May 1, 2000
Salon: On the record. Q&A with Hilary Rosen, CEO of RIAA. No one is arguing Chicken Little here; what we are saying is that if that geometric progression is such that music has less and less value, ultimately you do get to a scenario where it's hard for the legitimate businesses to compete.

• Upside: From January 10, 1999; New Media, Same Song

Industry Standard: Spawn of Napster. "No one goes into this business to tick off the recording industry unnecessarily," says attorney Andrew Bridges, who successfully defended Diamond Multimedia, maker of the Rio portable MP3 player, in a landmark case brought by the Recording Industry Association of America in 1998. "On the other hand, the recording industry doesn't play fair, and no one can wait for the RIAA's consent or approval in order to develop a business plan."

NY Times: MP3.com Hopes for Deal in Copyright Suit. Jim Griffin, chief executive of Cherry Lane Digital, a consulting firm for digitally distributed arts companies, said the current case is part of a broader conflict. "Music is the canary in the coal mine for all digital entertainment," he said. "This is a minor skirmish in the war between record companies and their so-called pirates."

SJ Mercury: Gordon Eubanks Q&A: Value customers, not stocks. One is, you have to survey the customers on their satisfaction, their success with what they buy from you. The other aspect is, you have to interact with customers in a totally non-sales way to understand where their pain points are, where their business is going, what the needs are. If you don't do both, you run into this continuous technology problem.

NY Times: Many Analysts Think Expensive Portal Deals Deserve More Scrutiny. For the last two years, Web portals, the jumping-off sites for many Internet surfers, have grabbed a piece of the e-commerce pie by offering retailers prime real estate on their sites. In exchange, the portals receive stratospheric tenancy fees.

News.Com: AOL, Homestore ink $200 million deal. Under the terms of the agreement, AOL will receive about 3.9 million shares of Homestore common stock and $20 million in cash. Homestore is also required to meet certain performance targets through the terms of the agreement.

USA Today: Dot-coms may be ducking ad bills. But as the Internet bubble bursts, stories of cyberspace clients allegedly not paying their debts are starting to emerge. More horror stories are expected as dot-coms with big advertising appetites but little cash go belly up.

Boston Globe: Return to sender. Note the time and put the body on ice. The ''Sell a Dollar's Worth of Merchandise for Fifty Cents and Make It Up On Volume.com'' business model is dead. Which makes this a pretty unfortunate time for Kozmo.com, the New York-based urban delivery service, to be going public.

Industry Standard: Kozmo.com, Media Company. In the past several weeks, Kozmo has quietly struck strategic investment deals with Warner Home Video, Sony's Columbia TriStar and Liberty Digital to position itself for broadband entertainment delivery, Kozmo insiders say.

Stating the Obvious: Pyra's Killer App. With Pyra, project managers could spend their time on true value-add project activities like setting goals, fostering inter-disciplinary communication, prioritizing features, resolving issues and communicating with project stakeholders that aren't part of the core team.

CNN: EPA: Clean toxic data from Web site. To keep sensitive information out of the hands of terrorists, the rule would prohibit the posting of information such as the size of the population in an area near a chemical plant and other information routinely filed with the EPA by hazardous materials facilities.

• NY Times: From September 12, 1999; Group Puts Disaster Data on Internet

NY Times: Web Surfers Want the News Fast and Free. The survey by Princeton Research Associates for the Web content distributor Screaming Media, found that 89 percent of the 1,232 respondents had never paid for news or information on the Web, and 83 percent were not willing to pay.

Industry Standard: Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam. It's precisely because being noticed is so important that companies should think about it less stupidly than most now do. How can I say "stupidly"? Well, you'd probably say something worse if you were on the receiving end of the typical dot-com's public relations efforts.

May 2, 2000
NY Times: Students Have Few Qualms About Online Music Piracy. Ethical barriers are falling along with the technical ones. Some students argue that commercial CDs are little more than an outdated delivery system that does not fit into their needs or budgets. Others see copying music as an ethical breach they can live with.

Harvard Business Review: Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs. Q&A with Don Tapscott, David Ticoll, and Alex Lowy. The four P's of marketing (product, place, price, and promotion) — and the traditional categories of advertising and PR-don't work in cyberspace. In a b-web, everyone and everything communicates: two-way, multi-way, and all the time.

TechWeb: Sony-Universal Subscription Service Echoed By MP3. Sony, the music arm of Sony Corp. and Universal, owned by Seagram, said they will license music and video content, potentially including streaming and downloading features, to Internet consumers using various platforms like computers, wireless personal devices, and set-top boxes.

Red Herring: Wake up, music industry. Critics already complain that the companies use clunky software or difficult processes that make buying music online a challenge and that they charge prices that are too high. Almost as if to show how clueless it is, Sony priced its singles at $3.50, with specials running at $2.50 each -- that makes an album of 10 songs cost 60 percent to 130 percent more than a CD.

CNN: Pressure mounts for instant messaging standard. After struggling for two years to define requirements for an instant messaging standard, the Internet Engineering Task Force has asked participants to submit full-blown protocol designs by June 15. This unusual move is meant to jump-start the standardization process, which has been bogged down by bickering over technical details.

Upside: How to win customer loyalty. Consumers might try these sites based on the loyalty program. But once they do, their experience with the site is likely to have a bigger impact on their future loyalty than the nature of the incentive program. In other words, a nice incentive deal might get consumers in the door, but it won't make them stay.

News.Com: AltaVista primes new search engine. But the site is expected to look very different, the sources added, as it will not support banner advertisements; instead, it will rely on selling links to merchants or other businesses that want to maintain a presence on the site.

Forbes: Google Searches For Success. The same unfettered, starry-eyed curiosity is what drove Brin and fellow Stanford University student Larry Page to build a better search engine--one infinitely easier to find than navigation bars from competing Web portals.

USA Today: An online battle of royal proportions. Radio stations dispute having to pay the fees, citing current exemptions from royalties for over-the-air broadcasts. Start-up Web companies that just offer music acknowledge they will have to pay fees, yet are fighting the recording industry over which sites should be eligible for a blanket license with a set royalty.

ZDNN: Supreme Court sides with ISPs on liability. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let stand the dismissal of a lawsuit against an Internet service provider after an impostor using a 15-year-old boy's name sent a threatening, profane e-mail and posted two vulgar bulletin board messages.

News.Com: Despite legal problems, Amazon stands by e-commerce deals. ...Amazon's use of Alexa's e-commerce technology has advanced the company in the all-important arena of personalization and comparison shopping, possibly forging new legal and practical ground for the industry as a whole.

Web Techniques: Asides on Hypertext. Michael Swaine. One site I often visit tends to put all the information it has about a topic right there on its front page. Far from being pleased at the convenience, I find myself clicking in frustration on random words, looking for the depth.

First Monday: FM Interviews Louise Addis. For a long time, the Web suffered from the stigma of being unsupported software. My goal was simply to provide better community access to the particle physics literature via SPIRES-HEP.

News.Com: Newspaper prints codes that link readers to the Web. Starting this week, The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., is delivering papers that have tiny bar codes on articles, allowing readers to use a pen-like wand to scan and pull up related information on the Web.

May 3, 2000
Information Week: A Public Corporate Water Cooler. Christopher Locke. Take Ford Motor Co. In February, Ford unveiled a plan to give its 350,000 employees Net-enabled home PCs. The mainstream press made much of the $30 million worth of equipment involved--and totally missed the main story: the Internet and the market conversations it spawns.

Editor & Publisher: Eyetrack Online News Study May Surprise You. Steve Outing. But this Eyetrack study may shock some of you. One of its principle findings is that news Web site users tend to look first at and look most intently at text, glossing over photos and images in search of meaningful textual information.

• Poynter.org: Definitely Not Your Father's Newspaper

David P. Reed: The End of the End-to-End Argument. Yet just when the possibilities hoped for by those folks in Marina del Rey are proving true, and just when the impact of solid-state physics, integrated optics, and software radio are creating unprecedented exponential growth in network capacity, we are starting to hear the call for centralized management...

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

Industry Standard: RealNames' Mission: Simple Words to Surf the Web. Beyond the friendliness, though, is a controversial ambition. RealNames' business plan hinges on the convergence of online and offline advertising; it focuses less on everyday language than on branding. In Teare's vision, common names will be bought.

Industry Standard: Moving Beyond Napster. The deal also prepares the two record labels for the post-Napster world of music consumption, where existing copyright laws might prove unenforceable. The labels' only alternative, then, is to offer a service as appealing to consumers and easy to use as Napster and any of the dozen or so other MP3 file-swapping systems now available.

NY Post: MP3, RIAA Spinning $100M Settlement. Sources tell The Post the Recording Industry Association of America - which represents 10 major labels - has asked the embattled music Web site to pony up $100 million to settle their lawsuit after a federal judge's ruling Friday that MP3.com violated copyright law...

AtNewYork: It's Only Rock and Roll: Why Metallica Doesn't Get It. Tom Watson. Furthermore, the band clearly has no clear estimation of just how far out of the barn the Internet music horse is. Instead of trying to put the close the barn door, Metallica and other artists should be looking for creative ways to create revenue from the Napsters and the MP3.com's and their likely successors.

Interactive Week: AltaVista Expands Search For Gold. Counter to the trend in which companies load portal pages with entree into everything from news and shopping to horoscopes and chat, AltaVista planned to go live late Tuesday with a site - RagingSearch.com - focused on Web searches.

Forbes: AltaVista Struggles To Find Niche. RagingSearch is a minimalist's dream. No e-commerce links, no clutter of banner advertisements. In other words, it looks an awful lot like Google. "AltaVista.com is the car; RagingSearch.com is the motorcycle," says Tracy Roberts, the company's director of product marketing. "RagingSearch just doesn't have the cup holders and other extra stuff."

Forbes: New Rules For New Media. "The Internet makes for strange bedfellows," admits Deanna Brown, CEO of Powerful Media and former president of Brill’s Content. She insists that the news staff of 70 reporters and editors will remain independent of any strategic partnerships. "That’s true of old media and new media."

CNNfn: Coke, AOL marketing pact. Coca-Cola Co. and America Online announced Wednesday they will pair in an online and offline marketing alliance that is reportedly valued at $64 million. The alliance marks the soft drink maker's first foray in worldwide online advertising...

May 4, 2000
Good Experience: Empathy and Experience. On the other hand, I do feel a stronger calling in my work than simply making clients more money (though we do plenty of that). Below I've listed five reasons I think there is something more to my work, maybe even some true empathy, than a simple profit motive.

AtNewYork: Does Jupiter's Inside Stake Raise Conflict Stakes? The announcement had barely hit the wires, however, when news media outlets questioned whether the stake would create conflict of interest issues -- or at least the appearance of conflict -- regarding other media companies that Jupiter researches. Both companies say there is no cause for concern.

Wired News: False Listings Bait Crawler. More unique, however, may be Pollstar's method for catching Gigmania's alleged behavior. To test its suspicions that its data was being electronically "crawled" and collected for Gigmania's database, Pollstar listed bogus events with fake names for bands, venues and cities and then waited for them to appear at Gigmania's site.

Forbes: Browser Bashers. Many critics blame the browser and are trying to develop an entirely new way of navigating the Internet. Excite at Home, the Web portal, runs a handful of skunkworks projects, including one aimed at creating three-dimensional Web interfaces. Microsoft is pursuing a 3-D design, as well. At the World Wide Web Consortium, scientists are working on a voice-driven browser.

Editor & Publisher: Online News Readers Prefer Text Over Graphics. The participants of the study were news junkies, recruited via newspaper ads. The chief qualification for selection was that they read online news at least three times per week.

Wired News: Online News All About Text. The study, which used small cameras to track the way online readers' eyes scan websites, found that surfers focus first on text, ignoring photos and graphics totally, only returning to them -- if at all -- after reading the text.

Fortune: E-Commodating the Disabled in the Workplace. Michael Schrage. Business' intensifying dependence on the Net accelerates the need to address disability and discrimination conflicts. Surely a policy erring on the side of access and accommodation is not inherently unreasonable.

New York Post: Big-Deal E-Tailer Boo is Thru. The six month-old fashion and sportwear site is up for sale and could be shut down if there is no taker, sources close to the situation told The Post. Either scenario would be an anticlimactic end for the splashy e-tailer, which came out last year with a giant wave of publicity and even bigger expectations.

• Salon: From November 5, 1999; Boo to Boo

NY Times: Scan the Headlines? No, Just the Bar Codes. Alan H. Seim, director of Internet operations at The Post and Courier, considers the bar codes a much-needed solution to a problem that newspapers and their readers have been facing since the dawn of the Web: the awkwardness of printing and typing (let alone remembering) a new Web address.

May 5, 2000
Business Week: Q&A with Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos. So if you go back and look at Sony's early mission, they wanted to make Japan known for quality -- not Sony, but Japan. They did it. In a similar sort of way, we want to raise the worldwide standard for customer experience and customer service...

First Monday: The COMsumer Manifesto. The incentive for the firm was to reach out and attract the customer. Now the transfer to the online world is rapidly changing this concept to drawing in the customer. This traces to customers having more information and immediate choices available.

A List Apart: DigiGlut.com. "Internet time" has a new meaning: whereas conventional advertising took at least a decade to wreck the promise of TV in its Golden Age, it has taken only five years, from the invention of the browser, to reduce the Internet to blather.

Business Week: Tell Me a (Digital) Story. But this is different. Unlike TV, where company-contrived stories are used to pitch products to customers, digital storytelling aims to build customer communities. By letting customers share their brand experiences with each other, stories become more authentic and interactive than just another ad.

Seattle Times: Computer 'shrinkwrap' license binding, court says. In a 7-2 decision yesterday, the court rejected a construction firm's claim that a software maker should be liable for $1.95 million in losses the company says were caused by a bad computer program. The court said the agreement enclosed in the packaging protected the software firm from liability, even if the construction company never read it.

The Village Voice: Down By Law. DiBona is teaching Garbus, who only recently learned how to work his own e-mail, why a miniscule bit of silicon in this player—and an equally miniscule program built to bypass it—have sparked a federal case that will determine whether we pass through the digital age with the First Amendment intact.

Industry Standard: Party's Over. And as if gate-crashers aren't enough of a problem, unhappy tech insiders can post their complaints on any number of Web sites devoted to reviewing dot-com parties. As a result, many Internet companies are honing the delicate art of party management.

• Good Experience: From April 28, 2000; Building an E-Business for Real

The Economist: Heavy reading. All the talk in technology publishing is of the “thud factor”. Subscribers are said to prefer computer magazines that make a loud slap when they hit the desk. If that is true, American readers are certainly getting what they want.

• Salon: From March 21, 2000; My dot-com business mags have fallen on me and I can't get up!

Business Week: A Beauty Site Marred by Endless Questions. Instead, it's as if Procter decided to be the Regis Philbin of e-beauty sites. If you're a game-show aficionado and love answering pointless questions about yourself, you'll love Reflect.com. But if you just want some lipstick, you might think about going somewhere else.

• ZDNet E-Business: From February 11, 2000; Reflect.com gets too personal too fast

Industry Standard: Boo Gets a Bailout. Industry doomsayers saw the move as a final, urgent bid by lead investors to recoup some of the $108 million they sank into Boo during the heady days of last summer, when the so-hip-it-hurts company hit the big time.

May 6, 2000
News.Com: MP3.com, BMI in music licensing deal. MP3.com, the Internet music company that was found by a federal judge to be violating copyrights, said it reached a licensing agreement with one of the two major U.S. organizations that collect music royalty payments.

Forbes: NetPD Wants To Be Web's Police Department. He has not provided details beyond the fact that NetPD's software "works like 5,000 humans sitting in a room doing Web searches" to identify thousands of user names very quickly. He insists that to say more would enable Napster and other MP3 programs to block the software.

InfoWorld: To keep users happy, ensure the search tool is matched to your audience's needs. In their quest for information, users turn to one tool before they depart: search. A well-designed search tool should not be the Band-Aid for a poorly designed site overall, but it is one of many systems on a Web site that requires continuous attention and improvement.

May 7, 2000
SJ Mercury: Media industry's business model must evolve or die. Dan Gillmor. It's time for the recording industry to face the new reality. Yes, digital entertainment can be copied, and it will be copied. But it's arrogant to assume that no one will pay for their music and outrageous to declare pirates of anyone who wants to make copies for personal use or play recordings on non-authorized equipment, which is where we're heading.

NY Times: Of Forty-Niners, Oilmen and the Dot-Com Boom. Most financial writers, groping for historic precedents to explain the dot-com boom, cite foreign events, like the tulip mania and the South Sea Bubble. But the most important precursors are those episodes in American history that exemplify our passion for seeking fortune and adventure in new territory.

NY Times: So Far, Big Brother Isn´t Big Business. For all the discussion about how the Internet is stripping consumers of whatever thin veil of privacy they have left in this world of credit bureaus and supermarket scanners, analysts have failed to recognize just how ineffective most of these data-gathering systems have been.

May 8, 2000
Salon: Come on, Eileen. Q&A with Eileen Richardson, CEO of Napster. I don't know that it's any different from what happened with radio when it was a new medium. Everyone then was up in arms, "Oh my God, how are people going to get paid; it's free and it shouldn't be." We're running into some of those same issues here.

Wired News: Napster's 'Safe Harbor' Sinks. Napster's defense hinged on the "safe harbor" provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that states an ISP should not be held liable for illegal activity occurring on the site, said copyright attorney Whitney Broussard.

ClickZ: Talk to Me Like I’m a Person. One of the ways you can increase the lifespan of the permission you receive from your customers or potential customers is to choose your tone of voice and writing style carefully. Implicit in the concept of permission marketing is that one is being treated as an individual.

Newsweek: Paying for Internet Time. Who's afraid of a little red ink? Ask an Internet start-up about its losses, and you'll hear about strategies to gain market share. But start-ups also lose money the old-fashioned way: they waste it. Dot-coms pay high rates to suppliers of all kinds of services, from public relations to accounting and even technical consulting, often for no good reason.

ZD Interactive Investor: Ad agencies still high, but cautious, on dot-com clients. However, ad agencies contacted by Reuters remain enthusiastic, if not bullish, about the future of dot-com clients. At the same time, while no one will deny the bloom is off the rose for Internet ventures, ad experts say that's not such a bad thing.

News.Com: Columbia University to bestow Net journalism awards. The Online Journalism Awards will honor outstanding online journalism each year with 11 prizes in six categories, the Graduate School of Journalism and the Online News Association said in a statement.

Industry Standard: Fashionistas Get Fed Up. While this might sound like a fragile fashionista complaining about a botched pedicure, fashion editors and writers were some of the first traditional media workers to jump on the online bandwagon.

• Salon: From June 11, 1999; The great Web "brain drain". Scott Rosenberg.

News.Com: Nickelodeon's Red Rocket doesn't take off. The closure of Red Rocket is significant given its role in Nickelodeon parent Viacom's high-profile online strategy. Red Rocket was originally an e-commerce site run by Viacom's Simon & Schuster publishing unit. Viacom acquired the site from Simon & Schuster in February 1999 as part of its concerted push into the online arena.

Computerworld: Battle Brews Over Reverse-Engineering. Recent court decisions limiting developers' rights to reverse-engineer software have sparked an outcry by critics who say these actions could severely limit developers and users trying to interoperate or find flaws in commercial software.

Wired News: Who Can Dig Digital Books? ...the University of Pennsylvania Library will spend the next five years publishing online every new history work produced by Oxford University Press. Researchers hope to gain insight into how digital texts impact teaching, research, and learning. They also want to determine whether digital books will replace or supplement printed texts.

Industry Standard: Just For Clicks. Today, nearly every Web site collects and analyzes clickstream data in one form or another. Dot-coms are using the data to learn how to design more customer-friendly sites, where to spend their Internet advertising dollars, how to run successful marketing and promotional campaigns and even how to personalize pages.

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

May 9, 2000
Salon: RIAA 1, Napster 0. Additionally, Napster's main argument -- that it is exempt from copyright infringement since no files ever pass through company servers -- may have boomeranged. As the RIAA argued in court, if no files pass through Napster, then Napster by definition is not a conduit and cannot qualify under the first safe harbor.

Business 2.0: WAP's Closed-door Approach. Clay Shirky. No matter what the technical arguments for WAP are, its effect is to put the phone companies firmly in control of the user. The WAP consortium is determined that no third party will be able to reach the user of a wireless device without going through an interface that one of its member companies controls and derives revenue from.

NY Times: AOL and Network Solutions Sign Multimillion Marketing Deal. Network Solutions Inc., the leading registrar of Internet addresses, agreed today to make Web name services available to America Online Inc. subscribers, giving the company direct access to 24 million online customers.

• News.Com: From April 21, 1999; AOL among new domain registrars

Wired News: Real Cybersquatting Really Sucks. To thwart anyone from mocking Verizon's wireless service, a lawyer registered the domain name verizonsucks.com. The lawyer is with the law firm Arnold and Porter, which represents Bell Atlantic, the company that launched Verizon with Vodaphone Airtouch. So it should be no surprise that Verizon lawyers were not amused when hacker-zine 2600 Magazine purchased verizonreallysucks.com.

• USA Today: From March 6, 2000; Net address expansion plan under fire. Bell Atlantic, for example, has three full time employees protecting the company's name on the Internet and last year fought to reclaim more than 1,000 unauthorized Web addresses.

News.Com: Yahoo, Excite@Home may join instant messaging complaint. iCast and Tribal Voice--both privately held, CMGI majority-owned firms--have requested support from Web giant Yahoo and cable Internet service provider Excite@Home, among others.

Business 2.0: Hocus Focus. Even Vividence's CEO says the service won't replace traditional user testing, where you can gauge how intensely a user feels about a particular feature and ask follow-up questions face to face.

Mappa.Mundi Magazine: Maps to Market Your Network. The big corporations that build and operate these data networks use maps to market their power of connectivity and capacity. In this article I want to look at just one exemplar of these maps, those produced by UUNET.

Industry Standard: Take It and Leave It. Carl Steadman. Successful startups are more or less all alike, but every unsuccessful venture fails in its own inimitable way. It might begin when your new CFO speeds away in his signing-bonus Boxster ... or when the unsustainable European office becomes increasingly unsustainable.

May 10, 2000
News.Com: FTC slams record labels on CD sales practices. The companies--units of Time Warner, Sony, EMI Group, Bertelsmann and Seagram--will drop for seven years what the FTC called coercive agreements requiring record stores to charge specific minimum advertised prices for CDs.

SJ Mercury: Music industry facing a revolution. The recording industry's lobbying group, the RIAA, claims that the price of CDs is reasonable because of the costs involved in developing and marketing new bands. If the price had kept up with other costs, a CD would cost $34, it says on its Web site.

NY Times: The Concept of Copyright Fights for Internet Survival. While American courts struggle over the recording industry's challenge to digital music swapping, Ian Clarke, a 23-year-old Irish programmer, is moving on to the next battleground. He is finishing a program that he says will make it impossible to control the traffic in any kind of digital information...

News.Com: EMI amps up digital music offerings. The recording giant today said that beginning July 1, it will make 100 of its albums and 40 associated singles available for download. Music shoppers will be able to download EMI tracks and albums from online retail sites.

Wall of Sound: Don Henley Decries 'Work-for-Hire' Bill. Instead of the rights to recordings reverting to the artists after 35 years, as current law states, recordings would be reclassified as "works for hire," with the record labels keeping the rights to them forever.

Upside: E-tailers: Smart customers buy more. Adding education or training to your Web site. If you educate your customers and prospects, make them more confident, and add to their interest, you'll not only get more sales, but sales of better, often higher-priced products as well.

USA Today: Survey says: Net reduces isolation. Steven Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said the Pew findings help bring balance to the debate on the Internet's social impact. He said the new study confirms his own research that Americans are learning to treat the Internet as a communications tool as fundamental as the telephone.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of the weaknesses in the Pew Research Center's new study. Most fundamentally, the study relies on a telephone survey: that is, calling people up to ask them questions instead of observing their actual behavior. Thus, all we have is self-reported claims and not true data.

Washington Post: Congress to Block Imaginary Internet Tax Bill. In the age of the Internet, even a prank can alter political reality. No one in Congress had proposed enacting anything like House Bill 602-P, but in reaction to the public sentiment, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) has drafted a proposal to block the idea.

USA Today: House votes to extend Net tax ban. Even though the current Internet tax moratorium does not expire until October 2001, the House Wednesday voted to extend the ban for five years but put aside for now the thornier issue of how state sales taxes should apply to electronic commerce.

Industry Standard: The Reel.com Deal. The movie retailer, a subsidiary of Hollywood Entertainment, which runs Hollywood Video, has stepped up its months-long campaign to protect its trademarks "reel," "reel.com," and others. Legal representatives for the Emeryville, Calif., subsidiary say that several sites using the word "reel" water down Reel.com's trademarks.

• ReelUniverse.com Press Release: From February 9, 2000; Reel.com Takes Legal Action Against Independent Home Video Distributor ReelUniverse.com Over Domain Name

Scientific American: Accounting for Taste. Now researchers are pushing personalization further. In Riedl's university lab, Jon Herlocker invented a feature to appear on the MovieLens site, which will translate the reasoning behind a recommendation into a language the user can understand and respond to.

News.Com: Napster boots 317,377 users from service. Last week, the band delivered 13 boxes full of legal documents identifying user names of people who allegedly had made Metallica songs available online and demanded that they be blocked from the MP3 music-swapping service.

May 11, 2000
Wired News: Windows Media: Music to Your Ears. "It's still a toe in the water until they put everything up on the Web," said John Parres, an Internet specialist with Los Angeles-based Artists Management Group. "What EMI is going to find out is that nobody wants to pay for music that has digital rights management. CDs are easy. The radio in your car is easy. Window's Media isn't easy."

• Fortune: From February 21, 2000; Why This Fan May Say Sayonara to Sony. Stewart Alsop.

News.Com: Researchers find Web divided into 4 regions. A study by researchers from Compaq Computer, Web portal AltaVista and IBM concluded that the Web has distinct regions, including some that are inaccessible to one another. The layout, researchers said, resembles a bow tie with four sections: a "strongly connected core," "origination" pages, "termination" pages and "disconnected" pages.

• IBM Press Release: AltaVista, Compaq and IBM Researchers Create World's Largest, Most Accurate Picture of the Web

Salon: Napster throws Metallica a curveball. In other words, Metallica had better prepare itself for an onslaught of legal notices from angry Napster fans who feel that they have been misidentified or otherwise unjustly served. Will Metallica and its attorneys have the time and interest to pursue legal action against even a few hundred (let alone 300,000) fans who might counterfile?

NY Times: Study Finds Internet of Social Benefit to Users. Bruce Bimber, director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said the contrast between the two studies showed that the Internet had become too diverse to examine as a singular phenomenon.

News.Com: Microsoft wants to censor some open-source postings. Regardless of whether Microsoft is successful in getting the information removed from Slashdot, legal analysts say material that found its way on to the Internet may no longer be entitled to trade secret protections.

PC World: Are Chat Rooms Really Anonymous? Freedom of speech advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center concede that Yahoo had to supply the information. But they say Yahoo should have warned John Doe.

• Industry Standard: From November 10, 1999; EPIC Blasts Yahoo for Identifying Posters

Good Experience: Lying Ad Banners. Tricking Web users into visiting a site will not succeed. Even if the banner does generate some clicks, what happens when customers arrive at the site and find that they were misled? They click the Back button and never come back.

• Webmonkey: From January 11, 2000; Click Here, You Idiot. Jeffrey Veen.

Internet World: A Network's Anatomy: Keynote Systems. The Network From a virtual bird's-eye view, Keynote's network has a straightforward design. Groups of servers that are loaded with software agents and scattered about the Internet gather data about designated Web sites and send that information to Keynote's network operations center in San Mateo, Calif.

May 12, 2000
FEED Magazine: Distribution Democracy. Clay Shirky. The week ended as badly for Time Warner as it began, because even though their executives glumly refused to promise never to hold their viewers hostage as a negotiating tactic, their inability to face the wrath of their own paying customers had been exposed for all the world to see.

AtNewYork: Cyberculture 2000: Alive and Well. Jason Chervokas. These days, big chunks of the cyberculture have moved from the fringe to the mainstream. Just this week, an exterminator who came to give my house a termite inspection engaged me in a long conversation about the music he had downloaded via Napster.

Boston Globe: Copyrights and MP3. The Sony Corp., which pioneered the Walkman technology that revolutionized music listening, has devised the Music Clip, a new kind of portable music player that forces users to convert MP3 files into a coded format. When Sony invented the Walkman, which played unencrypted tape cassettes, it had not yet bought the CBS recording company.

ZDNN: Think Napster -- only for movies. Since its release, DivX has taken the video pirate arena by storm. Today, with just a little creativity and a willingness to trade, any movie released on DVD can be found in DivX format on the Internet.

A List Apart: Much Ado About 5K. Jeffrey Zeldman. The challenge and its rationale electrified the web design community like nothing had done in a long, long time. With no budget, no PR firm, no sponsors, no caterers, no rented hall, no celebrity judges, no entry fees, no TV cameras, and no real prizes (not even tee shirts), the 5K Awards and its humble call for entries conjured an outpouring of amazing work.

Internet Week: Patent Office Takes A Fresh Look At The Net. In an attempt to clear up some of the murky waters, the Information Technology Association of America is launching a program in which patent examiners will work with information technology developers to better understand how Internet technology is built.

Web Review: The Value of Gnutella and Freenet. But investigating Gnutella, Freenet, and Napster, I have been pleasantly surprised to find that they're intriguing innovations in the best tradition of the Internet pioneers. While it's important to talk about their potential for the distribution of illegal content, we have to look at their larger goals and the promise they offer.

InfoWorld: Web sites asked to disclose circ numbers. Mounting pressure from advertisers and investment bankers to make e-commerce sites accountable to traditional practices for monitoring and publishing circulation figures could be addressed next quarter with the debut of Audit Central.

NY Times: U.S. Senators Write Agencies on Internet Fairness. Two senators, concerned over Web-media combinations such as America Online's proposed purchase of Time Warner, said Internet service providers can tweak equipment to favor their own Web sites and slow access to others. But AOL said Thursday it has never done so and that such action is against its policy.

• PC World: From July 29, 1999; Will Your Cable Modem Censor the Web?

May 13, 2000
On Magazine: The purist. Q&A with Jakob Nielsen. Before we talk about the future, we should take a moment to appreciate the miserable technology we have, because it forces us to focus more on the content of a site. If we had the widespread broadband people would like, there’s a risk the Web would just turn into television. Luckily, that’s not possible today, and any Web site that tries that approach fails miserably.

MSNBC: Web map shows tangles and gaps. The study, conducted by researchers at IBM, Compaq and AltaVista, is to be presented at scientific conferences next week. It builds on previous research into the structure of the World Wide Web and argues against the widely held impression that the entire Internet is highly interconnected.

Editor & Publisher: Senators Question Delay In Release of Judges' Records. APBNews.com reports that two senators are asking the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts why it's taking so long for the financial records of federal judges to be released. APBNews first requested the records last September.

• APBnews.com: From May 10, 2000; Senators Question Slow Release of Judge Finances

Useit.Com: Spotlight of Peter Pirolli's debunking of a computerized service to assess websites. Unfortunately, trade magazines have mainly relied on the companies' own press releases in describing several voodoo usability services that have been released in recent months.

Internet Technical Group: A Web Site User Model Should at Least Model Something About Users. It is the nature of marketing to print press releases that paint a product in the best light possible using whatever evidence is available. These press releases then find their way into national and international publications. When claims are published that are simply prima facie invalid...

Wired News: COPPA Lets Steam out of Thomas. Call it the law of unintended consequences: The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which Congress said would help children, in some cases has had precisely the opposite effect. The law took effect last month.

NY Times: Parents Remain Unclear on Online Privacy Law. Parry Aftab, executive director of CyberAngels, an online privacy firm, estimated that each Web site would have to spend between $60,000 and $100,000 to comply with the law, and said such costs have pushed some sites to look for ways to be COPPA-compliant without additional capital investment.

May 14, 2000
Useit.Com: Eyetracking Study of Web Readers. Web content is intellectually bankrupt and almost never designed to comply with the way users behave online. Almost all websites contain content that would have worked just as well in print. Even online-only webzines are filled with linear articles with traditional blocks-of-text layouts. No hyperlinks, no scannability.

Online Journalism Review: Newspapers Should Set Web Standards. The site was more than merely interesting, however. It also was instructive, spinning out just one of what I believe could be multiple new forms of online stories capable of supplementing the pervasive cut-and-paste postings from the AP wire.

• Online Journalism Review: From May 20, 1999; Is Reliance on the AP Draining the Life from Online News?

NY Times: Rising Internet Use Quietly Transforms Way Japanese Live. The Internet is quietly transforming Japan, making celebrities of small farmers like the Kimuras, empowering women, changing the way people apply for jobs and schools and generally chipping away at traditional patterns of behavior.

Washington Post: A Net Make-Over. With $4 billion in revenue, the company apparently felt it could afford to take its time in assessing the Internet. "They're not in a big hurry," said Carol F. Warner Wilke, an industry analyst with Credit Suisse First Boston. "It's not like someone else has 15 great brands."

• Useit.Com: From June 1, 1997; The Fallacy of Atypical Web Examples

TechWeb: Cable Carries MPEG-4 Flag In Codec War. The U.S. cable industry, with a nod to cost and design constraints, appears to be casting its allegiance toward the MPEG-4 standard in the battle over streaming media, where proprietary codecs from RealNetworks, Microsoft, and Apple have been slugging it out.

May 15, 2000
NY Times: Divided Against Each Other, United Against the Government. Lessig reminded his audience that AOL formerly wanted the government to guarantee neutrality in high-speed Internet communications via cable TV systems, but changed that position once it agreed to merge with Time Warner. All the more reason for the government to step in, he said, adding, "You don't want the Internet to turn out like TV."

NY Times: AOL-Time Warner May Have a ´Super-Editor´. Two senior Time Inc. executives said last week that an editorial job might be created above Pearlstine's, a sort of AOL Time Warner super-editor who would oversee -- and try to create synergies between -- the journalistic activities at Time Warner and America Online.

Business Week: Unleashing the Monster of E-Mail Marketing. And while last year, the surfeit of television ads really only hurt the dot-com companies who paid for the commercials, a similar tidal wave of e-mail marketing is going to make consumers crazy and create a major backlash against the Internet.

Business Week: Post Love Bug, Microsoft Trades Flexibility for Security. "In the past, we've always sided with users' desire for power and flexibility," says Steven Sinofsky, senior vice-president in Microsoft's Office group. "Now we are saying that because of the pervasiveness of networking, there are some things you cannot do because of the risk they pose to other peoples' systems."

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

News.Com: Sony's handheld plans start to take shape. The company has been characteristically tight-lipped about details of the device, saying only that it is developing a PDA with multimedia and wireless capabilities, based on Palm's operating system...

MSNBC: Lexis battles an Internet upstart over distributing case law online. While Lexis fights Jurisline in the courts, its parent company, Reed Elsevier, along with West’s parent, Thomson, and other purveyors of information are trying to use legislative muscle to stamp out Internet competition.

• New York Law Journal: From April 12, 2000; Jurisline.com Presses Battle With Lexis

Interactive Week: Words Still Flying Over Instant Messaging. Companies such as Microsoft, Tribal Voice and Yahoo!, rivals in the IM space, have been working together to create a common protocol through the Internet Engineering Task Force. But AOL has been noticeably absent from most of the discussions.

NY Times: Catalog Companies Exploit the Web. Happy as they are with their core businesses, catalog companies recognize that it is far more economical to close a sale over the Web than over the phone, so they are pushing to convert more of their customers to the Web with every passing month.

Industry Standard: Europe's Media Too Slow on Web, Forrester Says. Media firms should aim to gain at least 50 percent of their online revenue from non-advertising sources after one year in operation, Forrester said. This compares with about 30 percent of revenue from other sources in the print publishing world...

NY Times: Flood of Trademark Applications Shows That the Web Is the Place to Be. In the last year, trademark applications have also tested the boundaries of what types of products and material the government views as eligible for protection. Those challenges have come, not surprisingly, from applications seeking trademarks that include ".com," "i" for Internet or "e" for electronic.

May 16, 2000
CIO: The End of the Hit Parade. They don't know how to slice it and dice it, and even if they do, the information they glean is often too simplistic: Hit levels alone can't demonstrate customer loyalty or satisfaction, nor can they tell a company whether its website has helped reduce costs or bring in new business.

• CIO WebBusiness: From June 1, 1999; Get Fewer Hits

Business Week: IBM's Mark Bregman: "The Immediacy of Data" Will Change How We Work. Here's the thing to keep in mind about "3G" phones: This is a major step forward, and it will make the wireless Internet real. But it won't be the same kind of thing you get with broadband on optical fiber. You won't do video-on-demand and watch 90-minute movies on your phone.

Business Week: Sprint's a Web Evangelist. When customers use the phones to purchase goods on Web sites, Sprint may collect transaction fees from the vendors. There could also be some advertising revenues, if mobile surfers tolerate the ads. And Sprint is charging ''slotting fees'' from companies such as Amazon.com, Yahoo!, and Bloomberg that choose to place a clickable icon on a phone's starting screen.

InfoWorld: Panasonic to use RealNames keywords in ads. Panasonic has signed an extensive agreement to use RealNames' Internet Keyword system in its advertising and marketing campaigns, a move designed to make it easier for consumers to find information about Panasonic products on the Web, representatives of the companies announced Tuesday.

• NY Times: From May 4, 2000; Scan the Headlines? No, Just the Bar Codes

Wired News: Tuning Up Digital Copyright Law. The fact that several issues have been raised –- including DeCSS and reverse engineering, Napster and music piracy, and webcasting rights -- should not be a surprise, experts say. The DMCA was intentionally written to be vague so that the courts and the copyright office could later determine the details.

Editor & Publisher: Web Site Gets Seats At Political Conventions. Upstart online television network Pseudo.com scored a first Monday when both major political parties granted it TV skyboxes at their conventions this summer. Pseudopolitics.com, a unit of Pseudo Programs Inc., will conduct the first interactive Webcasts of political conventions...

• USA Today: From December 15, 1999; AOL seeks access to party conventions

Wired News: BMI: Let the Net Music Play. Performing rights organization BMI on Tuesday launched a Digital Licensing Center to enable Internet companies to obtain music performance licenses digitally through BMI.com.

Business Week: Dot-Coms on TV: Now It's the Dirt-Cheap Approach. Perhaps only the sharpest witnesses of Gumbel's interview with Chet Lyons, CEO of College Broadcast, an entertainment portal and cable-TV programmer for the college audience, understood that they were watching the latest trend in dot-com marketing: the dirt-cheap approach.

May 17, 2000
Upside: The lure of ultrawideband. What is unique about ultrawideband is that the technology has the potential to alleviate several wireless industry problems at the same time, not the least of which is the crowding of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Wired News: Wireless Web Fight Gets Catty. On its brochure Web pages, the WAP Forum says it’s working closely with the W3C, but it was clear that some in the W3C resent the company plowing ahead with its own new rules, and not waiting on the W3C’s more ponderous process.

Business Week: Martin Cooper: A Wireless Prophet Who's Pushing "Smart Antennas". In total, service providers such as Vodafone spent $35 billion dollars for slices of 3G radio spectrum. But in Cooper's contrarian view, these bidders are heading for a bitter disappointment. "3G will be a useful voice solution, but it does little for data..."

Columbia Journalism Review: Should Voter Data Be Released? The exit poll controversy represents the most important journalistic impact that the Internet has had so far this year, and one of the most significant since the Internet came to mass prominence. It is, for starters, a battle that only the Internet could make possible.

• Online Journalism Review: From March 6, 2000; Forecasting the Ballot: A Clash Over Exit Polls

News.Com: MP3 player "sale" exposes Amazon's flexible prices. Amazon said it was testing prices for the MP3 player, randomly offering different discounts to different customers. The company said it routinely tests new features and items on its Web site. "During a test period, it's likely that a customer may pay a much lower price for an item than another customer," spokeswoman Patty Smith said.

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

AtNewYork: B&N Sharpens Elbows For Same Day Delivery. Online book retailer Barnesandnoble.com has raised the bar on itself and some upstart delivery rivals. In a major marketing push unleashed today, the company began offering Manhattanites same-day delivery on over 800,000 book and music titles.

News.Com: Few Net surfers use RealNames' keyword service. But after three years on the Web, comparatively few people actually use its service. "The average Joe surfer does not know they exist," said Peggy O'Neill, analyst with NetRatings. O'Neill's assessment doesn't even get an argument from RealNames.

Editor & Publisher: Rehnquist Opposes Full Disclosure of Judges' Records. Rehnquist says that federal judges might be endangered by placing their financial disclosure reports on the Internet. But the Judicial Conference, a policy-making body for the federal bench headed by Rehnquist, ordered in March that the reports be released.

BBC News: Internet firm collapses. UK-based online clothing retailer Boo.com has collapsed through lack of funds, just six months after it launched to a huge fanfare of publicity. Appeals to investors aimed at securing $30m in additional cash failed, despite rising sales.

• Salon: From November 5, 1999; Boo to Boo

ZDNN: RecordTV expecting legal trouble. RecordTV.com, which lets its 50,000 registered viewers record TV programs and then watch them online via RealPlayer, shares some striking similarities with iCraveTV -- the Toronto-based startup that rebroadcast TV programs on the Net until it lost a court battle...

BBC News: Data is going dotty. Soon you could be downloading software, music and video clips from your newspaper. Two US companies have found ways to turn bits and bytes into dots that can be printed on almost any quality of paper - even newsprint.

ZDNN: DoubleClick reviewing its privacy practices. DoubleClick Inc., seeking to recover from criticism about its plans to use consumer data, is expected to appoint Wednesday an independent panel composed of seven high-profile members who will review the Internet advertising company's new products and services for potential privacy threats.

May 18, 2000
Washington Post: E-Power to the People. Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape Communications and a former chief technology officer for AOL, compares Gnutella to a benevolent virus, a "revolutionary" program that spreads the power of publishing from an elite set of corporations to anyone who has a computer. "It changes the Internet in a way that it hasn't changed since the browser..."

SF Chronicle: E-mail For Sale. And since legitimate online marketers say they would never send e- mail without the recipient's prior consent (most e-tailers ask for and receive permission when you register at their Web site), using friends as spokespeople is one of the only acceptable ways a company can e-mail a potential customer.

Marketing Computers: Consent Decree. Michael Schrage. Within 18 months, it will be ruthlessly clear to every peddler on the Net-Nasdaq correction or no-that "consent is king." Anybody stupid, arrogant or criminal enough to disagree will end up spending more time with lawyers than Microsoft's management.

Industry Standard: DEN: The Party's Over. DEN executives did not return repeated calls for comment, but a source close to the company who requested anonymity confirmed that the company had laid off its employees on Wednesday night and said that it would probably file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

• Salon: From December 9, 1999; Dot-com dogs

NY Times: Secrecy for Everyone, as Encryption Goes to Market. But now their software may just be something the masses will want. At the same time that the federal government is loosening restrictions on encryption technologies, building commercial products and cashing in on them (either through sales or advertising revenue) has become a viable option.

Salon: Boo hoo! The Web's first immersive retail environment had its own online guide (Miss Boo), its own online magazine (Boom) and some of the hippest clothing brands. But it was wildy overdesigned, difficult to navigate and completely out of touch with most Web retailers' vision of quick shopping and ease of use.

News.Com: Commentary: Dot-coms learn a lesson from Boo.com. Gartner believes the hype-cycle scenario is correct and forecasts that more failures and consolidations will take place. However, one should not conclude such events invalidate e-business as a concept, or that all business-to-consumer dot-com models will fail.

Detroit Free-Press: Amway blames Web for job cuts. But business turnaround expert Van Conway, president of Conway, Mackenzie & Dunleavy in Birmingham, said the move has cost-cutting written all over it." This is a pure reduction of overhead and downsizing," Conway said. "It suggests there may be more severe problems than they want to admit."

SJ Mercury: Honeywell favors self-service Web sites. Like other giant manufacturers, it has used the Web to streamline its own supply chain and create electronic storefronts. But Honeywell's boldest e-ventures are a handful of sites set up to offer interactive problem solving.

News.Com: GM tells dealers to cut ties with some Web sites. In a letter mailed to 7,700 U.S. dealers this week, the world's largest automaker reiterated a long-standing policy that prohibits dealers from selling to third parties for resale to the consumer. Ford recently sent a similar letter to its dealers.

Industry Standard: Feeling Sociable. And contrary to previous findings – but consistent with the general life principle that if you want something done, you should ask a busy person to do it – the Pew survey indicated that the more involved people were with the Net, the more likely they were to enjoy other forms of social interaction, too.

Editor & Publisher: NY Times Chooses Copyright Solution. CCC is one of several companies vying for the online permissions space. The company says its online program allows publishers to determine which types of reuse to authorize, including e-mail, Internet, and intranet.

May 19, 2000
Salon: DEN, Boo: R.I.P. Scott Rosenberg. The Net business may or may not be in trouble, but the failures of these companies don't offer much of a weather vane for this industry. Their problems stem not from general market conditions but from some very specific mistakes that more successful Web sites learned to avoid years ago.

NY Times: Boo.com, Online Fashion Retailer, Goes Out of Business. It was supposed to follow the dot-com fairy tale script. Two young entrepreneurs devise an idea for the next big e-commerce Web site, raise enormous sums of cash, spend lavishly on advertising, lose money on every sale, take the company public and make every employee a billionaire.

New York Post: But More Online Shopping Sites Are On The Way. Nieman Marcus is now teaming up with New York technology company RichFX to offer an online boutique that is similar to Boo.com's in philosophy, and offers some of the same features, The Post has learned. Starting this fall, the Manolo Blahnik site on NeimanMarcus.com will really resemble a boutique.

Good Experience: Boo Bites It. Let's just state the plain reason for it all: Boo.com had a bad customer experience. And since the customer experience drives the success or failure of a site, Boo failed because it ignored its customers.

Wired News: Mobility Focus of WWW Confab. And while the WAP Forum and the W3C each say they are working closely together, Nokia and Ericsson are not going to sit around Scandinavia waiting to sell phones while academics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, discuss how they should serve Web content.

Red Herring: Startups hope GUIs are sticky sweet. They want to use visual aids to improve navigation and create more opportunities for Web sites to make more money through cool new alternatives to banner ads. Analysts say the new GUIs are "cool," but they aren't convinced that Web-heads will go for them.

• FEED Magazine: From October 28, 1998; The Brain's Missing Link. Steven Johnson.

NY Times: In New Forum for Domain Name Disputes, Trademark Holders Dominate. That case, and several others, are raising questions about whether arbitrators working under a dispute resolution system established by the Internet's oversight board, the Icann, are following the narrow parameters established by the board for reassigning domain names.

Wired News: Digi-Security Act Has Its Day. The U.S. Copyright Office hearings are the last session on circumvention before a final decision is made on which exceptions will be included in DMCA Section 12.01. It deals with what individuals can and cannot do to avoid the technological security measures protecting copyrighted materials.

• Salon: From November 20, 1998; The Copyright Boomerang

Fortune: How E-Tailers Deliver Within Hours. The hard part is delivering the correct stuff promptly to the right party without going broke. Opportunities for routing inefficiencies, screwups--and alienating customers--are abundant. But the latest software purports to offer a path around many of the pitfalls.

• Business Week: From May 10, 1999; The Delivery Dilemma Could Box In E-Commerce

MSNBC: No accounting for the Net? Profit issue sparks conflict. While First Call has become more indulgent in recent years about letting companies and analysts slice earnings the way they see fit, First Call research director Chuck Hill says that excluding Internet losses is beyond the pale.

Industry Standard: Major Labels in Talks With Yahoo. The source says Yahoo and the labels are mulling several ideas, including a subscription-based service that would give customers access to an artist's entire catalog. A Yahoo spokesperson says the company doesn't "comment on rumors and speculation."

May 20, 2000
Wired News: Browsing the Future. Held at Amsterdam's grandiose Paradiso concert hall, representatives from a dozen art and design academies throughout Europe each had three minutes to convince the audience of their creation's merits, which ranged from functional prototypes to wildly abstract digressions on the nature of information itself.

Project Cool: Will the Artists Please Rise? But shortly after the web browser debuted, the cult of technology started to distort the meaning of the word. In short order, content came to mean not that which was delivered via web pages, but the material generated by creative endeavor: the written word, the art, the photo, the video. Because this material was not the technology, the technology-driven value system began to deride its value.

• Upside: From June 29, 1999; We Are Not Content!

BBC News: Buy yourself a hero. Some players of popular internet-based games such as Everquest and Ultima Online are cashing in on the time they have invested in the virtual worlds by selling off the characters, magic weapons and even buildings they have collected.

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

May 21, 2000
SJ Mercury: Sports lawyers: Web Is legal issue. Because it is a new area of the law, courts are faced with deciding how much control can be exerted over cyberspace. ``We are all literally under siege by companies that are stealing our content,'' said Joel Litvin, chief legal officer for the NBA.

• News.Com: From October 21, 1996; NBA goes to court

SJ Mercury: The Internet doesn't isolate, but reconnects us to others. I suspect anyone who's been online for any significant period of time has felt the power of the network to strengthen important connections and pump new life into relationships that had long ago gone cold.

May 22, 2000
NY Times: Agent´s Role in Music Site Changes War Over Rights. Ovitz's backing for Scour.com's file-exchange mechanism suggests that opposition may be eroding to technology that, by many accounts, will force the development of new business models for the entertainment industry, changing how artists are compensated for their work and how their work is protected.

Freedom Forum: In corporate doze, press doesn't question 'Death Star'. Jon Katz. Watching Case glide through his self-serving public service promotion on "Today" earlier this week, it seemed increasingly likely that he will not be asked about any of these issues. The press is now so completely corporatized it's hard to imagine which journalists are going to press Case about the size and power of his new company.

• Salon: From January 11, 2000; AOL and Time Warner's marriage of insecurity. Scott Rosenberg.

Industry Standard: Nike's New Net Religion. Industry observers are divided on Nike's Internet strategy. Webcasting sports events and developing MP3 players are a far cry from Nike's core business, making athletic apparel. There's even skepticism over the prospect of selling footwear – a product that has to be tried on before buying – on the Web.

Fortune: Office Multiplex: At Work You'll Wake Up Screening. Michael Schrage. With display technologies offering ever higher resolution and PC prices falling ever lower, the image of the office cubicle as multiplex theater is no techno fetish. After all, even the largest screens simply can't be split or segmented ad infinitum. Returns rapidly diminish.

Industry Standard: Wondering About WAP. While the rest of the world is embracing the Wireless Application Protocol, commonly known as WAP, which enables wireless Web access, U.S. companies, questioning whether this is the best solution, mill about waiting for someone to make the first move.

ZDNN: Linux leaders: Beware of Napster. But if the "Napster good" crowd is expecting support for its position from open-source movement leaders, it's going to be disappointed. "Piracy is bad," says Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, when asked about the matter.

Computerworld: Jams ahead for wireless LANs. The spectrum used by the LANs' signals is expected to become crowded so quickly that companies could find themselves replacing all of their wireless equipment in just two to three years, as wireless technology is forced to move to less-obstructed, higher frequencies.

• NY Times: From April 27, 2000; Preparing for a Collision of Wireless Services

Computerworld: Opinion: Broadly speaking. Despite a lot of handwringing on Wall Street about B-to-C, thousands of new commerce sites are destined to go live this year. Designing systems that depend on rich media to lure visitors and sell goods will turn out to be more foolish than farsighted.

NY Times: Law Firms See a Bill Come Due. The lawyers who run the large firms are reluctant to say they regret giving the raises -- which would be tantamount to saying their own employees are overvalued -- but many partners agree that had the market downturn come sooner, salaries might not be at their current level.

ZDNN: Arthur Treacher's trades fish for chips. The company, most famous for its chain of fast food restaurants, announced today that it will take the name of its subsidiary, Digital Creative Development Corp., to reflect its new focus on the Internet.

May 23, 2000
Adweek: The Halo Effect. Indeed, as marketers struggle to find the winning formula for advertising on the Web, a growing number of companies and Web producers have begun to eschew plain-vanilla banner ads in favor of good-old-fashioned sponsorship models. Think of it as the equivalent of the kind of TV and radio sponsorships from the 50s, set in the digital arena.

• Editor & Publisher: From July 16, 1999; The Effectiveness of Content Sponsorships. Steve Outing.

Online News Association: Journalistic Credibility Online vs. E-Commerce? Bruce Koon, Regional VP of Site Operations, KnightRidder.com. What can we as a journalism organization do to sharpen this debate? What should we as a journalism organization do to protect online editorial independence and credibility in the world of e-commerce?

NY Times: 4 Giants Set to Embrace Electronic Publishing. The frantic pace of developments indicates that the industry is fast reaching a critical mass in its embrace of technology that could reshape the market, although skeptics still argue that electronic books are at least two years away from gaining widespread popularity.

SJ Mercury: Chinese censors losing online race. The broad range of opinions expressed on the People's Daily Web site and others is less an indication of tolerance than incapacity. Censors delete many controversial postings, but the rapid-fire technology of the Internet allows users to post comments faster than censors can sort through them.

Wired News: France Gags Yahoo on Nazi Bids. Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez told the firm that the auctions were "an offense to the collective memory of the country" and ordered it to report back on July 24 to explain the measures it had taken to prevent the French from participating in the sales.

News.Com: AOL error underscores spam filter challenge. As the courts and Congress lag in placing limits on spam--one of the Internet's most reviled by-products--companies that offer email services, including AOL, are moving ahead with technological fixes that may go too far in dealing with the nuisance of bulk email.

• NY Times: From February 19, 1999; Junk E-Mail Filters Spawn a Suit Against Microsoft

News.Com: High-speed companies tackle mass adoption. Analysts say broadband service providers have huge incentives to ease the installation process, namely saving money by having consumers rather than technicians perform the setup.

Business Week: Why WineShopper.com's Big Plans Are Bottled Up. The biggest problem has been WineShopper's main innovation: a nationwide distribution system that it's developing on its own. The system, called the Naxon Network, is designed to link and track the inventory of about 250 major wholesalers in the U.S.

Interactive Week: Audits: The ABC Of The Online Hit Parade. The Audit Bureau of Circulations, the biggest name in print readership bean counting, has broken into the Internet world to provide reality checks on site traffic for the benefit of advertisers and advertising agencies.

Wired News: A DoubleClick Smokescreen? It's little surprise, then, that the online advertising giant's latest announcement -- a hand-picked consumer privacy advisory board replete with big names and fancy titles –- has some critics openly questioning whether there's any substance to this consortium.

ZDNN: FTC gives up on Net self-regulation. The FTC, citing the fact that only 20 percent of sites with 39,000 or more unique visitors a month protect consumers' privacy, said this was proof positive that the industry's calls for self-regulation are not working.

May 24, 2000
Industry Standard: Telco Must Stop Selling WAP Phones – for Now. A French court ordered France Télécom on Tuesday to stop selling certain mobile phones while the judge determines whether the telecommunications operator has a right to lock the phones to access its information services by default.

• Business 2.0: From May 2000; WAP's Closed-door Approach. Clay Shirky.

ClickZ: What Do People Want Online? The answer, it seems, is very utilitarian: People want to accomplish something online. They're not aimless "surfers" looking for a fix or a novelty. Instead, the average Net user seems to be a goal-oriented person interested in finding information and communicating with others.

News.Com: Instant messaging companies gather to talk strategy. Breaking its long silence on instant messaging standards, Yahoo today suggested the time has come to build a coalition of companies capable of moving forward without AOL.

MSNBC: Media meltdown: Crisis and critics. Should journalists be allowed to invest in the stocks they discuss in their work? What level of disclosure is necessary for media properties owned by complicated agglomerations of corporate conglomerations? Are portal pages responsible for the ravings on sites to which they only link?

• Salon: From July 27, 1999; Should journalists and IPOs mix? Scott Rosenberg.

Editor & Publisher: Newspaper Web Sites Begin To Offer Customer Service. Steve Outing. The idea is innovative among newspaper Web sites. The Republic has hired two part-time online customer support representatives, who answer e-mail messages, phone calls, and AOL Instant Messenger notes from online users. The goal is to answer all reasonable requests from the Web sites' users.

CIO WebBusiness: Toys'R'Rushed: A Cautionary Tale. Lou Rosenfeld. While many might find this early admission to shortcomings refreshingly honest, we sharks who critique websites for a living smell blood. Toy'R'Us might as well have used blinking orange text to notify users that the site is broken, poorly designed, or prematurely launched.

• Useit.Com: From April 2, 2000; The Mud-Throwing Theory of Usability

LA Times: GM to Let Buyers See Production on Net. The company's Oldsmobile Alero and Pontiac Grand Am factory in Lansing, Mich., may be the first assembly line wired with cameras in some areas to let customers watch production, Hogan said. The company will e-mail customers when their cars move through the wired parts of the plant.

Business Week: Ellen Marram's Not-So-Excellent Dot-Com Adventure. Last August Ellen R. Marram became one of Corporate America's best-known executives to gamble on an Internet job. Now it seems the former Tropicana CEO bet on the wrong horse.

May 25, 2000
FEED Magazine: RE: Martin Garbus. Law is based on two hundred years of precedence, and I think the precedent is the structure, and I'm not so sure that that structure can handle these demands. So the question is how do you build new structures, and what are those new structures going to be. And this is going to be the first case to define those.

News.Com: Judge bars Bidder's Edge Web crawler on eBay. In his ruling, Whyte scoffed at the broader implications of the lawsuit. "The parties submit a variety of declarations asserting that the Internet will cease to function if (they lose the dispute)," Whyte wrote. "The court suspects that the Internet will not only survive but continue to grow and develop regardless of the outcome of this litigation."

Industry Standard: A New Note in the Song-Swap Debate. Critics pointed out that the sales decline could be attributed to any number of factors besides online file sharing. College students, for example, are more sensitive to price and might be buying less as prices go up. Furthermore, Napster has only existed as a widespread phenomenon for the past six months.

ZDNN: Glaser: Keep e-music simple, stupid! Agreeing on one, or possibly two, standards is in the industry's best interests, Glaser added. Otherwise, consumers will be so confused that they'll readily embrace an easy-to-use download tool, such as Napster.

ABCNews.Com: Sony’s Err Apparent? Alas, the answer is readily apparent. For all of its engineering prowess, Sony doesn’t know beans about selling. It is as hard to buy a Vaio product as it is easy to use or steal. Consider this saga. I began by trying to buy a Vaio on Sony’s Web site, www.sony.com.

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

Internet Week: When It Has To Be There Now. These e-commerce specialists handle regionally distributed inventory on behalf of retailers, with the aid of real-time connections to merchant ordering systems. The goal: same-day delivery of merchandise.

Upside: FedEx's expedient precision. But now the package delivery company is fronting its biggest challenge, namely e-commerce. Moreover, old rivals United Parcel Service and U.S. Postal Service, along with newcomers such as Webvan, are competing for chunks of the e-commerce delivery market.

ZDNN: Dotcom making waves with travel offer. Only time will tell but the Internet startup is achieving the notoriety it sought with its offer of cash guarantees to travelers who fall victim to all sorts of inconveniences from flight delays to the wrong meal service.

Industry Standard: Microsoft to Ease E-mail Security Patch's Stranglehold. One of the main criticisms of the original security patch was its all-or-nothing blockage of 37 attachment types, some of which are used for collaborative applications. Many users said the patch was too rigid and went too far in trying to secure Outlook, which has routinely been a vehicle for viruses.

NY Times: Summer Movie Sites Lack Hollywood's Digital Magic. This is arts@large's fifth annual survey of summer movie sites, and not much has changed since the first. In fact, if memory serves, the sites for "Mission: Impossible 2" and "Nutty Professor II: The Klumps" are remarkably similar to -- and just as routine as -- the ones developed for their cinematic antecedents in 1996.

American Journalism Review: You Be the Judge. There is definitely something surreal about injecting a totally unscientific opinion poll into an ostensibly objective news report. When Web surveys are cited in the body of a story or a broadcast--even with explicit qualifications--integrity and objectivity are in peril.

May 26, 2000
Freedom Forum: Hysteria over freewheeling Net blinds people to the beauty of truly free expression. Jon Katz. It speaks powerfully to the state of media and politics that few people in the country understand how much is at stake when it comes to the architecture of the Net, and the political, cultural and economic issues involved that relate so directly to this uniquely free environment.

NY Times: Judge Says a Spider Is Trespassing on EBay. The ruling, if it is not reversed on appeal, may serve as a precedent to safeguard the contents of large, publicly available databases like eBay's, said lawyers familiar with the case. Current copyright law only covers forms of expression, not collections of facts like the auction listings.

• Web Review: From November 19, 1999; Protecting Against Piracies of the Past

Online Journalism Review: My Time in the DEN of Iniquity. The full rise-and-fall story has and will continue to be written elsewhere, but my sliver of an experience can hopefully provide a few lessons about what not do with an Internet start-up. For instance, it is probably bad form to hire scores of people every month at outrageous salaries for a company that changes its fundamental strategy each week...

Web Review: Users Matter: Meeting Site Visitor Needs. Understanding users helps us design good online experiences for them. If you don't try to understand who will be using your site, and how, you will design a site that only meets your own goals.

Wired News: Giving PCs a New Dimension. Although gamers and engineers are familiar with the visualization benefits that 3-D environments bring to computing, most desktop applications still rely on the same flat appearance of twenty years ago. Software companies are developing applications to bring similar depth to everyday desktop activities.

• Useit.Com: From November 15, 1998; 2D is Better Than 3D

Washington Post: Web Users Dial 404 For Frustration. The error message can come in different forms--"Not Found," "The Page Cannot Be Found," perhaps accompanied by an invitation to e-mail the site--but the meaning is the same: You'll have no Web page and like it!

• PC Magazine: From February 24, 1997; The Biggest Problem with the Web: The 404 Error. John C. Dvorak.

Wired News: Amex Nixes X-Rated Exchanges. American Express shrugs off the complaints, saying the decision boils down to simple economics. While online merchants themselves have to foot the bill for phony charges, American Express has to pay administrators to process the disputes.

• ZDNN: From April 3, 2000; Credit-card firms squeeze porn sites

May 27, 2000
InfoWorld: Instant messaging protocol hits speed bump. Although the IETF had been working on IMPP since last year, the proposed protocol was tangled up in details and "abstractions," which necessitated a change, said IMPP working group co-chair Dave Marvit with Fujitsu Laboratories America.

Editor & Publisher: Newspapers Struggle With Online Audience Measurement. This decidedly mixed report card for the nation's largest dailies draws the ire of many publishers who say their own server logs tell a different story — leading an industry task force to look into the whole issue of audience measurement.

• Editor & Publisher: From March 15, 1999; News Sites Say Their Reach Is Underestimated. Steve Outing.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of Themestream's pay-for-content service. Even though Themestream is doomed, the service shows the way forward by providing a business model for authors: once you get paid for writing, people will develop better-quality Web-specific content.

ZDNN: Targeted Real ads -- a real nuisance. "I think it's clear that in their quest for deriving revenue from ostensibly free software some companies are going to push the envelope as far as users are willing to let them," said privacy advocate Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility.

• Project Cool: From August 28, 1999; A Real Invader

Project Cool: Remembering the Rules. They didn't flameout because of some flaw in the technology or because the online model is bad. Their problems don't prove that there is anything inherently flawed about e-commerce any more than this local grocery store's ongoing cold case problem proves anything inherently flawed about retail food sales.

EE Times: JPEG2000 Net imaging spec sparks design work. Expectations that the pending JPEG2000 standard will bolster the role of Internet-based digital imaging are sparking behind-the-scenes partnerships and product development activity among chip vendors, software suppliers, camera manufacturers and wireless companies.

May 28, 2000
SJ Mercury: Microsoft to unveil Internet initiative. Dan Gillmor. The complex strategy, which one hopes will be given a catchier name than NGWS, raises several questions. Is it simply another Microsoft power grab, a push to dominate an even bigger computing arena? Or has the company finally realized it can do well, if not prosper, by being a truly cooperating part of a larger ecosystem?

Useit.Com: Alertbox Five Years Retrospective. Very few people who write about the Internet can say the same; no big companies dare put their five-year-old reports on the Web for potential customers to check the sustainability of their predictions and advice. The reason old Alertboxes continue to offer valid advice is that they are based on human characteristics...

ZDNN: NeoPlanet's latest browser really rocks. Both parties declined to disclose specifics of the deal, other than to say NeoPlanet would produce more than a dozen Web browsers tied to Universal film and DVD releases. All will feature Flash 4-enabled movie sounds and images, built-in search and e-mail, plus channels tied to Universal content sites.

• PC World: From March 23, 1999; IE5: Branded for Life?

The Sunday Times: Dan Wagner snaps up Boo.com's technology. Wagner sees an opportunity to hire out the technology as well as Boo's programming staff to companies wanting to build business-to-consumer internet activities. He is already thought to be talking to potential clients.

May 29, 2000
NY Times: Convergence Turns Out to Be a Strange Creature. Television is a one-way, centrally created and distributed medium. It is not the killer application for the Internet because the Internet does not operate like TV. And yet, most demonstrations of converged applications that include video, including those at Vortex, are essentially television with some interactive buttons...

• Useit.Com: From February 15, 1997; TV Meets the Web

Wired News: Web Shows: Does Anybody Watch? For years tech industry experts have predicted the convergence of computers and TV but nearly every experiment in Web broadcasting drew anemic ratings. The failures were blamed on everything from a lack of advertising to tricky technology snafus.

• Salon: From March 17, 2000; Give my regards to broadband. Scott Rosenebrg.

Newsweek: The Noisy War Over Napster. The fight over Napster has taken on a larger dimension, involving the future of music publishing, copyright law, 21st-century ethics and the relationship of artists to their audience. Pamela Samuelson, codirector of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, fears a "civil war" between artists, technology companies and desperate "copyright holders who want to control it all."

Industry Standard: Digital Squatters Won't Budge From Spectrum. ...the next auction is slated to sell off a huge chunk of prime 700-MHz airwaves – perfect for high-speed Net service or broadband mobile-phone applications. The only problem: Those frequencies are already used by more than 100 television stations across the country.

• Washington Post: From April 27, 2000; Wireless Hopes Left Up in the Air

• Industry Standard: From February 8, 1999; The Littlest Murdoch