, don't be surprised if a sociologist or anthropologist pops in to ask you a few questions. Or perhaps someone already is examining your behavior without your knowing it.

April 18, 2000
Industry Standard: In Search of Skeptics. Lawrence Lessig. The law needs this skepticism now, especially regarding regulation of the Internet. We need this willingness to think about the effects of regulation on the process of innovation.

News.Com: Patent demands may spur Unisys rivals in graphics market. Unisys has successfully licensed its technology for years, but Web developers say the company recently has become more aggressive in asserting its GIF patent, called LZW, targeting Web content companies and charging higher licensing fees.

• Atlantic Unbound: From November 3, 1999; Hey Ho, GIFs Must Go!

Computerworld: Net tax panel failed to resolve a crucial issue. Dan Gillmor. Instead, we've opted for paralysis. The negative effect won't be obvious during the current economic boom, when sales tax revenues aren't dropping in major ways, and not at all in most jurisdictions. But when the next economic downturn hits, we'll regret our refusal to face up to a serious issue.

MSNBC: Hope springs anew for Web retailers: Study shows many are making money. Don’t sound the death knell for online retailers just yet. Despite the stock market’s recent trashing of Internet retail stocks, a new study shows 38% of Web retailers are actually making money. And a surprising 72% of catalog companies that have moved onto the Internet have Web operations that are now in the black.

• SF Chronicle: From January 3, 2000; Catalogs Thrive in an Online Age

AtNewYork: The End of Nasdaq Welfare. Tom Watson. In the last year and a half, following a public marketplace that almost never rejected a deal, New York's new media and technology sector has exploded-with people, money, and only a handful of ideas.

Industry Standard: Cherry-Picking The Web. Users can now customize a single Web page to include content as diverse as the latest Dilbert, updates on their pending eBay auctions and New York Observer columns, without any pesky banner ads or e-commerce links that go along with the source sites.

Interactive Week: Screen Scraping Makes Web Comeback. As befits all things Internet, the new screen scrapers have rechristened themselves Web account aggregators. They're focused on getting all of a customer's financial information to appear in one online location.

NY Times: Ad Agencies Sizing Up Dot-Com Clients Warily After Market Maelstrom. As the dot-com shakeout proceeds with the gyrations of the stock markets, agencies are warily watching to see how they will be affected as the winners and losers in cyberspace are decided.

Forbes: Shameless In Seattle. Public relation coups all. But beyond the hype is a company with dubious technology, scads of well-funded rivals--Lucent is now selling an airborne laser--and a strategy so grandiose that it leaves no room for error.

• Red Herring: From April 13, 2000; Terabeam scores Major League alliance with Lucent

TechWeb: Corel Markets Free Ad-Supported Apps. Before a user starts working on the application, the software will display ads for everything from database systems to books and records. Oracle, Zkey, Individual.com, and Columbia House are among the initial advertising sponsors, Corel said.

April 19, 2000
Editor & Publisher: Newspaper Sites Must Adjust To Life Without 'Editions'. Steve Outing. While the idea of publishing Web "editions" is a comfortable one for a newspaper company, editions are really counter to the nature of the Internet publishing medium. Ideally, a news Web site will publish news without a set schedule.

CNN: Is Web caching bad for the Internet? These companies have submitted NECP to the Internet Engineering Task Force for publication as an informational document. NECP is embroiled in controversy because some IETF leaders say one likely use of NECP - as an interception proxy - violates the Internet's fundamental design.

• Industry Standard: From November 14, 1999; Architecting Innovation. Lawrence Lessig.

CIO: The Future of Wealth. Review of Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer's new book, Future Wealth. Among those changes, Davis and Meyer envision a time when efficient markets are developed for just about everything, including the connected economy's most scarce and precious resources: human talent and intellectual capital.

MSNBC: Eating their own dog food: Cisco goes online to buy, sell and hire. And Chief Executive John Chambers wants more. At an all-day senior-staff meeting in February, Mr. Chambers required executives from departments such as product development, mergers and acquisitions, law and public relations to detail how they would use the Web.

digitalMASS: Your online persona just got made over. Judith Donath, the director of the Sociable Media Group at MIT, wants to help chatters relax, to entice them into sitting on that virtual sofa. Existing chat room interfaces don't allow that, she says. The mission of Donath's group is to research issues concerning identity and society in the "networked" world.

Editor & Publisher: Managing Online Message Board Brawls. The Los Angeles Times, fearful that the newspaper would be held accountable, put an end to the whole business. Newspaper spokesperson Mike Lang says the message boards will be back once the Times has figured out a software solution that will give the newspaper better control.

News.Com: Technology tussle underlies wireless Web. Powerful players such as Microsoft, Nokia and Phone.com are lining up to push the technology in different directions, in a fight that will determine what mobile Net access will look like, and which companies will dominate this market.

• InfoWorld: From December 13, 1999; Wireless standards support slipping

Industry Standard: Net Election: Concerning Concerned Journalists. Lacking any clear sense of what it thinks Web campaign journalism ought to be, the study tallies up irrelevant statistics, criticizes Web journalism for a multitude of insignificant sins and praises it for a host of nonexistent virtues.

Forbes: Luxe.Com. To hear Ashford.com's critics tell it, the luxury-goods retailer is the online equivalent of the guy in a trench coat selling bootleg watches on a street corner. Baume & Mercier, the expensive Swiss watchmaker, took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal last December warning consumers not to buy through Ashford.com.

• NY Times: From January 11, 2000; For Luxury Watchmakers, the Web Is the Enemy

April 20, 2000
SF Chronicle: Journalists Seduced by the `Dark Side' to Jump Ship to the Internet. ...but the latest trend doesn't have reporters and editors leaping to online journalistic ventures like Cnet, Wired News and MarketWatch.com. Instead, they're opting for bigger paydays at places like Healtheon/WebMD, Quicken.com, AllBusiness.com and BabyCenter, to name a few.

• Online Journalism Review: From December 7, 1999; From Doing Good to Doing Well; When Journalists Go E-Commerce

ZDNN: Sites brace for COPPA fallout. Many companies, such as the Walt Disney Co. and FreeZone, are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to make their sites compliant. Others, such as eCrush, are taking the most drastic approach, cutting off preteens altogether.

PC Week: Palm's president has lofty expectations. "Rather than shoving technology at folks, saying, 'This is the ultimate handheld device' ... we're saying, 'Wait a minute,'" Kessler said. "You buy your cell phone for what it primarily does, you have a handheld for what it primarily does.

InfoWorld: Vitessa changes Net transaction model. Vitessa believes giant shopping sites such as Amazon.com have held sway for too long. Community sites such as iVillage.com have a built-in customer base to whom they could be selling instead of passing visitors on through affiliate links to sites like Amazon's, Dave Mullan, Vitessa's chief operating officer...

News.Com: Group aims to curb spread of cell phone ads. The association, founded by AdForce, involves about 14 other companies, including Media Metrix, Motorola and OmniSky. The goal is to position the group as a central resource for wireless advertising, much like the Internet Advertising Bureau determines guidelines for ads on the Net.

• Industry Standard: From November 22, 1999; Do Ad Companies Need Another Alliance?

Washington Post: Hefty Computer Connects The Dots. A Sun E10000 used to be the master domain server for the Internet domain-name system, but Network Solutions picked IBM's RS/6000 S80 computer when it decided it needed an upgrade. IBM says it is the world's most powerful server, although it has a mere 24 processing chips, fewer than many competitors.

LA Times: Virtual Loot for Real Cash. Ebaid is part of a growing wave of online game players who hunt down and collect weapons, equipment and other accessories from popular online computer games, then sell the booty to other players for up to thousands of dollars apiece.

April 21, 2000
Salon: Bad company. Simson Garfinkel. A growing number of companies are using e-mail for direct marketing. These aren't fly-by-night spammers with get-rich-quick schemes or steaming come-ons to hot sex sites. No, these are legitimate businesses -- companies that think they have the right to send me unsolicited mail simply because they have my e-mail address.

SF Chronicle: AOL Blocking Pac Bell E-Mail In Effort to Thwart Spammers. America Online yesterday confirmed it has started blocking e-mail sent from thousands of Pac Bell Internet customers as part of its effort to thwart spammers, who have been flooding the company's 21 million users with unwanted junk mail.

The Economist: Death of the salesmen. It is a simple change, but one with enormous consequences. Take the salesforce out of the loop and suddenly opaque pricing becomes transparent pricing. Access to price information shifts the balance of power to the buyers...

MSNBC: ‘Dot commies’ invade press corps. This elite bunch counts no Internet-based reporters among its regular ranks. However, earlier this week the “dot-com press,” as we are affectionately called, were invited to ride on the press bus and fly Air Force One to cover the president’s “digital divide” tour.

Wired News: Free Car? More Like Fool's Gold. The concepts behind so many startup companies are ridiculous, Fishman said, and he wanted to think of something beyond absurd, writing about it as if it were real. Esquire never stated that the article was a spoof.

NY Times: Suit Against Anonymous Pest Revives Online Speech Law. A little-known federal law restricting indecent speech online that many lawyers thought was essentially dead has come back to life in Federal District Court in Manhattan, to the chagrin of some civil libertarians.

Webmonkey: Bittersweet Releases. Jeffrey Veen. The big fish (Netscape and Microsoft) and the small (Opera) have anted up another round of releases, and the new playing field gives the developer community some pleasant surprises as well as some familiar disappointments.

Computerworld: Maryland may be first to enact UCITA. Although Maryland is the second state to approve UCITA, it may be the first state to legally enact the measure, according to a spokeswoman at the governor's office. The act, if signed Tuesday, will take effect latter this year.

NY Times: Regulators Confront Web Role in Politics. As more campaigning goes online and as new forms of cybercampaigning arise, federal regulators face a tricky set of questions about how to regulate the Web -- and whether to do so -- as it plays an increasingly powerful role in promoting candidates, raising money and encouraging political discussion.

April 22, 2000
Freedom Forum: Journalism basics still needed in cyberspace, educators told. The two schools a year ago began a joint class that studies online publications from a business perspective and a journalism perspective. The evening's discussion, at The Freedom Forum Pacific Coast Center, focused on what the university should be doing to prepare students for the Internet industry.

InfoWorld: Nasdaq fluctuations say it's time to cull a few dot-coms from the herd of Bulls. Venture capitalists are getting picky about business plans, looking for things such as lucrative markets, sound business strategies, and talented management teams. In other words, a real business.

Project Cool: The Means or the End? Internet Industry spewed out lots of stories about how million-dollar house purchases were put on hold, office leasing paused, and the whole "new economy" teetered on the brink. The Web World kept on building the medium, secure in the knowledge that the world has already been inalterably changed.

InfoWorld: Maryland Legislature caves to UCITA, but Iowa may offer a safe haven from law. Several concerned corporations in Iowa have helped promote what has been called bomb-shelter legislation to protect all Iowa customers, consumers, and businesses from UCITA or UCITA-like laws in other states.

April 23, 2000
CNBC.com: Web Content Won’t Always Be Free. James Miller, Smith College. In the future, however, when the benefits of giving products away dissipate and investors demand that firms charge for content, the benefits of making small cash payments will be great enough for consumers to adopt software that facilitates small net payments.

• Useit.Com: From January 25, 1998; The Case for Micropayments

April 24, 2000
Forbes: ETranslate Breaks Net Language Barrier. Machine translation--used by everyone from Daimler Chrysler to Ericsson for quick, and by no means flowery, translations--weren’t going to work. So Quokka Sports gambled that San Francisco-based startup eTranslate would make this big project work. After all, eTranslate overcomes the problems presented by machine translations. How? By using humans

• Red Herring: From June 3, 1999; ETranslate speaks the language of money

Infoworld: AirFiber sees the light over last-mile broadband connectivity. The high costs associated with providing last-mile broadband networking connectivity into office buildings is prompting vendors to develop new alternatives, the latest of which will be revealed this week when AirFiber publicly launches itself and its first product, dubbed OptiMesh Network.

Wired News: AOL Founder: Censor the Net? Ha! Communist Vietnam, China, and even the U.S. government should think again if they believed they could censor the Internet, the founder of America Online said Monday. "I think Vietnam, China, and others that are trying to control the Internet -- even our own government -- have no chance," James Kimsey said in Hanoi.

Industry Standard: Cash Looks Better and Better. The model has worked well so far, and Kaboom has stock in four of its five clients. In fact, before the recent Nasdaq fluctuations, the company turned away some desirable dot-coms that weren't willing to give away equity. But after two weeks of violent swings in the market, Lowe and Park are rethinking their payment model.

NY Times: Web Retailers Face Demands for Efficiency. "More and more, the focus is now on what will drive near-term revenue," said John Hagel, a partner at McKinsey & Co., the management consultants. "There's clearly a sense of urgency around the efficiency side of the equation, which for a long time was ignored quite explicitly."

SF Chronicle: Dot-Com Penny Stocks Languish. The stock market's brutal sell-off in the last month has saddled battered ``dot-com'' companies with an ironic new problem: On top of their many other worries, the fact that their stocks have sunk to such low levels may itself keep the share prices from rising.

USA Today: If these walls had ears: What goes on inside AOL. ''This is the thing I've been having heartburn over,'' Schuler begins, as Lazaro sprawls drafts of screens on the conference table. ''The AOL audience hates two things: big scrolling pages and what they call blue type, the links.''

Computerworld: MasterCard criticizes Disney plan for Net child privacy. William Binzel, a spokesman for credit-card company MasterCard International Inc., declined to comment on how such fraud could be carried out, but he insisted that credit cards can't be "validated" as Disney suggested in cases of tiny or nonexistent sums.

ZDNN: COPPA cost too high for some sites. Such measures are adding to the financial pressures and administrative headaches of doing business online. This, in turn, is causing a number of dotcoms, many of which are already struggling to survive, to ditch services entirely rather than leave themselves open to potential lawsuits.

Interactive Week: Keynote Unveils Peering Measurement. Keynote Systems, the company that over the past five years made a name for itself by measuring backbone performance, plans to unveil a new service today that for the first time puts information on peering speeds in the public domain.

Industry Standard: Yournamehere.com. Carl Steadman. Save some moola! Take a word that describes your venture – "scam," for instance – and append any of the following: -as, -ia, -ic, -ion, -isis, -ium, -on. Using our example, we get "Scamisis," which you've got to admit sounds like one high-class Web site.

April 25, 2000
USA Today: Bailing out from the Super Bowl ad binge. Wall Street's angst was shared along Madison Avenue and beyond, where ad agencies and media companies had feasted on dot-com ad dollars that dropped like manna from heaven through 1999. The party culminated in a windfall of wildly expensive commercials during January's Super Bowl. Those days of free money are over.

Salon: Dot-com party madness. Dot-com valuations may have withered, but the enthusiasm for extravagant dot-com parties hasn't, and party budgets show no signs of being trimmed. In any given week, technology companies throw 15 to 20 parties in the San Francisco Bay Area. On average, each costs $30,000 to $50,000, according to party planners and venue owners...

Industry Standard: The Latest GIF Tiff. However, open-source advocates are calling the AccuWeather switch-over a victory in the ongoing campaign against GIFs – which contain a file-encoding system patented in America, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Britain by Unisys.com – and against software patents in general.

Computerworld: Maryland governor signs UCITA. Maryland Gov. Parris N. Glendening signed the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act into law today. UCITA will take effect Oct. 1; as things stands now, Maryland will be the first state to enact the software licensing measure.

PC Week: Palm's future: All wireless. According to officials of the Santa Clara, Calif., handheld developer, every Palm device under development and due by year's end will have the ability to remotely surf the Net, through either integrated technology, add-on modems, or cell phone hook ups.

Computerworld: Secret Shoppers Offer Personal Touch Online. [Mike Bezona, President and CEO of BuyerTouch] While analysis software can tell you which pages were visited and for how long, his company offers customers insights into why people chose the actions they did. "We're not into the clickstream," he says. "We are the human aspect."

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

Computerworld: New Wireless Technology Promises Smarter Packages. Just as the optical laser scanner revolutionized grocery shopping, a new technology from Motorola Inc. promises to take that kind of identification and control to a new level, applying it to nearly anything that can be printed or have a label stuck on it.

Business Week: Dueling to Be the King of Web Content. Even as they expand, both syndicators will face the challenge of sameness -- as in the degree of that they confer on customer sites. "If you go to two different sports sites, they often have the exact same stories," says Steve Outing...

News.Com: AOL instant messaging rivals to file complaint with FCC. According to an iCast spokesman, CMGI's iCast and Tribal Voice plan to file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission that will ask officials to "encourage" AOL to open its network.

Forbes: New Economy's Currency Devalued. People who take options as payment know full well that they involve risk, because they're essentially worthless if the price of the share drops below the strike price at which the owner can sell them. But why worry about those risks when dot-com stocks defy gravity and promise instant riches?

April 26, 2000
Editor & Publisher: Stock Tables, Election Results: Do We Need Them in Print? Steve Outing. At some point, perhaps printed stock tables and morning-after election results will no longer be printed in newspapers. With the coming ubiquity of online and wireless communication, it may no longer be worth the newsprint to publish data that is outdated by the time it reaches consumers' hands.

Online Journalism Review: Internet Statistics Unsound. Studies that are weak, inconclusive, and potentially misleading are presented as authoritative and significant. The perverse outcome is that the most press coverage goes to the most speculative and hyperbolic research.

• Salon: From September 3, 1998; From Sad and lonely in cyberspace? Scott Rosenberg.

Wired News: Patent Hangs Up Phone.com. "Phone.com has also filed a patent with the WAP Forum which covers much of the WAP architecture and is holding this over the heads of the entire industry," said Adam de Boor, Geoworks' chief technology officer. It will be up to the courts to decide whose patent is bigger.

Wired News: Consumers Blast AOL Merger. But perhaps most significant, the consumer groups said, the combined AOL firm could set its own standards over basic utilities of the Internet age, including email, instant messaging, buddy lists, calendar management, and electronic programming guides.

Upside: Give AOL a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t. AOL has not only popularized a new application -- instant messaging -- it has also helped e-commerce gain acceptance. AOL users, even though they generally have less computer experience, do as much or more online buying than many supposedly more technologically advanced consumers.

• Salon: From February 2, 2000; Friends don't let friends use AOL

Computerworld: Nextel kicks off flat-rate wireless data service. Nextel Communications Inc., in Reston Va., has introduced nationwide flat-rate wireless data services aimed at the business market, with service initially available in 43 major markets and 750 cities. The service is scheduled to be available throughout its network by midyear.

ZDNN: Sony picks Psion over MS, Palm. Palm has announced loose plans to cooperate with Symbian, but the apparent defection of Palm's highest-profile licensee could force it to decide quickly whether to work far closer with the consortium.

Industry Standard: Net Election: Yahoo vs. Free Speech. All the big portals have rules governing the types of banner ads that can run on their pages. Some portals have specific guidelines for political advertising. Those guidelines might be good-faith efforts to set ground rules, but in some cases they have the effect of diminishing the quantity and quality of political expression online.

News.Com: Free, anonymous information on the anarchists' Net. Clarke and a growing group of allied programmers are creating a kind of parallel Internet called "Freenet," where censorship is impossible, surfers are anonymous, and content is moved and hosted automatically to points near the people who want it.

ZDNN: Pentagon cracks down on ... PowerPoint. Too many bright, young junior officers are leaving the military for the private sector? A recent survey of captains at Fort Benning, Ga., cites the "ubiquity of the PowerPoint Army" as a prime reason for their disaffection.

InfoWorld: SEC issues guidelines on public companies' Net use. The new guidelines approved unanimously by the commission Tuesday seek to reduce the uncertainty and remove some of the barriers to using the Web to disseminate information to investors, the SEC said in a fact sheet about the new guidelines.

April 27, 2000
Freedom Forum: On the Internet Edge, we're defining ourselves. Jon Katz. In the social as well as technological arena, writes Stefik, technologies often cause radical change. "This is why the edge for technologies of connection is often a conflict between global and local values. Such a conflict can evoke resistance, a 'pushback,' as people seek stability and attempt to protect the status quo."

• CIO WebBusiness: From November 1, 1999; On the Internet Edge. Q&A with Xerox PARC's Mark Stefik.

Information Week: Online Collaboration Tools Help Simplify Product Design. Driven by shrinking product cycles and pressure to reduce overhead, companies are beginning to embrace a virtual approach to product design enabled by a new breed of Internet-based design, project management, and product data-management tools.

NY Times: Top Internet Art Prize Goes to Science-Fiction Writer. In what is likely to be a controversial election, the science-fiction author Neal Stephenson will receive the top prize in the Internet category of the Prix Ars Electronica, according to people involved with the prestigious computer-arts competition.

Wired News: Wazzup? Not Elián Web Parody. [AP official David Tomlin] "Shutting this site down was purely a copyright issue," he said. "It is our policy to police our copyright as aggressively as we can, although this is the first time that I can remember us going after a parody site. But intellectual property threats on the Internet are very real."

NY Times: Waiting for Harry Potter in Long Lines on the Net. That is because I realized that placing an online order would probably not get the book to us faster. In fact, we might get a copy sooner if we just walked into a bookstore on the release date and grabbed one from the ceiling-high stacks that the publisher plans to distribute nationwide.

• SF Chronicle: From July 9, 1999; Amazon.com Conjures Up Transatlantic Battle Over British Book

Washington Post: Wireless Hopes Left Up in the Air. But now, the government's plans appear imperiled by a uniquely Washington mixture of politics, profit and inconvenient physics. At stake are billions of taxpayer dollars, the quality of wireless service for millions of consumers and, some argue, the continued dominance of U.S. technology.

NY Times: Preparing for a Collision of Wireless Services. If wireless networks proliferate as fast as many researchers predict, is it possible for the airwaves to become overloaded? Cell phones and some handheld organizers transmit and receive scores of messages a day. With laptop computers and other devices added to the mix, will there eventually be one big wireless traffic jam?

Wired News: Intel Nixes Chip-Tracking ID. Hoping to avoid another campaign by privacy activists, Intel has decided not to include a controversial user identification feature in its forthcoming 1.5 GHz Willamette chip. Absent from Willamette's design are a unique ID number and other security measures that could be used to limit piracy by tracking users...

USA Today: Md. software law protects consumers. Maryland's law goes into effect on Oct. 1; the state changed the original version to make it more consumer-friendly. Virginia, the only other state to adopt UCITA, has delayed implementation until July 2001 to give legislators more time to consider consumer protections.

April 28, 2000
A List Apart: Time to Close the Web? From Search to News to Browsers, sites are serving the same look, news and information. Newspaper and News sites – seduced by the promise of complete story, not constrained by column inches, advertising placement, or above-the-fold considerations – have failed more thoroughly than any other category.

Industry Standard: Elian Movie Stirs Copyright Debate. [David Tomlin, assistant to the president at AP] If nothing else, it's a good object lesson for AP. Tomlin says they'll take more time to think before pursuing possible copyright violators who use content to bring levity to serious issues if done in good taste.

Wired News: SDMI: Shape Up or Ship Out. At this week's SDMI meetings in Los Angeles, executive director Leonardo Chiariglione set an ominous mood for the conference with an opening speech that chastised SDMI members for failing to come up with an aggressive work plan, and in general, not pursuing the organization's goals in a professional manner.

• NY Times: From March 1, 1999; Expert to Help Devise Format for Delivering Music on Internet

AtNewYork: The Case for E-Commerce: Where We Went Wrong. Jason Chervokas. The problem for the current class of e-tailers is that they've done little more than drag the traditional way of doing things online, and in so doing, lost sight of the advantages the Net was supposed to afford. We forgot about what was new about the so-called "new economy."

Computerworld: Study: e-commerce sites need more than loyalty programs. New York-based Jupiter said the survey of 1,200 U.S. online consumers revealed that only 22% of them cited loyalty programs as an incentive to buy products or services from a Web site. Consumers placed a higher value on easy returns, customer service and product selection.

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

The Economist: America rides the wireless wave. Much depends on whether the big telephone companies will allow start-ups to flourish. The Internet’s success is due not least to the inability of telephone companies to control what services were offered over their networks.

O'Reilly Network: Simson Garfinkel: Chicken Little or Paul Revere? Q&A with Simson Garfinkel. The marketplace doesn't regulate issues when there are externalities. You need to have regulation so that companies are forced to bear the brunt of what they throw onto society. And privacy is very much like that.

NY Times: Xerox and Microsoft Create Digital Safeguard Company. The Xerox Corporation and the Microsoft Corporation said today that they would create a company to produce and market software that protects copyrighted materials like books, music and video distributed over the Internet.

• The Economist: From July 17, 1999; Digital rights and wrongs

April 29, 2000
InfoWorld: Quality multimedia in real time is the impetus for Enkido's 768 service. The real name of Enkido's service is OC768, where OC stands for Optical Carrier. So you might guess Enkido is providing Internet access at 768Mbps. Logical, but wrong again. Enkido's OC768 service is connecting Deutsche Telecom locations in Manhattan with fibers operating at 40,000,000,000 bits per second (40Gbps).

• Wired: From October 1995; 2020: The Fiber-Coax Legacy. Nicholas Negroponte.

Good Experience: Building an E-Business for Real. With the end, or the beginning of the end, of the tech stock bubble, it's finally time for the dotcoms to focus on the customer. These days it might not not be such a good idea to waste investors' money on $20 million TV ad campaigns, overdesigned sites, and exorbitant sushi-and-lobster parties.

April 30, 2000
Useit.Com: Finally Progress in Internet Client Design. This sorry picture is finally changing. Several recent software products have introduced specialized applications with better user interfaces for special-purpose use. And there is even a new browser out with improved user control.

Red Herring: Music lawsuits bring down the hammer. As some in the U.S. academic legal community see it, the future of technological innovation, computing, democratic discourse, and freedom of speech could turn on the outcome of the current spate of lawsuits in progress against individuals and companies promoting the digital distribution of music.

visualLogic: The Web and enterprise identity, part 2. As networked work environments become the norm, as various forms of telecommuting and remote access become routine, Web-based work environments will become the dominant force in creating and maintaining the corporate ethos, attitudes, and values.

Salon: Wazzup, Elián! [David Tomlin, assistant to the president at the Associated Press] Tomlin also admits that it's difficult to protect a digital image that can be endlessly copied by online fans. "Right now, obviously, if there's a communal will on the Internet to display this material, it's going to get displayed," he shrugs.

Upside: Do cryptic sites equal lost opportunities? Vividence, a high-profile Silicon Valley startup funded by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, believes it can help. For $20,000 and up, it can send hundreds of volunteer Web surfers to a site and report on major problems within five days.