July 1, 2000
Online Journalism Review: Some Guidelines From One of Online News' Walking Wounded. I've watched blood flow at new media conference tables since 1982 (Times Mirror's videotex project, Prodigy, latimes.com) and have learned some painful lessons. Others, in a pragmatic way, have also been learning the Rules of the Internet. Here's my contribution...

Project Cool: The Sky Is Falling? The reality of the web industry bore the same relation to the reported new economy as the wild, wild west did to Horace Greely's anthems or Wild Bill Hitchcock's traveling show. The problem was, the industry had started to believe its own reviews.

• Salon: From November 4, 1996; After the gold rush. Scott Rosenberg.

Online Journalism Review: The Final Days of Privacy. But in this country, we sustain the illusion that the business community is capable of policing itself through voluntary standards of privacy protection. It isn't. The profit to be made from "mining" consumer data has proved just too lucrative for most businesses to ignore.

Boston Globe: Net store to sell its customer list. For Toysmart, the dilemma involved deciding whether to sell its customer list to pay back more than $20 million in debt or keep its pledge not to share customer information with outside parties. The problem could become more common as dozens of online retailers appear headed for financial failure, privacy advocates warn.

Advertising Age: Cereal makers entice online kids. Internet initiatives have helped General Mills, Kellogg Co. and Quaker Oats Co. reach their young target, an age group to whom cereal companies have historically directed the bulk of their promotional efforts. But selling them cereal is another story.

July 2, 2000
SJ Mercury: Preserving our history for future. Dan Gillmor. The Rosetta Disk's public unveiling is part of the ``10,000-year Library'' symposium at Stanford University. This small but significant gathering of leading thinkers has been pulled together to ask some essential questions about the preservation of our knowledge and cultures.

• The Long Now Foundation: Rosetta Disk

Washington Post: Finders That Are Keepers. "We don't want to compete with our Web site partners" by putting the software online for free, explained Reza Moazzami, chief executive of CallTheShots. "If we let everyone create the ultimate financial page with their own nuggets from Quote.com, why would anyone go to Quote.com?"

InfoWorld: Hyperlinking on the Web? I am shocked, Louie, just quite simply shocked! I don't have a problem with someone getting a patent on a particular method of "hyperlinking" (a specific set of protocols to link documents). But the whole concept of linking between documents? Isn't that tantamount to saying, "I've got the patent on referring to other information?"

Washington Post: Wage Suit Against AOL Could Change Online Volunteerism. Almond was part of an unusual group that could exist only on the frontiers of cyberspace: people who volunteer by the thousands to help support what has become one of the world's most profitable new-media companies, the very first to crack the Fortune 500.

• NY Times: From May 28, 1999; Online Companies Try to Walk Line Between Volunteers and Staff

July 3, 2000
NY Times: Giving Consumers Access to Personal Data. Access has been a sleeper issue primarily because it is so complex. It seems obvious that consumers should be able to check the files that others keep on them and to change anything that is wrong. But articulating the boundaries of such a policy is no easy task.

Industry Standard: TRUSTe to File Antiprivacy Brief Against Toysmart. "There really is no meaningful protection provided to Internet users and that means both the absence of federal laws in this area and the reliance that some people in some companies are placing on certain programs like TRUSTe," Sobel says.

News.Com: Napster: Downloading music for free is legal. In its first lengthy legal response to the record industry's attempt to shut down the service, Napster attorneys today said that finding and downloading copyrighted songs for free is protected by law as long as Napster members themselves aren't making money from the recordings.

Business 2.0: The Internet’s First Use Dilemma. The consumer now has control of digital content, empowered with these digital tools. The result of this disintermediation must be the introduction of new business models, not the deus ex machina of technology- or legal-based protection schemes.

Wired News: Cable Biz Agrees to Open Access. The end result? Industry-wide competition as each delivery method scrambles to be the first on the block, creating more choice and lower costs for consumers while eliminating the need for industry regulation, at least for now.

• Industry Standard: From November 14, 1999; The Cable Debate, Part II. Lawrence Lessig.

Business 2.0: Spam Sparks Stampede. Weeks before the store opened this past April, Ikea planned to build brand awareness among the legions of Bay Area Internet devotees by offering Website visitors up to $75 in discounts at the new outlet. All they had to do was forward Ikea promotional email to 10 friends...

• News.Com: From March 8, 2000; IKEA enlists friends for email publicity

NY Times: Digital Economy's Demand for Steady Power Strains Utilities. Mr. Mills's prescription for microprocessor-friendly power quality is 10 nines, or 99.99999999 percent reliability -- a mere 32 seconds of power loss a year -- plus equipment to protect against those gaps and the sags, spikes and surges in between.

• Business Week: From January 20, 2000; What If the Internet Ran Out of Power?

Industry Standard: For Immediate Release. Carl Steadman. "Know your limits," says Steadman, identifying worthwhile PR opportunities: new products, new versions of products, new product ideas, ideas for new products, new members of the product team and the hiring of a new PR agency when the old one fails to generate press for your products.

News.Com: AllAdvantage nixes pending IPO. The 15-month-old company, which pays members to surf the Web in exchange for viewing ads, filed to sell 15 million shares to the public for between $8 and $10 in early February, according to its S-1 filing. But since that time, the market for dot-coms has taken a beating.

• Fortune: From June 19, 2000; The Dumbest Dot-Com

USA Today: What's in a name? The fading of dot-com. Executives of Internet businesses, hoping to shed the image of a fad, are increasingly dropping references to the World Wide Web from their corporations' names. Using "e," "i," and ".com" will make the company seem like a dinosaur even five years from now...

July 4, 2000
SJ Mercury: Tonga becomes proving ground for wireless technology. Dan Gillmor. For Hendricks, Tonga is a proving ground for wireless technology he and his colleagues believe could shatter the status quo here. It's also an example of what he calls ``regulatory activism,'' working inside and outside the system to make changes.

Industry Standard: Living With Contradictions. On top of that, the dynamics of the media and public discourse tend to polarize the discussion: "The Internet Economy is going through a turbulent time, and some players are likely to be badly hurt while others prosper" is not a very good story line.

• Salon: From November 4, 1996; After the gold rush. Scott Rosenberg.

Industry Standard: Not Enough Privacy? The European Parliament was scheduled to vote July 4 on a proposed agreement between the United States and the 15-nation European Union that would grant Europeans greater online protection from U.S. companies than they legally are required to provide to Americans.

Irish Times: Fury follows BT's surprise claim on hyperlinks. Company spokespeople have said BT will go after these big guys, rather than skimming more income off those of us who have our own little Web pages. Gee, thanks for that magnanimous gesture as you rock the very foundations of the Internet, guys.

New Scientist: Internet geeks are going into battle against British Telecom. But New Scientist has discovered that it may have been an online newsletter that gave BT the idea to defend its patent. Greg Aharonian, who runs the Internet Patent News Service, spotted the patent in 1997 and suggested in a newsletter that "with a few legal gymnastics" it might "cover all uses of Web pages".

NY Times: Silicon Alley Suffers as Market Instability Cripples Investors. Unlike California's Silicon Valley, New York's new media industry tends to specialize in content rather than technology, making it more vulnerable to gyrations on Wall Street because few of these companies are likely to show a profit any time soon.

July 5, 2000
Internet World: Content Goes to Pieces. Rather than treat the Web as a library of sites and pages, Yodlee and others such as CallTheShots Inc., Moreover.com, Octopus.com, and OnePage.com break down the Web into smaller components - a table, a headline, a single word - and shuffle the pieces into new forms.

NY Times: While Others Yawn, Web Journalists Look to Conventions With Digital Energy. From boutique start-up ventures like Speakout.com to virtual empires like America Online, Web sites and Webzines are looking to the political gatherings in Philadelphia and Los Angeles as potential defining moments in the evolution of news on the Internet.

ZDNN: Napster fuels P-to-P uproar. Skeptics, and there are many, say the accumulating froth over peer-to-peer reminds them of other big ideas that came and went without ever living up to overheated predictions, like "push computing," which in 1996 was set to replace traditional Web browsing...

• Useit.Com: From April 30, 2000; Finally Progress in Internet Client Design

Computerworld: IT on the 'Outer Limits'. Proponents say that linking computers through the Internet could enable long-term, computation-intensive tasks in aerodynamics, pharmacology, geophysics, biotechnology and manufacturing to be done in relatively little time.

Wired News: S. Korea Sets High 3G Price. The Ministry of Information and Communication set a bid ceiling at 1.3 trillion won ($1.17 billion) and floor of one trillion won to avert a bidding war. "We are concerned bidding costs by contestants might be passed on to service users later," the ministry said.

Infoworld: European domain address proceeds. Moreover, the new top level domain would let companies avoid the necessity of registering in different EU countries, according to the Commission. Currently, each EU country has its own domain -- ".fr" for France, for example. The .eu domain would eliminate the existing country domains...

Chicago Sun-Times: State moves toward Internet sales tax. Supporters of the Illinois bill argue that they are not proposing new taxes but rather creating a way to collect existing sales tax that are now largely ignored by consumers, who officially have the obligation to pay the state sales tax.

Washington Post: Hong Kong 'Superboy' Bets on Broadband. To realize this vision, Li is spending $1.5 billion over the next five years, much of it on an edgy, state-of-the-art studio in London that will produce original programming. Although the initial target market is in Asia, Li wants to take his network global.

• SJ Mercury: From November 20, 1999; Asian project has big designs, many skeptics. Dan Gillmor.

News.Com: Deleted documents do double duty on rogue Web site. A Web site trying to make a name for itself by publishing deleted Securities and Exchange Commission filings scored a coup last month when Lehman Brothers attempted to delete a misfiled form detailing more than $20 billion of the firm's holdings.

Columbia Journalism Review: Defining the Blurry Line Between Commerce and Content. Either way, linking articles to commerce is far more immediate and powerful online. While a print advertisement requires you to visit a store to make a purchase, online you can simply move your wrist slightly to buy. "Just because you can make such links, doesn't mean you should," says Swisher.

• Industry Standard: From February 15, 1999; Online Editors Aim to Sharpen Blurry Lines

July 6, 2000
The Guardian: Can Xerox copy old success? Underlying all Xerox research is ethnography, the study of human behaviour. Xerox employs some 15 ethnographers. One of them, Jack Whalen, says ethnogra phy is "at the very heart of this center" because of a study at Parc decades ago.

CNN: Company aims to preserve Web history. The Internet Archive is a massive collection of Web sites donated by the Alexa Internet, an arm of Amazon.com. It preserves those Web pages that would otherwise be wiped from computer memories and lost forever.

SJ Mercury: U.S. firms silent over Chinese Net arrest. U.S. Internet companies, which often cite information technology as the key to promoting free speech in China, have responded with resounding silence to an urgent call for help from a human rights group concerned about the detention of a Chinese Web site operator.

• PC Week: From June 14, 1999; Can the Internet let freedom ring in China?

USA Today: Firms kick the bricks-and-mortar habit. These are true virtual companies, where staffers work from their homes and meet only a few times (or less) each year. Job reviews are on conference calls, meetings are held on the Internet, and office politics take place online rather than around the water cooler.

Washington Post: IP, the P.O. Box of the Future. [Stratton Sclavos, CEO of VeriSign] Sclavos said his company has studied whether people could be given IP addresses in place of phone numbers. Then their main IP number could be associated with all their digital devices. "For our kids, your Social Security number will become an IP number," he predicted. "I guarantee that."

• Salon: From March 10, 2000; Their names are legion. Scott Rosenberg.

NY Times: Focus Groups Go Online to Measure the Appeal of Web Sites. Focus groups have long been a staple of marketers and business planners. Now marketing research companies are creating online focus groups to examine things like the effectiveness of Web site designs and the appeal of new product names.

• Upside: From April 28, 2000; Do cryptic sites equal lost opportunities?

The Register: 3D mall is just such a stupid idea, we can't believe it. And so ECLand was born. ECLand is an online shopping mall. What's that? Well, it's a "unique 3D approach to shopping on the Internet." It has "finally made on-line shopping not only accessible to all but also fun for all." Terrific, you say. How does it do it?

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

News.Com: Glitches let Net shoppers grab free goods. Watchful Net bargain hunters who trade tips on special message boards soon swooped in to load up on the steeply discounted or free goods. A malfunction at Web portal AltaVista also falsely gave customers the right to claim freebies.

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

July 7, 2000
Upside: Naked.com: Web leaves businesses nowhere to hide. The one aspect of becoming an e-business that is often not considered is the incredible visibility it gives everyone into your internal systems. The problem is that most companies' legacy internal systems were never developed with the notion of broad and untrained access in mind.

The Economist: Waves of the future. The prospect has started to worry many in the industry. Ericsson’s president, Kurt Hellström, recently echoed warnings by Nicholas Negroponte (MIT’s guru of all things wired) that the high prices being paid for 3G licences could slow the deployment of new mobile networks.

• Irish Times: From June 2, 2000; Warning against UK style licence auction

USA Today: Japan pioneers brave new wireless world. Japan has more Internet-enabled cellular phones than the rest of the world combined, analysts estimate. Its wireless giant, NTT DoCoMo, boasts the world's largest Internet-cellular phone network. And Japanese consumers are providing clues to the wireless world on what people do with cellular phones.

TechWeb: Future Looks Bright For DoCoMo. A key plus for i-mode vs. other services is that it is always on, observers said. It "uses packet technology so users don't have to access or dial in or activate the service," said Alan Mosher, a senior analyst at Probe Research, Cedar Knolls, N.J.

ZDNN: Waiting for the wireless Internet. But at least one analyst, Mike McGuire of Dataquest, feels that 3G has been overhyped to the point where users are expecting it to do things that it was not designed to do. According to McGuire, rich multimedia experiences will not be possible via wireless until fourth-generation networks...

Salon: Napster death match, Round 3. Taking its cue from the judge, Napster in its latest brief basically ditches the DMCA defense (although there is a halfhearted attempt to revive it), and instead focuses on the broader question of whether Napster even needs immunity from copyright infringements.

Business Week: Now, Companies Can Track Down Their Cyber-Critics. To me, there's something very troubling about cyberspinning. Good public-relations personnel can quell panic and remind people of their company's side of the story in the heat of a crisis. But personalized spin campaigns.

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

Forbes: InterTrust Sorts Out Rights, Songs. "It’s like when stores try to sell a leather jacket that’s chained to the rack," says Edmund Fish, InterTrust’s executive vice president and chief business operator in Santa Clara, Calif. "If you make it too hard to try on, nobody will buy it."

Silicon: Geoworks patent claim excludes European WAP market. A successful enforcement of this patent would mean all companies selling WAP technology would have to pay a license fee to Geoworks. However, the patent will only affect the low-profile US and Japanese WAP and not the lucrative European market.

July 8, 2000
NY Times: The Nirvana News. News that analyzes events and investigates all aspects of life is an expensive, handmade commodity. For the moment, the Web is getting it free of charge from the old ink media that are searching for ways to adapt to the new technology.

• DaveNet: From February 4, 2000; How to Make Money on the Internet

InfoWorld: Broadband connection horror stories to improve with the advent of wireless. Broadband war stories have a certain cachet among the technophilic; as all things geeky, the harder it is, the better. The blood, sweat, and tears you had to shed to get your connection has become a badge of honor, a Purple Heart in the telecom wars.

• News.Com: From May 23, 2000; High-speed companies tackle mass adoption

InfoWorld: HTML forms get face-lift. At this week's meeting of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) XForms working group, the mechanisms for HTML forms will at long last be updated -- seven years after the specification saw its last major overhaul.

Computerworld: New top-level domains up for discussion this week. The group that could trigger a land rush for new Internet domain names will begin meeting this week in Japan to address the thorny issues involved in a proposal to expand the lineup of generic top-level domains beyond current ones such as .com, .net and .org.

The Chornicle for Higher Education: Plans for New Domain Suffixes Have Colleges Girding for Fresh Trademark Fights. Already, Stanford University and Yale University, to name two, complain about the time and resources they spend fighting cybersquatters -- those who seek to profit from an institution or business with name recognition by incorporating that name into a new Web address.

Newsbytes: Tacoma Web Developer Bests Giant Fuji In Domain Dispute. This week, an arbitration-like system launched late last year by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers determined that the $13 billion a year Japanese company and its Fuji Photo Film USA subsidiary were mistaken and that Fuji Publishing has a fair claim the domain.

July 9, 2000
Useit.Com: WAP Backlash. The sad conclusion: it will be much more expensive to develop services for WAP than for conventional browsers. Much of the early success of the Web was due to the simplicity of development where you could design a single website and have it work across platforms.

• 4K Associates: From April 9, 1999; W* Effect Considered Harmful. Rohit Khare.

Web Informant: eCommerce for her, another dumb idea. Are there specific cars that more women buy than men? I am sure there are. But don't put up a few pages on your site telling me this. Provide better service, better tools for anyone to find what they are looking for.

• NY Times: From March 29, 2000; Since Women Ask for Directions, the Web is Being Remapped
• ClickZ: From June 15, 2000; The Feminine Net

Strange Connections: Defining Information Architecture. Peter Morville. This was a watershed event in the field of information architecture, not because we answered important questions, but because it was the first large-scale gathering of the community of information architects.

Strange Connections: Information Architecture and Ulcers. Peter Morville. From anthropology to zoology, professionals in academia and business have had to make the case for qualitative research methods. Let's explore some of the key reasons why qualitative approaches are critical to information architecture design.

July 10, 2000
NY Times: Wireless Web Has Big Promise but a Few Kinks. The other carriers are not limiting access, but they are nonetheless charging Web sites fees to be listed in prominent positions in their cramped on-screen menus. Recently, America Online supplanted Yahoo as the top item on Sprint's menu after reportedly agreeing to a sizable payment.

ZDNN: Pioneering Webzines join forces. A band of respected Webzines is hoping for strength in numbers. Feed Magazine and Suck.com, two of the Web’s oldest publications, are expected to announce Monday that they are joining forces.

• New York Post: From October 26, 1999; 'Zine sites linking to get more $

MSNBC: FTC is set to challenge Toysmart to prevent the sale of consumer data. If legal action is taken and is successful, the case could set a precedent against such data sales when they contradict earlier company policies. More such data sales are expected as the first major wave of Web-retailing failures plays out.

Strange Connections: Little Blue Folders. Peter Morville. They are over-selling these automated classification products in a way that may pump up sales in the short term, but will inevitably lead to a major back-lash as their customers learn the hard way that software alone can't solve their portal problems.

• Forbes: From July 5, 1999; Mining documents by understanding ideas

Upside: The new buzzword already sounds old. If, on the other hand, this technology could be used to stimulate a true renaissance in creativity by both enabling and encouraging people to create and share their own content, then we'd be on to something real.

InfoWorld: i-mode: A cautionary tale. Business people here may admire the ability of NTT Docomo to "monetize" content as my friend David Hayden, CEO of MobileID says, but that has more to do with the Japanese market, the lower percentage of desktop Internet users, and the headlock NTT Docomo has on its own market.

• The Economist: From March 11, 2000; i-modest success

Silicon: Developer worries see WAP turning Japanese. Developers behind the wireless Internet protocol, WAP, have been forced to accept its failings and incorporate the technology of Japanese rival, I-Mode as a combined version of WAP and I-Mode technologies is to hit Europe next summer.

News.Com: Coolsavings settles e-coupon patent dispute. Online direct marketing firm Coolsavings.com said today it settled its lawsuit against another company offering a similar service, ending one of several patent disputes.

• Industry Standard: From January 13, 2000; CoolSavings.com Settles Patent-Infringement Suit

News.Com: All eyes on Yahoo's ad revenue. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Yahoo goes into its earning report on the heels of successive analyst reports warning of expected weakening in ad revenue growth. As an Internet bellwether, the company's performance could have repercussions for legions of dot-coms...

NY Times: Campaign Stresses Customized Beauty Products Sold Online. Executives at Reflect.com and its agency of record, Deutsch Inc. in New York, hope to distinguish the newcomer from its rivals by stressing the customized products sold at the site, which are, as the saying goes, not available in stores.

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

TechWeb: Come Browse With Me. "Why would you want to do this?" said Jonathan Gow, research manager at IDC, Framingham, Mass. "Part of the beauty of the Web is that it's asynchronous, that you don't have to be together. Why would you want to do this instead of just e-mailing the URL?"

July 11, 2000
Salon: Can a labeling system protect your privacy? Simson Garfinkel. But P3P isn't technology, it's politics. The Clinton administration and companies such as Microsoft are all set to use P3P as the latest excuse to promote their campaign of "industry self-regulation" and delay meaningful legislation on Internet privacy.

SJ Mercury: Draconian cyber-surveillance near in Britain. Dan Gillmor. The problem with RIP is that it will also rid the United Kingdom of any semblance to online privacy and liberty while doing little to enhance security. Any rational business will think twice before investing in the U.K.

ZDNN: FBI system covertly searches e-mail. But in employing the system, which can scan millions of e-mails a second, the FBI has upset privacy advocates and some in the computer industry. Experts say the system opens a thicket of unresolved legal issues and privacy concerns.

USA Today: Phone.com wants to be giant. And by creating an open standard, which anyone could copy or build on, it allayed the big companies' fears of buying from an unknown source. If Unwired Planet went under or proved to be flaky, other companies working on the same standard could pick up the slack.

• FEED Magazine: From February 3, 2000; The Constraints Of The Wireless Web. Clay Shirky.

digitalMASS: It really stands for 'What a Pain'. A second version is on its way, and early reports suggest that the WAP Forum companies are beginning to work more closely with legitimate standard organizations. Yet most of the WAP action revolves around phone, which begs the question: If you're working with a phone, why don't you just call?

• Wired News: From May 17, 2000; Wireless Web Fight Gets Catty

Online Journalism Review: The Significance of Salon Travel. The move confirms fears that Web technology that allows sites to track the exact number of visits to each story turns every reader into the online equivalent of a Nielsen family, threatening every underrated article, writer or section with the chopping block.

InfoWorld: Senate panel hears music debate. But the U.S. lawmakers mostly stayed clear of the rhetoric that Web music services like San Mateo, Calif.-based Napster have generated, recommending the parties work out a settlement themselves. The senators showed little inclination toward writing new laws, at least for now.

Inside: RecordTV.com Takes the Betamax Defense. The counterclaim's basic argument is that the service is protected by the Supreme Court's 1984 ruling in Sony Corp. of America vs. Universal City Studios (commonly referred to as the Betamax decision), which sanctioned personal video recording for non-commercial uses.

Forbes: Sony Establishes New, Obsolete CD-ROM Format. Sony plans to sell a new kind of compact disc. Unfortunately, it will probably be obsolete as soon as it hits the market. So obsolete, in fact, that it may quickly join the ranks of such Sony success stories as the hard drive floppy disk and the Betamax video format.

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

Red Herring: Inside the dying DEN. The reasons for DEN's demise are plenty, say former employees and industry onlookers. At the core of the meltdown was the inability to manage the company properly and execute on the business plan.

Forbes: Reliable Yahoo! Fails To Fail. "Everyone's looking at the Yahoo! call as a window into the next six months of online advertising," says Carolyn Trabuco, an analyst with First Union Securities in New York. As a result, Yahoo! has been pounded with requests for more detail about its advertising income...

Wired News: Yahoo Has a Big Quarter. Yahoo Chief Executive Jeff Mallett said in an interview that alternate metrics such as transactions enabled, time spent online and "voice minutes" would become more important in reflecting the company's increasingly diverse services.

July 12, 2000
Information Week: Redefining The Wireless Application Protocol. Interestingly, every cell phone, PDA, and wireless network infrastructure executive I've talked to concedes that running pure TCP/IP and HTTP to wireless devices is inevitable. It's just a matter of how long it will take to get faster wireless networks and more powerful handheld devices in place to support it.

IT Director: WAP stands accused, but who should really be in the dock? The prime suspects in the case of "failure to meet expectations" are the mobile operators. With the right services presented in the right way, internet enabled mobile phones could be a valuable asset. But WAP phones have been rushed to market before the network and the services are ready.

SF Chronicle: Pay-to-Surf Not Paying Off For Web Sites. Many companies in this space, including AllAdvantage, are branching out beyond the pay-to-surf model. AllAdvantage recently started a program that pays members to read e-mail ads.

• News.Com: From June 14, 2000; Start-up with pricey Super Bowl ad goes bust

• Industry Standard: From October 11, 1999; Say It Ain't So, Mel

• Salon: From March 10, 2000; Their names are legion. Scott Rosenberg.

InfoWorld: IBM labs peek into future. Karasick is part of the global team of researchers from IBM labs involved in the company's four-year, $180 million Planet Blue experiment, whose goal is to "build the world of personal computing -- to build applications that help show how people live and exist in a post-PC world," Karasick said.

Industry Standard: Napster Steals Universal Music Exec. Napster hired another executive with a deep resume in the music business Wednesday. The music file-swapping service found him at Seagram's Universal Music Group, the world's largest record label and a company that has vowed to sue Napster into the dust.

Computerworld: Counterpane offers Internet security insurance. Counterpane Internet Security Inc. in San Jose announced this week that its clients will be able to purchase up to $100 million in insurance coverage to protect against loss of revenue and information assets caused by Internet and e-commerce security breaches.

Industry Standard: Three-Way Alliance to Bid for Europe's 3G Market. Japan's NTT DoCoMo, the Netherlands' Royal KPN and Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa agreed to join forces Wednesday to compete for third-generation mobile phone service licenses in four European countries, starting with the U.K., then Germany, France and Belgium.

July 13, 2000
Inside: Hatch Warns Labels, Don't Make Me Come Over There and Spank You. The DMCA -- intended to create what he called ''a stable, predictable legal environment'' that would boost the availability of intellectual property on the Internet -- had ''sadly'' failed for music, Hatch said. Instead of licensing their music to new e-businesses, the senator explained, the labels had kept it locked up in their vaults...

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

• Atlantic Monthly: From September 1998; Who Will Own Your Next Good Idea? Charles C. Mann.

Newsbytes: Web Content Will Never Be Worthless - Panel. [Alan Ellman, Screaming Media] He described a conversation he once had with representatives of an unnamed but, he said, major media conglomerate, which wanted to move its product onto the Web - but completely on its own terms. "They described this giant castle of information, complete with a moat..."

• DaveNet: From September 3, 1999; A Bright Future for Syndication

Red Herring: Wireless à la I-mode. Still, as mobile operators in Europe and the United States glean lessons from the I-mode, it remains unanswered to what degree the company's fortunes are due to technology prowess, to an acute appreciation for aesthetics, or to sound business sense.

PC World: SEC Urges Eyes on the Net. Stark joined Neal Wilson, general counsel of the Washington brokerage firm Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co., for a recent discussion with law students on the SEC's efforts to stop securities fraud on the Internet and the future of online public offerings.

• eJournal: From March 30, 2000; SEC and Public Postings. Dan Gillmor.

ZDNet E-Business: Toysrus.com navigation: Intelligent inconsistency. Traditionally, online retailers assign top navigation tabs to categories or departments such as music, videos or electronics. Toysrus.com, however, appropriately uses inconsistency in the design of its top navigation tabs to make it easier for customers to find hot-selling items.

NY Times: Building a Better Web With Content Blueprints. A good architect won't forget your staircase, and a good information architect -- a job that is becoming increasingly more important as the world moves to the Web -- will make sure that visitors to a site will be able to find their way around easily as well.

July 14, 2000
NY Times: DVD Case Will Test Reach of Digital Copyright Law. An important Internet case pitting Hollywood's right to control access to its digital wares against the traditional rights to fair use of copyright and free speech is scheduled to get under way in federal court in Manhattan on Monday.

• Wired News: From May 16, 2000; Tuning Up Digital Copyright Law

• FEED Magazine: From April 13, 2000; Napster's Death Knell. Clay Shirky.

SJ Mercury: ICANN holding key meeting on creating new domain names. Dan Gillmor. Even if you've heard of ICANN, you probably don't know much about it. But the Internet oversight body, formally known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is holding a pivotal meeting here this week, and the outcome will help shape the Net's future.

eCompany: Souping Up the Wireless Web. So, then, why is everyone in hot pursuit of 3G? "The whole concept of 3G grew out of the telephone industry’s monopoly view," says Cooper. By that he means that 3G technology is an incremental upgrade to mobile carriers’ existing networks instead of a radical technological leap.

• Business Week: From May 17, 2000; Martin Cooper: A Wireless Prophet Who's Pushing "Smart Antennas"

Computerworld: European official vows to go forward with U.S. data-privacy deal. The European Union official who led negotiations over the proposed "safe harbor" data-privacy rules for U.S. companies that do business in Europe yesterday said he would recommend that the rules be adopted as is, despite last week's vote by the European Parliament requesting a series of changes.

SJ Mercury: Auto-set signal for VCR clocks is back on the beam. The time stamp, coming from Fox's Los Angeles studios, has been inserting West Coast time into VCRs from San Jose to New York for at least a year. The time stamp was playing havoc with a VCR feature known as ``auto-clock set,'' which is built into half of the 22 million VCRs sold in this country annually.

Internet World: Deconstructing AA.com. Peter Merholz and Joseph Squier. You can purchase tickets over the phone without having to sign up for frequent flier miles, yet you have to register with the AAdvantage program to make a reservation online. This forced registration steers users down a form-filled chute before letting them purchase tickets.

• CIO WebBusiness: From February 1, 1999; American Airlines' $3 Million Makeover

July 15, 2000
NY Times: Freedom, One Song at a Time. Clay Shirky. The question remains of how artists will be paid when songs are downloaded over the Internet, and there are many sources of revenue being bandied about -- advertising, sponsorship, user subscription, pay-per-song. But merely recreating the CD in cyberspace will not work.

EIU ebusiness forum: The world according to WAP. Q&A with Clay Shirky. I think most of the battles that we're seeing in the media space right now are battles where the people who own the pipes are also trying to own the interface. The pipe companies or the people who own the pipes are trying to get the user.

EIU ebusiness forum: Local heroes strike back. Q&A with Hal Varian. The mass media, so the argument goes, push us towards having superstars. You can think of lots of examples where the local acting troupe, the local musicians, whatever, disappear. But then along comes the Internet.

EIU ebusiness forum: Making a 360-degree turn. Q&A with Mike Walsh, CEO of Ogilvy. So the online environment makes it crucial to get things like the speed of the site, navigation, responsiveness, and value for money spot-on. That's why Ogilvy preaches the gospel of 360 Degree Branding, to ensure that wherever the customer has contact with the brand...

EIU ebusiness forum: Stop the insanity! Q&A with Paul Kedrosky. How do I know whether or not that organisation is currently a client of the market research firm that's selling me a service. So I find that more and more organisations are incredibly sceptical of all the information they get.

• Salon: From Septemeber 2, 1999; Jupiter shoots for the moon

July 16, 2000
Irish Times: Copying law would be a mistake. Lawrence Lessig. If the measure is approved, software in Europe, as in the US, will enjoy both the protection of copyright and patent law. But though the apparent beneficiaries of this change are software developers, those same developers are beginning to resist this expansion in their rights.

ZDNN: ICANN OK's new Internet names. ICANN will begin taking applications from companies that plan to sell and register the new top-level domains, called registrars. Those companies will submit proposals for the new TLDs and explain how they will screen and register those seeking to own Web sites with the new suffixes.

SJ Mercury: New neighbors to join `dot-com' on Internet. Dan Gillmor. It's designed to show that the domain system can grow smoothly without causing technical problems for Internet users. And, according to ICANN Chairwoman Esther Dyson, it's aimed to promote diversity in business models as well as voices.

ZDNN: Hackers making Napster 'irrelevant'. "We don't need Napster anymore," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of culture and communication at New York University, during the panel discussion. "There is enough other file sharing systems out there to make it irrelevant."

July 17, 2000
NY Times: Microsoft Sees Software ´Agent´ as Way to Avoid Distractions. In the view of Horvitz's team, this aging interface has allowed a deluge of electronic interruptions to cascade upon office workers with each new generation of technology, to the point that the telephone and potentially dozens of computer programs are now free to distract a person with impunity.

NY Times: Companies Seek Reciprocal Deals to Attract Customers. To the consumer, these efforts look a bit like chain-letter e-commerce. Spend $40 at eToys, for instance, and get a gift certificate for $10 at Gap.com. Spend $40 at Gap.com and get a $10 gift certificate at ProFlowers.com. And so on.

• Internet Week: From February 25, 2000; New Page For Web Marketing

TechWeb: Analysts Wary Of MSN's Web Traffic Claims. "It's not that meaningful," said Jordan Rohan, an analyst at Wit/Soundview. "Arguing about who is No. 1, 2, or 3 is not as important. It's easy to distort statistics; measurability of the Web is less than ideal despite all the efforts."

LA Times: To This Veteran's Ear, the Music Industry's Timing Has Been Off. Q&A with Jimmy Iovine, Farmclub.com. The 46-year-old executive is sick of corporate bureaucrats compromising the industry's future by obstructing online initiatives and tying the hands of entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out how to compete on the Web.

New Jersey Online: To build virtual trust, Web sites develop `reputation managers. Using equations and databases, they're creating systems known as "reputation managers." Increasingly, these digital repositories of confidence will help you decide whom to do business with and whose recommendations you ought to accept.

News.Com: Pay-to-surf company lays off 60. But the weight of paying its members has ended up crushing AllAdvantage's revenues. The company paid $32.7 million to members from December to March but made only $9.1 million in the same period.

• Fortune: From June 19, 2000; The Dumbest Dot-Com

SJ Mercury: Domain names aside, future of Net is at stake. Dan Gillmor. I'm a little more pessimistic about the future of ICANN's governance. The board has opened its decision-making process somewhat since its highly autocratic, secretive beginnings. But I get the constant feeling that many members loathe any scrutiny.

Wired News: This E-Book Is a Free Book. [Seth Godin] "By going from giving away just a third to sharing the entire thing, I hope to show that digital media wants to be free, and that those who contribute their ideas -- and throw up the fewest barriers -- are the ones who benefit the most."

News.Com: Web users have case of short-term memory. Did life exist before the Internet? That's not necessarily a facetious question. Many teachers and others wonder whether the ease of doing research online has made students oblivious to history before around 1995, when the Web became popular.

Internet Week: E-tailers Hit Hard By Credit Card Fraud. Credit card fraud is 12 times higher for online merchants than their offline, brick-and-mortar counterparts, according to a survey of more than 160 online retailers by market researcher GartnerGroup, Stamford, Conn.

July 18, 2000
Industry Standard: Retailers May Not Like Sony's New Look. In a move that could draw the ire of Sony products retailers, Sony Electronics is planning to launch a new Internet business next week in a belated attempt to bypass retailers and eventually sell its entire inventory of gadgets, TVs and computers directly to consumers.

• ZDNN: From February 1, 2000; Sony's plan to sell online shocks dealers

Industry Standard: The Napsterization of Hollywood. "On the Internet, you don't need complex technology to make a pirate," he says. "You and I are pirating intellectual property all the time. Encryption is a joke. Security is predicated on a trust that parties at two end-points have."

Salon: Put Mom through, but not that marketing VP! The invention of e-mail opened us up to direct communication with anyone who could find us -- and that's proving to be a bit more than we bargained for. But I don't see how hiding behind another layer of technology is going to save us from each other.

• News.Com: From October 28, 1999; "Intelligent agent" technology staging a comeback

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

NY Times: Books by the Chapter or Verse Arrive on the Internet This Fall. The Frommer's guide to France may be made up of chapters and maps, but most readers know it as an indivisible and coherent whole: a book. This fall, that book and a few hundred others will take a new form on the Internet. They will be sold in component parts...

Wired News: Yesmail Fights Blacklist Threat. The Realtime Blackhole List, an anti-spam alert system, has stepped into a legal black hole of its own. The organization that maintains the list has been temporarily prevented by a federal court in Illinois from adding a permissive email marketer to its roster of banned domains.

• O'Reilly Network: From June 9, 2000; Shining Light Into the Realtime Blackhole List. David Strom.

civic.com: Is your Web site friendly? Speaking at the National Association of Counties’ Annual Meeting in Charlotte, N.C., James Vaughn, an AOL programming manager, gave county leaders tips for making their Web sites friendly.

Newsbytes: Law Profs Oppose Court's Ban On EBay Spidering. Led by Mark Lemley, a professor and co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, the brief contends that Judge Whyte's decision "represents an unwarranted and dangerous extension of the ancient doctrine of trespass to chattels to control the flow of information on the Internet."

July 19, 2000
Salon: Code on trial. "It's a landmark case because it tests the limits of copyright," says Mark Radcliffe, a law partner in Palo Alto's firm of Gray Carey Ware and Friedenrich. "Before the DMCA, copyright law controlled merely behavior -- the act of copying -- but now, the law is extended to possession, simply having a tool that could lead to copying."

Wired News: MP3 Recorder for FM: LoFi Sound. "This type of recording development is more like a bad sign of things to come," said Malcolm Maclachlan, media e-commerce analyst at IDC. It's good for consumer convenience, but it's going to be bad for consumer choice."

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

TechWeb: Redefining Internet 'Users' And 'Content'. Individuals looking to rebel against the Internet's information status quo might start by eliminating the words "content" and "user" from their vocabularies. That is, if they agree with what America Online editorial director Jesse Kornbluth had to say Wednesday at the 2000 malCONTENT conference...

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

News.Com: Time Warner, AOL test ways to share high-speed networks. The companies have begun testing high-speed versions of their online services in Columbus, Ohio, a Time Warner spokesman confirmed today. High-speed versions of Time Warner's Road Runner cable ISP and AOL's CompuServe and proprietary service are involved...

News.Com: CNET buys rival Ziff-Davis for $1.6 billion. Through the acquisition CNET will gain Ziff-Davis' technology publication Computer Shopper, online educational service Smart Planet and online technology information site ZDNet.

• Salon: From March 13, 1998; Can Minor strike gold?

USA Today: FTC checks sites for child law compliance. The Federal Trade Commission is warning Web sites for children that they could face lawsuits if they don't comply with a recent law barring them from obtaining personal information from kids without first getting permission from parents.

• Salon: From June 23, 2000; Another defeat for "kiddie porn" law

Computerworld: Gartner survey sparks debate on Internet retail fraud. Gartner Group Inc. yesterday released the results of a survey showing that online retailers get hit by fraudulent credit-card purchases much more than their brick-and-mortar counterparts do. But some observers said they aren't sure the problem is as dire as the survey indicates.

July 20, 2000
Industry Standard: A Blockbuster Deal Coming to a PC Near You. For Blockbuster, several key issues need to be resolved before this new service becomes a reality. First, the company will need to obtain rebroadcasting licenses from individual movie studios and media companies in order to offer these types of services.

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

Forbes: Enron, Blockbuster Partner For Movie Mania. As telecom carriers like Enron mature and grow beyond selling regular phone services, they are beginning to sell multiple offerings like broadband, wireless and Internet services. Most recently some insiders are also calling for content strategies.

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

News.Com: Sony plans ISP, partnerships to tie content to devices. Ashcroft said Sony expects to announce more partnerships in the coming months to link its consumer electronics products with media content, including its video offerings, but the company does not intend to distribute Sony content exclusively.

TechWeb: Software Industry Feels Threatened By Napster. Krumholtz also recommended that government take a more active role in protecting the intellectual property of American software companies, including ensuring that the agencies responsible for combating the problems of piracy have adequate funding for enforcement.

• Industry Standard: From June 19, 2000; The Limits of Copyright. Lawrence Lessig.

Computerworld: Microsoft adding deeper cookie controls to Internet Explorer. Key to the changes are easier ways for users to delete cookies that are stored on their computer hard drives, as well as more selective alerts to notify users that a cookie has arrived from Web sites they have visited.

NY Times: Convention Coverage Takes to the Internet. For many Web site producers outside the parties, the conventions present an opportunity to test different methods of telling a story and tapping the public's interests. During important speeches, producers at America Online will offer chats and instant polling to subscribers.

digitalMASS: Closing the e-commerce loop. Think of the e-delivery loops this would close, the doors it would open. The AllBox, let's call it, would address the two great conflicting commerce problems of the day: You can get anything delivered, but you're never at home - and when you are, you don't want to be bugged.

• NY Times: From November 18, 1999; Delivering the Goods: No Simple Solution

July 21, 2000
Forbes: Lyin' Eyeballs. But tactics like About.com's hidden window suggest that traffic increases aren't always as healthy as they seem. Hidden windows are just one of the gimmicks dot-coms now employ to inflate unique visits with little regard to whether the visitors end up using the site to buy products or view ads.

• LA Times: From April 17, 2000; Web Firms May Vastly Inflate Claims of 'Hits'

Advertising Age: Microsoft plan irks e-marketers. The Network Advertising Initiative, the coalition of third-party ad servers, warned about 'overbroad'' solutions that "undermine the Internet business model that allows Web sites to stay free. Netscape already offers similar functionality in its browser but by default allows cookies.

News.Com: Net ranking numbers don't tell whole story. Because no one has created industry-wide usage standards, and several companies purport to be the most credible ranking services, experts say that gauging Web traffic is an imprecise craft in need of an operational overhaul.

Inside: Broadcast.com's Insta-Billionaire Looks to Start Music Label. Mark Cuban, the billionaire founder of Broadcast.com and owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA franchise, is planning to launch an off- and online music label in partnership with a major radio group, possibly industry giant Clear Channel Communications.

ZDNN: Study: Napster boosts CD sales. Adding to a growing list of contradictory evidence regarding Napster's effects on CD sales, Jupiter Communications Wednesday said that Napster users are more likely to buy music -- not less, as the music industry claims.

News.Com: FTC says Toysmart violated child Net privacy law. It was in investigating the earlier case that the commission discovered the COPPA violation. The FTC said in a statement that it will amend the complaint it filed in U.S. District Court in Boston to include the new charges against Toysmart.

ZDNN: FTC may let Toysmart sell customer list. The Federal Trade Commission's staff lawyers are recommending that commissioners approve a settlement negotiated with Toysmart.com Inc. that would let the troubled Web site sell its customer list with conditions on its use by the purchaser.

News.Com: Messaging rivals call AOL on privacy, security issues. A group of America Online's instant messaging rivals today accused the Internet giant of using inflated security and privacy concerns to stall progress on technology standards that would allow its services to work with those of competitors.

InfoWorld: FBI demonstrates e-mail sniffer. The FBI provided details on Friday about a controversial technology that law enforcement officials began using recently to uncover evidence in e-mail. The officials held a briefing and a demonstration of the program, nicknamed "Carnivore," for reporters at FBI headquarters...

ZDNet E-Business: Tiffany.com makes too much of an understatement. Tiffany, the celebrated luxury retailer, has practiced the art of understated elegance for decades. Unfortunately, Tiffany.com takes understatement too far when it fails to provide basic product information up-front.

July 22, 2000
NY Times: Toysmart.com in Settlement With F.T.C. Under the settlement, a buyer of Toysmart's database must be in a family-related commerce market, buy the entire Web site and agree not to sell the database without getting permission from the individuals included in it.

InfoWorld: Data-optimized wireless alternatives gain momentum. As the race for higher-capacity networks heats up, high-speed, data-optimized technologies are emerging as alternatives for wireless data access. In addition, companies such as Cisco Systems are working to strengthen the role of IP in third-generation networks...

Useit.Com: Spotlight of Sun Microsystem's Java Web Start. As much as it may irk Sun to have to fit inside Microsoft's UI standards, this is clearly the right choice: network computing will only work when integrated with the user's main platform. Just like the Palm Pilot won because it integrated with the PC whereas the Newton didn't integrate with the Mac.

Wired News: Sega Crushes Dreamcast Pirates. Sega announced Thursday it had crushed more than 60 illegal websites and 125 auction sites flogging pirated versions of its Dreamcast games, until recently viewed as one of the most secure digital entertainment systems on the market.

July 23, 2000
Useit.Com: End of Web Design. Websites have to reduce their differences and allow advanced features to either become standard across sites or be extracted from the sites altogether and placed in the browser. Focus on services and content; use a standard design.

• Clay Shirky: From June 1999; An Open Letter to Jakob Nielsen.

InfoWorld: The cell phone of the future will make the Palm obsolete. Cell phones will become the dominant way to access data because, when the smoke clears, no later than next year, users will discover that the kind of data they want to access is easily displayed on a cell phone.

• PC Week: From April 25, 2000; Palm's future: All wireless

July 24, 2000
NY Times: Retailers Hope Integrated Systems Will Improve Customer Service. In retailing parlance, this issue falls under the heading of "channel synchronization." In the last several months, some of the more forward-looking bricks-and-mortar companies have begun the long and expensive process of synchronizing their catalog, Web and retail operations.

Industry Standard: Why Labels Should Love Napster. The challenge record labels face is not whether to distribute music over the Net and watch their MP3s escape in all directions, but how to price those MP3s in such a way that they can make money despite losing customers to surreptitious methods.

Computerworld: Other opponents of Toysmart sale reviewing FTC settlement. Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly -- who led a the group of state attorneys general that filed an objection to the proposed sale with the bankruptcy court last week -- said it's unclear what the group's next step will be.

USA Today: Online privacy still a hot-button issue. In theory, sites that display a green TRUSTe seal are announcing their intention to manage users' data responsibly. But several interest groups charge that the non-profit site's close ties to the industry make the seals meaningless.

Stating the Obvious: The Beginning of Web Design. If information can move freely, why should I have to jump from site to site to have an "overall user experience?" If all information is networked, why should I have to travel the web to find it? Why shouldn't it come directly to me, in a user experience that's uniquely tailored to my needs?

Industry Standard: French Court Gives Yahoo More Time. A French court has extended its order against Yahoo to Aug. 11, giving the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company three more weeks to either remove Nazi-related items on its auction site or block the access of French citizens to such items.

BBC News: Yahoo in court over Nazi auctions. At Monday's hearing, Yahoo's representatives were due to outline the measures they have taken to comply with the court order. The ruling followed a complaint by a Paris-based group, the International League Against Racism and anti-Semitism.

Industry Standard: A New Leader For ICANN. Now ICANN faces the prospect of losing both its top official and its leading government champion. Burr says in a few months she will quit the Commerce Department to return to the private sector. And Dyson has signaled she plans to announce her resignation from the board...

Wired News: Anti-Fraud That's Anti-Consumer. PayPal's fraud screening system -- run by a company called CyberSource, which collects and analyzes data from more than 2,000 other Web merchants, including Amazon.com and Buy.com -- had flagged his card as a fraud risk.

• Information Week: From March 6, 2000; CyberSource Helps Detect Consumer Fraud Online

SF Chronicle: Consumers Pay a Price for Internet Phone Convenience. But some industry players are already beginning to sense a backlash, as early users complain that it's not as simple to use a Net phone as it is to flick on their home computers. ``People who have used the Internet from their desktops expect it to be the same thing,'' laments Greg Heumann, a marketing executive at Phone.com...

LA Times: For Web Phones, the Future Is Calling. To be sure, grandiose predictions of ubiquitous Internet phones require technical solutions to daunting problems, starting with the unreliability of cellular reception and the online claustrophobia of facing a screen the size of a couple of postage stamps.

July 25, 2000
SF Chronicle: Dot-Complaints. Recently, corporations -- although not renowned for their raunchy senses of humor -- have started to mute their opposition to hearing that they, well, suck. In part, they fear they'll appear to be trampling the First Amendment; in part they can't win in court.

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

Industry Standard: How VCRs May Help Napster's Legal Fight. The legal issues, more so than the analogies, complicate this case. Both Napster and the RIAA intend to rely on the same Supreme Court decision, that of Sony vs. Universal in 1984, which legalized the Betamax.

ZDNN: Glaser: Let's make music Napster-easy. "Compare this to typing REM into Napster and that's the world's simplest IQ test," said Glaser. "What Napster has done is create a benchmark on how easy the legitimate music experience has to be. It's gotta be pretty darn close to that easy."

• ZDNN: From May 24, 2000; Glaser: Keep e-music simple, stupid!

Inside: World's Best Minds Tinker With Reality, Just for Fun. Interactivity rules. That's the simple message from the Emerging Technologies showcase at Siggraph, the annual computing graphics and technology convention under way here. Many of the technologies involve personal interaction; but advances in environmental and even auditory interface abound, too.

News.Com: Intel, Macromedia see 3D in Web's future. With their joint effort, Intel and Macromedia are treading on familiar ground: The software industry is littered with the companies that have tried to popularize 3D animation that could thrive in the Web's low-bandwidth environment.

Upside: Sony makes enemies of its retailers. Now Sony is doing it again. This time it's launching a new website called SonyStyle.com. Included in the new site's offering will be many of the consumer electronic products that Sony traditionally sells through its expansive list of retailers.

• NY Times: From March 2, 1999; Internet Sellers Work to Allay Fears of Retail Outlets

Computerworld: AOL rivals unite to force open its instant messaging. According to a statement issued today, the group's goal is to allow users of all IM services to be able to chat live with one another over the Internet. By the end of next month, IMUnified said, it will publicly release a set of specifications that will link the networks of its members...

Inside: Hot Time at Comic Fest as Knowles and Gore Trade Shots. The official title of the session was ''Caught in the Net: Movie Webmasters on Hollywood, the Internet and the Future of Their Bastard Child.'' Unofficially, it was a verbal brawl among proprietors of the Web's most popular and influential movie news and rumor sites...

USA Today: Study: Net sales costing states big bucks. States and localities will lose between $300 million and $3.8 billion in tax revenue this year because of purchases over the Internet, the General Accounting Office said Monday. The GAO, Congress' investigative arm, said the wide disparity was due to the difficulty of documenting Internet sales.

July 26, 2000
Industry Standard: Napster Stopped in Its Tracks. Judge Marilyn Hall Patel has told Napster it is responsible for removing all of the plaintiffs' copyrighted music from its service, which would include artists from the "Big Five" labels. Napster has until midnight PST Friday to comply with the order or file for a stay.

Wired News: Whose Link Is It Anyway? Is it OK for a website to turn the dialogue of online discussions into product-oriented shopping links? The question underlies a new feature from Deja.com that will automatically link mentions of product names in discussion threads to a commerce area on its site.

• Salon: From May 24, 1999; What does it take to make a buck off of Usenet?

Industry Standard: FTC-Toysmart Agreement Criticized. A consent agreement between the Federal Trade Commission and Toysmart.com has run aground in a federal bankruptcy court in Boston, with dozens of states and a privacy watchdog group arguing that the settlement doesn't go far enough to protect consumers' privacy.

NY Times: High-Tech Sleuth Joins Center Looking at New Privacy Issues. Organizers of the center, which is to be formally announced today, said they would gather data on whether and how personal information was captured by software makers, operators of communications systems and Internet services.

Industry Standard: FTC Expected to Vote on Privacy Standards. Under the new standards, Web surfers would be shown prominent notices whenever a Web site plans to transmit information to third-party ad servers. If the ad-servers plan to combine anonymous online data with personally identifying offline data...

MSNBC: Experts probe Net’s natural defenses. In the new study, the trio focused on the implications for the Internet’s survivability in the face of failure. Turning again to their “small-world” samples, they found that the Internet, the Web and other scale-free networks could stand up to even unrealistically high rates of random failures.

• Business 2.0: From December 1, 1999; Around the Web in 19 Clicks

News.Com: Advertisers renegotiating deals with portals. The relationship, of course, isn't a one-way street. The advertisers still need high-volume sites such as portals to increase their traffic. But portals are falling under increasing pressure to demonstrate the effectiveness of their sites in creating business.

Inside: Media Sites Still Wait for E-Tailing's Quick Buck. Jason Chervokas and Tom Watson. But with e-tailers under such competitive pressures, with the capital and labor demands requiring them to shift focus and revamp strategies and vet technologies so quickly, it is virtually impossible for media companies to keep up.

Editor & Publisher: Errors and Typos: Are There More Online? Steve Outing. This is largely a matter of resources, as many smaller Web sites don't have the luxury of having large copyediting staffs. You'll find the same thing at understaffed small newspapers, whose staffs often consist of journalistic rookies.

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

July 27, 2000
Salon: Why the music industry has nothing to celebrate. Scott Rosenberg. That's why in the long run the anti-Napster campaign is as doomed as Prohibition. For all sorts of reasons, some good ones and some rationalizations, people don't feel that they're doing anything wrong when they trade music files with Napster.

• FEED Magazine: From April 13, 2000; Napster's Death Knell. Clay Shirky.

Good Experience: Bit Literacy is a Better Response. The Net industry (and all industries that use the Net) will soon be challenged to create a new solution that solves these new problems in the user experience. That solution is what I call "bit literacy": a new commitment to simplicity in digital work, and a new way of using digital devices...

Wired News: FTC Endorses Privacy Rules. In a double-barreled report affecting the future of online privacy, federal trade regulators on Thursday approved a plan by Internet advertisers to self-regulate the way they collect information used to profile online consumers.

News.Com: AOL to accommodate blind Web surfers. The National Federation of the Blind agreed to drop a lawsuit accusing AOL of violating the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. In return, AOL will make its software compatible with programs the blind use to convert digital information to speech or Braille.

Atlantic Monthly: No "There" There. Are these problems more common because of the Internet? Yes. Do they involve more jurisdictions because of the Internet? Yes. But they do not involve their own jurisdiction, any more than matters initiated or conducted through the mails involve "postalspace."

NY Times: Saving The Nation's Digital Legacy. But now the nation's creativity extends to Web sites, electronic journals and magazines, and CD-ROM's of every sort. And the library is lagging in collecting and archiving that digital material, according to a report released yesterday by the National Academy of Sciences.

• NY Times: From April 8, 1999; Books to Bytes: The Electronic Archive

USA Today: Search warrants for online data soar. The findings, based on an examination of search warrants served on the nation's largest Internet service provider, America Online, came as a surprise to federal lawmakers and civil libertarians and are prompting calls for legal reforms.

NY Times: Divided Data Can Elude the Censor. On the ever-shifting Internet, what is on a Web site today could easily be gone tomorrow. But a new publishing system developed by AT&T promises to add permanence to information put on the Internet, assuring protection against censorship...

ZDNN: Authors slam Amazon for fake comments. Goodkind is not the only author to be impersonated in Amazon author comments. British science fiction author John Christopher was similarly embarrassed when he found fake comments referring to his novel "The Tripods" as a "world-famous book."

• Salon: From June 21, 1999; The case of the malicious critic

Red Herring: Lab Rat: Talking doors and opinionated couches. Whether the resulting gadget is a computerized threshold or furniture that talks, Mr. Selker uses a combination of homemade sensors and off-the-shelf technology to teach students what's possible when devices and rooms are "aware" of their users and inhabitants.

• Good Experience: From March 22, 2000; The Laughing Computer

July 28, 2000
Business 2.0: It’s the Communication, Stupid. Clay Shirky. The telcos obviously haven’t asked what their customers want in a wireless device, and when they finally do, they’re in for a rude shock, because most of their customers aren’t desperate for packaged content, no matter how "dynamic" it is.

• Time Digital: From January 4, 2000; The RIM Pager: Wireless Internet Done Right

News.Com: Court grants stay of Napster injunction. The decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allows Napster to remain in operation past midnight tonight, when a previous court ruling would have forced the company halt the sharing of copyrighted files.

SJ Mercury: Music industry can't win. Dan Gillmor. But the beyond-greedy recording industry, in its zeal to stamp out all possible unauthorized use of copyrighted materials -- in effect, pronouncing that all would-be customers are likely thieves -- is setting itself up for a fight that it cannot win.

• Salon: From March 20, 1998; Mutiny on the net

SF Gate: Copyright law always tied to technology of the time. Today, Napster is sending shockwaves through the recording industry. But the spasms over the free Internet music service are consistent with other times when copyright law seemed unable to cope with an unanticipated, wildly popular invention.

ZDNN: FCC: Open access key to AOL deal. But Case and Levin's assurances that the merged company would play fairly weren't enough for many of the commissioners, who asked several times for a timetable on when the merged company would open its cable lines to other ISPs.

Fortune: Clicking in the Dark. In fact, NBC, like many of its big media competitors, is suffering from the effects of trying to do too much, too late on the Internet -- the great new medium that network executives are sure they should be involved in, but are not really sure how.

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

Strange Connections: Big Architect, Little Architect. Peter Morville. While this diversity and fuzziness drives some people crazy, I think it's a good thing. In the rich, dynamic environment of web design, it would be foolish to draw thick black lines between and around professional roles and responsibilities.

Web Review: Marketing Guru Al Ries Talks About the Web. What Internet businesses need to do before advertising is PR. "Unless you are relatively known—maybe not well-known—but have some degree of presence in the mind, advertising is almost sure to be a total waste."

ZDNN: Sprint to speed up wireless access. In a call to corporate customers, Sprint this summer will offer business users 56K wireless access using compression technology, sources said. Officials from Sprint confirmed the rumor but would not provide further details about the company's plans.

Wired News: 'Arts At Large' No Longer. The column was one of the first in the mainstream press to report on the intersection of art and technology, including "Web-based art exhibits, interactive music, hypertext fiction and other expressions of digital creativity," according to the website.

Christian Science Monitor: The war over patents on the Web: Who owns an idea? Yet the limelight has not been kind to this under-funded, short-staffed group in Arlington, Va. Director Q. Todd Dickinson and his team of examiners have been accused of handing out patents on software technology like they were housewarming gifts: "Welcome to the Internet - here's your patent."

July 29, 2000
News.Com: Attacking piracy at the source: CDs. Nearly all of the music traded on the Internet comes from CDs, which can be easily copied, or "ripped," as MP3 digital audio files. Analysts point to CDs as the biggest hole in the music industry's strategy for thwarting online piracy.

• Wired News: From February 3, 2000; Copy-Protected CDs Taken Back

InfoWorld: Service providers' profit motives rule content at wireless customers' expense. At the moment in the wireless world, the power resides with the cellular service providers. AT&T Wireless Services, Nextel Communications, and Sprint PCS come immediately to mind. They own the home deck, a bit like having the home court advantage.

TechWeb: Conflicts Stalk Wireless Data Spec. The WAP Forum, using W3C's working draft, is scheduled to complete the first draft of the WAP 2.0 spec in September and to roll out the next-generation WAP specifications before year's end.

The Economist: Napster and the damage done. The Recording Industry Association of America has only itself to blame. Music lovers wanting to collect songs on their computers—hardly an unreasonable request—have little choice but to do so with Napster and its like.

InfoWorld: A question for the IETF on the eve of its meeting: What's next for TCP/IP? Instead of HTML over HTTP over TCP over IP over ATM over SONet (Synchronous Optical Network), how about some real protocol disintermediation -- like Napster directly on the lambdas of DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) fibers?

July 30, 2000
Business 2.0: Blurring the Consumers and Providers. Clay Shirky. "Cox vs. Napster" isn’t just a legal fight, it’s a fight over the difference between information consumers and information providers. The question of the day is, "Can Cox (or any media business) force its users to retain their second-class status as mere consumers of information?"

Business 2.0: We've (Still) Got a Long Way to Go. Clay Shirky. The right way to think about Internet penetration is "Internet as rule": simply start with the assumption that the Internet is going to become part of everything — every book, every song, every plane ticket bought, every share of stock sold — and then look for the roadblocks to this vision.

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

Boston Globe: What's wrong with this picture? But just what form that interactive television will take is still uncertain; it will probably be some hybrid that combines video on demand with selective Internet access as well as the same kind of passive programming available today.

• Salon: From February 18, 1998; Once more, into the interactive-TV breach. Scott Rosenberg.

Lighthouse: A flying menu attack can wound your navigation. Right now, too many Web travellers have to pull over to the side of the road to find the destination they want. And the Web equivalent of the roadside information bay is the fly-out menu. In all its forms, it is used too often.

July 31, 2000
NY Times: Free Speech Rights for Computer Code? But the Manhattan case, involving the copying of DVD movie disks, may have more far-reaching effects -- both on the way cultural products are consumed and on whether computer code is deemed to be speech deserving of First Amendment protection.

Salon: Watermarks in music? Q&A with Talal Shamoon, executive VP at InterTrust Technologies. But if people [in the music industry] do their job right, the incentive to rip CDs en masse will go away. Then the industry will adopt a common encrypted for