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October 1, 2000
Useit.Com: Content Creation for Average People.
In any case, regular folks must be able to create their own content and contribute it to the Internet. This sounds easy enough, but is actually quite a challenge. The biggest problem is that most people are (and always have been) bad content creators.
Seattle Times: Debate over Amazon's '1-Click' heads to appeal.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., will hear arguments Monday in the dispute. The appeals court must decide whether to lift a judge's preliminary order blocking Barnes & Noble.com from using technology that enables online purchases with one click of a computer mouse.
SJ Mercury: Sony leader works to move his company into new era.
Dan Gillmor. While Idei says it's ``impossible to limit the internal competition'' between Sony units, he isn't necessarily encouraging them to directly attack each others' product lines. But he wants everyone to remember that technology is morphing old boundaries more quickly than anyone had imagined possible.
The Economist: In praise of Bayes.
The essence of the Bayesian approach is to provide a mathematical rule explaining how you should change your existing beliefs in the light of new evidence. In other words, it allows scientists to combine new data with their existing knowledge or expertise.
October 2, 2000
Industry Standard: Copyrights Rule.
Lawrence Lessig. Why do the courts treat laws that regulate copyright so differently from laws that regulate pornography? Or to put it another way, why is it so easy to invoke the power of the state to protect Hollywood, yet so difficult to wield the power of the state to protect kids?
Inside: The Pol and the Professor Debate How Free the Internet Should Be.
When dapper Hollywood spokesman Jack Valenti and hard-nosed law professor Lawrence Lessig faced off Sunday night at a Harvard Law School debate on ''The Future of Intellectual Property on the Internet,'' it was a battle as much of style as of substance.
EE Times: SDMI finds itself in a Web-based war of words.
What started as a debate over the Internet community's participation in an SDMI challenge to hackers has escalated into an argument over SDMI's mission and whether its technology violates consumer rights regarding the fair use of copyrighted content.
NY Times: Enlisting Congress on Technology.
But at a time when technology is evolving so rapidly and the stakes are so high over who can exercise how much control over copyrighted works, there may be cause for Congress to look more closely at the rights it has doled out in the past, and how those rights are being applied now.
News.Com: Sony loses Supreme Court appeal to limit reverse engineering.
The justices, without comment, refused to consider Sony's appeal of a decision rejecting its copyright claims against Connectix, whose Virtual Game Station competes with Sony's top-selling PlayStation game console.
NY Times: Divining the Nature of Business.
And though his theories do not provide a road map for e- commerce success, they do provide a compass for executives whose strategic vision has been blurred by a sandstorm of alliance offers, shifting business models and new competition.
Information Today: eMedicine, Inc. Receives Patent for Internet Publishing Software.
eMedicine, Inc., the medical-education network and developer of the first online peer-reviewed medical reference series, has announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted a patent to the company’s proprietary Group Publishing System software.
USA Today: Media Metrix sues Web tracking rival.
Jupiter Media Metrix contends that PC Data, based in Reston, Va., is violating the patent with its PC Data Tracking software. The program can determine which Internet sites a personal computer user visits, length of the visit and pages viewed.
Computerworld: Wal-Mart shuts Web site for renovations until Oct. 17.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, has shut down its Web site for a few weeks to allow myriad customer suggestions to be integrated into the site. Melissa Jones, a customer help representative at Wal-Mart, said the company chose to shut the site for the work after last year's redesign took longer than expected.
USA Today: E-tailers scramble to improve for holidays.
Lands' End, however, is not interested in initiating contact with online consumers encountering difficulties. ''We don't want to be there monitoring their activity,'' said Jean Ballweg, business Internet analyst for the Dodgeville, Wis.-based retailer.
Wired News: ICANN Elections Under Way.
Although 158,000 people applied across the globe, McLaughlin said that only 76,000 individuals ultimately activated their ICANN at-large accounts. The ICANN At Large Membership Program is an experimental effort to give people a chance to participate in the ICANN decision-making process.
CIO: Bad Legislation.
Two wrongs never make a right, and in the case of UCITA, the two wrongs—a flawed body of commercial code governing technology purchases that significantly reduces the power of the buyer and the technically inept members of the state legislatures—add up to one huge wrong.
October 3, 2000
Salon: Is the SDMI boycott backfiring?
But hackers aren't the only people unhappy with SDMI. The hack-SDMI challenge is revealing deep fissures within SDMI itself -- a rift separating the technology companies charged with implementing digital watermarking from the entertainment companies that want their music protected now.
Business 2.0: Moving from Units to Eunuchs.
Clay Shirky. These economics drag entertainment companies to the brink of a terrifying precipice: the end of per-unit pricing. While the real per-unit costs of the offline world have enforced a minimum cost, the first real price war that breaks out online will bring about a race to the bottom...
NY Times: Napster Case: Hard Queries on Copyrights.
Three federal appeals judges today pointedly questioned lawyers for the record industry about their argument that Napster, the Internet music service, is liable for contributing to copyright infringement.
MSNBC: ‘Business-method’ patents create growing controversy.
The issue is heating up in Washington. Tuesday, two House Democrats plan to offer a bill they say would make it easier and quicker to challenge business-method patents, in part by proposing a controversial step: making such patent applications publicly available...
ZDNN: AOL endorses 'opt-out' privacy policy.
America Online Inc., the world's biggest online services company, endorsed making consumers choose to be exempted from having their personal data shared Tuesday, but critics called it a flawed approach to protecting privacy on commercial web sites.
Wired News: China Reacts to Chilly Net Wind.
Most of the big companies in the massive country's burgeoning Internet industry already knew that the Internet Practice Code would limit overseas capital and ban politically sensitive content online. Essentially, China's Net players were prepared for the worst, and they got it.
Ask Tog: Urbanpixel—Visible Navigation for the Web.
When you wander a store powered by Urbanpixel, you don’t see laundry lists of products. Instead, you traverse a virtual store with clustered displays of items, just like in the real world. And, like the real world, you see people, in the form of iconic avatars, wandering through the store with you.
Sydney Morning Herald: Browsers bring original net vision closer - without ads.
These programs are actually browsers on steroids that put the user in charge of the Internet experience by providing a set of tools which allow the surfer to copy and paste content from an infinite number of web sites into one personally-designed web page.
CNN: Lucasfilm orders links to new 'Star Wars' images removed.
Lucasfilm's Jeanne Cole said the company was first alerted to the posting on two fan sites called Aldera.net and NaboOnline last week. A cease and desist letter citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was subsequently sent out and the links were later removed.
Wired News: Debating the Internet's Domain.
In addition to Friday's debates, which have been archived online, MIT will host a panel discussion on the ICANN elections Wednesday, while Stanford University Law School will host three of the seven candidates in a debate on Thursday.
PC World: Debate Rages Over Net Copyrights.
Though Lessig attempted to note how close their views might actually be, Valenti seemed throughout the 90-minute discourse to resist that notion, arguing strenuously that copyright holders should have control of their "property."
USA Today: Web sites demand greater Olympic access.
Reporters from MSNBC.com and several other sites got media credentials through their parent print or broadcast outlet. FoxSports.com covered events by buying tickets or watching them on television.
Industry Standard: The Ad Man Cometh for EBay.
"Our site hasn't had advertising; we don't want to all of a sudden make it look like a big billboard," says eBay's director of business development, Gary Dillabough. He adds that eBay will work hard not to alienate users accustomed to an ad-free site.
October 4, 2000
Internet World: Small Fortunes.
For Musk, it's a no-brainer that systems like PayPal and its competitors will spread the use of micropayments across the Net. The Net is about information, after all - everything from stock research and product reviews to images, music, and software - which people presumably will be willing to pay for...
Adweek: IQ Q&A with Jaron Lanier.
There also tends to be a naive understanding of how the Internet [can be used] in the future. For instance, a lot of commercial developers of broadband services still think of the Internet as a form of cable TV service in which people want to subscribe to content that is delivered to them, and so they create asymmetrical links.
Internet World: Your Call Is Important.
The Web can provide all the benefits of customer self-service - if a company is willing to view its investment in customer service as an ongoing process. But be forewarned, this requires real time, real attention, and real resources.
SJ Mercury: ICANN pursuing slowest-possible expansion of Net domain names.
Dan Gillmor. The more plausible reason was that powerful trademark interests want to keep this resource scarce. For one thing, they've already invested in .com domains. For another, it's easier to police alleged violations of trademarks with fewer TLDs.
News.Com: Disney lobbyist speaks out against AOL.
AOL's policies became clear when Disney's ABC News tried to become a partner with the Internet company, said Preston Padden. AOL asked ABC News to remove links directing readers to other Web sites and retained the option of ending the contract if more than 25 percent of ABC News' visitors used outside links...
Internet World: Deconstructing Moviefone.com.
Joy Busse and Peter Merholz. Too many clicks. Remember, we've got a busy person here, with a couple of spare minutes to purchase tickets in between tasks. Every click and page load counts. First-time users have to go through seven clicks from the home page to buying tickets...
AtNewYork: Can 3D Media Banish Ghosts of E-Tailers' Past?
Eddie Bauer, Inc. is one retailer testing the technology with its Web catalog EddieBauer. The company recently started using 3D technology to allow visitors to view its backpack products from different angles and zoom in for extra-detailed looks at the products' textures.
FEED Magazine: Change the System!
Steven Johnson. I confess to being one of those early adopters, and I also confess to suffering from the strange lack of proportion that a software event like this induces. This fixation has got me thinking about the cultural status of operating systems...
Salon: Artificial stupidity.
Lanier simply wanted to write the word "tele-immersion" as "tele-i." And when Word wouldn't let him do it, capitalizing the "i" repeatedly, Lanier found himself frustrated, even angry. Though he knows how to turn it off, he claims most users don't. And he's still none too pleased.
MSNBC: Web publishers hunt for bottom line.
To help boost revenue and cut costs, Chairman David Talbot is trying to form a kind of business cooperative among niche sites, under which Salon’s advertising staff would sell and host ads for other content sites in return for a percentage of ad revenues.
Internet World: Metadata to the Rescue?
Because of its size, diversity, and dynamic nature, the Web as we know it will probably never be as well organized as the local public library. Yet we might bring it closer to that ideal by adding metadata to the raw content on the Web.
October 5, 2000
Red Herring: The rich get richer off ad dollars.
Despite Mr. Hyland's upbeat assessment of Internet advertising's long-term growth, he notes online ad dollars are increasingly being concentrated. For example, ten Web site operators in the second quarter earned 71 percent of all online ad revenue...
Salon: Did Gore invent the Internet?
Scott Rosenberg. It took social engineers as well as software engineers to build the Net. And that may be why the response to Gore's original statement was so savage: Not because his claim was a lie, but because it was a truth that a lot of people today are trying to forget or bury.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Court skeptical of Amazon's claim.
Amazon.com's fight to bar rival Barnes & Noble.com Inc. from using a patented single-click online purchasing method drew a skeptical response yesterday from a federal appeals court, which questioned whether the invention is worth protecting.
MSNBC: Audio-equipment makers turn out web-related products for holidays.
Electronics companies are also bringing out products that can tune into music transmitted over the Internet. The new products will include radios with built-in modems to tap into so-called streaming audio, such as faraway radio stations that broadcast their programs on the Web.
Editor & Publisher: Web Dabbling Done, Publishing Execs Return to Print.
Now the tide has turned, and publishing execs that dabbled with dot-coms are making their way back to print, often with better titles. After just 15 months at egreetings.com, where he was vp/sales, Rodale veteran Ken Wallace was lured back to publishing last month...
ZDNN: WAP's failure to communicate
The mere thought of surfing the Web on anything that inappropriate should turn most potential users off. The initial excitement about WAP wasn't based on initial user response but on idealized projections of a science-fiction type future where we are all constantly connected...
NY Times: 3-D Space as New Frontier.
It may not be the Internet's final frontier, but it could be its next one. From Mr. Kash's humble abode to the Guggenheim's elaborate showcase, Web browsers are displaying characters, objects and spatial environments as if they existed in three dimensions rather than on a flat screen.
Internet Week: Wal-Mart No Web Mart.
"There's no good reason to have to do this. Nobody else has to do this," said Forrester Research analyst Seema Williams. "It's one thing for your site to be totally overrun by customers and you have to shut down. That's a good news/bad news type of thing. But that's not the case with Wal-Mart."
ZDNN: A shiny new site for Christmas.
The key to online commerce, of course, is to stay online. But as the crucial holiday shopping season for web commerce begins in just a month, more and more sites are shutting down for makeovers. Along with Wal-Mart, Bluelight and Kmart are closing up their web sites to make upgrades.
MSDN Online: Why Great Technologies Don't Make Great Products.
There's no way to know how biased you are without working through usability engineering and other forms of customer feedback. You must spend time with users throughout the product cycle, repeatedly refreshing the team perspective on what you're building and for whom.
New Scientist: A bit of evolution will work wonders for the Internet.
Viruses are common on the Internet, but now it's the turn of bacteria, says British Telecom. But rather than being a menace, the organisms BT has in mind have been designed to help make the Net faster. The idea is to mimic bacterial sex to "evolve" a more efficient network.
October 6, 2000
Salon: Mano a mano with John McCain.
Simson Garfinkel. Can you imagine somebody navigating to the AOL Marketing Preferences section and clicking the button, "Yes, I do want to receive special AOL member-only pop-up offers"? It's like sending e-mail to a spammer: "Please send me your low-interest-rate credit-card offers."
Internet Week: When Eye Candy Isn't Sweet.
ECandy executives were confident their Web site--featuring graphics of Gummi Bears, Swiss chocolate and other delicacies--would be a big hit when it launched in December. They were wrong. The problem: Search engines don't have a sweet tooth. They only recognize plain vanilla HTML text.
Darwin: Nice Guys Finish Last.
You see, QVC understands what many companies have yet to learn (or what many may forget given all the hoo-ha around CRM): Before a company can use technology to boost customer loyalty and sales, it must have a strategy to put customers at the core of corporate decision making.
LA Times: Whose Art Is It, Anyway?
As attorneys wrangle over the finer legal points surrounding digital piracy, larger philosophical questions loom: If technology renders copyright unenforceable, will some artists stop creating? How much control should an artist have over his work once it enters a public forum?
NY Times: Copyright Extension Stifles Creativity, Lawyer Tells Court.
Artists, Mr. Lessig said, look to works in the public domain for inspiration and ideas. The extension of copyrights, he said, violates guarantees of free speech by reprivatizing works that otherwise would have become public property.
Wired News: Patent Battle Takes TV Turn.
In an application filed last week, OpenTV moved to extend its existing patent on interactive TV technology, filed in 1994. The extension seeks to expand the original patent, U.S. patent number 5,819,034, to cover one-click electronic purchases...
Business 2.0: Five Questions With... Thomas Dolby Robertson, Beatnik's Chief Beatnik.
Apparently, a third of American households has a guitar or some musical instrument in them. That's not exactly a hobbyist market. Now if people are spending money on instruments and putting their time into learning them, it implies that they have a relationship with music that is not purely a passive one.
Industry Standard: Sony Unit Prepares Multimedia 'Jukebox'.
Dubbed Unsurface, the San Francisco-based service would enable users to download protected media content – music, movies, video games – into a digital storage locker, where it will be available for streaming only.
Salon: Candidate for the (Net) people.
Simons admits she's still quite frustrated that ICANN's entire 18-member board could end up without a female voice after present chair Esther Dyson steps down next month. But she also says the issue lacks heft when compared to a far more important cause -- saving the Net from corporate interests.
InfoWorld: Online merchants gird for credit card fraud.
Despite being squeezed by higher credit card fraud rates and fees as much as 18 times higher for virtual transactions than those in the physical world, many online retailers struggle to find affordable fraud-protection software or services alternatives...
October 7, 2000
Doc Searls: An Open Letter to Meg Whitman.
EBay was conceived and has grown entirely as a marketplace, not as a medium. Members visit eBay to buy, to sell, to shop, to compare, to talk, to grow their communities. Not for advertising. Not for "messages," however "targeted" those messages may be.
ZDNN: The third wave of network attacks.
Bruce Schneier, CTO of Counterpane. The third wave of network attacks comprises semantic attacks: attacks that target the way we, as humans, assign meaning to content. In our society, people tend to believe what they read. How often have you needed the answer to a question and searched for it on the Web?
Scientific American: The Wireless Web.
That said, even a skeptic would give the wireless Web a good chance of success. Overheated sales rhetoric should not detract from the real engineering achievements. Spraying data through the airwaves isn't easy. Morse code used to be the basis of radio communication for good reason...
Maps of the Month: Mapping the Geography of Domain Names.
Zook argues that his research is 'putting place back in cyberspace' as a scholarly response to the simplistic claims made by some commentators that the Internet and telecommunications will inevitably lead to the massive dispersal of people and economic activities...
Scientific American: Speech without Accountability.
Inventors have played an occasional starring role, too, Gutenberg being the archetype. But with the rise of the Internet, a certain class of inventors--computer scientists--has asserted its own special power to determine the boundaries of permissible speech.
October 8, 2000
Washington Post: Time Warner Terms For Cable Criticized.
Under a confidential term sheet provided to the Texas companies and obtained by The Washington Post, Time Warner would receive 75 percent of the Internet service providers' revenue from all subscriber fees--which are often their biggest source of sales.
Seattle Times: As e-commerce grows, computer privacy shrinks.
The idea behind OneName is wonderfully simple. You and the people who e-mail you are bound by a real-time contractual arrangement not to bother one another with garbage. You promise not to send junk someone else's way. Those contacting you promise not to send junk your way.
NY Times: Now That I Have Your Attention.
Lately, it seems, spammers have become more intimate in their subject lines, often hinting at some connection to the recipient. Messages to me that were labeled "Hi" turned out to be a get-rich-quick scheme, "How's it going" was for pornography...
SJ Mercury: Mobile commerce has long way to go.
Sounds great, but don't be fooled. Today's reality of mobile commerce or ``m-commerce'' -- online shopping done on the run -- is a disappointing shell of what's to come, though most experts agree that the future is bright for making purchases on cell phones and handheld computers.
IBM Developer: The usability lifecycle.
Jakob Nielsen. The one thing that works for creating usable systems is a full usability engineering lifecycle that corrects the quality of the design at every single step of the way. Here is the lifecycle I recommend, divided across the three main stages of a development project.
SJ Mercury: Metricom offers flat taste of wireless Net access.
Metricom is launching a long-delayed nationwide upgrade of its service to 128 kilobits per second, double the best speed of conventional dial-up phone modems. That's fast. After several days of field testing, however, I'm sorry to report Ricochet is neither reliable nor affordable.
October 9, 2000
NY Times: Finding Middle Ground in a World Obsessed With the New.
The Internet can transmit information, but conveying knowledge is a much bigger job. Knowledge comes from understanding the context of information, seeing it in practice and learning the things that are tacitly understood but rarely stated. And so change is less radical than we might expect.
Salon: The Mojo solution.
Q&A with Jim McCoy, CEO of Autonomous Zone Industries. Users cannot simply take and give as they do with Napster and every other file-sharing service. Rather, those who download the free, open-source new release in November must use Mojo to buy and sell content for prices that they themselves determine.
Wired News: Fear of a Pay-Per-Use World.
Unless some exceptions are created, they argue, the entertainment industry will have more control than the Constitution allows. One concern is that this could lead to a pay-per-use world where consumers don't truly own the books, movies and music they purchase.
Argus ACIA: An Interview with Nathan Shedroff.
Too much lip service has been given to user or customer experience but little has actually been done to address it well. The fact is that 80-90% of the companies weren't going to be first so their only chance was to be best and most of them blew that.
MSNBC: AT&T-Time Warner link draws fire from Sen. Hatch.
Time Warner Entertainment holds most of Time Warner’s cable-television and entertainment-programming operations. AT&T, of New York, acquired its 25% stake when it bought cable giant MediaOne Group this year.
SJ Mercury: Net privacy laws will have to wait.
After handing the high-tech industry important legislative victories on trade with China and visas for foreign workers, the U.S. Congress is set to adjourn this week without settling the debate over one critical issue: how to protect consumer privacy online.
Interactive Week: Between Ripped Rock And A Hard Place.
But the SDMI environment could also create headaches for consumers. They would have to install multiple systems to play music they rip or download in secure formats, and update all the systems every time they buy a new computer.
Wired News: Webcaster Goes Intellectual.
Q&A with Jonathan Potter, executive director of Digital Media Association. The problem with Intertrust, and several of the digital rights management companies, is that it makes it difficult for consumers to use. Napster is very user friendly, very point-and-click. It's the AOL of file trading. How do you make DRM point-and-click?
Industry Standard: In Search of ...
Most companies say they are satisfied with their search functionality, yet many admitted to Forrester Research they spend minimal time and money on this technology. They often throw together a search feature when they launch their site...
MSNBC: E-tailers try to keep shoppers from bolting at checkout point.
A number of retailers are fighting to save some lost online revenues, experimenting with technology they hope will improve customer service and improve their chances of clinching sales.
Good Experience: Avoiding the Abandoned Shopping Cart.
These e-tailers are making a strategic mistake. Customers are confused by the complicated website; obviously the correct solution is to simplify the on-site experience. This means taking things away from the experience that shouldn't be there, like log-in interfaces.
The Register: Tower Records Web launch confuses UK customers.
Tower Records has had to relaunch its UK Web site using its US parent's code, with the unfortunate side-effect that all the prices are in dollars and the shipping mechanism is all over the place. That's right, now matter what you want to buy at Tower Records.CO.UK you will have to buy it in dollars.
ZDNet E-Business: iQVC needs to get visual in some places.
To learn about the item, shoppers must click on the description to access the product page. This extra step makes it difficult to peruse offerings; browsing the section requires clicking back and forth dozens of times.
October 10, 2000
Washington Post: AOL Restrictions Alleged.
According to people who have reviewed the 1996 contract, Disney was prohibited from creating links within the AOL network to outside sites on the Web without AOL's written approval. That year, AOL prohibited Disney from selling in its online store a set of products that AOL sold or might sell...
News.Com: AT&T may make Web merchants pay for customers.
Under the possible plan, AT&T, the giant telephone and cable TV company, would charge for each customer that accesses an Internet retail site using AT&T's high-speed communications network. It would receive an additional commission when customers buy something, said Gartner analyst Ken McGee.
IBM developerWorks: Why the Internet won't be metered.
John Levine. Odlyzko's paper has much more than I can summarize here but its important messages are simple: People are willing to pay much more for point-to-point communication than for broadcast content, and successful services almost always move from complex pricing to low flat rates.
Industry Standard: Web Publishers Learn to Love Micropayments.
But publishers complain that the micropayment brigade still hasn't fixed the biggest problem – customers' unwillingness to pay à la carte. Until there's a widespread and easy-to-use standard, that reluctance will probably endure.
Washington Post: FCC Head to Propose Fee for Airwaves.
But pressure has been building on broadcasters to speed up their transition to digital and free up the analog airwaves. That pressure comes in part from the mobile-phone industry, which has demonstrated a willingness to pay the government billions of dollars for the rights to analog signals.
Industry Standard: All Quiet on the Network Front.
This is a Secure Operations Center run by Counterpane Internet Security, one of a growing number of companies that monitor clients' computer networks – from e-commerce sites to internal servers – in search of malicious intruders.
IBM developerWorks: When Web pages don't work.
If you want to sustain your Web-based business, you'll need to take a close look at the user experience. While user experience isn't the holy grail of Web design, when applied intelligently, it can increase customer satisfaction, facilitate purchasing, and drive that ever-important repeat business.
News.Com: Sweepstakes sites play for survival.
Buying traffic can be an expensive way to boost advertising in a tight market, analysts say. Paid Web surfers are not as valuable to advertisers as unpaid surfers, making it harder for incentive sites to sell consumer data and target marketing campaigns.
Industry Standard: Promises, Promises.
It will take years before it is finished, because of engineering, scientific, regulatory and financial problems still to be solved. So the challenge for wireless companies is to introduce customers to what's available now, without pretending to offer more than they can.
October 11, 2000
Inside: Wrong Road Taken: How AltaVista Lost Its Way by Trying to Be a Media Brand.
Jason Chervokas and Tom Watson. But over the last year or so, AltaVista has disappeared from our bookmarks file and is likely never to return. Its twice-pulled IPO and nomad-like wanderings from parent corporation to parent corporation are well documented, but AltaVista holds deeper lessons for would-be crossover Internet-technology-media companies.
Boston Globe: A slice of e-commerce pie.
AT&T had no comment on the plans, and it was McGee, recounting a conversation he had late last month with AT&T Broadband chief executive Daniel Somers, who broke the news over the weekend that the commission-based e-commerce plan is under serious consideration by AT&T.
Industry Standard: Two Outspoken Critics Elected to ICANN Board.
The next directors' meeting of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers – the organization that oversees the Net's domain-name system – promises to be a rowdy affair. In a global online vote that ended last night, two of the most radical candidates were elected to its board.
The Economist: Thrills and spills.
The entertainment industry, which had put aside its scepticism and thrown itself into this enthusiastically, is now in a state of confusion. The future is looking increasingly uncertain. “Nobody knows anything,” the screenwriter William Goldman’s mantra about Hollywood, is truer than ever.
Wired News: Browsing for a Better Design.
But on Tuesday evening at an organizational meeting to kick off the fourth International Browserday, digital artists from New York and Amsterdam exhorted more than 200 art-school students to think radically about browsers.
American Journalism Review: When to Make the Link.
It's an illustration of potential pitfalls as news organizations direct readers into cyberspace. And it raises the question: If these news organizations have an obligation to stand behind the content of their stories, should they also be responsible for the material on the sites to which they send their readers?
News.Com: Chipshot.com bogeys into bankruptcy.
Although Chipshot continues to operate its site, it has been notifying customers who place orders that all items are on back order. But Sroub said the company may shut down the site soon rather than continue to accept orders that it cannot fulfill.
Washington Post: EU Regulators Back AOL Time Warner.
The merger, which would combine an Internet giant boasting 24 million customers with the world's largest media and entertainment company, still must receive clearance from two regulatory agencies in the United States before it can be consummated.
October 12, 2000
Salon: SDMI cracked!
All of the Secure Digital Music Initiative's watermarks -- its much ballyhooed music protection scheme -- have been broken. According to off-the-record sources, the results of the Hack SDMI contest are in and not one single watermark resisted attack.
News.Com: RIAA to develop "digital bar code" for online music.
The record industry's trade association said Thursday that it will develop a system for identifying digital music, an effort that could help it protect downloads from labels and find songs posted illegally online.
NY Times: Gemstar Plans Push Into E-Books.
Devices using Gemstar's technology will go on sale at electronics retailers at Thanksgiving, for prices starting around $300. Gemstar's format appeals to publishers because of its relative security from piracy. Consumers dial directly to Gemstar's computer server from modems inside the devices.
Fortune: M (For Misguided?)-Commerce.
But so far, the wireless Web looks like a giant sinkhole, with a lot of money and talent pouring in to solve problems that don't really exist. Right now, there's not much evidence that "the Web on your phone" is anything but dead on arrival, just another tech bubble getting ready to burst.
News.Com: Web sites gauge the price of speed.
A smaller company, FreeDSL.com operator Winfire, is already moving down this path. By next quarter, it will have a program in place that allows Web sites to buy into "channels," where surfers' download speeds will automatically be turned up a few notches.
Online Journalism Review: Immersive News Technology: Beyond Convergence.
Parts of immersive technology are starting to enter the news marketplace. Our laboratory at the Annenberg School for Communication, working with IMSC, has begun to test how this technology can be used and what its introduction will mean to news organizations and audiences.
SJ Mercury: Spam blacklist battle goes to court.
The issue has come to a head in a lawsuit unfolding in Santa Clara County Superior Court, where a Redwood City-based anti-spam organization is locked in a legal tussle with a New Hampshire company that claims it has been defamed and economically damaged by being identified as a spammer.
InfoWorld: Phil Zimmermann, Security.
Not many technologists receive e-mail from their users saying the only thing standing between them and an oppressive government is your technology, but that's exactly the kind of e-mail Phil Zimmermann evokes, thanks to his creation Pretty Good Privacy.
eCompany: Punting on Personalization.
Accordingly, Net Perceptions is broadening its product line to include more general marketing and merchandising tools for retailers, both online and off. This move is also aimed at helping it compete with companies such as E.piphany and Personify...
News.Com: Audrey, 3Com's Net appliance, to make its entrance.
Audrey, a countertop unit with an 8-inch touch screen, is designed to be the first in a family of Internet appliances dubbed Ergo. Audrey uses a combination of the QNX and Palm operating systems. It runs on National Semiconductor's Geode processor.
The Guardian: Kerbango tango.
"It looks and works like a radio, but it's an internet radio, so instead of picking up just 20 stations, it could pick up 20,000," says James Gable, the president of Kerbango. "And it does it without using a personal computer!"
Newsbytes: Honeywell Ships WebPAD Wireless Net Access Device.
Internet addicts can surf the Web as they wander about their houses now that home-gadget maker Honeywell International Inc. is shipping its portable wireless WebPAD Internet access device.
InfoWorld: Jeff Hawkins, Handhelds.
To solve the problem, Hawkins the realist found and interviewed as many Newton owners as he could. "We watched the failure of products like the Newton and asked users, 'why were you disappointed and what were you hoping it [would] do?' That was the real important question."
October 13, 2000
Publish: Build a better buggy whip.
Christopher Locke. The deeper point is not this specific history lesson, but what it suggests about similar mistakes companies are making today–reinventing buggy whips to spur on Model Ts. The most dangerous of these mistakes is continuing to equate publishing with broadcast.
Financial Times: Profile: Web's watchful parent.
His focus on the community (again and again he returns to the phrase "the common good") is at odds with the commercial focus of today's web. On a crowded planet, Mr Berners-Lee's centralised design makes the "unique resource" difficult to parcel out equitably.
ZDNN: Ford spends big on web spin.
The Ford ad banners have proliferated since Sept. 18, when 6.5 million of Bridgestone's Firestone tires, many of them on Ford cars, were recalled. Clicks take viewers to a tire recall site that gives Ford's "official" view of events.
SJ Mercury: Judge allows case against spam blacklist to proceed.
A Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge ruled Thursday that a New Hampshire company could pursue its claims against a local anti-spam organization, saying the company's allegation that it was damaged by being listed as a spammer has some merit.
Forbes: Amazon tastes its own Patent Medicine.
Should the Patent Office decide in OpenTV's favor, Amazon could be forced to either pay licensing fees for one-click shopping or abandon it altogether. Ironically, that's the same position Amazon has been trying to put Barnesandnoble.com into for the past year.
NY Times: Internet Law Heats Up.
Night classes at law schools are notoriously hard to fill, but Schwartz' Internet Law course on Thursday evenings is a popular subject for full-time and evening students at Brooklyn Law School, which is celebrating its centennial this academic year.
Forbes: Take My Server-Please!
The big guys have been growing faster than the market by stealing business from second-tier companies like Silicon Graphics. But now, to maintain their high growth rates, the leaders are turning on one other.
The Economist: The wireless gamble.
Although managers speak smoothly of knowing their business and of doing their sums before bidding in spectrum auctions, investors are becoming edgy. Shares in most big telecoms companies have tumbled as fears have grown and debts have mounted.
Wired News: Clinton: Find Me 3G Bandwith.
In response to a report touting the promises of third generation wireless technology, President Clinton issued an executive memorandum Friday urging federal agencies to work together to identify spectrum that can be used to implement 3G networks.
Forbes: AT&T Scours For New Revenue.
The company is throwing out big ideas, from international mergers to spinoffs, trying to see what will stick in the market. Still, its stock keeps slipping. AT&T is most recently rumored to be experimenting with its broadband pricing, considering sharing revenue from transactions carried out via its DSL services.
October 14, 2000
Advertising Age: 3-D or not 3-D that is the question.
Top dogs at Bombay Co., Home Depot and Target Stores' Target.com echoed that sentiment at a National Retail Federation conference late last month. They told attendees at the San Diego gathering about their lack of enthusiasm for adding 3-D and streaming video options to their sites.
Advertising Age: Sam's Club streams big-ticket test.
Buying pearls, diamonds and other high-price items is not typically associated with the likes of Sam's Club. But this membership-based, discount store chain and Wal-Mart Stores division would like them to be and executives said they hope streaming media will do the trick.
Advertising Age: Latest Web strategy spreads Levi content.
Levi Strauss & Co. is experimenting with an Internet marketing approach that refashions the World Wide Web with the emphasis on "Wide." In a new fall campaign for its high-end Silver Tab line, Levi Strauss plans to develop more than a dozen Web sites that interweave stories of the journey of three fictitious Americans...
Washington Post: FTC, AOL Remain Apart as Merger Deadline Nears.
Federal Trade Commission attorneys are preparing court documents to block America Online Inc.'s takeover of Time Warner Inc., as the two sides remain apart on the exact language of a guarantee allowing rivals access to the combined company's high-speed Internet service.
ZDNN: Who's the fattest site of them all?
But new data from Byte Level Research suggests the median weight, determined by the number of kilobytes (KB) of data on a homepage, is still nearly twice what a lean, mean Web site should be. The median weight now sits at 89KB.
October 15, 2000
Useit.Com: Request Marketing.
The Web works in the opposite direction of permission marketing: from the user to the website. It is the ultimate customer-driven medium: he or she who clicks the mouse controls everything. It is time to recognize this fact and embed it in Internet marketing strategy.
The Register: This music will self destruct in 5 plays: RIAA looks to the future.
The RIAA tries to pitch its system as a positive move for "future on-line music commerce," but there's a more ominous quote a little further down the food chain: "Very soon, licence terms will be associated with the digital information asset itself, and content protection technology will require that consumers comply with those terms."
Publish: Designers confront the challenges of digital convergence.
Several months after that meeting, prominent thinkers in the design world continue to disagree about which c-word better describes the future of design, but nearly all of them say they’ve already noticed a fundamental shift in how they work from day to day.
ZDNN: An outsider looks in on ICANN.
What makes Mueller-Maguhn stand out among the freshmen class of at-large ICANN board members is his past and present vocation. He's a hacker, and a proud hacker at that. He's perhaps the most visible member of the Hamburg-based group Chaos Computer Club.
October 16, 2000
Industry Standard: This Is Only a Test.
But the established entertainment companies are not learning what the folks at Yahoo know implicitly: The media application that gives the viewer control – and turns the viewer into more than merely a viewer – is the one that will succeed.
Salon: ICANN-oclast.
Q&A with Karl Auerbach. Well, ICANN is moving into a realm where knowledge of technology is actually going to make a difference. And I know the technology. For example, all this business about top-level domains and how many the Net can support...
Inside: Are SDMI Technologies All Hacked? Chiariglione Says No One Knows Yet.
As members of the Secure Digital Music Initiative, or SDMI, prepared for their October meeting in Los Angeles on Friday afternoon, executive director Leonardo Chiariglione had some harsh words for those claiming an early victory for the hackers...
Business 2.0: Darwin, Linux, and Radiation.
Clay Shirky. So it is with Linux–after a decade of computers acting as either clients or servers, new classes of devices are now being invented almost weekly–phones, consoles, PDAs–and only Linux is adaptable enough to work on most of them.
Interactive Week: Deja Puts Sale Up For Discussion.
Another dot-com, this time Deja.com, is seeking shelter from the Internet economy by way of a merger. The New York company's business units - its longstanding Deja News Usenet discussion business and its newer Precision Buying Service buying guide - will be sold separately...
USA Today: Court: Unsigned Net postings unprotected.
In a ruling that challenges online anonymity, a Florida appeals court declared Monday that Internet service providers must divulge the identities of people who post defamatory messages on the Internet.
Internet World: Deconstructing OpenTable.com.
Terry Swack and Mark Hurst. The business was founded on the concept of "allowing people to book tables the way they book airline tickets." Now I understand why I was asked to register and give credit card information! When was the last time you called a restaurant that required your personal info to hold a table?
Inside: Redesigned WSJ.com to 'Break Away' from Look of Print Version.
While the New York Times on Thursday unveiled a slightly tweaked NYTimes.com that still hews closely to the paper's print architecture, the Wall Street Journal is working on a redesign of WSJ.com that will sweep away many of the visual similarities to its newsstand edition.
Internet World: Mapquest's Mission.
Q&A with Kathy Kinney, Mapquest. We're going to try the advertising thing. And in the Business Locator, we're testing a preferential-listing type of model. Once you get into "lodging," if you want to be the first brand to be located, then that's a preferential listing that you pay for.
Interactive Week: Saffron Spices Up Searches.
Saffron introduced a type of decision-making software that mimics human learning. It understands context - something other forms of the personalization technology just don't get, said Dr. Manuel Aparicio, Saffron's co-founder and chief technology officer...
October 17, 2000
Marketing Computers: XX-Rated Dogma.
Michael Schrage. Oracle, AOL, Yahoo!, eBay, Microsoft, Schwab, Napster all succeed because giving people the media and means to create their own content is ultimately a better business than selling people content. Steve Case's best-ever line was about how AOL succeeds by selling its audience to itself.
Upside: NBCi sells off AllBusiness.com unit.
That strategy, however, failed to materialize, as NBCi got distracted by a host of other problems, including a sinking stock price, sluggish revenue and difficulty combining its myriad properties, which included Xoom.com and Snap.com.
Red Herring: Mastering Technology Management.
Q&A with Michael Schrage. Well, if you think a home page is more about unstructured databases than about personality, you may be right. But I doubt it. What I see is this tremendous business opportunity in creating content that lets people create content.
Red Herring: Nordstrom.com says execute, don't innovate.
A month and a half ago, his company launched a redesigned Web site, touting some new features, most notably live chat help, but largely things that already are de rigueur in e-commerce, such as improved search features, better graphics, and streamlined checkout.
SF Chronicle: 3Com's Countertop Computer Finally Arrives.
Skrzypczak also questioned the value of the built-in ``channels,'' which can be accessed with the knob. In addition to popular features like news, weather and sports, 3Com also plans to feature online retailers, such as Drugstore.com and Wine.com, on the dial.
The Register: SDMI was cracked, and is doomed: count on it.
Chiariglione's outburst to Inside is entirely consistent with this, and by a bizarre and miraculous coincidence the RIAA announced it was starting development of its own digital ID system on the day of the SDMI plenary meeting that did/didn't discuss the results of the tests.
NY Times: Questions on Net Anonymity.
Lawsuits to pierce the veil of anonymity online are increasingly common in the Internet age. But two advocacy groups involved in workplace and online issues, Public Citizen and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argue that the AK Steel request goes too far...
IBM Developer: The user experience.
Designers learned a great deal through 15 years of evolving the graphical user interface. It certainly isn't perfect, but its evolution has all but stopped. In many cases Web designers are repeating past sins when they blindly adopt GUI approaches for Web-based applications.
Business Week: Filling the E-Tailers' Gaps.
And increasingly, they're turning to small companies and startups like 4YourSoul.com for niche services aimed at boosting customer loyalty and making Web sites easier to navigate and more interactive.
Wired News: Gnutella Development Gnotted.
The open-source heir apparent to Napster may not survive long enough to claim the crown. Conflict from within the open-source family of developers creating Gnutella, and not its current technical difficulties, could be the file-sharing network's downfall.
October 18, 2000
Internet Week: On Call.
"But 10 or 11 hours is a lifetime in the Internet world and the customer might not want to wait," Morin says, which is where ServiceSoft's knowledge base helped out by guiding customers through the Web site so they could answer many of their own questions.
digitalMASS: Scent of scandal at domain name giant.
Stan Smith, an Alabama resident, is suing NSI, contending that it's abused its power. His attorney, Scott Powell, claims that Network Solutions is deliberately withholding expired names from the general pool with the intent to auction them, which he says violates the registrar's agreement with ICANN.
Newsbytes: As Of Next Week, MercuryCenter.com Goes Strictly Portal.
As of Oct. 24, visitors trying to visit MercuryCenter.com, the online version of the Silicon Valley newspaper the San Jose Mercury News, will be automatically redirected to the BayArea.com portal, part of Knight Ridder's 29-site Real Cities online network.
Inside: Valenti Shops for a Digital Czar and a Strategy to Go With Him.
At this point, apparently the play is three-pronged: Establish a global set of standards for digital film; continue efforts to establish secure distribution online and theatrically through encryption and watermarking; and launch a public education campaign...
eCompany: Dotcom Inferno: Money to Burn.
Just about every company that has ever launched a website can recite a litany of complaints: The work arrived five months late, the customers found the design confusing, the damn thing crashed 12 times a day, the checkout function lost people's information -- and on and on.
Forbes: Zaplet Snags $90 Million In Funding.
One logical path is to get Microsoft and Sun to customize and market the technology, says Tom Dwyer, an analyst with Boston-based Aberdeen Group. "Lotus will have to build their own unless [Zaplet's] patent will convince them to do a deal much like Microsoft licensed Java..."
BountyQuest: Our Vision and Our History.
Now, with BountyQuest, we invite you to make a difference. You or someone you know may be able to knock out one of the patents listed on our site. That will not only win you a reward, but also help other consumers as well as companies affected by the patent.
Computerworld: Study: Online sales stall at the checkout counter.
Online retail sales are projected to surpass the $9 billion mark this holiday season, but almost half of all Web shoppers could abandon their virtual shopping carts at the checkout counter if Web stores fail to simplify the online buying process.
NewMedia: The Internet Backbone, Part 1.
"Most of the new optical infrastructure is targeted at the business world," says Jim Slaby, an analyst at Giga Information Group. "The buildup is not designed to address the bottleneck in the public Internet. Carriers aren't interested in consumer bottlenecks."
EE Times: Thomson plans lighter, cheaper e-book systems.
Yuen and executives from Thomson Multimedia said they expect consumers will use Gemstar's e-book format to get secure, high-speed access to reading content for future e-books and to services such as crossword puzzles and word games.
October 19, 2000
Salon: Cracked or not? The SDMI saga continues.
Our source replied, giving us even greater detail about what is happening behind SDMI's closed doors. We have decided to publish our insider's response, verbatim, along with additional responses from both Chiariglione and Matt Oppenheim, senior V.P. of business and legal affairs for the RIAA.
Editor & Publisher: News Sites Still Lack Interactivity.
Journalists, professors and media critics who gathered last week at the University of Minnesota's Institute for New Media Studies discussed solutions for the interactivity black hole at news sites.
Wired News: Cashing In on Bogus Patents.
But on Wednesday, O'Reilly and Bezos officially went into business together -- the patent-reform business, no less. The erstwhile adversaries are jointly funding a new site called BountyQuest, which will, among other things, pay big cash rewards to people who dig up "prior art" that helps debunk controversial patents.
Fairfax IT: Adobe.com domain name relocates to China.
Xiamen, China website administrator Hill Lee told Fairfax IT via email today that he registered the adobe.com domain name as a “joke” against the ICANN, the United States based domain name system management authority, after his website's domain name was hijacked last month.
Business Week: Service, Please.
This year, eluxury.com Inc., a San Francisco-based, high-end goods site, has spent an estimated $2 million or more on new software that scans its warehouse every seven minutes to update inventory records. That way no customer is even offered the chance to buy an item out of stock.
SF Chronicle: HyperMedia Done In by Market Drop.
San Mateo's HyperMedia Communications, which produced the Web publication NewMedia.com, is closing its doors, throwing 26 people out of work. Richard Landry, HyperMedia's chief executive, said the firm was essentially a victim of the stock market.
USA Today: Society grappling with info overload.
"Today, individuals are creating and distributing huge amounts of information. It's a huge revolution and a true democratic movement," says Peter Lyman, a professor at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems and co-author of the study with the school's dean, Hal Varian.
Wired News: The Science of E-Publishing.
"Scientists, physicians and the public are becoming impatient with the delay factor built into traditional review and publishing," said Lundberg, who is also a former editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Red Herring: There's no computer like no computer.
Mr. Russell is heading up IBM's Planet Blue, a $180 million, 45-person research project to develop the concept of pervasive computing. As one of the world's largest purveyors of computer equipment and software, the company has a stake in finding the future direction of the technology industry.
EE Times: AT&T Labs engineers imagine next-gen vision for kids.
If Stuart Gannes and a group of engineers at AT&T Labs have their way, the next hot wireless communication gizmo might be a toy — a ball-shaped, radio-controlled plaything that's also a wireless videophone.
Editor & Publisher: MSNBC.com, Yale Will Study Online Polling.
The two groups have developed an in-depth political survey about the upcoming Presidential election that will be conducted online and through random-dial telephone calls. Results will be compared to better understand the differences between the two polling methods.
October 20, 2000
Salon: Keep the customer dissatisfied.
Scott Rosenberg. Either e-commerce doesn't deliver much in the way of reducing friction, adding convenience and lowering prices, in which case there's no reason to embrace it; or it does manage to do so, in which case the consumer's gain is the industry's loss.
NY Times: Company Challenges Law Banning Net Tobacco Sales.
The company is hoping to take advantage of a major trend in Internet-related court cases: the increasing tendency of courts to rule that a state's attempt to regulate Internet activities within its borders runs afoul of the Constitution's commerce clause.
Fortune: After the Buzz Is Gone.
Ever wonder what happens to yesterday's news? It's an odd sort of question, but one well worth asking. Technology, like entertainment, is driven by buzz and surprise. But last year's buzz can likely be this year's flub.
SJ Mercury: Adobe's Web traffic detoured to China by `Net joyride'.
Adobe spent a harried couple of days working with Network Solutions Inc., the Virginia-based registrar of Web addresses, to try to regain control of the site. By Thursday afternoon, the site was restored, the e-mail system was on its way back and officials were trying to figure out just what had happened.
News.Com: Employee data posted on Living.com yanked after complaints.
The court-appointed trustee handling Living.com's bankruptcy reversed herself this week, removing court documents that were posted on the company's Web site that revealed employees' salaries and stock options and listed thousands of customers' names and home addresses.
Good Experience: Why 3D Shopping Makes No Sense.
But now that 3D vendors have better compression technology, and some customers are getting online with faster modems, it finally makes sense to put 3D on the sites. The obvious error in this argument is that it is centered on the technology.
Wired News: Coming Soon: Pay-Per-Game.
Yummy Interactive announced agreements this week with leading video-game publishers Infogrames, Activision, Ripcord Games and Eidos that will allow broadband users to download files from Yummy's site to play stand-alone or multi-player games.
Internet Week: Deliver On Time, Or Else.
E-retailers fined by the Federal Trade Commission last holiday season for failing to meet their delivery promises say they're ready this time around. But no two strategies are alike, underscoring the complexity of fulfilling online orders.
Computerworld: Wal-Mart.com continuing to work on Web-site renovations.
Online retailer WalMart.com's ongoing pre-holiday season Web site renovations are taking the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company longer than anticipated. The site, which temporarily closed Oct. 3 to allow its online e-commerce platform to be replaced with a newly acquired and improved system, was tentatively set to reopen Oct. 17...
October 21, 2000
InfoWorld: No free speech @Home for critic who posts service documents to newsgroup.
...it was no surprise @Home would be hypersensitive -- the company has suffered from leaked documents before. Last year's notorious "upload rate cap" came to the attention of most customers, and the press, only after a document from @Home to the cable companies was posted on the Internet.
Advertising Age: P&G weds data, sales.
Amid a sea of corporate Web sites offering mainly dry company information, Procter & Gamble Co. is trying to reinvent PG.com as a marketing tool that incorporates marketing, research, e-commerce and customer service.
Advertising Age: CyberCritique of Procter & Gamble Co.
Brand-centric microsites could work well for the brands. But this notion of a site that sits on top of all the other sites and sends users back and forth between the mothership and the pods, no. It's confusing. There are too many intermediate steps.
Washington Post: AOL Sends Mixed Signals on Instant Messaging.
Until now, AOL executives have played down the economic potential of instant messaging in response to inquiries from federal regulators who are concerned about AOL's dominance in this fast-growing field. But in a private dispute with another ISP last year, the Dulles-based company was not reticent about asserting its financial interests.
Industry Standard: Will Xerox Shut the PARC?
But should the PARC be sold off, that type of research, which is focused on general theories and problems, not on inventing specific new products for the marketplace, would end. Especially if, as reports have it, the group is sold to venture capitalists.
Computerworld: FTC to study software-licensing practices.
The looming state-by-state passage of the controversial UCITA software-licensing law is prompting the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to take a hard look at the software industry's bedrock practice of selling software through licenses instead of an outright purchase of the product.
October 22, 2000
Web Informant: When you really want to read this email.
Spam is a way of life these days. And while most of us can't do much about it, I recently ran into the opposite problem: when you really want to get particular messages, you might not be able to because of anti-spam measures and other new "improvements" that various email service providers have implemented...
Washington Post: E-Commerce the Play.
The failure of WebHouse, a highly publicized offshoot of one the best-known Internet retailers, the airline-ticket seller Priceline.com, marks the end of the first stage of electronic commerce--the high-spirited, free-spending, deep-discounting, we're-making-it-up-as-we-go-along age.
Networld World: DNS security upgrade promises a safer 'Net.
An emerging technology promises to improve the security of the Internet's infrastructure by preventing hackers from hijacking Web traffic and redirecting it to bogus sites. The new security mechanism, dubbed DNSSEC, plugs a hole in the Internet's DNS that hackers have exploited to spoof Web sites.
Interactive Week: P&G Breaks From Tradition.
The branding leader says it is striving to become a "dot-com-bined economy" business, which Mark Schar, vice president of Global iVentures and Consumer & Market Knowledge at P&G, described recently as a company that offers "products and services that are information-enabled or enhanced."
October 23, 2000
Industry Standard: AOL's Rough Riders.
"In the beginning, you're like, 'Hey, we've looked into this space and you're the best. If you hook up with us, you can really kick ass,'" says ex-AOL dealmaker Phillip Zakas, who delivered the pitch many times. "I could be saying that to three different companies at once, but it would always work."
News.Com: AOL offers glimpse of music strategy.
Web portals struggling to harmonize their online music plans are closely watching moves by America Online and Time Warner to create a music subscription service, although the strategy may be more difficult for free sites to pull off, analysts say.
Wired News: Online Music's Strange Bedfellows.
But if their behavior is any indication, Nullsoft's half-dozen star programmers seem determined to keep their hacker spirit intact, scripting a growing series of freely distributed software. And for now, in public at least, AOL seems nonplussed by Nullsoft's antics.
Salon: Who ya gonna call? Patent busters!
Q&A with Charles Cella, CEO of BountyQuest. Really, though, we see [our own patent] as a way of putting it to the test. In our case, if someone knocks it out, it validates our business model and if they can't knock it out, it proves our patent so we're happy either way.
Interactive Week: AT&T Broadband Aims For Greater Market Share.
AT&T Broadband, the nation's biggest cable television company, is exploring setting up deals with Web and interactive TV merchants. AT&T would charge its partners for delivering customers to them via icons on the screen, special promotions and other methods.
Industry Standard: The Revolution That Failed.
But long before those efforts, AT&T launched a secret Internet project, wider in scope than anything the company has ever attempted. The project, known by the code name Geoplex, was designed to build a universal software platform for the Internet.
The Register: Senator Hatch's Napster Epiphany.
Senator Hatch, a decent man was only too willing to lend a hand in this seemingly noble venture. Two years would pass before the Senator would grasp the slick way in which the entertainment industry had made him their patsy.
Boston Globe: Cultural revolution.
Shaheen, mellow and thoughtful, is in synch with Greenspun and the talented collection of programmers he has assembled at ArsDigita, but he's also aware that the company needs discipline - not to mention a sales, marketing, and business development organization.
USA Today: Study: Magazines shouldn't rush online.
The McKinsey study recommends that most publishers spend no more than $275,000 to develop and $270,000 a year to maintain what it calls "companion" sites. sites that seem to exemplify this type include those by Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and Country Living.
Wired News: Hacker Site Raises GM's Hackles.
In recent weeks the magazine has received letters threatening legal action from General Motors, NBC and Verizon, demanding the hacker quarterly turn over a series of rude domain names it has registered.
Computerworld: Companies Fight Back Against Internet Attacks.
"We get requests for that all the time," said J. Christopher Racich, director of high-tech investigations at Kroll Associates in Washington. "But it's not something you want to do if you're just aggravated [about the messages], because the investigation can be very expensive" - say, $30,000 to $40,000.
October 24, 2000
Newsweek: The ‘Semantic Web’.
Q&A with Tim Berners-Lee. At the moment the data is processed for human consumption, and if it is to be reprocessed [for machines] it first has to be undressed into raw data. That is very cumbersome. The Semantic Web says, “Let’s get the data on the Web with its meaning.”
SJ Mercury: Groove should do wonders for peer-to-peer computing.
Dan Gillmor. It's a collaboration tool for small groups of people who work at the edge of large enterprises -- the people who do the real work -- and across organizations. It's a tool for families and friends who want to communicate more easily and efficiently. It's instant-messaging on steroids.
NY Times: Lotus Notes Developer to Introduce a New Internet Tool.
One of the first consumer-oriented software programs to take full advantage of the Clinton administration's decision to drop national security restrictions on encryption technology, Mr. Ozzie's program will permit any group of users to create a secure and private channel...
XML Magazine: A New Groove.
Q&A with Ray Ozzie. The platform we're building serves individuals at the edge of the organization, as opposed to systems at the center. The tools that people are using successfully at the edge of the organizations—e-mail and telephone—are self-empowering tools.
ZDNN: Messaging group won't pick a favorite.
Despite its withdrawal from the process, the IMPP working group did narrow the field of proposals to three finalists. In addition, the working group has been discussing which pieces of proposals to include in the final draft that will be submitted to the IETF...
ZDNN: Secure digital music hits a sour note.
On Monday, a group of researchers from Princeton University, Rice University, and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center announced that they broke four test watermarking technologies the creators hoped would make music identifiable.
Internet Week: E-Commerce Searches Get Smarter.
When site visitors can't find the information they seek, one of four things generally happens: They fire off an e-mail to a help desk, phone in with the inquiry, initiate an online chat session, or leave frustrated. Each carries a considerable cost, according to Forrester Research.
Salon: How stupid can an e-mail program be?
The feature bears some graphic resemblance to a slot machine, with iconic drawings of vegetables instead of fruit. A new column appears in all e-mail logs alerting the user to "the level of offensiveness" of messages by the appearance of "one, two, or three red chili peppers."
Inside: Even Britney's Imagemakers Can't Make the Internet Obey.
Jason Chervokas and Tom Watson. Whatever the business reasons behind the lawsuit -- hardly the first in the litigious world of media creation and distribution -- the case against BritneySpears.com is another chapter in the ongoing story over the control and marketing of celebrity on the Internet.
Industry Standard: How Well Do You Stream?
It is a universally acknowledged truth that slow Web pages inspire surfers to go elsewhere. But how long will Internet users wait for a site's streaming-media files before they bail? Keynote Systems hopes to answer that question with the first-ever streaming-media performance index.
October 25, 2000
NY Times: When Competitors Are Partners, How Bare Do They Dare?
In this world, knowledge -- information, expertise and more -- is not just power. It is an asset to be appropriated, refined, enhanced and then sold. No wonder the demand is high among Internetworked partners to bare it all.
NY Times: A Glass of Wine Helps Show What Buyers Want.
Research at M.I.T. has included what makes consumers trust, or distrust, commercial Web sites; how to design sites to make them easier to navigate; and how to convert more visitors into buyers by analyzing data on how people click through a site.
Editor & Publisher: Is Now the Time to Start Charging for Your Content?
Steve Outing. The business model of offering free content and supporting that expense largely by advertising and e-commerce revenues is clearly suspect these days. Publishers are looking for alternatives — and one that's looking good to a growing number is to charge for content.
digitalMASS: "I read it online, so it must be true".
Katz wouldn't necessarily argue with that last statement. But to him, new media have already proved themselves by their success. Sites like Slashdot, he contends, are enjoying increasing popularity even as the old media attain abysmal credibility ratings in public opinion polls.
NY Times: Spinners' Web Weapons: T-Chips and Dark Sites.
The nature of the World Wide Web in some ways opens the floodgates. Companies like Edelman, the largest independently owned public relations firm in the world, are using the Internet to generate positive buzz and to respond to the negative kind.
Wired News: Usenet Sale: Sounds to Silence?
It is the Usenet archive of Deja.com -- and its fate is now in question because it is about to be sold. More to the point, a change in fortune for the biggest Usenet archive on the Net raises the question: Does the archive have a secure future?
News.Com: Multiple Web personalities skew registration numbers.
At the very least, that means registered user numbers are wildly out of proportion with the number of people who actually use those sites as their primary Web bases. At worst, it could give advertisers more reason to take a cynical view of the Internet numbers game...
Red Herring: Italy's 3G auctions flop.
The Italian 3G auctions may have dramatically closed with far less money than the government had expected, but they demonstrate how much greed surrounds Europe's auctions for third-generation mobile licenses.
USA Today: Study suggests Net does not create isolation.
But the Internet has only been a popular communication tool for the past five years, cautions UCLA researcher Jeffrey Cole. Cole, the lead researcher of ''Surveying the Digital Future,'' believes the Web will have profound long-term effects that most users can't yet detect.
ZDNN: U.S. crypto winners -- Belgian heroes.
The last thing the two longtime friends and research partners are lacking these days is attention. They have become heroes at the Catholic University of Leuven, where both studied for their doctorate degrees in cryptography.
October 26, 2000
Upside: Will pricing innovations on the Web survive?
Companies that use complicated pricing models like iDerive run the risk that customers will have little interest in trying to understand these schemes. Academic research has long told us that complexity in any aspect of innovation hurts the adoption and diffusion of both products and ideas.
eCompany: Multimedia Takes Center Stage at Internet World.
Here's a sampling of the technologies that several companies are touting this week. And I’m afraid I’m going to need to use the word 3-D environment to explain some of what I’m seeing. Forgive me. But the new technologies are supposed to let Web designers create "immersive 3-D environments."
ZDNN: The 3-D Internet -- will it take off?
The list goes on -- Eddie Bauer, Palm and The Sharper Image all have 3-D on their sites as well. Is 3-D on the Web becoming a reality? The half-dozen 3-D creating companies attending the Fall Internet World show here are certainly banking on it.
Internet Week: Manufacturers Preach Teamwork.
Makers of more tailored products are now discovering a very different way to harness the power of the medium. They're using the Web to orchestrate the design of the products themselves, well before they hit the assembly line.
MSNBC: Dirt in the domain name game.
ICANN’s proceedings and board meetings have only recently been held out for public accountability and scrutiny. And that was a begrudging concession to a ground swell of public criticism. Then just last week we learn that a crucial ICANN policy committee was created and is meeting secret.
Wired News: Streamlining Domain Squabbles.
That's where Domain Name Law Reports and several nonprofit groups come in. Thanks to volunteer efforts, sorely needed legal tools are being developed to grapple with the mass of UDRP decisions. And in contrast to traditional sources of legal information, the new tools are free to use.
FEED Magazine: Birth of a Station.
Mark Pesce. We're less than two years away from reaching that target, and there's no sign that things are slowing down. Quite the contrary. The PlayStation2, rather than being just another "cool" video-game platform, is actually the birth of a new kind of home computer...
News.Com: New software forces members to AOL home page.
America Online's newly released AOL 6.0 promises to be the most comprehensive version yet, but the company seems to have nixed one feature from its Web browser: a home page button. That means AOL subscribers cannot set their own default home pages...
Boston Globe: Hackers go one up.
Indeed, Felten is convinced that the SDMI approach has little chance of success. Each watermarked music file is a guidebook for potential pirates, offering clues about how to beat the system. Turn loose a few thousand man-hours of intelligence on the problem, and somebody's bound to solve it.
Washington Post: Amazon Faces Informal SEC Inquiry.
Officials at the Internet retailer said the regulatory agency had questions about how it accounted for shares received from partner companies in exchange for services, such as featuring another company's Web site on Amazon's home page.
NY Times: Trying to Make Package Delivery as Easy as Shopping Online.
To help solve the problem of that last mile (and to save a trip to the post office with a yellow Delivery Attempt note in hand or the irritation of playing tag with the courier service), a company called zBox has created what it calls a "smart home-delivery appliance."
October 27, 2000
ZDNN: Copyright Office backs content holders.
The Copyright Office, part of the Library of Congress, decided to allow only two narrow exemptions to a new federal law that makes it illegal for Web users to hack through the barriers that copyright holders erect around books, films, music and other content released online.
MIT Technology Review: Search Us, Says Google.
Q&A with Sergei Bring and Larry Page. We have a six-person research group that's chartered to do things that are one year away and that may or may not work. We are on a quest to build the ultimate search engine. We think it will be a smart tool that understands exactly what you want...
Online Journalism Review: Can You Trust Online Polling?
Other pollsters, like the Gallup Organization, have been experimenting with online polling by first contacting potential respondents via telephone. If interviewees have access to the Web, they are then asked to complete polls online. But Harris has conducted its election polls almost entirely online.
MIT Technology Review: Toppling the Desktop.
Perhaps the next big step in the everyday computer interface will be in the direction of more language-based interaction, achieving much of the power of the arcane Unix command line with most of the simplicity of simple Web queries.
Computerworld: Users look to FTC for help on reining in UCITA.
Horizon Blue Cross/Blue Shield of New Jersey is located in a state that hasn't adopted the new UCITA software licensing law, but that doesn't mean the Newark-based insurer doesn't have to deal with the controversial measure.
NY Times: Barnes & Noble to Coordinate Online Sales.
In a long-awaited effort to coordinate support for its online spinoff, Barnes & Noble is installing barnesandnoble.com terminals in its 550 superstores and starting a joint membership discount program to encourage its biggest customers to shop at its online store.
Inside: Party on! Modo's Dead but Launch Event Is Live Tonight at Hollywood's Les Deux.
This one may set a standard for new economy flame-outs: Scout Electromedia, the maker of the Modo lifestyle pager, will hold a launch party tonight at Les Deux Caf€ in Los Angeles, despite the fact that the company ceased operations Tuesday after less than two months of selling the device.
Wired News: TRUSTe Suit Spies Bogus Seals.
TRUSTe filed the suit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington against Underwriters Digital Research, the parent company of two websites TRUSTe said displayed the seal illegally on their pages.
Computerworld: EarthLink antispam measure trips some users.
Some subscribers to EarthLink Inc.'s network were caught off guard this week when it shut down inbound communications through two commonly used communications ports in what the Internet service provider said was an attempt to stop spam from getting through to its members.
October 28, 2000
Forbes: We Know Where You Live.
The companies are racing to compile databases that match up the 4.3 billion possible Internet locations with actual locations. They can get as general as country and metropolitan region, or potentially as specific as zip codes and even exact street addresses.
SJ Mercury: Web site counters draw fire over wide discrepancies.
Britannica is one of many Web site operators that are increasingly concerned they aren't getting enough credit from third-party monitors for traffic on their sites. Many, grappling with the dot-com downturn, feel as though they are swimming upstream against such data...
Wired: GUIs Just Want to Have Fun.
Now, a growing community of graphic artists, coders, and obsessive users is pushing the limits of personalization to bring control, not just content, to the edge of the network. Take charge of your computer, they say. Don't let it be held hostage to group-think. Set it free. Give it a new skin.
Wired: The Debriefing: John Seely Brown.
Point-and-click browsers are an extension of the desktop metaphor - a very disorienting metaphor as you surf the world. How do we design ways to stay oriented with the world, so the user gets centered? The best example is the hyperbolic tree browser we built...
eWeek: Macromedia CEO finds success in community.
Q&A with Rob Burgess. I groan a lot of times at our own site and at other sites. Flash can be used for good or evil. We're trying to enunciate for the industry best practices and a lot of lessons we've learned. The laws of survival also help with that as well. Really well-designed Web sites win.
October 29, 2000
Fortune: Building a Better Web Experience.
Nielsen thinks that too many marketing and design execs come from the "one-way" world of TV, radio, and print, and just don't get the interactive design that's necessary for a successful Web project. "And the higher the exec, the worse his instincts are," laments Nielsen.
NY Times: Restaurants Online: Not Yet Today's Special.
Since Mr. Romano joined the Foodline network early last month, the online rush has been minimal. In fact, it has been zero. But Mr. Romano says he is not discouraged. "We've just scratched the surface with the Internet," he said. "The way the world is evolving, I guess you have to be part of it."
law.com: Long Odds For Software Law.
The chips are down for software manufacturers. What once seemed a sure bet -- passage of a controversial bill that would give the industry almost absolute power in determining the terms of product sales -- is languishing in statehouses across the country.
Web Informant: Block them lawyers.
First off, classicvolvo.com isn't one of those sites that tries to masquerade as any "official" Volvo site: you can't mistake the home-grown feel of the pages, the car enthusiast feel throughout. This is as far from a corporate site as you can get.
SJ Mercury: Activists extend reach of new media.
Dan Gillmor. The non-profit Media Development Loan Fund, and its affiliates are doing it with money, training and equipment. Assistance ranges from loans for printing presses to creating software for online reporters and editors.
Village Voice: All Hands Off the Keyboard!
DEN and Pseudo made a mistake when they took an "all hands off the keyboard" approach, asking viewers to stop everything else to watch. The Internet is an absolutely frigid medium, in which the end user is not a recipient of media messages, but a participant in them.
Salon: Nude amateur hour.
Guided by a distinctive editorial "voice," user-generated content can also be a powerful method for building strong communities of virile viral marketers. An as on so many other fronts on the Net, the adult sites are leading the way.
Washington Post: Advertising On Internet Doesn't Click.
It's not only Web surfers who are losing interest. Internet start-up companies, which have bought the bulk of online ads, are increasingly selective about where they put their dwindling dollars. Meanwhile, the major off-line brands aren't promoting their wares on the Internet quite as much as expected.
October 30, 2000
NY Times: Web Merchants Make Good on Hype.
It is a bittersweet paradox that now, as the e-tailing morgue fills up, industry survivors and the nearly dead are actually starting to deliver on their promise of easy shopping. Take Web site design. Entering the holiday season, many e-commerce sites are revamping their navigation systems to help shoppers...
Business Week: Will Walmart.com Get It Right This Time?
Walmart.com Creative Director Erik Hagerman says he took his cues from Wal-Mart's easy-to-use supercenters, with their wide aisles and plentiful signage. ''This is not a terribly sexy home page,'' he says, ''but it will load like lightning.''
Contra Costa Times: Online businesses use coding to trap Web surfers.
Pick up the gear of the week at Abercrombie & Fitch's Web site, but don't expect to be able to throw your browser into reverse. Shop Macy's online -- but be prepared to stay awhile. Your back button won't get you out of this Web site if you're using a Netscape browser.
NY Times: Lessons in Spam: A Nordstrom E-Mail Goes Astray.
Nordstrom is a prestigious retailer that prides itself on customer service. But an e-mail marketing campaign last week for its Web site, Nordstrom.com, illustrates the pitfalls of relaxing standards on protecting customer information.
ClickZ: Are You at War With Your Customers?
Online, millions of customers are just beginning to clear their throats for the first time. They're discovering that they do have a voice and that they are connected and can aggregate their opinions with millions of others.
Useit.Com: Flash: 99% Bad.
Although multimedia has its role on the Web, current Flash technology tends to discourage usability for three reasons: it makes bad design more likely, it breaks with the Web's fundamental interaction style, and it consumes resources that would be better spent enhancing a site's core value.
Industry Standard: Primedia and About.com: Wallflowers Meet Their Match.
Primedia, which owns hundreds of niche publications, hopes to turbocharge its online presence with this deal. About, which has 700 niche sites for consumers, will benefit from Primedia's big guns – such as its 1,600-person sales force...
Wired News: Coming Soon: Fiber to the Home.
Vaughn's new company -- initially named Western Integrated Networks and later shortened to Winfirst -- is building what its founder believes will be the most extensive network in the United States of fiber-optic cables connected directly to the home.
News.Com: Kyocera to debut revamped Palm-cell phone hybrid.
Now, Japan-based Kyocera appears to have solved some of those issues. Photos of the prototype and a draft of the user's guide were posted to the Federal Communications Commission Web site. The Web addresses were posted Friday to Silicon Investor message boards.
TechWeb: Librarians Slam Digital Copyright Ruling.
Lynne Bradley, director of government relations for the American Library Association, said librarians are concerned that the ruling will severely limit the public's ability to quote from digital materials, especially those that are not published in nondigital formats.
October 31, 2000
Industry Standard: Government Property.
Lawrence Lessig. Walker's rhetoric betrays a deep confusion – though no doubt a confusion created by lawyers. Patents are a form of intellectual property. "Intellectual property" sounds like "property." And "property," as any red-blooded American knows, is sacred.
Business 2.0: Wireless Auction Follies.
Clay Shirky. This fall, Sweden will also assign its wireless spectrum to telecom companies eager to offer next-generation (or 3G) wireless services, but instead of emulating Britain's budget-maximizing strategy, it opted for a seemingly wasteful beauty pageant...
Industry Standard: Let the Music Play: Bertelsmann and Napster Come Together.
Bertelsmann, the German media and publishing giant, broke ranks today with the major record labels by announcing a strategic alliance with Napster, the song-sharing company it had been suing. Together, the two companies will develop the file-swapping service's commercial potential.
Boston Globe: Assessing the virtual newsroom.
In a broad sense, the stereotypes are true. The online culture, though not monolithic, is freer, faster, and feistier. Traditional journalism, though evolving, is more tethered to newsroom standards, structure, and stodginess.
Computerworld: Walmart.com site back online after 28-day overhaul.
Among the highlights are the use of file folder "tabs" to differentiate product categories in order to make it easier for users to find different products, Ladd said. The addition of clearer information on pricing, warranty details, the country of origin for products...
InfoWorld: Ray Ozzie: The creator of Lotus Notes and CEO of Groove Networks touts the benefits of peer-to-peer computing.
I'm really big on things like Blackberry pagers; I think they're great devices. But I actually think the real interesting stuff is [a device that falls] somewhere between the laptop and the PDA, maybe something in the form of a tablet with a foldout keyboard.
Industry Standard: The Changing of ICANN's Guard.
The changing of the guard for ICANN will come after the group, which was designated by the Clinton administration to manage the Internet's name and address system in 1998, is scheduled to select several new top level domains from among dozens of proposals.
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