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September 1, 2000
Strange Connections: Information Architecture and Business Strategy.
Peter Morville. In fact, we've found that defining an information architecture strategy is a wonderful way to expose gaps in business strategy. The process forces people to ask difficult questions and make hard decisions they've previously managed to avoid.
Financial Times: Sweden receives 10 applicants for 3G 'beauty contest'.
Swedish authorities on Friday announced they had received 10 applicants for the country's four UMTS mobile phone licences which will be awarded at nominal cost, in sharp contrast to the billions of dollars charged in other European countries.
NY Times: New Software Being Offered By Microsoft to Catch AOL.
Indeed, Microsoft executives who have long extolled Microsoft's leadership in software features are trying to turn MSN Explorer's paucity of features into an advantage. Version 5.0 of America Online's software has 138 options that make it confusing, a Microsoft executive said.
media.org: R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
So the big problem is, where do we draw the line? Can we, when faced by the dynamics and inherent multiplicity of the Internet, actually draw that line? And should we even attempt to draw that line, when there may be larger matters at stake?
Computerworld: Amazon.com revises privacy policy on use of customer data.
One key modification made by Amazon is a promise that it won't trade personal data to other companies without first getting permission from individual customers. The company previously reserved the right to buy, sell and trade such information at will...
eWEEK: No master keys for me, thank you.
When I'm going out of town for weeks at a time, I leave a key with a trusted neighbor who brings in the mail and who looks for signs of anything untoward. I don't tell the postal service that I'm leaving, and I don't leave a key with the local police.
Industry Standard: EU to Object to AOL-Time Warner Merger.
The European Commission has drafted a 45-page statement of objections that outlines the regulators' concerns about the mega-merger. The document could be the opening salvo in negotiations to prevent the new entity from discriminating against rivals.b
News.Com: Net consulting companies hit as investors bail out.
The Viant warning capped a miserable week for Internet consulting companies, as many investors bailed. Analysts have become pessimistic about many players in the Internet consulting sector, an increasingly competitive niche that appears ripe for massive consolidation.
Good Experience: Review of DrMartens.com.
Customers come to DrMartens for the shoes, not the bits. And putting flashy bits in the spotlight, instead of the shoes, misses the strategic customer experience: finding good info about the shoes. Doc Martens is about shoes, not cartoons -- and the website should only serve that goal.
Argus ACIA: An Interview with Mark Hurst.
By taking a holistic view of the experience, our work is extremely effective; way more effective than if we just focused on one aspect of the experience, like the "usability" or, if you'll allow me, just the "information architecture."
media.org: Transparent Patents.
The key to solving this problem is to use the obvious: the concept of the hyperlink (a non-patented invention). The patent database must be properly linked into the overall database of knowledge that is now instantiated on the World Wide Web.
Industry Standard: IOC Bans Athletes From Net Storytelling.
Rule 59 states that an Olympic athlete is not permitted to record his thoughts of his Olympic experience and have it posted on the Internet. Doing so would be tantamount to an athlete acting as a journalist, the IOC has determined. And that is grounds for being thrown out of the Games.
September 2, 2000
NY Times: Is Litigation The Best Way To Tame New Technology?
Unlike Judges Patel and Kaplan, however, jurists have generally been reluctant to wade into fast-evolving technical issues. Existing law can fit poorly with technological developments, mostly because the legislators who drafted the laws did not anticipate them.
InfoWorld: I guess the only solution if the MPAA has its way is to shut down the Internet.
Let's boil it down: It is illegal to type the words a href = followed by a Web site. This is about half a step shy of the thought police. Does it strike anyone else as strange that a person is liable for providing a link whereas a machine is offered "safe harbor" under the DMCA?
Upside: U.S. Copyright Office weighs in on Net music licensing.
The rulings will mark not only the first time the office has weighed in on the issue, but also the start of a long and contentious arbitration battle over how much it will cost to transmit recordings through the digital ether.
PC World: Is Eudora Snooping on You?
That's the situation we currently find with the Eudora 4.3 e-mail client. And while the company that makes the program, Qualcomm, says no "personal information" is being sent to their servers, data is being sent from the program to a Qualcomm server, and most users probably don't know it.
TechWeb: USPS Takes On E-Commerce, Despite Criticism.
The U.S. Postal Service this month embarks on a series of e-commerce initiatives designed to ensure the agency has a role in the Internet Age, even as some critics question whether it's appropriate for a government agency to invest so much in e-business.
September 3, 2000
Washington Post: 'Opting In': A Privacy Paradox.
It's one of the more puzzling conundrums of online life. While companies that capitalize on the Internet's powerful potential to invade privacy are denounced as villains of the information age, millions of people type out highly personal data and send it off to Web sites they've barely heard of...
Industry Standard: Net Election: Just the Facts, Please.
That was the conclusion of a recent telephone poll by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The problem is major media sites on the Net largely lack the deep information culled from databases that the medium is in the unique position of being able to provide.
NewMedia: Inside Edge.
This is a true quantum shift, for although it's one thing to just-in-time design and manufacture a computer through Dell, it's quite another when a company such as P&G mounts the wave. They've recognized that new product and service lines...
NY Post: Dis-content In Zine-land.
King Content is dead. Long live King Content. The world of pure content plays online was up in arms this week as the various players thrashed out their business plans and took each other on - in print and online.
Seattle Times: When feeling secure is more important than progress.
What is discomfiting to thoughtful - and long-in-the-tooth - observers is the imposing tradeoff involved in an "everywhere connected" world. In a way, it is not a new dawn, but a throwback to the previous era of time-sharing.
September 4, 2000
Washington Post: FTC Seeks Assurances In AOL Deal.
Federal antitrust attorneys, fearful of a media juggernaut that could control the Internet, are prepared to block the America Online Inc.-Time Warner Inc. merger unless the companies agree to keep open their high-speed cable lines to competing entertainment and online companies...
Useit.Com: Regulatory Usability.
Regulatory requirements often reduce the usability of Web content and end up damaging the exact goals they were trying to promote. Regulatory agencies usually base their rules and regulations on design criteria that are appropriate for paper-based documents but which don't work in the online medium.
Interactive Week: FCC To Rule On Copy Protection Technology Dispute.
The movie industry has been at loggerheads for months with makers of high-definition television sets, VCRs and cable set-top boxes over how copy protection technology will be implemented in digital cable systems.
NY Times: Professionals Take Over Sporting Goods Sites.
Which is not to say that the sports sites are eschewing e-commerce altogether. Rather, many of them are taking a new approach to selling goods online, one that gives content sites a way to glean the benefits of e-commerce while avoiding the headaches such an effort can cause.
Industry Standard: Hey, Profits!
In fact, this year promises to be the first in which a broad range of real, old-fashioned companies – steel manufacturers, chemical companies, hotel chains – will see their Internet investments produce real, old-fashioned earnings.
Industry Standard: Yahoo "Ads" It Up.
Anheuser Busch might know that millions of dollars spent on ads that feature talking frogs will lead to hundreds of millions in beer sales. But the intuitive logic of advertising seems like a stretch to Wall Street, especially with investors leery of Internet stocks.
ZDNet E-Business: Neimanmarcus.com's navigation: It was bad ... now it's worse.
This new navigation system is harder for customers to use than the underlined text links from the previous design. The category links are so close together that if a customer moves the mouse only a few pixels from one category, the rollover menu changes to the next category.
LA Times: Pols Make Strange Webfellows.
Esther Dyson. Most Americans are happy enough; their lives won't change dramatically no matter who is president. Others are unhappy, but they don't believe that national politics will change their lives dramatically, either. A Webcast that is as passive as a TV broadcast isn't going to change anything.
Adweek: Staying in Focus.
Companies that want to sneak a peek into the minds of their customers have long relied on the focus group as a marketing tool. Online focus groups, a recent addition to the Internet marketing field, capitalize on the strengths of the Web to make the process leaner and meaner.
Industry Standard: Diving Into the Deep Web.
The surface Web, Sullivan points out, is akin to a bookstore or a library in which the search engine knows all the books on the shelves. But if you want to find a book that isn't in stock, or to mine data that's in the books, you need a more powerful tool.
NY Times: Trademarks Winning Domain Fights.
At the heart of Icann's domain name arbitration system is the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy, a set of rules that provide the litmus tests for determining if a domain name holder is acting in bad faith or is out to hijack a trademarked name.
September 5, 2000
Industry Standard: Behind the Curtain.
Lawrence Lessig. This picture points to the next great hope for the information revolution: that we might be able to learn as much about governments and business as they have learned about us. That this might be the end of their effective privacy, just as it has effectively been the end of ours.
Washington Post: AOL May Be Told To Divest Stake.
An FTC spokesman declined to comment on the internal review, but sources said the agency's concerns center on the potential for the merged company to dominate high-speed access, be it through satellites or cable, and control consumer choice of content.
Financial Times: EU may ask AOL/Time Warner to free download technology.
The European Commission is expected to force internet giant AOL and Time Warner, the media group, to offer proprietary technology for downloading music and videos from the internet as one of the conditions for clearing its $160bn merger.
Industry Standard: Generic wipeout from WIPO.
The future for generic domain name owners looks shaky if the trend of decisions from the World Intellectual Property Organisation, the domain name arbitrator in Geneva, stays on its current track.
SJ Mercury: Interval: The think tank that tanked.
Imagine: The world's second-richest man pledges $100 million and a 10-year commitment to build what he hopes will be the most ambitious research venture in valley history. He hires some of the greatest minds on Earth and charges them with inventing the future.
Marketing Computers: Digital Delusion.
Michael Schrage. The notion that digital access both perpetrates and perpetuates economic and racial disparities would be laughable were it not for the fact that so many solemn-faced pundits and polls insist that it is so.
NY Times: Online Deliveries Lighten Burden for the Disabled.
Executives of similar online delivery services said they were not necessarily trying to attract disabled customers when they started. Most of the businesses, based in Manhattan's Silicon Alley, focused on reaching young urban professionals, appealing to a simple desire for convenience.
News.Com: ESPN.com steps back into e-commerce batter's box.
Eric Handler, a spokesman for Disney, declined to specify the financial arrangements of the deal. ESPN.com closed its online store late last month to prepare a new e-tail offering, one that would allow merchants to handle most of the site's retail efforts instead of Disney...
ZDNN: DreamWorks' Pop.com scales back plans.
Scaling back will have serious consequences for Pop's operations. Katzenberg said the site has spent $7 million so far, but plans to spend only about $1 million a year in the future. That will mean cutting the company's roster of about 70 employees back to perhaps a dozen.
News.Com: Now showing: random DVD prices on Amazon.
The variable prices affected more than half of the company's top-100 best-selling DVDs, or digital versatile discs. Depending on the particular movie and the discount Amazon offered, one customer could pay up to $15 more for a DVD than another customer.
NY Times: In a Second-to-Second News World, Bloomberg Takes Stock.
With 950 reporters and 79 bureaus, Bloomberg competes to break news with Dow Jones, Reuters and Bridge News along with newspaper Web sites, dozens of smaller Internet sites and even gossipy chat rooms.
September 6, 2000
CIO: Ain't Nothing Link the Real Thing.
But many have had to resort to workarounds that fall far short of offering real-time information. While those workarounds might be good enough for now, it is going to become increasingly important for companies to make the move to real-time in the future.
News.Com: IKEA exposes customer information on catalog site.
Rich D'Amico, new business development manager for IKEA North America, said the catalog order site is maintained by an outside company that he declined to name. IKEA asked the company to shut down the Web site after being notified of the problem by CNET News.com.
Computerworld: Glitch at Amazon.com exposes Associates' e-mail addresses.
Although English notified Amazon.com about the problem on Aug. 31 -- he provided Computerworld with an Aug. 31 reply e-mail from Amazon.com saying the company was investigating the matter -- he said he was still able to access other users' e-mail addresses today.
ZDNN: RSA releases patents two weeks early.
The 20th has been widely considered a watershed date, circled on many security company executives' calendars. Some companies, such as Baltimore Technologies Inc., were using the expiration of the patent as a springboard for new products and marketing campaigns.
Industry Standard: German Government Defends Net Tax Plan.
The German government defended plans Wednesday to raise new levies on computer and Internet hardware products, saying they were needed to boost royalty payments to musicians, authors and film-makers.
digitalMASS: Newsflash: So far, we're not impressed.
Designers don't seem to be learning any lessons from Boo's fate. Unnecessary Flash and Shockwave features seem to be more ubiquitous than ever. And, unlike Boo's arguably neat "dressing room," many of them even lack a coolness factor.
MSNBC: Schools’ spectrum rights promise a bonanza, but can they cash in?
Decades ago, the government donated the rights to enable the schools to televise educational programs, and it subsequently allowed unused capacity to be leased to the private sector. Now, a variety of companies are bidding billions of dollars at public auctions for spectrum rights...
Computerworld: Maryland's UCITA May Have National Reach.
Despite that potential, legal experts aren't expecting licensers, in landgrab style, to begin citing Maryland law in their contracts. UCITA is still very new, complex and legally unsettled. Years of court challenges doubtlessly lie ahead.
Industry Standard: Home Depot's Self-Improvement.
While Home Depot crows about its online push, the company is hardly moving at Internet speed. Executives won't say when online sales will go national, though they aim to begin online sales in Austin and San Antonio, Texas, later this year.
NY Times: Plans for Upstate 'Server Farm'.
Now, one of New York City's larger landlords, Max Capital Management, which owns eight million square feet of office space, is proposing another type of technology installation. It plans to build a data center, sometimes called a server farm, in Newburgh, N.Y.
Industry Standard: The Decline of the Roman Empire.
Companies such as i-DNS use translation technologies that connect non-Roman languages with the existing domain-name system. But without a standard for how these technologies will talk to each other, compatibility roadblocks prevent people from hopping from one Internet address to another.
September 7, 2000
Adweek: IQ Q&A: Norman Pearlstine, Time Inc.
At its worst, it seems to me Pathfinder was a useful, legitimate and appropriate investment for a division like Time Inc. It certainly got us thinking about new media faster and got more people thinking about it than would have otherwise been the case.
Business Week: So Who Wants to Surf the Tube Anyway?
Q&A with Lutz Erbring, professor at the Free University of Berlin. The technology is there to combine the devices. But nothing that we've [seen] suggests that people want to mix those activities. When they're watching TV, they want to relax. They don't want to do any research.
CIO WebBusiness: Thin Air.
Q&A with Mark Zohar, Forrester Research. The killer app for the wireless web is voice, and the second killer app is messaging. Everything beyond that is going to be niche. People aren't going to fire up their handsets to buy groceries, or books.
Wired News: Digital Security for Free.
The patent and RSA's enforcement of it have been controversial, and critics say the company's tight control on its commercial use has hobbled the growth of the computer security industry, with many developers seeking ways to avoid using the algorithm.
News.Com: Microsoft set to buy searchable music site.
The acquisition comes as online music sites MP3.com and Napster remain immensely popular despite weathering blistering legal challenges from the recording industry and copyright holders. The MongoMusic acquisition promises to be noncontroversial from a legal perspective.
eCompany: Typists, Dust Off Your Keyboards.
Now the much-maligned term content is enjoying a renaissance, and those who produce it have a new sophistication about its uses and abuses. Good content is a critical component of a successful Web business. But just what kind does your site need?
Inside: Desperate for a Solution to Their Tech Woes, Media Companies Still Fear Giving Up Control.
Jason Chervokas and Tom Watson. It's no wonder that in this environment media companies have been debating whether or not to centralize these systems, and whether or not they should own these production solutions -- the way newspaper publishers own printing plants and employ pressmen.
News.Com: AOL, Time Warner bar set-tops from merger concessions.
AOL and Time Warner said in the filing made yesterday in response to queries from the FCC that they would keep their promises to not discriminate against ISPs and let multiple service providers use their cable lines. However, the companies excluded access for unaffiliated ISPs or Internet telephony services via interactive set-top boxes.
TechWeb: Image Choices Dwindle To Two: Corbis Or Getty.
While the Internet has served as a boon for photographers trying to peddle their work, it is also threatening their livelihood as the number of companies that offer stock images consolidate into two dominant players.
Adweek: Sites By Design.
Jakob Nielsen, Brian Collins and Michael Grossman. To determine what makes for successful content design on the Web, IQ asked three design gurus to critique three content sites' home pages: The New York Times, ESPN and Seventeen.
Forbes: FedEx, Post Office Challenge UPS.
In January FedEx announced the launch of a new business-to-consumer ground delivery service with special features like drop-offs by appointment. That business is struggling. CFO Alan Graf admitted as much in a March conference call when he mentioned that the division's volume wasn't what he'd hoped for.
September 8, 2000
USA Today: Decision could limit tapes of TV broadcasts.
Critics of the Federal Communications Commission's proposed ruling are especially concerned that it could allow studios to prevent many of the 230,000 consumers who plunked down up to $10,000 for digital TV sets from watching high-definition pictures. But FCC officials say they have little choice.
Industry Standard: Is Taping a TV Movie a God-Given Right?
What's unclear is what will happen if the MPAA gets turned down. Industry officials have threatened under their breath that if they don't get their way, they simply won't make their movies available to TV networks that might be vulnerable to digital taping. But that seems like a hollow threat...
The Village Voice: Why I Flame.
In service to our employers, we flamers slither across the Internet—a realm where rudeness is a form of currency—and take out the customers, competitors, and wannabes who target businesses out of misplaced rage or the need to feel important.
Internet Week: Retail Site Pushes Web Envelope.
Neiman Marcus hopes to build a strong Internet presence with technology that's as fashionable as the $1,000-plus articles of clothing it peddles. The tony retailer is following up a $24 million Web site investment with new multimedia applications that promise to make the online shopping experience more realistic.
InfoWorld: Retailers ignore Web technologies.
Many of the retailers cited costs and concerns over alienating consumers by integrating the technologies into their sites. But Loizides asserted that the new technologies, when integrated properly, can better the online shopping experience.
Salon: Data mining mutilations, beatings, murders.
Simson Garfinkel. Ironically, he uses many of the same database-mining techniques used by marketing firms to manipulate consumer opinion or by intelligence agencies to track the movements of dissidents. But in Ball's hands, these techniques instead become tools for justice and equity.
NY Times: Assessing Linking Liability.
In a largely overlooked portion of a recent decision, a federal judge has indicated the answer is, yes indeed. According to Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District, in Manhattan, a link can be bad or good. It mainly turns on whether the linker's intent is laudable or not.
EE Times: SDMI challenges hackers to crack its technology.
The multi-industry group, which is defining a secure framework for the digital distribution of music, issued the challenge in the form of an open letter that offers up to $10,000 to any hacker who can "remove the watermark or defeat the other technology" in an SDMI-proposed copyright protection system.
TechWeb: ICANN Nominations' Deadline Approaches.
Individuals who applied to become at-large members of the organization that governs cyberspace have until midnight GMT Friday to log their nominations for the first ICANN at-large board election.
The Economist: ICANN call it what I want.
The result is a procedure biased in favour of the trademark holder, which, Mr Froomkin argues, damages the consumer’s right to use the Internet for purposes other than capitalism—such as free speech, posting pictures of your children, or parody.
Industry Standard: Deconstructing the I-Builder Blues.
But the spring stock market slump shut off the tap. As startup budgets grew thin, brick-and-mortar competitors felt less pressure to spend on the Net. Now Web services companies must reevaluate their businesses and regroup.
September 9, 2000
InfoWorld: The speed of business: If your pages are slow, your customers will go.
I understand the difference between Web-and host-based systems, but the difference between 2 and 8 seconds is far too much. Our expectations appear to be heading in the wrong direction. I'm also certain we didn't become more patient over the years.
Forbes: MongoMusic Fans Include Microsoft.
People like to think their tastes are quirky and unique, and Hinman doesn't disagree. He just believes he's found a way to predict their music likes and dislikes--down to the chord, even--using a database of songs and a patent-pending computer program.
Newsbytes: Postal Service's E-ventures Get GAO Evil Eye.
While such transgressions might be all too common in the dot-com world, government auditors are notorious sticklers for detail. The GAO said it couldn't accurately tell just how well the Postal Service's e-commerce initiatives were going because the numbers on the books were "inconsistent and deficient."
InfoWorld: Say goodbye to the personal computer and hello to personal dataspace.
File synchronization, as it stands today, is a nightmare. It's tedious, arcane, inefficient, and counterintuitive. We need to radically advance the science of moving data around. We need to aim for everyone having a ubiquitous personal dataspace.
Wired News: Gov't Says Napster Violates Law.
The federal government, along with entertainment industry groups, filed legal arguments against Napster Inc. on Friday, saying the music-sharing service is not protected under a key copyright law the company has cited in its defense.
InfoWorld: Comcast's nebulous VPN policy could leave you in the telecom Twilight Zone.
So where does this leave Comcast@Home telecommuters? In a very odd place, I think. Even though their subscriber agreement now specifically forbids VPN usage in any form, Comcast says it's OK for telecommuters to keep using the residential service if they don't use VPN too much.
eCompany: A New Way to Keep Score on the Web.
At IRI, they gave 50,000 pen scanners to a panel of consumers to keep track of all their purchases -- an expensive proposition. Now, on the Web, they’ve attracted 1.3 million surfers who willingly allow ComScore to stalk them online and record every click.
September 10, 2000
NY Times: Copyright and Copying Wrongs: A Web Rebalancing Act.
As books and movies follow music from the physical to the digital realm, some legal experts argue that a new balance must be struck between copyright holders and the users of their works if copyright is to continue to drive economic and creative development.
Industry Standard: Judge's Injunction Hits Streambox.com Real Hard.
In the first full hearing of what promises to be a major test of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a U.S. District Court judge Tuesday issued a preliminary injunction against the sale or distribution of two Streambox products, its VCR and Ferret utilities.
NY Times: Close-Out Items a Reliable Source of Revenue for Online Retailers.
In fact, close-outs are becoming such a reliable source of revenue for Web merchants that a growing number of online stores are devoting entire sections of their sites to outlet- type offerings.
Dallas Morning News: J.C. Penney could be wired for success.
The 98-year-old retailer has one of the more advanced click-and-mortar models. It's supported by a $4 billion-a-year catalog operation, and all merchandise bought online can be returned at Penney stores.
NY Times: Consulting Services Hit Hard by Internet Shakeup.
In the current climate for technology stocks, it is not surprising that the troubles plaguing other sectors of the industry have now fallen on the consulting companies that help businesses build and manage their Internet operations. What is remarkable, though, is how quickly the pall has descended.
September 11, 2000
NY Times: AOL-Time Warner Rivals Preparing for Interactive TV Fight.
But even before most people have the chance to click their remotes to check a sports score or order a pizza, an industry battle is brewing over who will lay claim to the tens of billions of dollars in new revenue that interactive advertising is expected to yield.
Salon: When Big Brother knows you watch "Big Brother".
Q&A with Mike Ramsay, CEO of TiVo. We're looking at interactive ads; we're putting ads and promotions on the disk as it goes out the door. We've got the ability to make ads more flexible so that if you're watching an ad and you're interested, you can hit select and it will take you to an infomercial.
media.org: Frankenstein or Einstein?
We ferociously defend our new medium, the Internet, as the means to set things right; an opportunity to pick up the pieces and repair the damage that television broadcasting, mass media and consumer culture has done to our society. The ironic twist to our hip new age enlightenment is that the song we are currently singing is not new.
Industry Standard: Sixth Avenue Heartache Over Wallflowers Album.
Universal Music, for its part has been addressing this issue by encoding advance CDs with a personalized digital signal, or ''watermark,'' which can identify the recipient of the disc and stays with the music no matter how many times it is copied, regardless of format.
Boston Globe: Bulb business.
The company's voice mail system touts it cheerily as ''the Web's number one light bulb superstore.'' But does the Web need a number one light bulb superstore, any more than it needs a number one paper clip store or a number one toilet plunger store?
Wired News: Wireless Patent Wars Heat up.
It's Round 2 in a wireless Web debate over broad technology patents. Geoworks Corporation, a mobile-device service provider, has counter-sued Phone.com (PHCM), alleging the software maker's Web-enabled phone microbrowsers contain a Geoworks-owned "flexible user interface technology."
Interactive Week: Trading Net Privacy At E-Checkout.
Signs are multiplying that online privacy is fast becoming a moot point - at least for shoppers. Americangreetings.com, the second largest retail site on the Web, has a click-through rate on its privacy policy link of 0.009 percent, or 9 in 100,000 visitors.
eCompany: The Rules for Writing a Privacy Policy.
But if companies want to keep track of my buying preferences, for their own purposes, I figure that's just how business is done. And if they want to treat information about me as an asset, that's fine too. Companies have been buying and selling information about me since I got my first credit card.
Wired News: Cracker Hits Western Union Site.
Computer crackers broke into Western Union's website servers late last week and grabbed the credit and debit card numbers of 15,700 customers who had transferred funds via Western Union's website.
Newsbytes: ICANN Ballot Set, One-Month Campaign Begins.
After tallying the final votes in a whirlwind five-week primary election, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has finalized the slate of candidates who will vie for five available seats on its powerful board of directors.
Business Week: Bad Timing for Swatch's Web Watch.
A Swatch spokeswoman now says the Internet Swatch has been put on hold because of "technical questions." The company isn't elaborating, but judging from a prototype unveiled earlier this year, the Web watch was so flawed that it may never be put on the market.
September 12, 2000
Advertising Age: Delta flies toward $1 billion in Web sales.
The campaign from Leo Burnett USA, Chicago, launched last week and includes TV, print and radio. Print tells customers the simpler URL will save them "an extra 0.73 seconds,'' TV features the delta-air.com URL morphing into the new delta.com, while radio asks, "Why oh why wasn't delta.com our Web address all along?''
Industry Standard: The Only Good Virus...
Bruce Schneier and Elizabeth Zwicky. Beneficial viruses are a simple solution that's always wrong. A virus is not "bad" or "good" based on its payload. Viral propagation mechanisms are inherently bad, and giving them beneficial payloads doesn't help. A virus isn't a tool for any rational network administrator, regardless of intent.
Wired News: Reno Talks Tough on Piracy.
Reno said that intellectual property crimes such as piracy "should be regarded as an extraditable offense," and nations should follow the lead of the United States in approving more criminal copyright laws.
Industry Standard: Disney Looks for the Magic.
Bornstein is fond of saying the new site won't try to be all things to all people and will focus instead on a few key areas. The search engine will still be in place, but in addition to Web results, consumers will also receive user-rated sites and related content from any of DIG's dozen or so other properties...
SJ Mercury: California's debate over Internet taxes heats up.
Both houses of the Legislature last month passed a bill that would force online merchants affiliated with brick-and-mortar retailers to collect sales tax from California residents. Gov. Gray Davis, who opposes Internet taxation, is expected to veto the bill...
Nando Times: AOL will hide Olympic results from users.
The Internet service and news provider announced last week it will allow its users two options for getting Olympic results: in real time or delayed. For those who prefer to be kept in the dark until NBC broadcasts the events on tape delay, AOL won't spoil the surprise.
Internet Week: Don't Trust Everything You Read, Even On The Internet.
The events that led to this damage involved a string of errors that would be comical if they weren't so serious. They all had one root cause: the fact that many people make major decisions based on information they find on the Internet but don't confirm.
News.Com: Amazon backs away from test prices.
Although Amazon has no plans to do any more pricing tests, the company guarantees that should it run another one, customers will pay the lowest test price even if they order goods at a higher price during the test.
Industry Standard: Electrical Storm Hits New Economy.
The Internet Economy is peculiarly vulnerable to shrinking power surpluses. Digital businesses require not only massive quantities of power, but also reliable systems: An interruption in power as instantaneous as one-sixtieth of a second won't cause the lights to flicker – but it will crash a computer.
Wired News: Eudora Retards Flames.
The newest version of the Qualcomm software features MoodWatch, an automated emotion monitor that scans the text of both incoming and outgoing email for the sorts of "aggressive, demeaning, or rude language," that typically appear in flames -- or abusive electronic communications.
September 13, 2000
Salon: A bug in the legal code?
Q&A with David Touretzky, Carnegie Mellon. If the MPAA is smart they'll just clam up and do nothing and wait for this to blow over. Everything they do simply helps our cause by drawing more attention to their attempted power grab. It used to be hard to get people to care about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now they care.
ZDNN: FCC wants AOL to open IM.
Under one of the FCC staff proposals, AOL would have to open its instant-messaging service to users of other messaging services either six months after FCC approval of the merger or as soon as AOL enables the two separate instant-message services it now operates, AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ, to interact, whichever occurs first...
Ask Tog: Elephants in the Living Room.
Four of your fellow development team members, all trying to do their specific jobs to the best of their abilities, have the power to sink your best effort at interaction design. As an interaction designer, it is your job to see they don't do so.
Editor & Publisher: A Credit Card Solution For Low-cost Content Sales.
Steve Outing. A new entrant in this space debuted this week, and in theory its approach looks promising. MicroCreditCard.com takes the approach of allowing consumers to use their existing credit cards to buy low-cost digital content or services.
Salon: Old school is oddly cool.
At a time when Web reportage and e-mail bulletins are just about the only things that seem current, and even newsweeklies like the Industry Standard sometimes read like Herodotus, how could HBS' cases -- which typically take four or five months to produce -- possibly be relevant?
Wired News: Who Wants Handheld Video?
Rob Tercek, president for programming for San Diego-based PacketVideo, presents this vision not as fantasy but as imminent reality. Cellular phones are much more logical platforms than PCs or TVs to build the next generation of personal interactivity, Tercek argues.
ZDNN: Can the Betamax save Napster?
Napster, along with its supporters, is citing the Sony case to say that even if the downloading of copyright songs is illegal -- something Napster contests -- the company should prevail because other parts of Napster are legal...
TechWeb: Junkbusters Busts Amazon.com.
Junkbusters Corp., a private advocacy group that seeks to help users stop spam and prevent other e-mail abuse, sent an open letter to Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos Wednesday protesting changes to his company's privacy policy.
MSNBC: Web of hate.
T.J. Leyden knows how powerful a tool the World Wide Web is for the hate movement. He used to be a Neo-Nazi recruiter. “Instead of the old way of putting a flyer on a car and attracting maybe a couple hundred people, now on the Internet you can reach millions, worldwide,” he said.
USA Today: Regulators to set digital TV rules.
A feud between television set makers and the cable-TV industry that threatens to slow the introduction of digital TV will end Thursday as U.S. regulators adopt labeling requirements for new, higher-quality receivers.
SF Chronicle: Microsoft Gets MongoMusic.
In a deal that will be formally announced today, Microsoft plans to make MongoMusic part of an evolving strategy to infuse more music and digital entertainment content into sites like MSN.com and WindowsMedia.com., said Bob Visse of MSN.com.
September 14, 2000
Fast Company: Delta's Web Strategy Takes Flight.
There is no "delta.com" here, no spin-off that has been kept insulated from the parent. The airline's e-commerce strategy and operations stay in-house and at the core of the business. At the same time, Delta has used its partnerships as a way to speed implementation...
Boston Globe: Too deep for most of us.
We don't want more Internet data; just the data we truly need. We try to tailor our searches to find the two or three pages that can really help us. Instead, today's search engines, LexiBot included, serve up a surfeit of sites, with thousands of times more data than we have time for.
Washington Post: FCC Enters Debate On Internet Access.
But consumer advocates and industry proponents for an open-access policy derided the new FCC proceeding as toothless and too late. They noted that it is likely to continue for months, and no rules can be enacted before the launch of another proceeding--a formal rulemaking.
Doc Searls: Free the IM 90 million.
I won't explain Jabber here. Jabber.org and Jabber.com do the job well enough. Let me just add that AOL has done nothing significant to improve IM over the past several years. And why should they? they "own" the market, right? Yet the range of what can be done with IM is flat-out enormous.
News.Com: Many e-tailers dodge phone calls to cut costs.
But many Internet companies take a hands-off approach to the phone, deliberately leaving phone numbers off their Web sites to avoid the cost and hassle of staffing call centers. Such shortsightedness exposes a dirty little secret of e-commerce...
The Register: Intel signs death warrant for support forums.
An Intel Europe spokesman claimed there were a 'substantial number' of support personnel who would be answering user email queries, but regular visitors to the forums will testify that there are only four or five Intel support staff replying to queries.
Wired News: Kids' Sites Cite COPPA Woes.
Steve Bryan, CEO of Zeeks.com, says his company can no longer afford the $200,000 a year in infrastructure and overhead costs to keep Zeeks.com COPPA-compliant, which is why features like chat will soon be phased out.
The Register: You'll never have to name that tune again.
Here's an interesting idea that will never work. Sony has come up with an amazing way for you never to miss out on a particular song again. Using this staggering piece of machinery - called an eMarker - you can track down any song you hear on the radio.
Internet Week: Going Global With I-mode.
The Japanese love sushi. The Japanese also love I-mode. Sushi is now a dominant meal choice around the globe, but I don't think that I-mode, an Internet-access technology for cell phones, will achieve the same success outside of Japan as it has inside that country.
InfoWorld: WAP Forum moves toward Net standards.
The next major version of WAP, a protocol for providing Internet-based data services on mobile phones, will complete a migration to XHTML and TCP as the foundation of the technology, which will make it easier for developers to write WAP applications...
Computerworld: Microsoft mulling 'persistence' changes to Internet Explorer.
To disable persistence now, Explorer users have to turn off the browser's scripting features. But Miller said Microsoft is considering a plan to include a capability in Explorer 6.0, the next scheduled release of the browser...
September 15, 2000
Salon: A scanner darkly.
Scott Rosenberg. If a company wants a magazine ad to drive traffic to its Web site, what's more reasonable for it to expect consumers to do: Type "www.companyname.com" into their browsers, or laboriously install the CueCat and its software and scan a bar code?
NY Times: Playboy Ruling Recognizes Limits to Online Rights of Trademark Holders.
In an important decision that recognizes limits to intellectual property rights online, a federal judge earlier this week ruled that a company's well-known trademarks may be used without authorization by search engines in some programming and sales practices.
Forbes ASAP: Look-Closely-Right-Now.
John Seely Brown. We judge truth in terms of trust, and trustworthiness through triangulation, taking bearings not on the information alone but also on its context. Whatever people say, most of us actually do judge books by their covers, not just their content.
Salon: Crack SDMI? No thanks!
Marti says he doesn't plan to pirate music, but he's also opposed to offering assistance to a system that wants to put new limits on where and how you can listen to music you already own. "SDMI is a blatant, unilateral attempt by the copyright holding industries to rewrite the balance of power..."
Industry Standard: FCC Tactically Delays Broadband Probe.
The delay was considered insignificant to proponents of requiring open access because the FCC inquiry will not necessarily lead to any new rules and could take a year or more to complete. Better to get conditions imposed on AOL and Time Warner and then fight the battle for nationwide rules...
Forbes ASAP: I of the Beholder.
Esther Dyson. Now both lies and truth travel faster and more freely. The result over the long run will likely be more disclosure, more discretion, and a better market for titillating lies as well as titillating truths. But there will also be more reliable sources to help you tell the difference.
Forbes ASAP: All The World's A Bootleg.
Charles C. Mann. Not paying attention to copyright, in other words, had led me to act like a little engine of misinformation, spraying inaccurately labeled bits around the Internet. Which recalled to mind the many early editions of William Shakespeare.
Washington Post: WAP, Europe's Wireless Dud?
The problem, not at all unfamiliar on the forward edge of technology, is that the designer's reach has exceeded the engineer's grasp. The task of providing full-scale Internet service through wireless connection to a pocket-sized phone has proven more difficult than most people had anticipated.
Forbes ASAP: Miles And Miles Of Flexible Track.
Hal Varian. The "Euphoria of 1999" that surrounded the Internet is already the stuff of legends. But what part of it was real and what part was not? Certainly, many investors misunderstood the two primary drivers of the Internet economy: network effects and lock-in.
News.Com: Deja.com staff cuts reach executives.
Deja, which provides information and reviews of a wide range of products, handed out the pink slips Wednesday to 30 staffers in New York and another 20 in Austin, Texas, leaving it with 90 employees.
Map of the Month: NewsMaps: Topographic Mapping of Information.
NewsMaps are one of best examples of information mapping available on the Web today. They are also among the most map-like of information maps, borrowing literally and liberally from the cartographer's toolbox.
September 16, 2000
Wired News: Publishing Without a Net.
This attitude becomes clear when visiting the websites of Talk, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. These marketing-oriented websites tease the reader -- saying, in so many words, that if they want the content, they should subscribe or buy the latest issue.
Computerworld: At privacy conference, government regulation starts to look inevitable.
...in the final hour of the conference today when one of the participants, U.S. FTC member Mozelle W. Thompson, asked the large audience of businesses representatives and privacy advocates a simple question: How many believe online privacy legislation is inevitable? A sea of hands were raised.
InfoWorld: Friends should never ask friends to spam -- even if Big Blue says to do so.
The readers I heard from were aghast that IBM would stoop to such tactics. "Can you believe it?" wrote one irritated recipient of the Big Blue missives. "They're asking me to spam my friends! I dropped my subscription to this e-mail [newsletter]. Its value is debatable anyway."
Advertising Age: User-created ads catch on.
Rather than dictating what their idea of cool advertising is, more marketers are asking online communities to come up with their own advertising and promotions. Pseudo.com, an Internet TV site, is one such company that's recently handed the ad controls to its audience.
InfoWorld: The plain old vanilla commerce you grew up with ain't what it used to be.
We will inevitably be moving into an era of more dynamic pricing models. It's a concept just too attractive to resist. Squeeze out all those inefficiencies in the market. But attention needs to be paid to the way dynamic pricing is presented.
News.Com: Industry group cooks up rules for spam.
Sixteen companies, including online advertisers DoubleClick and 24/7 Media, banded together over the summer to hash out a set of professional standards that they expect to make public at a marketing conference in Boston later this month.
September 17, 2000
Useit.Com: New Devices Augur Decent Mobile User Experience.
The current generation of mobile Internet products and services (shown at the DEMOmobile'2000 conference) has miserable usability. New devices like Blackberry, Modo, and a prototype Microsoft telephone do better.
SJ Mercury: P2P furor putting focus on profoundly important issue.
Dan Gillmor. Peer-to-peer is a logical and essential extension. We're seeing software and services that let us use the Net -- the World Wide Web in particular -- to communicate and collaborate in more sophisticated and valuable ways.
NY Times: A High-Tech Vision Lifts Fidelity.
The technology center, known as FCAT is not an operation that one might expect to find at an asset management firm. Built last year, it is a multipurpose laboratory and workshop, where Fidelity tests and demonstrates next- generation technologies.
Red Herring: VCs gamble big on beauty B2C.
Reflect.com's latest round of funding didn't come willingly, the source says. IVP and Redpoint, a firm that spun out of IVP, chipped in more money to the startup to avoid the embarrassment that would come if they abandoned it, he says.
Industry Standard: InStyle Won't Be Home for Christmas.
While Time's InStyle has created many a windfall for its retailers, the magazine's own attempt to make a profit by selling fashion accessories on its Web site is still plagued by technical delays that will make it miss the Christmas shopping season.
September 18, 2000
Industry Standard: Out With the Old.
Many old-media executives, mostly from television, were hired. All of them were smart people who had succeeded in their previous careers and – as in the early days of other media – most of them sought to graft their previously successful ideas onto the newest medium.
Industry Standard: The Lights Go Down on Pseudo.
Launched in 1994 by Jupiter Communications co-founder Josh Harris, Pseudo was a pioneering force in creating original programming streamed over the Internet. Originally designed as an Internet radio Webcasting service, the ambitious venture eventually upgraded to video in the late 1990s.
USA Today: Energizer Bunny ads hop onto Web.
The battery maker opened a ''hybrid'' ad campaign this weekend that starts on network TV, marches to the Web and tries to finish with a drumbeat of e-mail. Such hybrid efforts may be marketing's future. Advertisers such as Energizer and Nike are trying to meld old and new media, using the strengths of each.
Industry Standard: The Active Customer.
Digital technologies are playing a huge role in this transition by making it easy for customers to help themselves without reliance on company talent. They also make it possible for suppliers to provide tools that enhance the customer's activities.
USA Today: Which company will be the last online?
More than 99% of Fortune 1000 companies have corporate Web sites, setting up an awkward race for being last to the Web. The competitors: Adams Resources & Energy, Jacobs Engineering Group, Grand Union, Stater Bros. and Charming Shoppes.
Village Voice: His So-Called Rights.
As founder of the anticensorship Peacefire.org, Haselton says government attempts to block access to sites could be unconstitutional, and he argues that private attempts, while legal, are both futile and insulting to young people.
Industry Standard: Weber Gets Grilled.
The guy may love Weber grills, but Weber-Stephen Co., the Tiffany of barbecues, doesn't like him. Earlier this year the company sued him in federal court in Chicago and filed a claim before the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva that could have smothered his lucrative e-commerce operation.
Wired News: Internet Land Rush at TM Office.
The new Internet land rush has begun at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Individuals and companies are filing trademark applications for trademarks that include domain names in yet-to-be-created top-level domains like .web, .firm and .sex.
InfoWorld: Startup gets geographic with online ads.
Through what Quova calls Precision Mapping Technology, GeoPoint will use IP addresses to route geographically content back to the user. For example, a national department store Web site using GeoPoint could route ads for a regional sale to users who log in from that area...
Wired News: COPA: Snoozin' in the Cabaña.
Place rabid anti-porn activists, free speech zealots, and federal prosecutors on a government commission, lock them in a windowless room, and what do you get? Answer: Bored contention.
USA Today: Researchers debate Net's social impact.
The Association of Internet Researchers' inaugural conference ended Sunday with more questions than answers about the Net's impact on social interactions and relationships. Does the Internet foster greater face-to-face contact offline, or does the new medium tend to make individuals more reclusive?
NY Times: Sellers Hire Auditors to Verify Privacy Policies and Increase Trust.
Some of the more fearless sites are now putting their reputations on the line, quite publicly, by paying well-known financial services firms to audit their World Wide Web sites and state whether or not their privacy policies are more than just pixels on the screen.
EE Times: AT&T, Nortel plot '4G' wireless nets.
Amid projections of a boom in wireless data, top technologists from AT&T Labs and Nortel Networks sketched out their first efforts to define fourth-generation cellular networks in separate presentations this week.
September 19, 2000
SJ Mercury: China keeps firm hand on Net use.
The Internet's growing popularity in China -- the number of Web users is doubling every six months -- is indeed causing change. But the companies that are eagerly entering the Internet market in China also provide ample evidence that the promise of freedom is, so far, oversold.
Salon: Rio's Pyrrhic victory.
But 15 months after Diamond's victory, as Napster and MP3.com fight for their lives in court after suffering a string of lopsided judicial defeats, observers are wondering whether some in Silicon Valley read too much into the Diamond win.
USA Today: Apple licenses Amazon's 1-Click.
''Right now Apple and Amazon are the only two companies in the world that use this technology,'' said Mitch Mandich, Apple senior vice president of worldwide sales. ''Amazon claims they have a patent, and so we didn't want to do anything that could infringe on the patent.''
Fortune: Wireless Web on Phones? Forget It!
Stewert Alsop. I really wanted to believe in this wonderful new world. I even got excited about stock quotes on my phone. But like a spurned lover, I now know the truth--and it hurts. Here are the three reasons that the wireless Web as it's imagined today is nothing more than a seductive chimera.
Inside: Talking About a Revolution or, What We Learned From a Napster Party.
Jason Chervokas and Tom Watson. The experience suggests that the looming combination of high-speed connectivity to American homes, ever-increasing desktop processing power and home data storage capacity plus peer-to-peer file sharing is more incendiary than we ever allowed ourselves to imagine.
News.Com: Music, morality and Moore's Law.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that the technical infrastructure is already in place. Two hundred million multimedia PCs. Seventeen billion CDs. One billion audio CD players. The CD itself is the real enemy of the music industry, yet there is no way to put the genie back in the bottle.
Wired News: Why E-Security Is Hard to Tame.
[Fran Rooney, CEO of Baltimore Technologies] Telecommunications companies, because they are the pipeline for the Internet connectivity that enables e-commerce, have "a huge moral and social obligation to really look at their power going forward," he said. "They've also got to invest in the future and make sure bandwidth is made available" to both businesses and the home.
Adweek: NDM in the Middle.
While the aforementioned teasers appear to be ripped from supermarket tabloid headlines, in reality they are pieces of an ambitious online puzzle being created by News Digital Media, the Los Angeles-based operator of Fox.com, FoxSports.com and FoxNews.com, all subsidiaries of New York-based News Corp.
News.Com: Music bookmarking firm loses place with investors.
Xenote, a start-up that gave away key-chain attachments allowing consumers to "bookmark" music from the radio, said today that it will shut its doors after failing to find additional funding.
Internet Week: A Wake-Up Call For E-Retailers.
To respond to these ever-expanding customer demands, vendors now offer many service technologies that go way beyond e-mail: automated e-mail management, instant messaging, Web call-back and even voice-recognition software that lets offline shoppers buy online via the telephone.
Business 2.0: XML: No Magic Problem Solver.
Clay Shirky. By asserting that their product or service uses XML, vendors everywhere are inviting clients to ignore the problems that arise from incompatible standards, devices, and formats, as if XML alone could act as a universal translator and future-proofer in the post-Babel world we inhabit.
Online Journalism Review: The Lesson of Emulex.
Bloomberg's first shot, on August 25, went up at 10:13 a.m. Dow Jones didn't get a headline up on the story until about 10:40 a.m. So what's the value of 27 minutes? In this case, millions of dollars. But this isn't a story to inspire lightning-fast journalism.
MSNBC: Credit-card fraud has become a nightmare for e-merchants.
But in the world of Internet retailing, the customers are always right. As a result, whether customers are ripping off merchants or have been victimized themselves by credit-card thieves, it’s the merchants who almost always end up losing money.
September 20, 2000
News.Com: Report: Music pirates will evade countermeasures.
"Right now, most traditional (record) companies are focused on providing security and using security to protect and control distribution of content," said Forrester analyst Eric Scheirer. "That proposition has no future in it. Content won't be controlled. Content can't be stopped legally."
InfoWorld: Digital music initiative nearly ready.
Since it was first announced in December 1998, SDMI, a body composed of more than 180 companies, has developed slowly. This is because it is difficult to create a consensus among such a large group on the technical and political issues involved, said Mike Reed, vice president of marketing for the Rio...
digitalMASS: Better content through exclusivity?
Daniel Schreiber, CEO of Alchemedia, which developed the Clever Content scheme for protecting images, would like you to buy that image. But he's not necessarily going to sweat it if you don't. As far as he's concerned, the big-picture, or, more precisely, big-image vision is one of "introducing exclusivity" to the Web.
NY Times: Clicking Outside the Box.
But don't quit your day job because you have a great idea for an interactive television programming company. Unlike the open Internet, the only services that viewers can receive on these systems are those offered by the owners.
News.Com: FCC's chief techie sees a wilder Net ride ahead.
Farber was quick to point out, however, that many problems lie ahead for businesses, consumers, and especially policy makers. "The biggest issue right now is security. The economy is based more and more on the Internet, and there are real concerns about the infrastructure...
NY Times: Those Banner Ads Keep On Waving, But They're Singing a Different Tune.
Ms. Foley agreed. Though she conceded that all the new talk was to some degree a face-saving exercise in 20/20 hindsight, she insisted that marketing people always knew that the measures being used for banners were incorrect, and that branding was the way to go.
Forbes: You've Got Ad-Mail.
Carmakers and entertainment companies have been the first to try sending e-commercials to consumers--and on a limited basis. Toyota spent $51,000 sending three e-ad campaigns to 112,000 people from their customer database over the summer.
Salon: Apple's "1-click" deal leaves a sour taste.
Thanks to the "innovative" technology behind Amazon's much-debated patent, "the easiest computer to use is now the easiest computer to buy," enthuses the Apple Web site. But Apple, in its quest for ease, essentially may be making things that much more difficult for Net retailers.
Forbes: Don't Go There.
That's why some sites are throwing in with a new creature: the commerce service provider. Vcommerce and firms such as Vitessa, Iconomy and Escalate will build and run your Web storefront, handling merchandising, inventory and shipping.
Good Experience: Reflect.com Lives On.
Who knows how valid the speculation is, coming from an anonymous source. But it seems reasonable that Reflect would be less than successful, given that it still takes over 20 clicks just to see the first product on the site.
Industry Standard: Handspring Sidles Into Wireless.
The Visor does makes an odd-looking phone – especially when you hold it up to your ear – but it retains all the nice PDA features, like a large screen, and doesn't bother with a physical keypad. Users can dial straight from their contact lists, and large touchscreen buttons ...
NY Times: Why This Consumer Giant Isn't About To Sell To Consumers.
It would be suicidal, they said, to spend billions of dollars to build distribution networks to compete with the likes of Wal-Mart, Kmart and Target, just for the privilege of wrapping $3 and $5 items individually and shipping them to consumers.
September 21, 2000
FEED Magazine: RE: Brewster Kahle.
Continuously amazed, surprised, bewildered by what's going on -- it's completely fun and interesting to just be in the soup. By being here at Alexa, we've got the biggest collection of what the current Web looks like now, and in the past, as well as where millions of people are surfing.
NY Times: Numbed by Numbers.
Few people are likely to grow cranky if not given a daily dose of Web site rankings or told how many Web-enabled cell phones will be on the market by year's end. In the rush to inform the public on all matters related to the Internet, no one has asked the most obvious question: Who really cares?
ZDNN: AOL's loose canon: Justin Frankel.
Frankel has, in fact, devised some software -- but not the kind AOL was expecting. The latest creation of the 21-year-old programmer enables users of AOL's wildly popular Instant Messenger to delete the ads from the online chat program.
Business 2.0: No More Search and Destroy.
Glenn Fleishman. All too often, a few words entered in a firm's search box lead to hundreds--or thousands--of individual items as results. Even worse, it's often a mystery why these are the matches to a given search. It's a marketer's worst nightmare, and it's not all that great for business, either.
Computerworld: Senate committee publishes online privacy guide.
While praising the committee's interest in protecting online privacy, Andrew Shen, a policy analyst at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said lawmakers should do less talking and more legislating.
Industry Standard: Kozmo May Strike Gold With Silver-Screen Deals.
Although movie rentals traditionally have been a low-margin business for online delivery companies, Kozmo's deal with Hollywood helps the company improve those margins since each video costs the company less to acquire.
Internet World: Deconstructing Homestore.com.
Peter Merholz and Joseph Squire. In a misguided effort to be all things to all people, Homestore.com struggles to be anything to anyone. As a one-stop shop for all things "home," the site clutters up the user's experience by throwing in everything - including the kitchen sink.
NY Times: Plotting the Next Chapter of Storytelling on the Web.
With the help of a series of breakthroughs that are expected to be available in the coming months in software, in hardware and in fresh creative thinking about how to use them, entertainment companies are expected to give increased emphasis to figuring out ways to better exploit the most fundamental power of the Internet -- its interactivity.
Computerworld: UPS launches online returns service.
The automated, browser-based system provides consumers with an on-screen label they can print on standard paper directly from their PCs. They're also provided a list of nearby UPS drop-off locations and color maps to these locations.
News.Com: New mobile modem hits download speeds of 128 kbps.
The newer service, also called Ricochet, delivers Internet content to PC customers at 128 kbps, comparable to an ISDN connection and several times faster than dial-up modems or the original Ricochet offering, which is only capable of 28.8-kbps downloads.
NY Times: E-Mail You Can't Outrun.
Internet executives rave about watching messages roll in while they conduct other business. Along with higher salaries and concierge service, BlackBerrys headed a list of demands submitted by junior analysts at Salomon Smith Barney to their superiors last spring.
Washington Post: FCC Offers AOL Terms.
The draft concludes that an "open access" condition--a rule requiring that Time Warner's cable customers be allowed to freely choose their Internet provider--would sufficiently protect against potential collusion with AT&T.
September 22, 2000
The Economist: To hack, or not to hack?
Even if they are tempted, though, SDMI may be wasting its money. According to Bruce Schneier, the founder of Counterpane Internet Security, a consultancy, such contests demonstrate nothing about security. They are, he says, nothing more than cheap publicity stunts.
News.Com: Web writers kept on Olympics sidelines.
ESPN.com executive editor John Marvel was ready to send his top two sports writers to the Sydney Olympics, but knew chances of getting his hands on press credentials were pretty thin. Since the advent of online journalism, not one Web reporter has been allowed to cover an official Olympic event.
US News: Help, Spidey, help! Comics are dying!
In the future, high-quality comics will be delivered online at lower costs. McCloud guesses a $2.50 comic could cost just 50 cents on the Web. When the bugs are finally worked out of online micropayment systems, readers will be able to sample comics online for pennies.
Web Informant: What makes for a well-designed web site.
Another scenario is to make the site the responsibility of the marketing department -- except those individuals are so busy getting out proposals, answering calls, and juggling the needs of the partners, they don't have time for it. And no one likes the site anyway so why bother?
Yahoo News: Online retailers try selling the store.
Now that online drug sales have disappointed, furniture has flopped, and software is a little soft, Internet stores are trying their hand at a new sales category many think could be their best seller yet. It's called selling the store.
Washington Post: Domain-Name Disputes Get Personal.
Today, in what is considered to be the longest-running domain name dispute, Doughney is trying to regain control of peta.org after a federal court in June ordered him to relinquish the name to the real PETA. Doughney's lawyer recently filed an appeal, arguing that the PETA parody is First Amendment-protected speech.
NY Times: A Question on Music Piracy.
Will Napster's novel claim that its users are protected by the Audio Home Recording Act carry the day? Probably not, said several lawyers and law professors who are experts in Internet law and copyright infringement.
Forbes: BN.com Pays Big Bucks For Yahoo! Pact.
The link is barnesnoble.com. Though that domain name is registered to Barnesandnoble.com, multiple attempts to reach the Barnesandnoble.com site with it often returned "not found," thus neutering millions of ad payments. Looks like bn.com has been too wrapped up in making ad deals to notice.
News.Com: 1-800-Flowers.com re-waters its AOL deal.
Under the deal, 1-800-Flowers will pay AOL $21.1 million over five years to be the exclusive flower retailer on the Dulles, Va., Internet service provider's network of sites. Previously, the company was paying $42 million for a four-year marketing deal...
Wired News: Internet Radio Boxes Debut.
People looking to listen to their favorite Internet radio station or Napster-downloaded MP3 song need no longer be glued to their PC. The first generation of Internet radio devices on display at the National Association of Broadcasters Radio Show...
SJ Mercury: CueCat lets privacy out of the bag, critics say.
While praising such measures, several privacy hounds said they aren't fully mollified. They said the company isn't being upfront enough about what it is collecting, and that there is always the risk that the company will change its privacy policy.
September 23, 2000
Business Week: Getting amIhealthy.com into Fine Form.
Jakob Nielsen and Steven Morris. Nielsen believes that a new arrival to amIhealthy.com immediately sees a homepage with words including employers, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and could logically wonder: Is the site going to tattle to the insurance companies so that I can't get covered?
InfoWorld: After 35 years of technology crusades, Bob Metcalfe rides off into the sunset.
These are several of the most obvious problems that could be solved with Anticiparallelism, but generally aren't. Today's computers squander parallelism. Their software sequentializes computations, failing to anticipate tasks that might be accelerated with precomputed partial results put in inventory --cached -- using idle resources.
Financial Times: Sony chief catches a ride on a meteorite.
Mr Idei came to London last week along with Sony executives from around the world to work out how to cope with the apocalyptic challenge of the internet. He expects the internet either to remake or destroy the Sony business. "If we fail to adapt ourselves, we will die," he warns.
SJ Mercury: Lawsuits won't stop free exchange on the Net.
So what will a record label be in the year 2005? My guess is that they'll be reduced to marketing firms in the business of preening, packaging and promoting artists. The smart ones -- the survivors -- will come to understand this before all their artists start to wander away.
InfoWorld: Caught between a rock and a hard place: How do you make online privacy policies stick?
So perhaps it's time to look at privacy policies and opt-in agreements as legal contracts or license agreements. Digital signatures have been around for years and the law is starting to recognize them. So why couldn't a company draw up a virtual contract on privacy that's binding on both sides?
Advertising Age: E-tailers missing the mark with flood of Web coupons.
For the retailers that think they're saving money by running more promotions and not plowing cash into brand advertising this fourth quarter, the cost of excessive couponing--measured in quality customer relationships, not dollars--could be far greater than they think.
September 24, 2000
Good Experience: The Wireless Customer Experience.
Our new free white paper on wireless customer experience is now available. The "hook" of the report is that success in wireless is not primarily about technology, or investors, or strategic partnerships. Success in wireless is based primarily on a good customer experience.
Upside: Secrets & Lies: Digital security in a networked world.
Excerpt from Bruce Schneier's new book Secrets & Lies. And the threats in the digital world mirror the threats in the physical world. If you strip away the technological buzzwords and graphical user interfaces, cyberspace isn't all that different from its flesh-and-blood, brick-and-mortar, atoms-not-bits, real-world counterpart.
DaveNet: OPML 1.0.
When I look at a computer screen I see an outline. An idea I had hanging out in the doorway of my programming partner's cube in 1980 has turned into a career. I said "I know how this *really* should work. Point at an idea, press a key and it expands to reveal detail.
NY Times: Preserving the Perishable Art of the Digital Age.
The increasing adoption of innovations like digital photography, digital video, digital projection in installations, and Web-based experiences opens a new chapter of challenges because these media are unstable, prone to deterioration and hold no promise of longevity.
InfoWorld: They are everywhere you want to be -- and even where you don't want them.
The more I studied Amazon's new privacy policy, the clearer it became how that particular issue is something of a red herring. Just before the "unlikely event" provision, the policy states quite boldly that customer information is a business asset of Amazon's...
September 25, 2000
Industry Standard: A Watchdog With Some Bite.
The Privacy Foundation models itself after the Computer Emergency Response Team, based at Carnegie Mellon University, which monitors computer security threats. Like CERT, the Privacy Foundation will put out alerts and guidelines when it discovers privacy violations.
Boston Globe: A setback at ICAST.
In the seven months since it went live, iCAST has tried to do a lot: a combination instant-messenger and jukebox called the iCASTER and channels devoted to music, movies, television, and comedy. It has also tried to expand its offerings through acquisitions, some of which have hit snags.
NY Times: Web-Leery Olympics Limit News.
The 27th Olympic Games may be remembered for many things but it will surely be a benchmark in the struggle between those who hold intellectual property rights in sporting events and those seeking to cover sports, especially for the ever-expanding universe of news outlets on the Internet.
Salon: Defanging Carnivore.
Q&A with Robert Graham. So, the moral of the story is whether it's the FBI, or just the people trying to get your e-mail to you, people are going to be reading your e-mail occasionally. Therefore, if there's something in the e-mail message that you don't want other people to read, you should encrypt it.
Interactive Week: Europeans Defining The Long Arm Of The Cyberlaw.
European and U.S. officials are moving toward a final draft of the world's first international treaty on cybercrime, a broad effort that high-tech industry groups and privacy advocates fear could intrude on personal privacy and hamper e-commerce.
ZDNN: Palm, Motorola pack cell phones.
Under an agreement to be formally announced Monday, the two companies plan to develop a phone by early 2002 that combines Palm's operating system with Motorola's wireless technology. The new device will feature a color-display screen that is larger than most cell-phone displays...
SJ Mercury: Phone keypad may go way of rotary dial.
As speech-recognition software gets more sophisticated in the next few years and mobile phones continue to shrink, AT&T expects we'll get used to saying words again instead of pushing buttons -- maybe in just a couple of years.
News.Com: Cox cable to test ICTV's interactive services.
ICTV differentiates itself from its competitors by putting most of the computing power in the central office, or the head end, of the cable network. With ICTV, the set-top box merely decodes the images sent over the cable network. Even the individual keystrokes are sent over the network for processing.
Business Week: Can Microsoft Stamp Out Piracy?
The result: You will no longer be able to lend your copy of Office to a friend or relative. That may be fair enough, but you will also face new hassles when you want to transfer your software to a new computer or restore your system after a serious crash.
NY Times: The Middlemen of Content.
These problems have not been lost on so-called online content syndicators, a relatively new category of Internet businesses that act as intermediaries between sites that need content and sites that want to sell it.
NY Times: Trademarks Gain Attention as Internet Passports and Critical Congressional Vote.
Some big trademark owners are particularly worried that Congress does not grasp the importance of brands. While Congress recently extended the life span of patents to conform with standards in Europe and Japan, it has not acted to adopt similar changes to trademark law...
September 26, 2000
Online Journalism Review: Sydney Morning Herald Sets an Enviable Course.
Burton believes the site has a sharper news focus than some U.S. news sites."In the U.S., some newspaper sites have allowed themselves to be pushed by big portals into becoming more portal-like," Burton says. "I think they lose their relevance to their users."
ZDNN: AOL quietly linking AIM, ICQ.
A person familiar with AOL's situation says the company is taking some steps internally to make AIM and ICQ interoperable, but that it faces challenges meshing the cultures of the two companies and also with the kind of users signed onto each system.
Industry Standard: You Talkin' to Me?
So far, though, "animated" is a pretty loose term when applied to today's bots. Some bots just wink at you while you type queries into a text window; others move around, lean into the screen and even show a little attitude. Some are splashy but essentially dumb user interfaces sitting on a thin layer of knowledge.
- Internet World: From January 1, 2000; Bad Bot
NewMedia: Is Rich Media Worth It's Weight in Gold?
Software designers and Webmasters keep pushing forward like scouts in the wilderness, claiming new audio and visual landscapes as their own. As a result, the Web now is a swirl of color and movement, games, three-dimensionality, and virtual worlds--it's a bastion of rich media. But there's a rub.
Computerworld: Texas AG reaches deal to limit sale of customer data by Living.com.
Texas officials said the lawsuit seeking an injunction against an unfettered customer-data sale by Living.com and the subsequent settlement deal weren't filed in response to any specific proposal by the online retailer, which shut down and filed for bankruptcy protection last month.
News.Com: Internet giants confer on denial-of-service attacks.
The Bay Area DDoS Working Group, which includes Internet industry giants across the country, will discuss a "best practices" document being drafted that advises sites and Internet service providers how to respond when under a distributed denial-of-service attack.
NY Post: Comedy Central Bucking the Tide Again - Online.
While entertainment sites are dropping like flies, Comedycentral.com announced yesterday it will buck the trend and launch a "24-hour All Comedy Internet Radio Station" with NetRadio.com and spin off new material from its roster of shows.
Red Herring: Car dealers, customers both win on Web.
On the Internet, this "dealer-centric approach" is turned on its head into a "customer-centric" experience, says Thilo Koslowski, an automotive analyst at the Gartner Group. Web customers, armed with more information and more choices, are making traditional dealers buckle.
News.Com: AOL devices expected to arrive next month.
The online giant is gearing up to release a version of Research in Motion's BlackBerry pager in October that will feature the AOL brand and software for trading instant messages, according to Samuel May, an analyst at US Bancorp Piper Jaffray.
SJ Mercury: Governor vetoes bill on state Internet taxes.
Supporters of the bill by Assemblywoman Carole Migden, D-San Francisco, complained that the governor miscast the bill as one imposing a new tax. In reality, they said, all it did was to clarify that current sales tax laws apply to all retailers with a physical presence in California.
September 27, 2000
Editor & Publisher: Discussion Not Always Frank On Industry Forums.
Steve Outing. From my seat in the middle of these discussions — I have served as list "owner" and "administrator" — I've noticed recently that the conversation has quieted considerably, as senior members of the online news profession have been less willing and able to speak openly with their colleagues in the profession.
Inside: Burn-Rate Casualties Ripe for Big-Company Buyouts.
Jason Chervokas and Tom Watson. While it may be clear now that giving a bunch of content creators buckets of money and expecting a return in the near term was foolish, it is equally clear that the market for online content is growing rather than contracting...
News.Com: MTVi cuts staff by 25 percent.
The changes at MTVi underscore the difficulties that traditional media companies have faced with their Internet plays. Like Viacom, Walt Disney and General Electric have spent considerable resources on their Internet units, Go.com and NBC Internet, respectively...
- Salon: From November 29, 1999; The music man.
Q&A with Nicholas Butterworth, president and CEO of MTVi.
Wired News: Webcasters Caught in RIAA Web.
Jonathan Potter, executive director of the Digital Media Association, warned that webcasters who haven't negotiated individual deals shouldn't be concerned that the RIAA will use agreements with companies like On-the-I.com to influence the royalty structure the copyright office will implement.
News.Com: Lawmakers want to legalize MP3.com service.
Dubbed the "Music Owners' Listening Rights Act of 2000," the bill would give companies the right to copy CDs, store them online, and stream the songs individually to listeners who could prove they already owned a copy of the CD.
The New Republic: Freaked Geeks.
ICANN may have hoped that its elections would come off with the orderliness and good sense of a Capra film. But by the time the servers started melting down last summer, it had something closer to the comic paranoia of Dr. Strangelove.
Washington Post: Holding Out for 'Open Access' to Cable.
The battle in Florida underscores how the once-obscure issue of open access has gained traction. In the past two years, while both the Federal Communications Commission and Congress have allowed the marketplace to resolve the issue, about a dozen cities have sought to test their authority...
Industry Standard: DoCoMo and AOL to Join in Japan.
The companies said they hope to eventually roll out what they call "fixed-mobile convergence" services around the world. They plan to set up a "strategic planning and operations committee" at a senior management level to develop and deploy such services...
Internet Week: Patent Licensing Benefits Both Sides.
Did Amazon really obtain tangible assets in return, or did it go easy on Apple just to get a license under its belt? Meanwhile, eBay, whose plans are still not fully fleshed out, similarly stands to benefit by taking in license fees for its technology.
Wired News: Carnivore Review Team Exposed!
On Tuesday, the Justice Department placed the 51-page PDF file online, with project information such as names, phone numbers, and government security clearances erased with thick black bars. But it turns out that the information wasn't removed after all.
News.Com: Microsoft to rewrite marketing labeled as spam.
Microsoft today said it plans to revise a notification message accompanying a test version of its new MSN Explorer software, bowing to criticism that the feature resembles self-promoting spam.
September 28, 2000
Salon: Loudcloud's silver lining.
Scott Rosenberg. It's this odd juxtaposition of hopeful business plans and disastrous doom scenarios that make S-1 filings the signature documents of digital-age finance. S-1s are capsules for all the new economy's dreams and nightmares...
The Guardian: Second sight.
Douglas Rushkoff. Sadly, our readiness to accept the tools we are given, in the form they are given, as well as the rules they come with, reduces our role to passive consumption, and threatens to end the digital revolution before it has even begun.
News.Com: Record labels push EU to tighten digital copyrights.
Representatives of the 15 European Union governments sent a new copyright law to the parliament for approval today. Industry groups say the definition of private copying is too broad, permitting millions of perfect copies to be traded or distributed free on the Internet.
NY Times: Creative Web Taxes in Europe.
Essentially, the legislation proposed in June by the European Commission, the Brussels-based executive arm of the 15-nation European Union, defines digital products like software and video programming downloaded by computer as services rather than goods.
News.Com: Sony wireless device links Net, television.
The device is designed as a sort of all-in-one remote control and Internet appliance, and fits into Sony's strategy of creating a networked home full of Sony computers, stereos, DVD players, and televisions, which can talk to each other and share information...
Editor & Publisher: News Sites Get Flash-y.
Flash has the potential to fulfill the promise of online interactivity, according to art directors at newspapers and Web news sites. But for now, the news industry is taking baby steps to achieve an appropriate balance between being "cool" and serious news storytelling.
Washington Post: Election Day on the Internet.
While most of the nation is focused on the presidential campaign, another important election will be held starting next week that is flying beneath everyone's radar. It's a worldwide vote, to be conducted by e-mail, that will go a long way toward shaping the future of the Internet.
Red Herring: Paid wireless content model is up in the air.
Tom Jessiman, managing director of Sports.com, a popular European sports content site, is one of the skeptics who doesn't think consumers will pay for wireless content. "I just cannot see someone paying even $2 or $3 for content..."
SF Chronicle: IBM Admits to Cyber-Misdirection.
IBM fessed up yesterday to a pre-Olympic strategy of redirecting Web surfers who intended to go to NBCOlympics.com to its site, Olympics.com. Shortly before the start of the Sydney Olympics on Sept. 15, users who typed in nbc.olympics.com ended up at Olympics.com...
PC World: Who Cares About Amazon.com's Privacy Policy?
Amazon.com did not retract its policy, and that could set a gloomy precedent, some consumer advocates say. Even more foreboding, they add, is the relatively muted response by consumers and the government.
AtNewYork: Privacy Advocates Criticize RECA's Proposed Guidelines.
But Catlett said industry self-policing simply "doesn't work," adding that the laws currently under consideration -- specifically, HR3113, based on the FTC's recommendations -- "actually has fairly weak provisions that wouldn't cause these companies any difficulties."
Upside: Fraud part of life for online retailers.
Costs associated with credit card fraud can cripple online merchants on several fronts. On top of an estimated $230 million lost in fraudulent sales in the past year -- 1.2 percent of all Internet sales -- online merchants are battered with high processing fees...
September 29, 2000
Wired News: Discussion on Web Entertainment.
If a panel of celebrities sponsored by Salon.com has anything to say about it, micropayments for websites and interactive games will rule -- and corporate content will be left by the wayside. And of course, there will continue to be lots of sex.
Salon: The Gnutella paradox.
If the decentralized Gnutella can't handle the legal and technical threats that come from mass usage, what system can? Or are music traders doomed to confront a future in which each new "next Napster" is progressively undermined by its own success?
media.org: Techno Greeks.
Since the craze began, commentary on weblogs has run from the astute to the absurd. Since we are all slaves to Internet time, we decided to throw our own hat into the ring by providing metacommentary on the craze, while the latest rash of historical retrospectives are still fresh in our RAM.
A List Apart: Indie Exposure.
The fact is, with very few exceptions, e-business never packs the impact of the independent content producer. These are the people who are pushing the boundaries, harnessing the power of the web, and building the things people want and need.
The Economist: Blocked.
It is no coincidence that the last couple of weeks have also seen a chorus of criticism aimed at Britain’s telecoms watchdog, Oftel, known unaffectionately in the industry as “Gums” (as in toothless). The row concerns Oftel’s handling of an arcane but crucial measure known as “unbundling the local loop”...
Industry Standard: Lost Lessons at Time Warner.
If the talks were just between two companies in the free market, Time Warner's stance might make sense. But with antitrust regulators at the Federal Trade Commission already questioning the company's voluntary pledge to let competing ISPs onto its system...
Online Journalism Review: French Web Site Revives Dead Print Edition.
The experience taught Agnus the joys of a concept that can't even be translated into one French word: Syndication. Now, roughly a year later, )Transfert.net syndicates content to more than 90 content-gobbling French-language sites, including popular portals such as Nomade and Libertysurf.
CIO WebBusiness: Revisiting Toys'R'Us.
Lou Rosenfeld. My jaw dropped after loading this page. I can understand partnering with the Web's major e-retailer to improve service, but I honestly didn't expect Toys'R'Us to sacrifice its brand to do so. The site screams "Amazon", from the look and feel down to the domain name.
Wired News: Webcasters Warned of RIAA Deals.
Through a series of email interviews, Cuban laid out the strategy that the recording industry has used in its attempt to negotiate licensing deals with various webcasters -- deals that he claims will put any for-profit webcasters out of business.
FEED Magazine: The DeCSS Case.
The fact that CNN could break the law while simply doing its journalistic legwork highlights just what the MPAA's opponents had been arguing all along: that the ability to link is a free-speech issue.
InfoWorld: Monster.com supports database protection bill.
Maynard, Mass.-based Monster.com, one of the best-known Web sites for job seekers and companies trying to fill open positions, voiced its support for the legislation when the company announced its membership of Coalition Against Database Piracy on Tuesday.
Industry Standard: Olympic Cheaters.
While Olympic organizers pat themselves on the back for their online crackdown, they recognize that they need to change with the times. Surfing the Web for violators will not answer the Olympics' Internet problem; clearly, the IOC has to figure out a way to include the Net in its media strategy.
September 30, 2000
InfoWorld: Forget about Gore and Bush: ICANN's first global online election will rock the world.
The first truly online election is taking place this week for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet's governing body. The decisions made by ICANN will ultimately affect every Windows and Internet user for years to come.
Forbes: FTC Demands Dot-com Christmas Delivery.
Macys.com president Kent Anderson admits that last year his site's inventory was updated only periodically, from once a day to once a week. "This year we rebuilt our entire order management process, and inventory information will be available to shoppers in real time as they're checking out..."
Internet Week: Customer Still Doesn't Come First.
Even as many e-retailers retool their sites to avoid the capacity and fulfillment debacles of last holiday season, many are neglecting to upgrade features designed to keep customers happy.
PC World: Web Sites Inch Toward Accessibility.
Web accessibility is a major concern at phone companies. At the human factors laboratory of SBC Technology Resources, a subsidiary of Southwestern Bell, computer users with disabilities put phone company Web sites to the test.
Advertising Age: Latest hot trend tests usability of Web sites.
The category is flourishing in a year when sites with slashed advertising budgets are trying to generate as much revenue as they can. How fast a site downloads, how easy it is to navigate and how promptly a customer service rep replies to an e-mail all are critical factors.
InfoWorld: HDML or WAP plus WML? IT disaster looms over mobile microbrowser wars.
If things continue as they are now, IT departments or ASPs hosting wireless business-to-business or business-to-consumer sites will have to support at least two versions of the same content, one for HDML and one for WML.
SJ Mercury: Davis' bow to tech industry on Net sales tax is irresponsible.
Dan Gillmor. ``Imposing sales taxes on Internet transactions at this point in its young life would send the wrong signal about California's international role as the incubator of the dot-com community,'' said Davis' veto message. Whoever wrote that line was either misinformed or deceitful.
InfoWorld: Sales tax program seeks to level playing field.
Companies such as Toys R Us, Sears, and J.C. Penney are getting behind an effort they hope will lead to changes in U.S tax law that would require all catalog and online companies to collect sales tax on all purchases.
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