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June 1, 2000
NY Times: Managing Online Security Risks.
Hal R. Varian. Security researchers have tended to focus on the hard issues of cryptography and system design. By contrast, the soft issues revolving around the use of computers by ordinary people and the creation of incentives to avoid fraud and abuse have been relatively neglected.
Wired News: Who Should Fight Cybercrime?
As the world's top politicians, lawmakers, and business types argue and bleat over what must be done to stop the horrible, world-stopping threat known as cybercrime, a group of engineers who built and preside over the Internet's backbone are debating whether they should get involved.
Darwin: Sneaker Attack.
The mandate was simple, recalls Nike iD General Manager Mark Allen. "Knight wanted us to marry the mass customization model with the Internet, and he charged us with being the first. We're a lot better at being a leader than we are at being a follower."
TechWeb: IBM Site Revamp Shows Design Priorities.
The computing giant, which tallied $14.8 billion in Web sales last year, used extensive customer research to find out what turns customers off and what makes them come back. The result: design changes that just about any dot-com could heed.
Computerworld: Is there a WAP-zap coming?
But Ovum, an independent research firm with offices in London and Boston, has forecast slower WAP growth, partly because it only counts "active" users of the wireless Web — that is, users who will actually use the Web features in the Web-enabled devices.
Red Herring: Lab Rat: Microsoft is calling you.
Priorities is a good example of the direction in which it is heading, demonstrating how Microsoft hopes to continue to tie consumers to Windows, even as they increasingly do more computing away from PCs.
O'Reilly Network: WAP Takes a Pounding.
The attacks are a sudden twist of fate for the protocol that over the past nine months has been hyped as the foundation of the next phase of wireless communications -- specifically, enabling the wireless web.
News.Com: Excite@Home alliances signal new strategy.
By signing multi-year deals with Akamai Technologies, iBeam Broadcasting and Microcast, Excite@Home has expanded the commercial use of its backbone network and used its base of 1.5 million high-speed, or "broadband," Internet customers to attract new income.
Fortune: Go Big or Go Home.
With its web of interlocked alliances, Excite@Home has always been hard to understand. Yet the biggest mystery may be how such a well-connected company could get itself into such a fix. After all, the company was years ahead of the competition in offering a killer service...
News.Com: Internet tax measure squeaks through state Assembly.
The proposed legislation would not tax sales from companies that have no brick-and-mortar stores or warehouses in the state. But for firms that do, some sort of tax would apply. This would affect businesses like book retailers Borders and Barnes & Noble, which charge online customers no state sales tax in California...
ZDNN: EU wants U.S. tax on digital exports.
Byrne said existing tax legislation was able to cope with the purchase of physical goods on the Internet when the goods were delivered by traditional means. But digital deliveries were creating more problems. He estimated that 29 percent of online digital product sales in the United States were heading for the European Union.
Salon: Undo me!
This works to both the advantage and the detriment of the interface designer. Habituation lets an experienced person use a well-designed interface more quickly. But that same habituation can also lead to errors -- sometimes catastrophic ones. And that's when it would be great if we had a truly workable undo.
Adweek: Good Housekeeping Unveils-Web site Review Program.
For the first time since instituting its seal of approval for advertisers in 1909, Good Housekeeping's venerated consumer protection program has created a new review process-this time to vet the Internet.
June 2, 2000
Salon: Lay off the layoff stories.
But somehow, it is nearly impossible to work up any interest at all about the fact that another 50 employees just got axed from another start-up hemorrhaging millions of dollars a month. Layoff stories, to be blunt, are mindbendingly boring.
Boston Globe: Internet boosters singing the blues.
News accounts are dominated by what's happening at the online equivalents of McDonald's or the fanciest restaurants in Boston and New York, Dyson said. ''But even as you read about these things, there's a huge amount of home cooking going on that you never read about. That's what's really going on on the Internet.''
Newsbytes: Forrester To Media: Let Go Of That Content!
The time has come, O'Brien said, when media companies, rather than hoard content, must cut it loose upon the public and work on making money from the partnerships that help distribute the material more widely.
Freedom Forum: Credentialing process denies online journalists access to news.
May I see your credentials? While most print and broadcast journalists can say yes to this simple question, it represents a serious problem for many online reporters who have been denied credentials and access to news events and newsmakers.
Ask Tog: If They Don't Test, Don't Hire Them.
The single best indicator as to the overall competence of an interaction design team is their plan for user testing. If you are presented with no plan or a sort of vague “and we’ll eventually do some user testing,” you may want to back off and look at other resources.
NY Times: Television Site Says It Has Solutions to Copyright Problems.
Bill Craig, iCraveTV's founder, said in a telephone interview that the company's has developed a system that can identify users by country. He said the so-called iWall system, which the company is seeking to patent, would allow the company to continue serving Canadians free.
Darwin: What's It Mean? Does It Matter?
Listen to the radio or watch TV for a few minutes and you'll probably hear some bizarre names—Boo.com, Kozmo.com, Snickelways.com. They may sound nonsensical or even downright foolish, but more often than not there is serious money and strategy behind the whimsy.
News.Com: Upscale shopping site Foofoo closes down.
In a note on its Web site, the closely held upscale shopping site told customers that it has closed shop and pointed them to its e-tail partners. "Thank you for visiting Foofoo.com," the company said in its note. "Regrettably, we are closed."
NY Times: In Fight Over Anonymity, John Doe Starts Slugging.
It is "really the first one in the second generation" of John Doe Internet-related lawsuits, she said. In the first round of cases, large corporations easily unmasked defendants without much public notice, she said. Now the John Does are beginning to squawk.
Industry Standard: Japan Deal to Put Ads on Cell Phones.
Japan's cellular phone giant, NTT DoCoMo, and the nation's largest ad agency, Dentsu, say they have created a joint venture to handle advertisements for DoCoMo's mega-hit mobile-phone Internet service, i-mode.
AtNewYork: Juno Sues NetZero, Qualcomm.
Silicon Alley ISP Juno Online Services Thursday filed suit in a Delaware federal court seeking unspecified damages and an injunction against NetZero, Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. for infringement of an advertising streaming patent held by Juno.
June 3, 2000
InfoWorld: The Next Big Thing in the world of convergence: The Broadcast Internet.
With stocks in decline and summer here, you may be pondering The Next Big Thing. Well, I found it for you at Vortex 2000, my third conference on the convergence of Internet, telephone, and television networks. It's The Broadcast Internet.
Internet World: Commitment Is 'In'.
Heavyweights such as Ford, Honda, Nestlé, and Charles Schwab have discovered the benefits of that enduring institution called sponsorship, liberally investing their resources to break through the clutter of ubiquitous banner ads.
NY Times: The Good E-Book.
The echo of such views is heard today in an equally misguided elite's hostility toward digital publishing; surely we will hear lamentations for the lost age of electronic literacy once scientists find a way to plant books directly into the brain.
Advertising Age: Cigarette makers frankly spell out smoking danger.
Want to quit smoking? There's a helpful site with links to QuitNet and Surgeon General reports, and a special link to a smoking and cancer mortality table that may scare the hell out of you. The site is from the people of Philip Morris.
News.Com: Nike site delves into factory conditions.
Nike posted audits of its North American factories on its Web site today as part of the athletic shoe and clothing maker's efforts to show it is working to improve conditions and guard labor rights around the world.
June 4, 2000
SJ Mercury: Losing media voices is threat to democracy.
Dan Gillmor. The mantra of competition says it'll all work out for the best. The evidence from the past doesn't support this confidence. Maybe a million Web sites will bloom, but flowers tend to wither when they're hidden from the sunlight.
SJ Mercury: Archaic law puts Yahoo in a tangled bureaucratic maze.
But until now -- more on this in a second -- Yahoo has been an investment company in the eyes of the Washington bureaucrats, something akin to a mutual fund. They've got Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle pegged as Peter Lynch, the famed investor.
Mappa.Mundi Magazine: Mapping A Virtual City.
Well, a sequence of 'satellite' maps of AlphaWorld provide us with a pretty good idea These fascinating maps show the growth of buildings, streets, parks and gardens designed and constructed by the citizens of the virtual world of AlphaWorld over the past five years.
June 5, 2000
Industry Standard: A Rough Road Trip to the Net.
Rand McNally thought its trip to the Net would involve little more than the modest Web site it launched four years ago to support some of its CD-ROM products. In the meantime, competitors have grabbed the lion's share of the online mapping business.
Forbes: Backbone Bullies.
Here's the rub: These few behemoths have a cozy arrangement for swapping traffic free-of-charge among themselves--but they charge stiff fees for the very same service when dealing with smaller players.
NY Times: Bill to Protect Databases Creates Strange Bedfellows.
These odd alliances of lobbyists have formed over the question of whether databases -- collections of facts like telephone directories, weather reports, stock tables and real estate listings -- can be copied, repackaged and distributed by anyone with an Internet connection.
LA Times: Ingram Micro to Boost Deliveries for Web Retailers.
The move by the Santa Ana company is aimed at creating a new source of revenue by using its network of warehouses and miles of conveyor belts to handle everything from books and compact discs to health and beauty products.
Industry Standard: No More "Sorry We Missed You".
ZBox isn't alone. In what has suddenly become a hot niche market, two other competitors are at work on their own versions of a better mailbox. MentalPhysics of Arlington, Va., has begun field tests with its depository while Atlantes of Menlo Park, Calif., says it will begin tests this month.
NY Times: Going Against the Grain in Integrating Web Operations.
But traditional retailers have a problem. If they integrate their physical stores and their Internet operations, they run the risk of causing a nexus in every state where they have a store and must then collect a sales tax in that state -- even for sales on the Internet.
Boston Globe: FCC policy expected to boost DSL access.
The new policy, called line sharing, will allow competitive providers to offer DSL over existing Bell Atlantic phone lines to businesses and homes, without having to go through the hassle and expense of having Bell crews string up a new line for DSL.
NY Times: New Versions of Ethernet Promise Swift Improvements in Communications.
At the rate the technology is evolving, some analysts expect office desktop computers to soon have access to data networks with speed and power formerly available only in the nation's best research laboratories -- but at prices no higher than today's standard business-office Internet connections.
Industry Standard: Digital Surveyor.
The study seemed to be one of those pieces of bad news that we were primed to hear, and the intensity with which reporters jumped on the story was indeed startling. But the Stanford director is hardly without blame for creating more heat than light in the public discourse.
Forbes: Gold Mine or Glut?
As long as the Web continues to grow, the logic goes, everyone who hosts Web outposts will make a bundle even if the dot-commers themselves never do. Don't bet on it. All the by-now-familiar signs of Internet mania are here...
NY Times: A Magazine Giant Weighs In on Internet Business.
No one expects the dot-com advertising boom to last forever. What's more, Huey must keep E-Company Now from leeching content from Fortune, its inspirational parent. But none of this daunts Huey. "I'm relatively confident this is going to work," he said in an interview last week from his home in Atlanta.
June 6, 2000
SJ Mercury: Data haven may be step in right direction.
Dan Gillmor. The need for something of this kind is growing. Governments and owners of intellectual property are trying to gain an iron grip over cyberspace. In the name of security, they're trampling civil liberties.
Editor & Publisher: APBNews.com Closes Doors, Fires Staff.
Since its launch in November 1998, APBNews.com had made a name for itself among both online and traditional media outlets. Its efforts to dig up government records and sue for the right to receive confidential documents from several public agencies drew praise from many journalism veterans.
Business 2.0: Shelter From the Storm.
But while their apocalypse-proof nature offers easy fodder for journalists in search of a hook, what's most important about them, in the long run, is the solution they offer to one of the Net's most pervasive, albeit mundane, evils: namely, super-congested exchange points.
Washington Post: Online Firms Plan Retail Guidelines.
The proposal calls for any company signing on to it to abide by a set of guidelines that include full disclosure of the terms of sale, an opportunity to review the transaction and discussion of all costs involved in the transaction and shipping.
Salon: Radio roadkill.
What we do know is that the economics of Web streaming show that both sides have obstacles to face; and while small and big stations alike try to figure out how to make Web radio profitable, listeners should face the welcome challenge of deciding which of the myriad stations available strikes their fancy.
NY Times: Warned by the Music Industry, Web Site Files Suit.
The company's lawsuit asked Judge Ronald M. Whyte to declare that MP3Board.com should not be held liable for copyright infringement if it provided results of an automated search that might include pirated copyrighted works.
USA Today: Sydney Games not ready for Internet.
Internet-based reporters probably won't be allowed in to cover the games. And nobody - not even NBC, which paid $705 million for television broadcast rights to the Sydney Games - will be allowed to use video or audio from the Games on their Web sites.
Florida Today: NASA accredits Internet journalist.
Cowing, the editor of an independent Web site called NASA Watch, announced last week that the space agency had accredited him. An ex-NASA employee turned journalist, Cowing made the announcement Thursday on his Web site.
News.Com: Internet appliance boom hampered by high display costs.
The high price of display screens, among other components, is keeping the price of home terminals, Web pads and other next-generation Internet access devices relatively high, makers here said.
Computerworld: AT&T plans high-speed mobile data tests.
AT&T Wireless Services will conduct tests this summer of next-generation wireless services designed to provide mobile users with a data throughput of up to 384K bit/sec., more than a tenfold increase from the highest data rate available to cellular telephone users today...
Interactive Week: Wal-Mart.com Seeks Marketing Help.
The online counterpart to the monster brick-and-mortar discounter plans to announce a two-year service deal with San Francisco-based Coremetrics to provide quick reports correlating sales with online and offline advertising and promotions.
Fortune: Gunning For the Heavy Weights in National Delivery.
NationStreet wants to be the place e-tailers, catalog merchants, and brick-and-mortar retailers go for delivery of furniture, appliances, and other large consumer products. Yet the Westborough, Mass., company doesn't own a single truck.
Business 2.0: Old-Line Goes Online.
What they've learned in the past few years has now become conventional wisdom. Consumers aren't particularly interested in visiting a Website centered around Wisk laundry detergent....
Business Week: What Dot-Com Cool-Down?
This is the third report in an ongoing study of the Internet economy, and government and private-sector economists agree it is probably the most comprehensive and accurate attempt yet to measure the impact of the Internet on the overall economy.
June 7, 2000
NY Times: Portals Struggle to Convert Browsers to Shoppers.
Converting traffic into transactions presents an opportunity for portals, which receive "rent" or commissions from e-tailers. They have been creating services and refining shopping tools to streamline and personalize the shopping experience.
Upside: Keeping sites in their sights.
SightSeer watches a site from outside the firewall: It ensures that business is open 24 hours a day. "It's brand protection end to end," explains Freshwater's director of marketing, Jacqueline Anderson. "They struggle with the fact that when transactions break down at these companion sites, their customers blame it on AOL."
NY Times: What's That Noise on the Internet? The Sound of Alliances Being Forged.
Scan a week's worth of dot-com headlines, and chances are good that you will find at least a dozen, if not scores, of partnership agreements or corporate alliances between Internet companies or traditional companies doing business on the Web.
Strategy & Business: Toys "R" Us Battles Back.
Actually, the initial inability of Toys "R" Us to puzzle out the Web and to grasp how influential e-commerce would be should not have come as a surprise. After all, it was the second business transformation Toys "R" Us failed to respond to quickly enough. And the same root causes were responsible for both missteps.
News.Com: Commission plans inquiry of COPA consequences.
Based on testimony from witnesses and public comments derived from the hearings, the commission will report to Congress by November regarding its evaluation and proposed recommendations for protecting children online.
Editor & Publisher: How Will The Jetsons Get Their News?
Steve Outing. Here's a look at the experience many of your news company's customers will have in the years ahead. It's helpful, if you're a news publisher, to understand what life will be like and how consumers will interact with what you offer.
Salon: Meet the $7.5 million URL.
I wasn't the only one who was a bit baffled by the debut of Business.com. "It's too early to tell, but my sense is it's not going to be something people are going to flock to," confided Joe Butt, an analyst with Forrester Research.
Marketing Computers: Credibility is king.
Michael Schrage. Let's be harsher: mediocre coverage now matters at least 20 times more than mediocre advertising. That's because nobody remembers mediocre advertising, but there's a fighting chance that the right people will remember a decent mention in a legitimate pub.
News.Com: AT&T to test open access to ISPs.
The six-month trial, to be conducted beginning in November in Boulder, Colorado, will explore the technical issues surrounding multiple Internet service providers operating on the same high-speed, or "broadband," cable network.
NY Times: Creating Ways to Cut the Delivery Time From Mouse to House.
Behind the scenes, many e-tailers are taking control of crucial inventory and warehouse functions, trying to avoid delays. Filling orders quickly -- using sophisticated technology to get a shipment out of the warehouse and on the road -- has become an imperative for astute Internet merchants.
News.Com: Sameday.com enters city's tight home delivery market.
Distribution firm Sameday.com announced that it has begun dispatching drivers in San Francisco to transport entertainment and convenience items and electronic products to customers' doors.
June 8, 2000
Wired News: NSI's Webjacking Epidemic.
Much to Meckler's chagrin, Network Solutions promptly made the transfer. "There was no double-checking on the part of Network Solutions," he said. "What kind of business would fax in a letter saying, 'Just turn over these 1,300 domains?'"
NY Times: Software Executives Say Consumers Will Pay for Piracy.
If copyright laws are not more broadly and aggressively enforced on the Internet, software developers will be forced to resort to cumbersome technological protections that consumers will not like, an industry leader warned Wednesday.
Washington Post: Recording Industry Near Deal In Suit.
Eisner would like to see a system in which computers and ISPs would be programmed to check each digital copy of a movie or record for an electronic watermark before allowing a copy to be made or transfer to take place.
Wired News: BMG First Label to Sell Streams.
As two of the major labels finalized settlement deals behind closed doors with MP3.com that will allow the company to license music content through its streaming music service, one recording company announced a similar deal on Thursday with a competing digital music company.
Irish Times: Warning against UK style licence auction.
Mr Negroponte said the money paid for the licences was unsustainable and that it would impede access to third-generation mobile communications because the companies would target the high end of the market to recover their outlay.
Red Herring: France's 3G beauty contest looks ugly all around.
In choosing to have regulators pick the operators who will receive third-generation wireless licenses -- but at unexpectedly exorbitant fees -- the French government adopted a King Solomon approach that backfired: they sliced the baby in half.
Business Week: A Glitch in Deja's Latest Incarnation.
Deja began its life as Dejanews.com, a Web site for easily accessing postings from Usenet, the popular Internet newsgroup service. In May, 1999, it shortened its name and relaunched as a site where consumers could swap opinions on thousands of products and services, from VCRs to veterinarians.
BBC News: 'Invisible' web code infringes trademark.
Road Tech went to court when it found that Mandata was using its Roadrunner trademark in their meta-tags. Hertfordshire-based Road Tech claimed Mandata was using the trademark to attract potential customers away from its own website.
Editor & Publisher: AdOne Fights Off Content Aggregator.
New York-based AdOne sent VacancyNet.com a cease-and-desist letter Wednesday after learning that the company was aggregating its listings. Founded in 1995, AdOne is backed by 11 newspaper companies and draws classified ad content those papers at abracat.com.
News.Com: Bidder's Edge changes eBay search after injunction.
Bidder's Edge modified its eBay search on Saturday, said Kimbo Mundy, the company's co-founder and vice president of engineering. Mundy said the new search system, which begins the eBay search in a new browser window, is better than those offered by Bidder's Edge's competitors, but is "not ideal."
Upside: Egghead.com nabs patent.
Specifically, the patent covers a technique in which Egghead's computer system electronically queries its own, and its distribution partners', databases to check on the status of orders. Those queries automatically generate email to customers.
June 9, 2000
News.Com: AOL, wireless firms appear to be on collision course.
America Online needs the cooperation of these carriers to bring its services to the airwaves. So far, phone companies' worries about AOL's competitive power has kept these deals to a minimum, creating a simmering tension now underlying the two camps' relationships, insiders say.
News.Com: Netscape's Clark: Keep Internet Explorer with Windows.
But Clark is worried that the proposed breakup of the software giant doesn't adequately guard against Microsoft regaining overwhelming power over the Internet. Allowing the company to put the most widely used Web browser under the same roof as its Web services is tempting fate...
Web Review: Effective E-Commerce Design.
If your business is to meet the challenge of selling in a narrow-band, sensory-deprived medium, you must become information intensive. Information intensity involves shifting the focus away from tangible resources and on to information.
NY Times: Judge Says Online Critic Has No Right to Hide.
The ruling, if not reversed on appeal, may serve as a precedent supporting the notion that anonymous speakers on the Internet, when informed or notified about pending subpoenas seeking to unmask them in the context of libel trials, do not have much of a chance of quashing the subpoenas on First Amendment grounds.
Industry Standard: Ad Execs Huddle on Web Standards.
In the face of a dramatic drop in the percentage of Web viewers who click on banners – from 3 percent when they were introduced to a miserable 0.5 percent today – advertisers and agencies began to talk this week about setting standards for streaming media, pinning their hopes on broadband.
PC World: Dial-Up Ain't Dead.
Most home Web surfers still connect to the Internet via dial-up at speeds less than 56 kbps. And that situation won't change for most of us anytime soon, no matter how many splashy ads we see about high-speed access. DSL and cable-modem access is available only to 27 percent of the US...
Industry Standard: MP3.com Settles With 2 Record Labels.
...the two Big Five labels, settled their copyright-infringement claims against MP3.com on Friday for about $20 million apiece. They issued the music-download site a license to use their copyrights for its My.MP3.com service, which requires MP3.com to pay the labels each time a copyrighted song is uploaded to the system and each time a song is streamed.
ZDNN: EU closer to copyright law.
The agreed document provides an obligatory exception from the copyright law for service providers, telecommunications operators and others who make so-called "technical" copies in the process of putting works onto the Internet.
PC World: Welcome to IBM's Wired Home.
Well, busy homeowner, rest assured. Soon you'll be able to digitally control any part of your home from within and from afar, via the Web. Such is the scenario of the IBM Pervasive Computing Lab in Austin, Texas, where engineers have developed what they call a "living lab."
New York Post: Industry Standard Adds New Mag.
Superheated ad pages are behind the surge. In the latest move, The Industry Standard, a two-year-old weekly, has seen its ad pages bulge to such proportions - 564 percent in the first five months of the year to 3,440.6 - that it plans to spin off an entire new monthly called Grok in September.
June 10, 2000
NY Times: Swashbuckling Anarchists Try to Eliminate Copyrights From Cyberspace.
If privacy and security can be protected, there will be a wide range of economic arrangements, just as there are now. Some cultural products will be publicly available. Some will be available only through subscription payments. And some will be available in the familiar pay-per-view or rental form that Lessig finds so disturbing in cyberspace.
InfoWorld: Ding dong, the dot-coms are dead, but I won't shed a single tear for their passing.
This is the right direction, but the stock-flip addiction is tough to kick. Investors are still thinking in two-year time lines. Short-term investing will never net us a future. Some businesses grow slowly: You don't reshape the world overnight.
USA Today: Some eBay clients slam ad plan.
Calling it a collision of mom and pop and big business, angry eBay sellers are waging a campaign against the auction giant's new strategy of accepting ads from major outside retailers.
News.Com: Sony device bookmarks music heard on radio.
The Sony-branded device, which is slightly larger than a car alarm remote control, is basically a digital stopwatch that can connect to a PC. When people hear a song on the radio they'd like to know more about, they press the device's lone button.
June 11, 2000
Useit.Com: Customers as Designers.
The Internet is undoing the industrial revolution's emphasis on mass-produced products; now everybody can get exactly what they want. But designing the product you want is hard, and current design interfaces are not good enough for novice designers (i.e., all normal customers).
The Guardian: Web inventor says ads 'pervert' content.
Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the web, told delegates at the International Advertising Association conference in London that surfers are often tricked into clicking on ads thinking they are part of the contents or, worse still, a message from the computer system.
SJ Mercury: Technology creates threat to economy.
Dan Gillmor. It's also at the heart of a question we'll need to answer in not too many decades from now. When people can replicate anything, who'll go to the trouble or expense of designing a new passenger airplane or life-saving medical device?
Wired News: Stephen King, the E-Publisher.
Creative people should be paid for their work, King writes, just as plumbers and carpenters and accountants are paid for theirs. "On the other hand," King's letter continues, "I think that the current technology is rapidly turning the whole idea of copyright into a risky proposition -- not quite a joke, but something close to it."
InfoWorld: Kerbango AM/FM/IM Radio moves us toward The Broadcast Internet.
For now, the Kerbango radio does nothing with its AM/FM receiver except pass analog audio through to its speakers. How long before digital Internet content is broadcast over AM/FM bands? Not soon, says Kerbango.
SJ Mercury: Data warehouses bring boon, burden.
But the trend also comes with problems. The very thing that makes such buildings an attractive idea for a congested suburban R&D park -- a ghostly lack of employees and, therefore, traffic -- is problematic for a place like downtown San Jose, where planners are trying to attract a critical mass of people.
June 12, 2000
NY Times: Easier-to-Use Sites Would Help E-Tailers Close More Sales.
Creative Good's chief executive, Phil Terry, concedes that prescribing these changes may be much easier than getting sites to implement them. "We've seen a real resistance to the basics in the industry," he said, "which indicates that this is just the tip of the iceberg."
Computerworld: Sharper Staples.
Staples Inc., the $9 billion office supply superstore, is constantly refining its Web site. In its most recent redesign, which launched May 7, the focus was to make it easier for customers to find products online and to help them complete their purchases quickly.
Forbes: Reel.com Cuts Commerce Unit, Keeps Content Site.
It’s only fitting, then, that Reel will continue to license its content. Ironically, though, the content will be licensed to bare bones discount commerce site buy.com. Buy.com previously marketed itself as a "no-nonsense, find it cheap" commerce site.
News.Com: No happy ending for Reel.com.
At the time, the acquisition was an example of brick-and-mortar retailers, such as Barnes & Noble and Egghead, looking to expand their businesses online. Today, the news punctuates the abrupt reversal of fortune for struggling e-tailers and content sites...
NY Times: G.E.'s Management Methods Are Put to Work on the Web.
Since 1996, at the dictum of GE's chairman, John F. Welch Jr., Six Sigma has been a way of life at GE. The company has applied it to pretty much every aspect of its business -- designing products, interacting with customers, fine-tuning delivery.
Web Review: Content Must Suck: Pulling Users In with Jared Spool.
What we found is that when Web sites have a consistent grid from one page to the next, so that every time the user clicks, it basically falls in the same format. Users basically learn that there are whole portions of the page that are not useful to them, and they stop looking there.
MSNBC: Web’s reach forces Hollywood to rethink America-first policy.
Another is legal e-commerce. Consumers in foreign markets are using American Web retailers, such as Amazon.com Inc., to buy films on digital video disk, or DVD, as soon as they are released in the U.S. In many cases, the films haven’t yet shown up in theaters around the world.
The Economist: The consensus machine.
In fact, cyberspace is highly organised and even regulated, and not just for technical standards. What is unique about the Internet is not that it is ungoverned; it is that its regulation has emerged from the bottom up and not the top down.
Industry Standard: Dot-Com Backlash.
Although reporters generally hope you'll forget their predictions, here are two I'll be willing to stand by: Al Gore's prospects will look better in October than they do now. And the Internet's image, in the press and popular culture, is about to look worse.
Wired News: Dot Coms? They're for Losers.
A lot of start-ups that stuck a trendy dot com at the end of their names to woo investors in last-year's Net-obsessed market are finding they may have hopped on the wrong bandwagon.
Industry Standard: Broadband or Bust.
Media titans like America Online and NBC, as well as a slew of lesser-known startups, are rolling out broadband Web sites loaded with audio, video and flashy graphics. All insist that these high-bandwidth venues are more than placeholders for tomorrow's broadband world.
Editor & Publisher: Newspapers Continue to Battle Classified Copycats.
Newspapers have battled this problem ever since scammers learned to photocopy printed ads and circulate them as their own. But now that papers are putting their classifieds online, it's never been simpler for upstart Web sites to copy and paste them by the hundreds.
Industry Standard: Speak Like an Expert.
Carl Steadman. Heard of the "conference season"? There is only one conference. It moves from convention center to convention center, city to city, but once you get inside the door, you'll find the same faces, same ideas, same $3 hot dogs.
June 13, 2000
Business Week: Even Big Domain Names Aren't Hard to Hijack.
But what happened has many big companies doing business on the Internet worried. For years, smaller companies have complained of domain-name hijacking, but the phenomenon has left publicly traded companies and their investors largely unscathed.
NY Times: For Want of $35, J.P. Morgan Loses Its Web Site and E-Mail.
All that frustration could have been averted if Morgan had sent a check for $35 for the annual registration fee to Network Solutions, a domain-name registrar in Herndon, Va. It pulled the plug on Morgan six weeks after Morgan's bill came due and after sending the firm at least three bills...
Adweek: CDnow Shifts Strategy From Spending to Selling.
In keeping with this philosophy, it's full speed ahead for the e-tailer, which looks to expand its base of advertisers and sponsors to augment its CD sales. The site, which averages 4.7 million users a month, plans to monetize those eyeballs by delivering them to advertisers.
Interactive Week: E-Commerce Doors Slamming On Portals.
Changing economics may be shifting power away from portals and to the companies that draw users to the sites. Through July, for example, Egreetings Network is paying The Microsoft Network to reach the portal's audience of tens of millions. Thereafter, though, MSN will be paying Egreetings...
News.Com: The latest in anti-piracy efforts: keystroke recognition.
"Technologies like Net Nanny can have at best zero value to the consumer and at worst can have negative value," said Eric Scheirer, an analyst with Forrester Research. The announcement takes the fight against online piracy toward a technological level that is more theory than practice.
News.Com: Commentary: Questions found regarding keystroke recognition.
It is understandable that creators of digital content and the original artists have a strong desire for copyright protection. However, even authorized consumers have no desire for digital rights management schemes.
Washington Post: Rooftops Loom As a Telecom Battleground.
There are about 750,000 office buildings in the nation. Companies such as Teligent are deploying foot soldiers like Garcia to pry their way in. If they fail, they could remain shut out of broad swaths of the multibillion-dollar frontier of the Internet and local phone competition.
SJ Mercury: Company pioneering wireless Web video.
Consumers could be using handheld computers this summer to tune in live videos from Wall Street, a concert hall or their kids' day care center, as San Diego-based PacketVideo launches a trial run of its wireless service with more than 35 media companies.
InfoWorld: Electronic paper proposed.
Officials at Lucent Technologies' New Ventures Group announced on Tuesday that the group has made a multimillion-dollar investment into Cambridge, Mass.-based E Ink and has established a minority equity position in the company.
Freedom Forum: Web news scores above print, broadcast on credibility.
The most-credible Internet news sources are Web sites run by network or cable TV outlets or national newspapers, according to a new survey. Such well-known Internet names as America Online, Netscape and Yahoo! ranked higher on credibility than lesser-known sites.
News.Com: Amazon, others add personal touch to home pages.
Other companies with similar initiatives include Reflect.com and Yahoo, which allow customers to arrange areas of their sites or product offerings. But those require the customer to request the changes, as opposed to Amazon, which makes the changes based on a sales pattern.
June 14, 2000
Industry Standard: AOL Will Offer IM-Sharing Plan.
America Online will offer an architectural plan on Thursday that would allow instant-messaging systems from competing services to interconnect with AOL's proprietary service, as the online giant moves to head off criticism that has drawn the attention of antitrust regulators reviewing its merger with Time Warner.
Fortune: The Dumbest Dot-Com.
The only winners in all this are the few members who have taken AllAdvantage for thousands of dollars apiece. There is some delicious irony to the thought that these more or less ordinary Net surfers should be the beneficiaries of a scheme in which some of Silicon Valley's hotshot financiers so thoroughly outsmarted themselves.
- Business 2.0: From February 2000; Ad It Up
News.Com: Start-up with pricey Super Bowl ad goes bust.
Denver-based Epidemic, which launched last September, paid consumers to attach links to Internet businesses on their outgoing email. The company's strategy was to stimulate "viral marketing," in which information about a company or promotion is spread largely through word of mouth.
Interactive Week: e-Tales: WAP! or thud.
It's all so reminiscent of bygone fads like interactive TV and handwriting-based computing, Parr says. "Communications infrastructure and connectivity — that is such a huge opportunity and an honorable business. They [telcos] need to stop trying to get into show business."
Industry Standard: Encoding E-Mail – It's Not for Everyone.
"Most people don't care about encrypting their e-mail," says Bruce Schneier, author of Applied Cryptography and CTO at Counterpane Internet Security. "You lock your front door now because you care. Your grandparents didn't."
Salon: RIAA tries to shut down Napster.
It's hard to imagine that shutting down Napster will have much of an effect on the whole culture of file-sharing. But attempting to work with Napster to develop a revenue model in which artists are compensated for their work would have a huge impact.
Film Threat: Deconstructing Harry: Ain't it Unethical?
If the studio or filmmaker foots the bill for "Harry's Adventure In...", it's with the expectation that young Knowles will pimp the product. This is strictly a marketing expense, not a favor to some spunky kid from the internet.
InfoWorld: Wireless services coming.
Affordable wireless services are coming to the consumer via third-generation devices, regardless of the high prices being paid for 3G mobile spectrum licenses, the chief executive officers of both U.S.-based Palm and its U.K. competitor, Psion, said at a conference Wednesday.
Excite News: Yahoo Won't Be Regulated Under Mutual Fund Laws-SEC.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company explained it makes small, non-controlling investments in companies that complement its Internet and new media business, carrying the investments on its balance sheet as long-term assets and does not invest for short-term or speculative reasons.
Industry Standard: Target, AOL Team Up.
The Target-AOL deal is the first major stride that the company has made toward being a competitive force on the Net. The alliance will be completed by September. The length of the deal and the exact financial terms were not disclosed.
Computerworld: Service beats price on the Web, study finds.
Customers most often choose sellers whose sites they had visited previously, said Brynjolfsson. Next was advertising — how familiar the company name is — then shipping time and finally price. "Companies like Amazon won on just about every dimension," he said.
June 15, 2000
TechWeb: AOL To Present Instant Messaging Plan 'Soon'.
[Barry Schuler, president of AOL Interactive] "If you go back and look at the history of mail, which moves at the same pace, everyone had different mail systems and then everyone decided it would be good to have mail systems talk to each other. And standards were created for it. What happened was a mistake, in retrospect. No one was thinking about spam."
News.Com: AOL releases its version of IM standards.
America Online today proposed instant messaging standards that would clear the way for rival services to work together. The submission comes on the final day for companies to hand their proposals for open instant messaging standards to the IETF...
Fast Company: Design Vision.
"We know how to do amazing things," he says, "and we're filling the world with amazing devices. But we cannot answer the most important question: What is this stuff really for?" That is the latest in a series of infrequently asked questions that have been occupying Thackara.
The Guardian: Japanese craze that could wipe out Wap.
The buzz word is micro-niches - tiny purchases that can be made while walking along the street or waiting for a train. Until now, these have been impossible because of the costs of distribution and billing, but with i-mode the marketplace is in your pocket and the cash register is your monthly phone bill.
Upside: GreatDomains gets spoofed.
The hijacking, known in darker circles of the Internet as "spoofing," is the seventh such incident in the past two weeks on a Network Solutions-hosted site and the 12th since January. It has prompted a warning to Network Solutions' million customers about pumping up security.
NY Times: The Library as the Latest Web Venture.
In fact, the new effort to build an electronic library is not about reading at all. It is about the power of electronic searching. With digital scanning, texts of works that may be decades old can be mined for those few morsels of insight that may enhance a research paper or help prove an argument.
Salon: Software that can spy on you.
Simson Garfinkel. Maybe Mattel knows something about rapidly advancing phonics theories that I don't, but I can't imagine what kind of "up-to-date" content the company wants to rush out to all the 5-year-olds using "learn to read" software.
NY Times: Internet Authority Proposes Rules for New Domains.
The Internet's new management authority on Wednesday laid out its initial proposal for expanding the network's addressing system beyond the popular suffixes of .com, .net and .org, saying it hoped to begin taking bids from companies wishing to run the new domains by Aug. 1.
Industry Standard: Cisco Joins the Net Publishing Game.
This would be Cisco's second magazine; the first one, Packet, has been around for about 12 years. But whereas Packet targets technical users of Cisco's networking products, IQ aims to capture an audience of Internet business executives...
News.Com: Hollywood cracks down on Web VCR site.
The motion picture industry and a dozen TV and movie studios sued start-up RecordTV.com today, charging that the Web VCR service has violated their copyrights. The lawsuit is in many ways a replay of a similar legal fight earlier this year over Canadian company iCraveTV.com...
NY Times: Will Chairs Sell on the Web, or Just Fold?
Then the gold rush turned into a soap opera, as Web entrepreneurs discovered what a tangled web the home furnishings industry can be. Trying to satisfy customers with products they hadn't seen in person was only the beginning.
June 16, 2000
NY Times: Is Linking Illegal?
Lawyers for the defendant, Eric Corley, who under the name Emmanuel Goldstein runs a print and Web publication, “2600: The Hacker Quarterly,” have sought to protect the act of linking. They claim that a link, in essence, tells someone where to go to get information. Thus it is a form of speech shielded by the First Amendment.
Wired News: Hotmail Clients Getting Steamed.
Hotmail accounts for some of the 330,000 people who have been shut out of the system started working by Wednesday morning, but a number of customers were dismayed that all of their data, including addresses and saved messages, were erased.
Web Review: Effective E-Commerce Design II: Beyond Infomercials.
Online, you have the potential to offer customers the most educated, and educational, sales staff in the world. This sales staff can combine the expertise of your company with the knowledge and experience of other industry experts, including customers, the most expert of all.
Computerworld: AOL proposes instant messaging standards.
Some critics say the 18-page standards proposal is an attempt to distract the government's antitrust investigation, spurred on in part by the proposed merger of AOL and Time Warner Inc. Antitrust enforcers at the FCC asked AOL in a June 9 letter to supply information about its activity in instant messaging...
News.Com: Commentary: Instant messaging best when companies agree.
But of the issues that exist, at the top is who will own, operate, manage and increase capacity for the directories and application servers that underlie instant messaging. Without funding and central management, the service will fail.
eCompany: The Patent Avenger.
In fact, Aharonian has managed to turn his contempt for the PTO into something of a cottage industry. He's well known among patent lawyers for his acerbic Patnews e-mail newsletter, which he sends to some 4,000 people several times a week.
News.Com: Register.com scrambles to close security hole.
The problem allowed unauthorized access to the security software Register.com and its business partners use to manage Internet site information, such as a customer's contact information or the numerical address associated with a domain name.
Industry Standard: Congress Gets Preview of AOL-TV.
While showing off the new service's ability to let TV watchers surf the Web, read e-mail and send instant messages from a TV set, AOL officials also sought to demonstrate that the service would not discriminate against other programming providers...
USA Today: Internet copyright laws debated.
Major content providers - and the director of the federal copyright office - argued Thursday that Internet companies should not be eligible for the special licenses that satellite and cable companies have to carry broadcast programming.
ZDNN: Yahoo! refuses to remove Nazi memorabilia.
"We are not going to change the content of our sites in the United States just because someone in France is asking us to do so," Yang told French daily Liberation in an interview published on Friday.
SF Chronicle: Stuck in Cable Gridlock.
For months, motorists have been fuming about closed lanes and slow traffic along El Camino Real in Palo Alto, Redwood City, San Mateo and points north and south. The reason: Crews are laying an expansive grid of underground fiber-optic cables.
PC World: Excite@Home Upgrades Searches.
Experts say such moves reflect concern on the part of Excite, AltaVista, and Lycos that serious searchers are increasingly turning to up-and-coming services such as Google.com and Direct Hit, as well as to more established ones such as Northern Light.
June 17, 2000
Salon: Courtney Love does the math.
Courtney Love. Our media says, "Boo hoo, poor pop stars, they had a nice ride. Fuck them for speaking up"; but I say this dialogue is imperative. And cynical media people, who are more fascinated with celebrity than most celebrities, need to reacquaint themselves with their value systems.
Wired News: Music Security's Maiden Voyage.
Unlike CD audio, however, the discs won't play on a home stereo because they are burned in a protected digital audio format. Instead, users load the disc –- which contains software audio players, digital rights management, and the content -- into their computers to be unlocked.
Project Cool: Viva Aus Vegas.
A product site supports a product. It helps people decide whether or not to purchase. It helps people understand what the product does. It provides a way to download demos or examples. It is a communications forum between vendor and customer. It is not a set of aggregated eyeballs.
InfoWorld: Oh the horror, the horror: The new world of wireless commerce runs amok.
Stop and ask yourself: "Just because we're developing the capability of purchasing via mobile systems, does that really mean people are going to develop a sudden and inexplicable Pavlovian desire to buy all the time?"
Red Herring: Crisis in PR!
Rather than standing out with precision placements, PaperStudio became yet another company in the long line of dot-com startups whose message was communicated by little more than spam to the media.
Marketing Computers: Sabrina Horn offers some answers.
At Horn Group, I can think of a half dozen times when we resigned a client for inherently flawed marketing strategies characterized by too many content-free releases, pointless pitch angles and unattainable expectations for the almighty cover of The Wall Street Journal.
Industry Standard: Shopping With Your Cell Phone.
Motorola, Symbol Technologies, AirClic and Connect Things are pooling $500 million to form a new company that will facilitate e-commerce from wireless devices. The company will allow consumers to make purchases simply by pushing a button or scanning a bar code.
June 18, 2000
News.Com: Company buys April Fool's URL.
"At first when they called, we thought they would be really annoyed with us," said Jay Woodruff, an editor at Esquire. "But it quickly turned into this discussion about how they wanted to buy the URL. I guess irony pays."
Boston Globe: Silly Web site in serious free-speech fight.
And being silly was all a New Hampshire man was aiming for when he created the Dialectizer page two years ago. It will turn any text, including Web pages, into one of seven pseudo dialects. Instead, Samuel Stoddard has become enmeshed in an Internet free-speech battle.
O'Reilly Network: Shining Light Into the Realtime Blackhole List.
David Strom. In my opinion, RBL isn't completely successful for several reasons. First off is that they have a very restrictive definition of best e-mail practices, and this definition is somewhat unclear from their public materials.
Useit.Com: Spotlight of Gnutella's user interface.
The user interface is totally mysterious and does not guide the user towards achieving his or her goal. Instead, it exposes too much technical detail (IP numbers and the like) which will be totally confusing for the average user.
June 19, 2000
Industry Standard: The Limits of Copyright.
Lawrence Lessig. You don't have to be a pirate to be concerned about this trend, especially when one adds to it the changes that cyberspace is now inducing. For in addition to these protections granted by law, code writers for copyright holders have built technologies that supplement the law.
Industry Standard: Toward Fewer Free Lunches.
Despite an estimate by researcher Greenfield Online that 66 percent of customers surveyed don't pay for online music and have no plan to obey copyright laws, EMusic CEO Gene Hoffman says he trusts his customers to do the right thing and that it's the technology that can't be trusted.
Wired News: When DVD Is Too Good to Be Legal.
To Hollywood's alarm, a British company is selling modified DVD players that output pure digital signals. Unlike regular DVD players, which provide ho-hum quality analog pictures, Function Communications' modified DVD players output a stream of pure digital video.
Industry Standard: Professor Farber Gets an Education.
Even if cable companies let other ISPs onto their lines, he notes, they could still use routers and caching technology to handicap sites run by everyone but their affiliates. Farber says he'll hammer away with doomsday scenarios, even as cable companies move forward with plans for sharing their lines.
Salon: Network Solutions hijacked my domain name.
The problem is that e-mail is the only way that Network Solutions would verify that I am who I claim to be; and I don't have that e-mail address anymore. In the rush of taking a new job, I forgot to change my domain name contact info before I left my old job -- and its e-mail address.
The Register: BT claims ownership of hyperlinks.
British Telecommunications claims it owns the patent to hyperlinks and wants ISPs in the US to cough up hard cash for the privilege of using them. The monster telco believes a patent filed in 1976 - and granted in 1989 - proves it owns the intellectual property rights...
MSNBC: Magazines, online sites blur the focus.
And at a time when reviews by seat-of-the-pants Web reporters like Wells and Harry Knowles — with their freewheeling mix of reporting, gossip and attitude — run rampant and far in advance of the traditional press, old print stalwarts are increasingly willing to break release dates.
Computerworld: Clash of the Killers Ps.
However, IT staffers and marketing departments often fail to devise careful policies for using data mining results in ways that preserve customer privacy, Gaw says. That's a mistake at a time when industry and Congress are fiercely debating whether and how to legislate privacy.
NY Times: Internet Merchants Turn to Online Sweepstakes.
And because investors have diminishing patience for Internet merchants that use generous, if not ludicrously expensive, product giveaways and free shipping promotions to snare new customers, e-tailers see sweepstakes as a much more affordable way to achieve marketing goals.
LA Times: Widening the Web World.
Once it is tied in, a visiting computer can connect to the Internet like any other native member of the network. Kleinrock said the Nomadix gateway will open up high-speed Internet access in all the usual haunts of road warriors--hotels, airports, office buildings and even Internet cafes.
TechWeb: Seeing The Light About Fiber Optics.
Jeffrey R. Harrow. Is "fiber to the curb" economically feasible? Bell Atlantic thinks so. It's currently testing a system from Marconi called "Deep Fiber FTH" (Fiber To The Home), according to the June 5 issue of Canarie News and LightReading.
Boston Globe: Lycos to hand off Net-search business.
Waltham-based Lycos Inc., one of the Internet's oldest search engines, is getting out of the Web search business. It's handing off the job to a Norwegian company that promises by next year to create the world's biggest Internet index, containing a billion Web pages.
June 20, 2000
MIT Technology Review: In Search of Webs Past.
Those who forget the past are condemned to reload it. The Web’s advance has been rapid, but that’s all the more reason to study it with care. In all the confusion, it’s easy to lose track of what publications and business models have already been tried, and with what results.
Salon: Deja.com loses its memory.
But for now at least, the archives are gone. And Deja.com is evidence of yet another failure to "monetize" (to use that ugliest of words) what was coolest about the Net. That's the fate of history in the 21st century -- we don't burn the books anymore, we just unplug the servers.
Wired News: British Telecom: We Own Linking.
BT shrugs off the implications. It has lots of patents; it enforces lots of patents -- that's what companies with patents do. "Really, it's all just in the course of business doing business," said Craven.
Financial Times: BT owns key web patent.
BT's invention is understood to have emerged in the 1970s from research at the Post Office which culminated in a system called Prestel. Patents were sought in 1976 and have already expired in countries out-side the US. But the US patent was not granted until 1986, and still has six years to run.
Internet World: Who Gnu?
Music is the most extreme example, but the same thing is happening across the information industries. Vertical integration of content production and distribution has been the trend for more than 20 years. While those involved publicly cite illusory "synergies," the real driver is fear of change.
ZDNN: Can fee music compete with free?
"At the end of the day, the music industry as we now know it is over," declares Avram Miller, a former Intel Corp. vice president with close ties to the entertainment industry. But the recording industry -- with the help of some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs -- believe they can use technology in new ways to stem the tide of piracy.
USA Today: Net rankings vex dot-coms.
On the Web, the ratings game is often a web of hair-splitting, corporate bravado - and, sometimes, old-fashioned fibbing. In many ways, it parallels the rancorous, decades-old debate over how other media researchers track TV, radio, newspapers and magazines.
Internet World: Millionaire Fever.
IWon's leveling off doesn't surprise Ken Lim, principal analyst at CyberMedia Convergence Consulting. Lim credits iWon's initial explosion entirely to CBS's airtime exposure. He predicts iWon will continue to grow, but no faster than the rest of its market.
SJ Mercury: Big things in store from IBM's Microdrive.
Dan Gillmor. I don't wonder anymore whether we'll be able to fill up our hard disks with data, though I'm not certain precisely what that data will be. But the Microdrive forces us to wonder something interesting about the products of tomorrow.
News.Com: Super-fast technology may help speed wireless Web.
But don't hold your breath waiting for it quite yet. AT&T executives say it will be about five years before the technology sees the light of day. And there's still a third generation of technology slowly being moved to market that has to launch first.
Interactive Week: Wireless Seeks IPv6 Upgrades.
Wireless carriers standardizing on IPv6 could pressure commercial backbone operators for the first time to implement IPv6. Until now, IPv6 deployment has been done mostly by nonprofit and scientific organizations.
June 21, 2000
Fortune: The Hot Idea of the Year.
But Napster's import goes far beyond the balance of power in the music business. Napster represents a new idea, a different architecture for exchanging information. No one can say yet how important the idea will become or how it will change things.
ZDNN: Protesters to Nike: Just hack it!
Manager said his company was still trying to figure out what went wrong, but added that his firm utilizes an extra layer of security, which means the company's domain name can not be altered by a simple e-mail. "They were very creative in how they did it," Manager said. "We are still investigating."
CIO: Playing for Keeps.
Michael Schrage. The spreadsheet is just one example of how the computational costs of prototyping products, simulating services and modeling business options are shrinking into insignificance. It's becoming ever easier, cheaper and faster to explore new ideas.
Business Week: The Great Portal Purge.
Many portal deals, signed with great fanfare within the past couple of years, are crumbling along with the financially strapped dot-coms that signed them. Software seller Beyond.com pulled the plug on its myriad portal deals--a move that cost the company $11 million in early-withdrawal fees.
Industry Standard: New Net Privacy Protocol Closer to Going Online.
A nascent technical protocol aimed at protecting online privacy got a big boost toward a final rollout Wednesday from the White House and several major corporations. But some privacy advocates warn that the new protocol could result in reduced Internet privacy protection.
The Guardian: Feeding frenzy.
Moreover makes money at both ends of the content-transfer process: banks and private companies pay for custom feeds that serve their own needs; at the other end, it charges content sites for the traffic it delivers to them - which can be far greater than advertising or search-engine positioning would bring.
Detroit News: Shoppers find Web’s blowout sale is over.
Remember all that free shipping, gratis gift wrapping and below-cost merchandise on retail Web sites? Hold onto the memories, because they’re all that’s left of most of those perks in the stingy new world of e-retailing.
Wired News: Luxury Giant Is Finally Online.
On Monday, Arnault's Europ@web and LVMH launched eLuxury, a website devoted to selling goods from LVMH's vast stable of pricey brands. The launch marks the first time LVMH has permitted most of the luxury manufacturers it owns to sell on the Net.
News.Com: MIT project seeks to make PCs invisible.
The Oxygen Alliance is a five-year project designed to make computers as ubiquitous--and invisible--as oxygen. At least 250 MIT researchers will be involved in the project, which is getting funding from the federal government and six corporations.
June 22, 2000
Freedom Forum: What's really happening with 'struggling' online news.
Jon Katz. What exactly characterizes the Open Media? Open Media sites embrace interactivity; they reflect ideas, commentary and information from a wide range of sources, especially their readers. Their agendas and political philosophies are rarely static, but continuously evolving, a gift of interactivity.
ZDNN: Gates: MS future rides on .Net strategy.
Gates likened the introduction of its .Net foundation to a transition on the order of the one that occurred when the company moved from DOS to Windows. One slide Gates showed during his hour-long presentation read: "We are on the brink of a new computing revolution."
Industry Standard: Hackers Just Do It to Nike.com Again.
The FBI is working with Nike and Network Solutions, the registrar of the Nike.com domain, to track down the suspects of Wednesday's attack. The working theory is that intruders redirected visitors to the site by infiltrating the Network Solutions' system, according to Nike and Network Solutions.
Wired News: Court Says Anti-Smut Law Illegal.
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia upheld a lower court's decision against the Child Online Protection Act, saying in a strongly-worded opinion that the measure was so unconstitutionally broad it affected even non-pornographic websites.
Internet Week: Banks Wield Peer Pressure.
A group of the nation's premier financial institutions is poised to give ISPs an ultimatum: Clean up your act or lose our business. The group's big gripe: unpredictable Web site performance because of inconsistencies in the way ISPs peer, or pass traffic among one another.
News.Com: AT&T wins key victory in cable-access fight.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the Portland decision that required AT&T cable to open its lines to rivals of AT&T's affiliated Internet service provider, Excite@Home, on the grounds that it had overstepped its authority.
Freedom Forum: Convention coverage goes 'dot-com'.
Both America Online and Pseudopolitics will be spending the big bucks required to turn skyboxes into news studios in Philadelphia, where the Republicans meet from July 31-Aug. 3, and Los Angeles, where the Democrats gather from Aug. 14-17.
Media Central: Newsweek, MSNBC launches site.
Newsweek.MSNBC.com went live early Sunday morning, executives at Newsweek, The Washington Post and MSNBC.com must have let out a deep sigh of relief at finally having inked a very complex, and perhaps unprecedented deal.
eWeek: Remember the human element in e-systems.
We can't repeal the seeming law of nature that systems will find a way to fail, but we can and should be candid with ourselves and our managers about the need for backup facilities and fail-safe designs.
Washington Post: The Name of the Game Is Names.
In a coming of age for domain names--those monikers that double as identities and addresses for computers hooked up to the Internet--Network Solutions is on the verge of opening an online market where people will be able to buy, sell and appraise previously owned domain names.
Industry Standard: Publishers Taking a Page From the Web.
IDG Books, the publisher of the ubiquitous For Dummies series, is offering readers the chance to design their own books on the Web. Readers can buy just the chapters they want or buy parts of several books and have them bound together.
Forbes: Equifax, eHNC Join Forces To Fight Online Fraud.
The system allows merchants to receive a "score" on the transaction, which indicates the likelihood that the would-be buyer is not who he says he is. (EHNC won't specify exactly what factors are used to compute the score.)
InfoWorld: Access to buildings urged.
The Smart Buildings Policy Project hopes to convince the Federal Communications Commission that it should require building owners to provide reasonable and nondiscriminatory access to rooftops and wiring conduit inside multitenant buildings.
News.Com: Engineers seek to teach the Web new languages.
The Internet Engineering Task Force is working on a project that will allow foreign characters to become part of Internet domain names, which now only permit letters geared toward modern, Western European languages.
USA Today: Internet saps California's power grid.
Add it all up, and ''We are pushing our energy transmission system harder than ever before,'' said Karl Stahlkopf, EPRI's vice president of power delivery. ''Improving our power system is going to be absolutely necessary if we are going to reach the productivity gains (envisioned) in the New Economy.''
June 23, 2000
Salon: Another defeat for "kiddie porn" law.
Thursday's decision to uphold the preliminary injunction takes an interesting look at the issue of online geography. The COPA had decreed that "contemporary community standards" would be used to determine which material was, indeed, "harmful to minors."
Web Review: Creating Great Customer Experience.
For an E-commerce site, the most basic measurements of marketability are conversion rate—the ratio of buyers to visitors—and average order size. A low conversion rate or a drop in order size should be a red flag about more serious site problems.
NY Times: Patent Claims Pop Up All Over the Internet.
Patent watchers say the claim will be tough for British Telecom to prove. But they say they expect the number of complex and potentially far-reaching patent cases like this one to increase as people try to apply old and new patents to broad areas of the Internet.
O'Reilly Network: British Telecom Patent: Lachey, Uninfringed and Invalid?
...my guess is that British Telecom is going to have a hard time asserting this patent against rich deep-pocketed ISPs who can afford to pay the best law firms to take these types of arguments and available prior art, and make much stronger versions of the above analysis.
Wired News: NYT Site Exposes CIA Agents.
The Times may have simply used Adobe Photoshop to put a layer of black boxes over the names in the 200-page Portable Document Format file, allowing viewers who "froze" the page while it was being downloaded to read the names underneath, according to the SecurityFocus report.
News.Com: Dot-com posts financial records of federal judges.
After receiving the reports for about 800 judges, the company yesterday quickly posted the reports of the Supreme Court's nine members. It planned to get the rest online as quickly as possible.
TechWeb: Web To Help Streamline Drug Companies.
The e-revolution is set to save drug companies hundreds of millions of dollars and several years in time by transforming the way they take products from the lab to regulators for approval, industry leaders said this week.
Internet Week: 'Wormholes' Speed Web Buys.
The approach taken by the Symbol-Motorola alliance will require that customers register each Web code with the vendor. By contrast, GoCode and Digimarc let their clients assign codes to Internet transactions on their own. Analysts are critical of the Motorola-Symbol alliance's lock-in approach.
NY Times: Appeals Court Sides With AT&T in Cable Access Case.
Portland, along with a coalition of Internet service providers, pointed to the language of the decision as evidence that AT&T will ultimately be subject to the same regulatory requirements as local telephone companies, which must open their lines to rivals.
Industry Standard: Wells Fargo Accused of Online Redlining.
Less than 24 hours after a community group in Dallas accused Wells Fargo Bank of redlining on the Internet, controversial neighborhood descriptions disappeared from the bank's Web site Thursday.
ZDNN: Napster in settlement talks with artists.
The sessions are seen as part of the peace-making efforts by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley venture-capital group that made a $13 million investment in the San Mateo, Calif., music Web site last month and which has tried to strike a conciliatory note with the record industry.
News.Com: Fight for access to airwaves reaching fever pitch.
About 100 television stations are already broadcasting their shows using this wireless real estate. They will have to leave before any new owners of the spectrum can use it nationwide. And figuring out how to clear the old guard to make room for the new high-speed data services is proving difficult.
Salon: Everyone's a critic.
Call it the new review zoo. Suddenly, consumer-critique sites are starting to multiply. Where once there was only Consumer Reports, John Q. Purchaser now has a handful of new outlets with which to discuss, rate and rant about every fridge or juicer he has ever bought
Seattle Times: If image is everything, the market is cornered.
In less than three years, Getty Images, now based in Seattle, has positioned itself as the largest online image bank in the world. The company has spent $1 billion purchasing 25 stock-photo companies and expanding its collection to 70 million images and 300,000 hours of film.
June 24, 2000
Industry Standard: No Pay, No Domain Name.
In a move competitors and customers decry as anticompetitive, Network Solutions, the world's largest registrar of domain names, will keep control over a name for which it has not received payment and auction it off on its site.
The Economist: Trying to connect you.
The antitrust enforcers clearly ought to make approval of the AOL/Time Warner deal contingent on a cast-iron agreement to open up the merged firm’s instant-messaging service and cable networks.
NY Times: David-and-Goliath Battle in Cyberspace.
It was the opening salvo in what would become more than a week of intense, day-to-day combat between the two companies, with Odigo engineers coming up with new solutions as soon as AOL experts had blocked the previous ones.
ABCNews.Com: Child Privacy Tiff.
In response to public complaints about privacy, Mattel Interactive announced that the company would provide a tool that removes software that was surreptitiously placed on customers’ computers and is designed to transmit and receive information to Mattel.
Computerworld: FCC floats flexible regulatory scheme for multibillion-dollar wireless auction.
He added that the FCC's approach to selling spectrum to wireless carriers, but then not taking any concrete steps to move the broadcasters "is like selling a house with the people still in it, with no guarantee that they will ever move out."
Useit.Com: Spotlight of a University of North Texas study of how children use the Web.
The Sullivan study is only a first stab at studying Web usability for children (only two age groups, only 16 test subjects, only two websites), so we need more data before drawing firm conclusions, but I do find it striking that these findings contradict much of the folklore around children and the Web.
June 25, 2000
Useit.Com: The Network is the User Experience: Microsoft's .NET Announcement.
Microsoft's .NET Announcement is a brilliant counter-move that reduces the Justice Department's proposed penalty to a victory in the previous war. Integrating the user experience at the network level opens the door to new and exciting services while diminishing the importance of traditional isolated websites.
Seattle Times: Microsoft's magic: Will it work with .NET?
In issuing a sweeping vision for its "Microsoft .NET" strategy three days ago, Microsoft signaled the passing of a decadelong Windows era that brought the company unsurpassed wealth and prominence, as well as a host of legal hassles.
DaveNet: Dot-What?
There are a bunch of other conversations they want to have, you can read about them on the Microsoft Web site. Before going in too deep and getting lost in the details, that's all there is. We have a common language. Now we're going to start talking.
Federal Computer Week: Web inventor: Let it be free.
As the Web continues to evolve and impact society, government could lead by example with enlightened privacy policies, Berners-Lee said during his keynote speech at the GovTech 2000 conference in Washington, D.C.
The Guardian: The star of search engines.
Q&A with Jerry Yang. "We're combining Yahoo Finance and Broadcast.com," he says, "and during the time the US markets are open, we have our own anchors doing a live web-based show. It's quite interesting because you have a live video stream from our Dallas operation plus a data stream of market information."
Federal Computer Week: They’re history: New media ages fast.
In an age dominated by e-mail communication, electronic documents, and digital audio and video, the problem of how to store historically important data is complicated enough. But fast-changing technology and surprisingly fragile electronic media foretell disaster for future researchers.
SJ Mercury: `Secure' digital files created to play defense for companies worried about online music piracy.
Jim Donio, executive vice president of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, said retailers are urging the labels to make the limits clear up front. ``We want customers to know what they're getting,'' Donio said.
June 26, 2000
Wired News: NSI Commandeers Deadbeat Domains.
Internet name registrars compete for the registration of available domain names, but the new policy gives Network Solutions unfair leverage in recollecting expired names for its own business, critics like Broitman charged Friday.
Boston Globe: Report hits Web sites' builders.
In the last two years, consumers and investors have rebuked companies sharply for lumbering online with poorly conceived e-commerce sites. But a new report says the designers and builders of Web sites - the Internet services and consulting firms that have sprouted around the country - share much of the blame.
Photo District News PIX: The Selling of Interactive Ad Agencies.
Jeffrey Zeldman. Since Adweek magazine recently published its list of the Top 100 Interactive Agencies, let's examine the sites of some of those big guns and see if they help explain the companies' successes. More importantly, since most huge corporate sites are practically interchangeable...
Industry Standard: Turning Patents Into Profits.
"I was mystified that someone would make such a claim at this point in history," says Nelson, who has labored for 40 years on Xanadu, his project for creating an alternate vision of the Net. "We're going over a speech I gave in 1969 that outlined something very much like linking."
Industry Standard: Six Degrees of Co-optation.
But now, even as activists turn the marketing guns against the big corporations, the corporations are in turn co-opting the activist's information and turning it into yet another branding play. Klein declined to help Unilever but the company is nonetheless watching – and learning fast.
SF Chronicle: Online Speech Hit With Offline Lawsuits.
Entwined in the debate are questions about online anonymity. Internet users may believe that Web sites guard their identities when they post messages under pseudonyms, but the truth is that the firms regularly disclose names when presented with subpoenas.
SF Chronicle: Monitoring Specialists Keep Firms Informed.
With thousands of Internet message boards out there, it's difficult for executives to keep abreast of what's being said about their companies. That's why some companies hire specialists to be their ears for Internet gossip.
CNN: Florida judge approves class-action lawsuit against America Online.
Miami attorney Andrew Tramont said AOL blocks customers' access to its services during the time that the pop-up advertisements are on the screen. About 2.5 million AOL hourly plan subscribers since 1994, he maintained, should not be forced to pay for that time.
Excite News: Sony may restrict Web film critics.
For freewheeling 'Net critics, the times they are a-changin'. Sony Pictures Entertainment will now determine on a film by film basis what long-lead screenings Internet reviewers will have access to, spokesman Dennis Higgins said.
InfoWorld: Billion-page Web catalog cited.
The agreement with Yahoo does not signal a move toward more formal portal status, Brin said. Google will still remain largely unadvertised, he said, preferring to rely on "word of mouth and quality of product" to bring users to the site.
LA Times: Consumer Advocate's Role in Ad Campaign Questioned.
In the so-called "open access" debate, a multimillion-dollar nationwide lobbying battle pitting cable companies against Internet service providers, Horowitz is one of many hired guns.
Wired News: Old News, Different Stream.
"I always say this type of programming is the same as television," said Eric J. Scholl, FinanceVision's executive director. "This is media. The audience is the same. It's just that people are insatiable for information. People want to see live news and they want to react to that."
LA Times: Fighting for the Remote Control.
Cable and satellite TV providers, along with a host of television software makers, claim that both companies already use their market dominance unfairly to monopolize not just TV listings but futuristic services such as movies on demand and one-click shopping.
News.Com: AT&T, Nokia team on next-generation phones.
AT&T Wireless and Nokia agreed today to work together to develop a new line of mobile phones capable of high-speed Net surfing, videoconferencing, streaming music and other next-generation features.
June 27, 2000
Salon: ICANN's double jeopardy.
And after two more domain-name brouhahas broke out this week, ICANN's foes are up in arms again, claiming that ICANN's actions -- or lack thereof -- prove once again that the nonprofit plays favorites and moves at a near-paralytic pace that hurts competition.
News.Com: Keep it simple, Handspring co-founder urges.
Hawkins pointed to the idea that computers should adapt to people intelligently as an example of such misguided thinking. Rather than expecting so-called smart devices, designers should create practical tools that people will want to learn to use, like the keyboard, he said.
Wired News: AOL's Digital Rights Dilemma.
With all of that content available, AOL now has a considerable interest in developing a secure way to sell and distribute digital content over the Internet. On Tuesday, AOL said that it would add InterTrust's InterRights Point security client to future versions of AOL's promotional CDs.
Computerworld: Software Development Goes Global.
The downside is that distributed development also introduces delays and other problems. So Lucent's Bell Laboratories in Naperville, Ill., is rolling out a suite of computer tools to aid collaboration among its far-flung development sites.
CIO: Look Sharp.
Q&A with Kathryn Grant, The Sharper Image. We've incorporated the ability to not necessarily touch but at least to turn something on and experience what it would be like to actually play with the object, to listen to the sounds, to turn it around, to open it and close it.
MSNBC: Flashy clothing site had good ideas, but financial controls were lacking.
Debates about Miss Boo could rage for days, and employees complain they were sometimes called in on weekends to discuss her attributes. “Everyone in the company had strong feelings about Miss Boo,” Ms. Leander says.
Advertising Age: Top Net magazines lose dot-com bucks in advertiser shift.
Some dot-com and technology advertisers are bowing out of Internet behemoths Business 2.0, Fast Company, The Industry Standard, Red Herring and Upside--just as the phone book-size publications vie for dominance based in part on their ad-page count.
ZDNN: Smart homes, dumb ideas.
John C. Dvorak. The idea sounds reasonable on the surface: Create an energy-saving home that monitors itself and make everything networked and coordinated. But the basic idea always expands into something silly.
News.Com: 3Com tunes in to Net radio start-up for $80 million.
Making a steady move into the market for digital home appliances, network equipment maker 3Com today said it will acquire Internet radio pioneer Kerbango in a cash deal valued at about $80 million.
ZDNN: Web advertising not as hot as it seems.
Leading Web Advertisers examined 20 of the top Web sites for advertisers, as measured by the New York consulting firm Media Metrix between January and mid-June this year. On average, about 22 percent of the ads on those sites were house ads, the survey found.
USA Today: With no special powers, studio sites catch few fans Film promos provide little imagination.
That said, there's not enough information on most studio film sites, which try mightily to outdo each other with flash and sizzle. For most surfers, that translates into a lot of waiting to get beyond welcome screens and menus.
Internet Week: E-Commerce Short On Juice.
E-business consultancy AMR Research, in a report expected to be released later this year, forecasts dire consequences for the Internet economy if the nation's electricity infrastructure isn't shored up.
June 28, 2000
Forbes: Palm Plans For Wireless Future.
Q&A with William Maggs, CTO of Palm. Palm is going out on a limb. The maker of popular personal organizers, which claimed a 78% market share in 1999, is now betting on a proprietary technology called Web Clipping that tacks Internet content onto wireless devices.
Wired News: Putting a Lock on WAP Phones.
At issue is that in France and Britain major telecommunication companies have been locking -- or creating so-called "walled gardens" -- on their WAP-enabled phones. When WAP phones are locked, users can't change the home page assigned by the phone-service carrier.
Internet World: A Front-Runner in the Net Phone Business Looks at the Hurdles Ahead.
Q&A with Alain Rossmann, CEO of Phone.com. Although we had a lot of patents and were ahead, we decided we needed to trade control for adoption. We absolutely knew there would be competitors, and that was the goal. The goal was to create an industry.
Newsbytes: Analyst - Digital Rights Protections May Be Moot Point.
"There's no shortage of technology in the world out there today. It's not like the whole industry has been at a standstill waiting for somebody to please come up with a watermarking technology," Scheirer said. "There are many vendors out there."
Salon: Adding up the funny numbers.
Anyone interested in the truth about Internet trends, however, should be a bit dubious. Think about it: Now, you'll have Jupiter Media Metrix analysts sorting through their own admittedly unreliable numbers to produce reports.
Fortune: Nice Building, but the Real Innovation Is in the Process.
Michael Schrage. The process of creating an innovative automobile or airplane or building begins to look pretty similar. So benchmarking the innovation process becomes just as important as benchmarking the product.
InfoWorld: Faster not always better with devices, exec says.
The network infrastructure right now does not support a "great user experience" for browsing and doing transactions on the Internet, Hawkins said. "Right now there is no support for a persistent connection" to the Internet from mobile devices, he said.
Time Digital: Palm to Piggyback on Cell Phone Connections.
The browsing technology is unfortunately based on the same "web clipping" and WAP that prevents Palm.net, Palm VII and cell phone users from accessing actual web pages. On the up side, users won't have to pay separate monthly fees for wireless access from the Palm...
Wired News: Canada Auctions Wireless Spectrum.
The government said it will open an auction in early November for four blocks of spectrum in the two gigahertz frequency band. That spectrum, used for digital wireless phones, will eventually support "third-generation" services...
PC World: Wireless Internet Gathers Speed.
Wireless Internet access is hot, but up till now the services have been too slow for anything beyond text messages and e-mail. Metricom aims to change that with its next-generation, 128-kbps Ricochet wireless service, which is slated to launch in Atlanta and San Diego at the end of July.
News.Com: Nokia, RealNetworks team for music, video over cell phones.
Already, AT&T Wireless is working under a business model in which a few wireless Web sites are free to access, but going outside that group requires surfers to pay an extra fee.
Internet World: Deconstructing SharperImage.com.
Peter Merholz and Louis Rosenfeld. Sharperimage.com also exposes the perils of "cutting-edge" technology. Trying to view any products in their "3D enhanced area" returned this error on IE5 for Win98: Cannot bind the object with the following variable name: "Dummy."
Industry Standard: Sony Finds a Broadband Guru.
Sony has lured Credit Suisse First Boston Managing Director Robert Wiesenthal to run its newly created Sony Broadband Entertainment unit. In a move that will accelerate the development of Sony's broadband strategy, the new unit is expected to invest in entertainment-related digital media concerns.
June 29, 2000
NY Times: The Search Engine as Cyborg.
For information scientists who have spent decades refining computer-based search techniques, that is bad news. Introducing the human touch into search engines also means introducing human biases. What the scientists want is a form of artificial intelligence.
CIO WebBusiness: Technical Support: (Yet Another) Holy Grail.
Lou Rosenfeld. Why don't companies devote more resources toward improving web-based, self-serve support, one of the most frequent tasks performed online? Like any good American, I have a conspiracy theory: vendors strive to have no contact with consumers, especially those in need.
Wired News: Whom to Sue for Nike.com Hack?
His beef: When Nike's website was hijacked last week, whoever hijacked the domain re-directed Nike.com's traffic through Smith's Web servers in the U.K., bogging them down and costing Smith's Web hosting company time and money.
Fortune: Why Internet Insurance Isn't the Best Policy.
He warns against the "new-policy-a-day phenomenon," in which companies feel compelled to snatch up every new policy that insurers issue to cover a new kind of risk. Often, he says, such risks are covered by other parts of the standard policies that companies already have.
Computerworld: Citibank to shut down online-only bank.
Citibank currently has around 450,000 online customers, the bulk of whom use the Direct Access service that's available to any of the bank's customers. Citi f/i is a stand-alone bank, and its customers are offered better prices on banking products. But they don't have access to Citibank's physical branches.
News.Com: FedEx slows down to move at Internet speed.
FedEx launched its Home Delivery service in March in major metro markets including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas after realizing that e-shoppers were choosing lower-cost delivery options after ordering goods online.
Boston Globe: Net service providers applaud AT&T agreement.
The long lead time allowed for AT&T to move to open access is among the reasons that Paul Trane, a leading broadband industry consultant with Telecommunications Insight Group in Somerville, dismissed the deal as ''smoke and mirrors and nothing else.
USA Today: AT&T, Mass. ISPs in accord.
On Tuesday, the company agreed in principle to open its Bay State networks to competitors, including America Online, MindSpring and Shore.Net by mid-2002. In return, opponents agreed to abandon plans to seek a November ballot initiative mandating open access statewide.
MSNBC: Lobbying machine revives issue of Internet taxes.
But the forces of cyberspace were in for a surprise. A broad collection of people who want sales taxes on the Internet suddenly materialized and succeeded in stalling the bill in the Senate. Senators may soon begin considering alternative bills that, while still blocking new Internet taxes...
Financial Times: European telecom stocks down on Ericsson 3G warning.
Mr Hellstroem told Dagens Industri, the Swedish business newspaper, that network operators would be certain to pass on the costs of the 3G licences to manufacturers to minimise their own risk. The costing, Mr Hellstroem warned, would stunt the development of the European mobile market.
Upside: Getting personal on the Internet.
Aside from the obvious privacy debate, many do not agree who can best personalize a customer's experience. If the economist view in marketing continues to dominate the Web, the promises of understanding what make customers tick will never materialize.
InfoWorld: Amazon's Bezos touts personalization.
Personalization, the ability to tailor a Web site's interface to each user logging on, is key to Amazon.com, one of the most recognized names on the Internet, Bezos said at a keynote address here at PC Expo Wednesday.
Red Herring: Lab Rat: Greif gives grief to tech status quo.
Another key to Ms. Greif's research success is spending time observing people to determine their needs -- rather than simply relying on their answers to questions. She explains this approach by pointing out that, when asked, people tend to react only to what's in front of them.
The Guardian: Second sight.
Douglas Rushkoff. Content is just a medium for interaction between people. The many forms of content we collect and experience online, I'd argue, are really just forms of ammunition - something to have when the conversation goes quiet at work the next day...
USA Today: Landlords grow leery of dot-coms.
Technology start-ups, once aggressively courted by real estate agents, increasingly are finding it difficult to rent office space in such tech hot spots as Silicon Valley, New York City, northern Virginia and Austin, Texas.
June 30, 2000
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