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December 1, 2000
Salon: Unchaining the Net.
Call it "the free-network movement" -- a bubbled-up-from-the-underground effort to spread high-bandwidth wireless connectivity everywhere. In their attempt to create a user-generated alternative to a top-down industry -- in this case, telecom -- initiatives...
NY Times: New Role for the Supreme Court's Web Site.
Bombarded by what is sure to be exhaustive coverage of today's Supreme Court battle most people will likely never notice a quiet but significant aspect of the election case -- the sudden and unprecedented effort by the high court to make its proceedings more open to the public via the Web.
SJ Mercury: Short Take: Quokka CEO on the ever-changing role of content on the Web.
With broadband, I think text will continue to play a big role. If you look at our broadband stuff, in a lot of it we don't even use video. Video in many ways is an incredibly inefficient way to get across a story. It takes a while to get it. Once you finally see it, it's jittery and you look at it for five minutes and a guy might say six words.
Strange Connections: The Ethics of Information Architecture.
Peter Morville. I'm the last person to tell you exactly how to save the world. Instead, I hope to present a framework that illuminates the unique set of (6) ethical dimensions faced by information architects, so you can make your own decisions. In short, I'll help you to see the invisible.
SF Chronicle: Technology Medal Honors Man of Mouse.
But Douglas C. Engelbart, who is to receive the nation's highest award for technology today, is convinced that the revolution he sparked in the 1960s is in its early stages. "We're probably only using about 10 or 15 percent of what could be achieved in the next five years," said Engelbart, an Atherton resident.
Business 2.0: Five Questions With...Esther Dyson, Chairman of Edventure Holdings.
You don't change my fundamental nature with technology, but you can give me a new capability. People have been lazy about their privacy online, but when it comes to cell phones, you're just going to have to be more practical or you're going to be getting called all the time.
eCompany: Radically New E-mail Marketing Campaigns.
But what's most serious, broadband-enhanced messages eliminate two of the most valuable aspects of e-mail -- its speed and its asynchronicity. I can read text messages whenever I want to, skimming some and reading others in detail, often squeezing a few messages in between meetings or phone calls.
Red Herring: X.com swerves to avoid Net bank pileup.
The accident, which occurred this past spring, is an apt metaphor for X.com, which may be headed for a crash with reality. Last week, it abandoned Mr. Musk's founding idea, shutting down its ailing Internet bank. It has burned through roughly $110 million of $175 million in venture backing.
December 2, 2000
Internet World: The Post-Spider World.
After bemoaning the sorry state of Internet search engines, I promised to show how peer-to-peer systems and metadata could provide a viable alternative to Web spidering. In the interest of full disclosure, the model I’m outlining here is something I’ve been cobbling together for about 18 months.
Inside: Salon.com Biggest Winner in First Online Journalism Awards.
The awards program, launched in May 2000 by the Online News Association, is administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which also handles the Pulitzer Prize, the National Magazine Awards and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards for broadcast journalism.
Industry Standard: Rumblings About AOL-Time Warner's EarthLink Deal.
The secrecy has prompted a round of conspiracy mongering among EarthLink's smaller rivals. Their thinking is that EarthLink, a company whose stock has suffered with the Nasdaq swoon, was in no position to demand tough terms from AOL-Time Warner.
Washington Post: Some FTC Staffers Back AOL-Time Concessions, Sources Say.
Some staffers are trying to persuade the commission that it should approve the deal on the table, which includes a key provision giving AOL rivals access to Time Warner's cable television network, rather than risk blowing up the $183 billion merger, sources said.
Internet World: Deconstructing LuxuryFinder.com.
Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Merholz. But their portal section links you to such unrelated sites as A&E and the Biography and History channels, while the calendar directs you to Star Wars. What in the world do these have to do with luxury? LuxuryFinder.com has no clear content-development policy.
Inside: Two Months After Replacing Amazon on Yahoo, BN.com is Still Waiting for its Traffic to Go Boom.
But early -- albeit very early -- returns are unclear as to whether the deal is paying off, judging by data from MediaMetrix, a Jupiter Media Metrix company. While the most recent weekly tallies of unique visitors reveal little movement, the latest monthly numbers...
December 3, 2000
Web Informant: Secure email is still the pits.
Not much has changed in two and a half years since I wrote that essay. Standards are no help whatsoever: indeed, as more products support S/MIME, more implementation issues crop up. Products are difficult to use and setup. And keeping track of your cryptographic infrastructure can drive anyone nuts.
SF Chronicle: Freedom To Criticize Belongs on The Web.
Esther Dyson. There is, of course, the danger that all critical comment would be relegated to .sucks. Instead, I would hope that .sucks would end up being a "place" where companies, people and even officials could go to find criticisms -- and to answer them.
Boston Globe: What's a penny worth on the Web? Maybe a lot.
Christine Adamow, the president and CEO of eCent, a Boston-based start-up, has spent the last 18 months actively pushing the idea that micropayments will soon start adding up for a wide variety of businesses that have a stake in the Web.
Washington Post: At eToys Site, It's Service With A Nervous Smile.
Lenk said eToys's extensive customer service operation "is only a small piece of our cost structure. The actual dollars we spend on it are pretty small." But analyst Goldberg said he is "pretty sure" that eToys's and other online retailers' original business plans "didn't include 700 people answering the phone.
Newsweek: Screen Wars.
But now, the wise heads of the digital world—and the frazzled hundreds of millions of users whose screens are now jammed by a virtual Ginza of icons, windows and menus—are in agreement: the traditional GUI has persisted long past its expiration date.
December 4, 2000
NY Times: Sites Not Yet Pitching at Full Speed.
"I don't need to show a flower blooming or spinning around in 3-D," said Chris McCann, president of 1-800-flowers.com. Mr. McCann said the company had nothing in particular with which to cater to high-bandwidth users even though the site's traffic reaches its peak during the business day...
Information Week: Help For Building Sticky Web Sites.
Loizides points to site-search functions as a primary example. "Your online customers want to be able to find a wide variety of information about your products or services on your site," she says. "If they can't find it easily, they'll end up calling customer service or, even worse, just abandoning the site entirely."
Industry Standard: Olympic Marketer Says Net Wins No Golds.
Olympic marketing chief Dick Pound has warned the sports world that the Internet is not yet the gold medal winner of money-making as business, sporting and New Media chiefs prepared to begin a special conference on online markets on Monday.
Boston Globe: Envisioning 2001.
If the technology world had its own theme song, it would be either Eric Clapton's ''Change the World'' or Timbuk 3's ''The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades.'' This is a field populated primarily by irrationally exuberant, perennially hopeful people.
Red Herring: How to design a blockbuster game.
Q&A with Will Wright, Bruce Shelly and Dennis Fong. Computer and video games have grown significantly in 25 years. Games sales are closing in on movie box office revenues, but a true mass market has eluded game developers. They haven't yet engaged tens of millions of potential gamers like women, girls and seniors.
Forbes: Around-The-Globe: Japan's Internet Plan.
However, as with most state-mandated directives to boost Japan's ailing economy, this one is primed for failure. Rather than doing away with regulations and opening the market, the Parliament is doing what it's done for a decade--plowing public funds into economic initiatives while avoiding real reform.
Computerworld: Canadian privacy law raises ante.
Next month, Canada will enact a law that offers sweeping privacy protections for its citizens. But the law may also create legal obligations and data management problems for potentially thousands of businesses that exchange data with firms and subsidiaries in Canada, the U.S.'s largest trading partner.
EE Times: E-book standards released in effort to ignite market.
The AAP standards are intended to enable consumers to buy any title from any source and view it on any e-book reader device. Interoperability of e-book devices and formats, and broad availability of content, is expected to jump-start the nascent market for the devices.
December 5, 2000
Business 2.0: DNS Hell: Is There a Solution?
Clay Shirky. The rush is now on with instant messaging protocols, single sign-on and wallet applications, and the explosion in peer-to-peer businesses to create and manage protocol-centric addresses, because these are essentially privately owned, centrally managed, instantly updated alternatives to DNS.
Online Journalism Review: What the New Media Research Labs Tell Us.
More than two dozen new media research laboratories offer such important advances for online journalism. These advances fall into three broad areas: how journalists do their work; the content of online news, in particular new forms of storytelling and information presentation and design; and how people access the news.
Advertising Age: CyberCritique of Ticketmaster.com.
Some companies have no business relying on the Internet to conduct business. Ticketmaster will tell you quite clearly that it is one of those companies, which flies in the face of all of its marketing efforts, many of which promote the ease of buying online.
Industry Standard: Content in Search of Profits.
Banner ads, e-commerce and subscriptions – the three legs that in varying degrees support the few relatively successful content sites – aren't cutting it for most Web content operations, and the formula for success remains elusive.
News.Com: Privacy groups call Amazon policy "deceptive".
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research center in Washington, D.C., is asking the commission to investigate Amazon's practices and compel the bookseller to withhold information about its customers instead of selling it to third parties.
Industry Standard: Olympic Committee Won't Let the Webcasts Begin.
The International Olympic Committee told the press Tuesday that it would maintain its contractual obligations to its TV broadcasters through the 2008 Summer Games, and that the Internet would continue to be a sideline feature.
News.Com: PR Newswire to turn press releases into revenues.
Available on more than 800 Web sites, PR Newswire is stepping up a campaign to attract the attention of online investors by adding interactive "T-buttons" to its Internet news releases which will offer people the option of buying products and stock, spokeswoman Renu Aldrich said.
ZDNN: MS makes mischief for AOL/Time Warner.
Microsoft, which declined to comment on matters pertaining to the merger plans of AOL and Time Warner, is now telling the FTC that Time Warner is refusing to negotiate further, preferring to deal with a weaker competitor like EarthLink.
December 6, 2000
Good evening! Thanks to Steve Krug for including Tomalak's Realm in his recommended reading section in his new Web usability book, Don't Make Me Think. Thanks Steve! Lawrence (tomalak@tomalak.org).
Inside: Fending Off the Pay-Per-View Society.
All the arcane "fair use" lawsuits you keep reading about are actually one very big story: the battle over our digital future. The hacker brigade believes we are headed for either a communal utopia or a suffocating corporate hell. A guide for the non-hysteric.
InfoWorld: UUNet's spam problem points to larger issues.
The issue is more complex, however, for those people hoping to get SyberSchool.net kicked off its network connection with a complaint to the e-mail abuse center for UUNet Technologies. UUNet's no-spam policy appears hard to enforce consistently and successfully.
Editor & Publisher: The Many Possible Directions Of Future Media.
Steve Outing. So recently, I asked the assembled minds of the Online-News discussion list to make some guesses ... ummm, predictions about the future of media. Through private mail to me, and public posts to the list, they came up with some fascinating insights.
American Journalism Review: New Courses for New Media.
With a subject matter that's rapidly evolving and a field that requires an understanding not only of reporting and writing skills, but often of several mediums and computer coding, cross-departmental teaching teams and professional partnerships are becoming more commonplace.
Salon: High tech's missionaries of sloppiness.
None of this is accidental. A culture of carelessness seems to have taken over in high-tech America. The personal computer is a shining model of unreliability because the high-tech industry today actually exalts sloppiness as a modus operandi.
Inside: Are Media Web Sites Victims of Their Own Success?
Jason Chervokas and Tom Watson. It seems that Yahoo wants to link branding closely with personal preferences in its broadband services. That's the way it intends to realize the company's big -- media dreams. Will it happen? From what we've seen so far, that's not a bet we'd take.
Forbes: My.MP3.com Doesn't Rock.
So unless you're just itching to remix your songs online, it seems easier to play discs directly on a CD-ROM or regular CD player. MP3.com offers plenty of other services that are much more attractive. It's too bad it had to spend a fortune on a middling feature.
Financial Times: Swiss 3G auction ends with a whimper.
The $120m raised compares with the $45.9bn achieved by Germany and the $32.6bn raised in the UK from similar auctions this year. However, Italy and Austria faced similar problems to Switzerland in terms of the number of bidders and raised $10.2bn and $625m respectively.
December 7, 2000
Boston Globe: Online shopping efforts too often decked with bouts of folly.
A Web site has ''so much complexity,'' said Thomas Maynard, a senior researcher at Lycos. The key, he said, is to keep it simple for the customer. But online shoppers may find that the e-commerce world has not improved much since last year.
Business Week: Will Google's Purity Pay Off?
Yahoo has begun cutting these deals in droves, matching lesser competitor LookSmart. But Brin says he isn't worried: "When somebody searches for 'cancer,' should you put up the site that paid you or the site that has better information?" Brin is betting better information will win the day.
Business 2.0 UK: Selling stories.
The idea has, however, triggered criticism that Moreover is simply making money off other companies' high quality news product. Nick Gilbert, business development director of UK news aggregation company, NewsNow.co.uk, believes the smaller publishers will suffer.
XML.Com: Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web Vision.
In a keynote session at XML 2000 Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the Wide Web Consortium, outlined his vision for the Semantic Web. In one of his most complete public expositions of the vision to date, he explained the layered architecture that he foresees being developed in the next ten years.
Industry Standard: Microsoft Gets With the Interactive TV Program.
Finally, the long-awaited Microsoft TV platform is seeing the light of day. After a series of delays that let competitors take the upper hand in the battle to provide software for set-top boxes, Microsoft is rolling out its system this month to a select group of consumers.
Poynter.org: Online News: A Permanent State of Flux.
Then along came BabyCenter.com, winner in the service journalism category. Not that we needed a prize ceremony to tip us off to the new world in our midst. But Friday's first conference of the Online News Association provided some vivid freeze-frames of journalism in flux.
Darwin: Your Good Name.
Are there nattering nabobs of negativism you aren't aware of in the chat rooms and on the message boards? Are rating and review services like BizRate, Gomez Advisors and Open Ratings chiseling away at your once-solid, once-gleaming reputation?
December 8, 2000
Digitrends: Halcyon Days of Broadcast Ad Model Fade.
Christopher Locke. To understand and make effective use of the Internet, business must grasp how different it is from all that has gone before, and how much it has already undermined the broadcast model.
Washington Post: 3Com's Audrey Is No Great Communicator.
This small tablet--one of a handful of low-cost devices that aim to offer a simple way online for people--is one of the most frustrating, least useful Web devices I've seen. It strips away much of the flexibility and utility of a conventional desktop computer without making things particularly easier in return.
News.Com: Bots snarl sites as shoppers seek PlayStation 2.
"We sat there and watched the site get 80,000 hits in a period of minutes," said Dave Karraker, spokesman for San Francisco-based BlueLight, which has suffered periodic delays in doing business because of heavy traffic. "It's clear to us that there are people using bots to scan the site for the PlayStation 2."
NY Times: Wireless Licenses Expected to Raise $15 Billion for U.S.
The auction of 422 licenses in 195 markets, including some of the largest and most attractive, presents a chance for the biggest carriers, like AT&T Wireless, Sprint PCS and Verizon Wireless, to fill in holes, enter new cities, beef up capacity and gain the true national footprint...
Independent: The world according to 'Tog'.
Tog himself is a big presence, like the barfly Norm Petersen in Cheers but with curly white hair. Funnier, as well: he had an audience of London digerati in hysterics last week. To illustrate how dire some human-computer interface design is, he described his attempts to order a vacuum cleaner belt on the Web.
ZDNN: Wireless Web ponders payment models.
Sprint PCS, which at the end of the third quarter had 720,000 users already uses content from 100 different providers. It's also launched 25 different games for wired phone users. Customers are paying for the montage "as part of their bucket of minutes," said Sprint PCS spokesman Dan Wilinsky.
News.Com: Linking customer behavior to e-commerce strategy.
The challenge for companies is to guide the consumer to the behavior matching the company's strategy; where this is not possible, companies should match the strategy to the customer's behavior. The approach given here may help managers discover the forces that determine their best strategy.
Washington Post: AOLTV: Channel Zero.
AOLTV navigation fails to live up to AOL's own standards of simplicity and ease. A row of special keys make it easy to hop to Buddy Lists, but it takes many non-intuitive button presses to return to a chat in progress if a TV event like a channel change removes its overlay window.
December 9, 2000
News.Com: Defunct ASPs leave customers in the lurch.
When Red Gorilla swung into the application service market, companies rushed to take advantage of its free services. A year later, clients trying to tap into their time and expense software programs got error messages instead: Red Gorilla had abruptly ditched the ASP jungle in October...
Washington Post: 'Free' Wireless Networks?
The wireless Internet antennas sprouting everywhere suggest something else: Today's civilian community is home to a very unregimented attempt to build a homemade wireless Web that seeks to rival the expensive plans of telecommunication conglomerates and other corporations.
Wired News: Webcasters Get Copyright Relief.
Webcasting got a little bit easier on Friday, thanks to the federal government. Two rulings by the United States Copyright Office pave the way for webcasters to compete on a more even ground with terrestrial radio stations broadcasting on the Web.
Computerworld: States seek sales-tax simplification.
A group of tax and policy officials from some 39 states, meeting as the Streamlined Sales Tax Project, this month may finalize "model" tax simplification legislation for adoption by state legislatures. The state group Thursday posted the proposed legislation on its Web site.
Advertising Age: Missing link in marketing data.
Moving beyond simply offering faster, cheaper versions of offline research, online researchers are looking to forge a missing link in market research-going beyond what consumers say to track what's most important to marketers-what they actually buy.
December 10, 2000
Useit.Com: WAP Field Study Findings.
Following a UK field study, 70% of users decided not to continue using WAP. Currently, its services are poorly designed, have insufficient task analysis, and abuse existing non-mobile design guidelines. WAP's killer app is killing time; m-commerce's prospects are dim for the next several years.
Industry Standard: Whistling a Happier Tune.
The premium service costs $49.95 a year and allows users to access up to 500 CDs, while the advertising-supported free version caps the number of discs at 25. "Who's going to pay to listen to music they've already bought?" says David Pakman, senior VP for business development at MP3.com competitor Myplay.
Red Herring: New media: Only connect, says Clay Shirky.
I think that the biggest revolution that Tim Berners-Lee unleashed was not hypertext, but the idea that the interface can be distributed with the data and not with the software. This is what makes social computing possible -- the idea that the computer is essentially a social device.
December 11, 2000
NY Times: Coming to Grips With the World Wide Web.
Several executives made bold predictions for the Web. "It's like C-Span for everyone," one said. Seven years and many business propositions later, the Web's uses and limits are still being tested. But it is now possible to make a number of observations informed by experience.
Interactive Week: An Octopus' Garden.
Key to the success of partner companies will be the terms under which the giants allow them into their "walled gardens," or the area that users see first on their PC, TV or wireless device. By building the garden, the controlling company decides which entertainment, shopping and services will be offered.
NY Times: They Built Online Meeting Places But the Venture Capital Didn't Stay.
But four years and dozens of disappointments later, community portals, as they came to be known, have fallen, and hard. The Globe, iVillage and others in the doldrums have learned that while community is an attractive notion, it does not transfer easily to the commercially minded Web.
LA Times: Web Privacy Programs Are Scrutinized.
But lately, privacy-certification programs, including Truste, BBBOnLine and WebTrust, are coming under scrutiny for failing to attract enough participants, not imposing strict enough privacy standards and not cracking down when companies that have been awarded privacy seals break the rules.
NY Times: New Economy: How Reality Fits With Fantasy in Cyberspace.
In the biggest collaborative act of creation since M. C. Escher drew a pair of hands drawing each other, the World Wide Web and the so-called new economy have looked to the literature of science fiction for a sense of direction and of style. The cross-fertilization worked both ways.
NY Times: In Search for Online Success, 'Easy Does It' Is Good Theme.
In the beginning there was a gray void and onto it were black letters. Some of the letters became blue and were underlined. These were links, and they begat other links. And so were the very first Web pages models of brutish simplicity — raw information and links to more information.
LA Times: Salon.com Wins Credibility Online With Intelligent and Stylish Content.
Steven Johnson, co-founder of Feed said, "We spent our first six months explaining what a Webzine was." Feed is a comparable, though smaller-scale, site that is considered one of the Web's journalistic pioneers. "After Salon, we didn't have to do that."
Wired News: Net Monitoring Service Pays Users.
Distributed Science, one of several companies looking to commercialize the once-voluntary distributed computing phenomenon, is teaming with Internet monitoring service Envive to get home PC users to make money by logging on.
NY Times: Lessons From the Online Rubble.
In the mid-1990's, as it became evident that the World Wide Web had potential as a commercial medium, economists, investors and executives filled the air with blue-sky notions of how to become rich from the Web: sell movies on demand; charge subscription fees for Web sites; peddle dog food.
December 12, 2000
Business Week: Walmart.com vs. Amazon: This Race Isn't Even Close.
Trouble is, the case for Amazon getting crushed by Wal-Mart doesn't stand up when you do some side-by-side comparing of their Web sites. What's wrong with Walmart.com? Put simply, it settles for taking orders for the products people come looking for rather than enticing them to buy things...
- Business 2.0: From September 1, 1999; No ExSKUses.
Glenn Fleishman.
Fortune: Need Innovation? Start by Locking Up the Tech Toys.
Michael Schrage. Technology subsidizes instant communication, calculation, and iteration, so we literally feel free to indulge. We take the bug of self-indulgence and try to pass it off as the feature of relentless responsiveness. That's why irritated CEOs are electing to ban technology excess in the workplace.
Industry Standard: Moreover.com Pushes Real-Time News.
Denton is not looking to charge publishers for this traffic, the way GoTo.com charges companies per click-through to be listed in its results. Instead, he sees the real opportunity coming from corporations that want to give their employees one place to go for tailored, work-relevant news.
TechWeb: Is 3-D Web Ready For Prime Time?
The Consortium, the principal group responsible for Virtual Reality Modeling Language and its continuing evolution, aims to establish an open industry standard for Web 3-D. The next official release of VRML, due out in about six months, will consist of X3D technology, which wraps XML around VRML...
News.Com: Samsung licenses Palm system for smart phones.
Samsung said Tuesday it will release a Code Division Multiple Access cell phone that contains a Palm organizer. The device is scheduled to arrive in the second quarter of 2001 in North America. Other products will follow.
Inside: Broadband's Misleading Message.
Jason Chervokas and Tom Watson. ...since we all acknowledge that the next growth factor impinging on the Net is the increasing access to high-bandwidth services among end users. It's not that end users don't want bandwidth-intensive media. It's that content producers don't have an economical way of delivering that content.
Online Journalism Review: Online Awards Bring Kudos and Criticism.
It was billed as a celebration, but there were a lot of somber moments at the inaugural Online Journalism Awards. Just as the Internet press corps was coming together to recognize its accomplishments, praise good work and push for high standards, folks were being laid off left and right.
Forbes: State of the Banner.
John C. Dvorak. In January CNet, the online publisher that arguably invented and perfected most online ad models, is parting ways with the Internet Advertising Bureau, which dictates standards such as banner sizes. CNet will debut 12 new programs and formats...
Adweek: Estee Lauder, Excite Settle Lawsuit.
The dispute stemmed from a lawsuit that Estee Lauder filed in January 1999 accusing Excite, a popular Internet search engine, of selling advertising rights to "keywords" such as "Estee Lauder" and "Origins," both Estee Lauder brand names, to other fragrance and cosmetics retailers.
December 13, 2000
Inside: The Revolution Is Glorious, and the Sky Is Falling. Get Used To It.
The de facto mission of both journalists and Wall Street analysts and traders is to oversimplify very complicated subjects, and technology is one complicated subject that most members of both groups understand dimly. For both, exaggeration is tempting, an occupational hazard.
SJ Mercury: New media streaming into the mainstream.
Dan Gillmor. FinanceVision is an amalgam of media -- text, charts, interactive databases and video. The video, typically news reports, interviews and panel discussions, flows into viewers' computers using a method called ``streaming,'' a way of delivering audio and video in real time over the Internet.
Upside: Yahoo, Microsoft battle for media dominance.
Yahoo and Microsoft's new programs are important because the companies are locked in a quiet battle for the so-called enterprise-streaming market. Both companies want to sell software and services that let large corporations stream video programs internally.
Good Experience: It's Time to Simplify the PC.
Simplicity also doesn't come from incrementally improving the usability of the deeply flawed hardware and software we have today. Simplicity calls for radical change, not reform; it must come from the users, not the tech industry.
TechWeb: E-Currencies Are Going Offline.
E-currencies are moving into the bricks-and-mortar world as they vie to gain traction with consumers and merchants. Online currency companies Beenz.com Inc. and Flooz.com Inc. plan to launch offline programs even as new Internet competitors are poised to emerge.
News.Com: Credit cards pushing e-currency out of the picture.
A year after alternative e-currencies such as Beenz and Flooz burst onto the Web scene, their companies are conceding that a strategy shift was needed after surprisingly nimble credit card companies have overtaken the niche.
MSNBC: Airlines surf Web for evidence of plans for more job actions.
When Delta Air Lines started its Wired Workforce project to help every employee get a home computer earlier this year, it didn’t expect this: “Stick with the rest of us. Be unified ... ‘No Overtime, No Excuses,’ ” read a posting by Charles Sargent on the password-protected online bulletin board...
The Register: Anti-WalMart domain win claimed as sea-change.
This decision was immediately claimed as an enormous victory, giving the man in the street a legal precedent to be allowed to criticise big, powerful companies without fear of intimidation or legal hassles. Unfortunately, it is nothing of the sort.
December 14, 2000
TechWeb: FTC Gives Green Light To AOL-Time Warner.
The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday afternoon unanimously approved the multibillion-dollar merger of America Online and Time Warner. The merger will create a behemoth in content and distribution, integrating high-speed Internet over cable, online music, programming, entertainment, instant messaging, and interactive TV.
Washington Post: On AOL, a Hint of Promotions to Come.
Analysts say Pittman's success depends to a large part on making Time Warner content a central element of AOL's online version of a walled garden. As long as consumers remain in that online garden, sequestered from the wider variety of choice provided by the larger Internet...
Information Week: The Customer As Co-Developer.
Christopher Locke. In this common scenario, companies literally aren't listening. They've made customer problems somebody else's job and destroyed any incentive for service reps to report valuable market intelligence. This is often true even when outsourcing isn't the issue.
Upside: Why software still sucks.
Sitting in a small cafe just off West Broadway in New York's Tribeca neighborhood, Lanier takes on the issue that has been vexing him for well over a decade: At a time when hardware design is getting more and more advanced, why is software design still such a chaotic mess?
ZDNet E-Business: Hilton.com: Help when and where you need it.
Hilton.com creates an especially good customer experience. The hotel site delivers help that specifically relates to the page customers are on, making it easier for them to complete the reservation process without having to contact a customer service representative.
EE Times: LCD makers gird for 'crystal cycle' oversupply woes.
Even as some LCD vendors diversify into non-PC applications, which are less prone to the so-called "crystal cycle" that periodically swamps the industry, others are warning that the steep ramp-up in capacity over the past year could make for the longest and the worst oversupply situation...
News.Com: RealNames cuts staff, refocuses business strategy.
RealNames, which maintains a simplified system of addressing Web pages that bypasses URLs, has been shrinking its work force markedly throughout the year. Since June, the company has shed through layoffs or attrition nearly 60 percent of its employees.
December 15, 2000
NY Times: Two Become One, and Then What?
But while these impediments may slow the companies, they do not fundamentally alter the ability of the unified AOL Time Warner to take advantage of its combined power in broadcasting, publishing, film, music and the Internet, analysts and executives said yesterday.
InfoWorld: BT sues Prodigy over U.S. hyperlink patent.
The London-based telecommunications company filed the suit in federal court in White Plains, N.Y., on Wednesday. The case will be overseen by Judge Barrington D. Parker Jr., a court spokesman confirmed Friday. BT declined to give details about any damages the company is seeking from Prodigy.
The Register: Prodigy to fight BT's 'shameless' hyperlinks patent lawsuit.
Prodigy Communications Corp has reacted angrily to BT's hypertext links lawsuit branding it "blatant and shameless". One of the US' biggest ISPs, Prodigy has broken its silence and claims BT's patent of hypertext links is "groundless".
Internet World: Special Report: Design Usability.
Each of these unpleasant experiences, and many others, means lost sales, customers, and credibility for your organization, which is utterly unnecessary. So Internet World has assembled a panel of experts to help you negotiate this maze in a special report on Web usability.
Online Journalism Review: Is Broadband News Ready for Prime Time?
Multimedia journalists who assembled recently at C|NET in San Francisco for a panel discussion on broadband seemed to collectively say: We've come a long way, we've got a long way to go, but today many online content sites are serving up a richer, more satisfying news experience for consumers.
Internet World: The Keyboard Becomes a Billboard.
ChannelCommerce may be banking on the fact that people will pay inflated prices for a Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt that exists only to advertise the Hilfiger line. But Tommy and his designer pals are selling style; no one’s going to feel hip because they have a keyboard that automatically sends them to CarPrices.com.
MIT Technology Review: Natural Language Processing.
Parallel efforts are under way at industry giants such as IBM and Microsoft, which see not only immediate applications for computer users who need to keep their hands and eyes free but also the rapid evolution of speech-enabled "intelligent environments."
Internet World: Making Art of Information Technology.
Q&A with Michael Chichi, creative director of marchFIRST. Even if interface becomes standardized, there are still other graphic qualities, branding, and other ways a designer can contribute. When broadband becomes more prevalent, designers will be more like producers, dealing with a lot of media.
December 16, 2000
Washington Post: FCC May Set New Condition for AOL.
Under the staff recommendation, if AOL offers advanced instant-messaging services over Time Warner's cable television network, it would have to agree to make the system interoperable with at least one other provider of instant messaging, sources said.
Darwin: Fancy Footwork.
Mike Caldwell, global director of brand knowledge creation and sharing of Nike. Although we design most of our footwear at our headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., we manufacture shoes in many parts of the world. So our business depends on being able to collaborate and share information as a shoe moves through the process.
MIT Technology Review: Digital Rights Management.
Which is what Singh and ContentGuard are about. Digital rights management, or DRM, is "the catalyst for a revolution in e-content," says Singh. "DRM will allow content owners to get much wider and deeper distribution than ever before," he maintains. "You can see who is passing your content to whom."
Wired News: Health Sites Seek Approval Seal.
Organized by Hi-Ethics Inc., a coalition of 18 health sites, and Truste, which runs a popular seal of approval program for mainstream sites, the effort marks a major step toward self-regulation in the sensitive area of providing and collecting online health-care information.
Darwin: Prepare for the Worst.
Insurance companies aren't charities. Faced with such great risks, they are either going to bow out or ask you to pay dearly for peace of mind. Offering specialized cyberpolicies—at prices that reflect the level of risk involved—is exactly what many companies in the insurance industry are now doing.
December 17, 2000
SJ Mercury: Tech stock boom was a legal con game.
Dan Gillmor. Journalists served more as stenographers than skeptical observers while technology executives, public-relations people, market ``analysts'' and other self-serving participants in the con talked up the New Economy and insisted that some fundamental laws of economics had been repealed.
SJ Mercury: eBook readers are more Tinker Bell marketing.
Consumer electronics companies often fall into what I call Tinker Bell marketing: clapping their hands together in staff meetings, repeating ``I believe, I believe,'' and then expecting the public to buy a clearly nonsensical product. My target this week is yet another flawed attempt to sell electronic book readers...
Web Informant: One man's simple secure email solution.
Let's say you want to send a confidential message to Terrashake Earthmoving. The company has a website with a secure-message form. You click to that form, and a reassuring notice says "You have requested a secure link". Your browser's little padlock icon snaps shut.
Information Week: Managing Content No Simple Matter For Online Media.
Online media executives gathered at the IQPC's Web content-management conference in Alexandria, Va., all seem to agree: Vignette Corp., Interwoven Inc., and other providers of content-management technology just aren't giving media customers what they need.
December 18, 2000
Interactive Week: Yahoo! Tries Out TV-Style Financial News.
It's unclear whether Web users want their content to mimic programming on TV, particularly when it comes to news. But Yahoo!, for one, is betting online consumers will want their news served up TV-style, as long as it offers the extra value of interactivity...
NY Times: Rules for AOL-Time Warner May Have Only a Narrow Impact.
But AOL's Internet services — on Time Warner's system or anyone else's — are a powerful distribution and promotion medium for Time Warner's old economy products: magazines, movies, music. And none of the F.T.C.'s vaunted conditions do anything to change that.
Fortune: Understanding AOL's Grand Unified Theory of the Media Cosmos.
What's the old saying? Be careful what you wish for? If America Online and Time Warner think they've had an agonizing time getting their merger past Washington regulators--and yes, they have--just wait until they get the deal done, take on the mind-boggling task of turning the two companies into one...
Business 2.0: New Economy's Unnatural Resources.
Clay Shirky. And as the Internet becomes an increasingly ordinary part of daily life, these unnatural resources–the rise of mobile networks, the depths of biological understanding, and the breadth of globalization–will come to drive what we've taken to calling the New Economy.
NY Times: The Unplugged Internet Generates 'Wapathy'.
It was not so long ago that the wireless Internet industry seemed to be an immensely promising offshoot of the Internet. Now, under pressure from anemic consumer response, more selective venture capital financing, thee industry is beginning to refashion its view of the world.
InfoWorld: IETF split on instant messaging standard.
The Internet Engineering Task Force seems hopelessly split on the issue of instant messaging standardization, making it likely that the international standards body will develop several communications protocols and let the market decide which is best.
NY Times: We Now Interrupt Your Browsing for This Commercial Message.
Newer types of Internet advertisements are emerging, including those that appear in applications other than on a Web browser. And there are advertisements that remain within the browser but appear in a window that overlays or replaces the one the user was viewing.
Context Magazine: It's A Mad, Mad, Mad Ad World.
Q&A with Jerry Della Femina and Sergio Zyman. A few months ago, I was online looking up the year 1968 for an article I was writing, and I was stalked by Amazon.com. Every time I typed in 1968, Amazon offered me the best music of 1968 and books from 1968. I did not appreciate it.
NY Times: E-Commerce Report: Internet Merchants Adapt to Survive.
Now, with so many e-tailing companies heading for the exits, and others adding catalogs or building traditional stores, one question for 2001 is whether any pure-play Internet merchants will survive intact. According to industry executives and analysts, few, in fact, will.
December 19, 2000
New Scientist: Surf like a Bushman.
At least that's the opinion of two researchers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in California. Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card are using foraging theories from ecology and anthropology to understand how people find information in data-rich environments such as the Internet.
Inside: Should Content Companies Sell Their Proprietary Software?
Jason Chervokas and Tom Watson. The only reason media companies should spin off software and technology businesses is because they've realized they've made a mistake in developing software in-house and now they want to get out of the business, not because they want to snap on a new line of revenue.
Red Herring: Reuters CEO gets the Net.
Reuters's choice is astounding, not because Mr. Glocer is the first American to head the venerable news organization, nor because he's a mere 41 years old -- the youngest to hold the position at Reuters. Rather, he is the company's first CEO who has not been a journalist.
Inside: Red Herring, Outsourcing Its Tech Department, Lays Off 32.
Red Herring CEO Hilary Schneider said the layoffs were ''a function of finding the most cost-effective way to produce the best product,'' as she sought to distance the move from the quasi-implosion of the formerly booming New Economy magazine category.
Good Experience: End-of-Year Thoughts.
This evening I was fortunate enough to attend the "winter show" of the New York University's ITP, where the students displayed their end-of-semester projects. Several of the projects pointed toward the coming emergence of bit literacy and related issues; hence these end-of-year thoughts.
Irish Times: Web's words.
Brian Friel's play, Translations is a harsh reminder of the perils a country can face as a result of losing its language. If we think that Ireland has had such an identity crisis, what about the prospect of the entire planet tuning in to a non-stop diet of English, specifically US English, via the Internet?
News.Com: Group unveils program to disable Web filters.
The Peacefire program is an amalgam of the instructions for disabling filters that Peacefire has been posting on its site for months. But instead of having to input lines of code, the download makes disabling filters a "one-click process," said Bennett Haselton, head of the organization.
Industry Standard: America Online Rivals Are Spitting Mad.
Last Wednesday, FCC staff gave formal recommendations on the proposed merger to Kennard and the agency's other four commissioners. The staff recommended that AOL be forced to allow interoperability, but only when offering "advanced" instant-messaging features and when the service was running over Time Warner's cable wires...
Internet World: AOL-Time Warner Merger Will Prove Harmless.
Jakob Nielsen. If the FTC does its job and emphasizes usability in future rulings, the resulting media landscape could be a renaissance for liberty and user experience. AOL would be forced to empower its customers. And alternative ISPs would be forced to make their offerings human-centered...
December 20, 2000
Editor & Publisher: It's Not Your Father's Newsroom.
Steve Outing. Called "Tomorrow's News," the dramatization of what a high-tech newsroom of the future will look like was created by Kerry Northrup, technologies editor of IFRA and executive director of the IFRA Centre for Advanced News Operations, and his staff.
Salon: All I want for Christmas is ... an e-mail program that works.
Scott Rosenberg. ...I have some more modest suggestions for products and technologies the industry could be providing today -- innovations that might not change the world but would certainly make life easier for those of us who depend on computers for our here-and-now work.
Industry Standard: The Nightmare Before Christmas.
If you're a major online retailer pumped up for the 2000 holiday season, the last thing you need is some administrative snafu that suspends your main URL and bars online shoppers from your Web site. Last Wednesday, Dec. 13, that's exactly what happened to Barnesandnoble.com.
digitalMASS: Power to the people (who write this stuff).
Wallis, who's written for The Boston Globe, the Times, and The New Yorker, among others, has been an outspoken advocate of writer's rights. His new project, Featurewell, is a site for syndicating content that he says will put power back into the hands of writers.
Argus ACIA: An Interview with Alex Wright, Phoenix Pop.
First, we need tools designed by IAs for IAs. And as long as we're toiling away with ad hoc solutions, we're going to waste a lot of time and effort re-inventing, re-purposing, and generally ad-libbing until someone comes up with a quality toolset designed for our profession.
InfoWorld: W3C releases XHTML Basic spec for mobile devices.
The group also used input from the WAP Forum, which is working on its Version 2.0 of WAP, W3C said. The next major version of the protocol for providing Internet-based data services on mobile phones, which is expected to be approved by mid-2001, is expected to complete a migration to XHTML as well as TCP.
AtNewYork: Beenz.com To Cutback Operations; 25 Laid Off.
Alternative currency play Beenz.com plans to close certain country-specific businesses which immediately results in the layoff of 25 employees in New York and San Francisco. In a brief statement issued to atNewYork Tuesday, Beenz.com said the cuts came after an in-depth analysis of the company...
Computerworld: Multilingual domain-name registrations reach 700,000 mark in test program.
The company that maintains the master database of Internet domain names said yesterday that more than 700,000 multilingual Web addresses have already been registered since it began testing the viability of using non-English characters in Web site addresses last month.
December 21, 2000
TechWeb: Shrinking Portables Tax Interface Design.
Designers of keypads and keyboards for handheld products must take into consideration factors such as size, profile, backlighting, tactile feedback, sealability, aesthetics, and applications when working with designers of handheld products.
NY Times: Assessing the New Internet Appliances.
Unfortunately, once you turn these machines on, you get a powerful lesson in the boneheadedness that can result from design by committee — or worse, two committees. (Each product reviewed here was a corporate collaboration.)
Upside: Yahoo takes French ruling to a U.S. court.
The company today said it has filed a declaratory judgment with a U.S. Federal District Court in San Jose, Calif. The action consists of two parts -- a complaint against an original court judgment and a summons to bring the case to the U.S.
The Register: Stealth plan puts copy protection into every hard drive.
Technical committees of NCTIS, the ANSI-blessed standards body, have been discussing the incorporation of content protection currently used for removable media into industry-standard ATA drives, using proprietary technology originating from the 4C Entity.
NY Times: Protests Arise Over Business Aspect of Censoring Web.
Among the critics' complaints is that some of the filtering companies' business plans include tracking students' Web wanderings and selling the data to market research firms. In addition, one company's software includes advertising to students on every screen.
New York Post: Claimes Disney Stole TV-'Net Technology.
Most everybody has heard of enhanced TV - but barely anyone has heard of ACTV. That's going to change if the small, New York City-based ACTV has its way. The company filed a lawsuit yesterday against Michael Eisner's Disney claiming its ESPN and ABC networks stole patented technology.
Wired News: Fed Opens Web to Disabled.
The guidelines, issued by the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board, an independent federal agency that focuses on accessibility issues, ordered agencies whose sites are not fully accessible to redesign their Web pages within six months.
Computerworld: Task force moves toward making IM systems work together.
Despite having heard proposals for three instant messaging standards, the Internet Engineering Task Force will likely move toward a way to make different IM systems work together, rather than select one standard for all IM services to use.
December 22, 2000
ZDNN: Egghead cracked by credit-card hack.
Analysts and industry watchers say the Egghead.com break-in highlights the general lack of security that companies have for their servers. "Server protection is really out of control," said Avivah Liton of researchers Gartner Group. Given the numbers, the heist is, far and away, the largest credit-card database infiltrated by cyberthieves to date.
NY Times: The Year in Technology Law.
Continuing a venerable three-year-old holiday tradition, Cyber Law Journal asked a variety of Internet legal mavens to weigh in with their nominations for the most significant or interesting cyberlaw developments in the year almost past.
Context Magazine: The Right Tool.
While Ace provides some information and advice at the site, the main attraction was that dealers could discuss do’s, doohickeys, and don’ts with each other. The commercial and industrial dealers developed into such a productive community of mutual advisers...
ZDNN: Netdocs: Microsoft's .Net poster child?
According to sources, Netdocs is a single, integrated application that will include a full suite of functions, including e-mail, personal information management, document-authoring tools, digital-media management, and instant messaging.
Newsweek: ‘The Bernice Test’.
I looked at three: 3Com’s Audrey, the MSN Companion by Compaq and the Gateway Connected TouchPad With Instant AOL. They all aced the first part of the test. Pull them out of the box, plug ‘em in and you’re on the Web. Unfortunately, none entirely clears the simplicity bar.
The Economist: The fluttering of tiny pixels.
Iridigm Technology, in San Francisco, plans to generate colour images using optical interference—the phenomenon that creates the rainbows on the surfaces of oily puddles and the beautiful blues on the wings of South American Morpho butterflies.
December 23, 2000
Fortune: It Can Go Down To Zero.
I said that everyone in the press had expected a crash; of course, we knew Net stocks could and should go down 70 percent or 80 percent. "But not 96 percent," he finished my sentence. I opened my mouth to deliver the next line, but he beat me to it. "It can go down to zero," he said.
SF Chronicle: Awash in Red Ink, Online Magazine Salon.com Lays Off 20% of Staff.
Ross, the founder who left to pursue his original passion, writing, said the Web is evolving to a point where not all content will be free. That doesn't necessarily mean Salon will charge its users, Ross said, but "the zeitgeist is changing, and for Salon, that's going to be enormously beneficial."
News.Com: Wal-Mart shoppers wait a year for AOL service.
Perhaps Wal-Mart would rather distinguish itself on the Internet by investing in site improvements instead of offering service, Gomez's Ladd said. "It seems (an ISP) would be a considerable investment to make sure people are shopping online," she said.
Advertising Age: Marketers reel after free ISPs exit business.
It’s one of the worst things that can happen to a marketer. You co-market a product using your brand name, and suddenly your co-marketer disappears, leaving you hanging and consumers upset not at them, but at you and your brand.
Industry Standard: 5 Million Customers Come First.
Last week, AltaVista said it would disconnect the 3 million users of its free service. Several others, including Freeinternet and WorldSpy, have closed in the last six months. But BlueLight, which banked on the free service as a way to lure shoppers to its fledgling site, is the first retailer to be left holding the bag...
NY Times: Canada Strengthens Internet Privacy.
Under the law, the consent of consumers would be required if their personal information was used commercially — and it would be illegal to use data gathered in the past without that consent. Consumers will also have the right to review any information about them that is on file.
Wired News: ISPs Face Down DMCA.
But these new systems might be overstepping the bounds of the law. While helping ISPs track users who are committing copyright infringement, attorney Fred von Lohmann said the new automated systems might actually be putting ISPs at the mercy of content owners.
December 24, 2000
Useit.Com: The Web in 2001: Paying Customers.
Offering free services on websites is not a sustainable business model, nor is advertising, which doesn't work on the Web. Most Internet companies are now pursuing an enterprise strategy to make money, but they'll soon begin turning to individual customers for revenue as well.
O'Reilly Network: The Case Against Micropayments.
Clay Shirky. The very micro-ness of micropayments makes them confusing. At the very least, users will be persistently puzzled over the conflicting messages of "This is worth so much you have to decide whether to buy it or not" and "This is worth so little that it has virtually no cost to you."
Computerworld: Giving a Lift to Micropayments.
Don Tapscott. Many skeptics e-mailed me after last month's column to say people will never use micropayment systems to buy small chunks of online content such as news, music or videos.
This is wishful thinking. Free content subsidized through advertising is unsustainable.
December 25, 2000
Salt Lake Tribune: Web Had Humble Beginnings.
It is amazing to think today, with the World Wide Web now spanning some 7 million sites, that its creator could barely get his colleagues interested at first. Ten years later, Tim Berners-Lee has different worries: keeping the Web from growing out of control as commercial developers pile layer after layer of software on top of the Web's foundation.
Salt Lake Tribune: Web Inventor Envisions Next Wave of Innovations.
Ten years after he created the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee is nurturing it into a gigantic brain, where databases get smarter and work together to solve problems. Berners-Lee terms it "the Semantic Web." To him, it's the second half of the information revolution.
NY Times: Bringing Competition Policy Into the Age of the Internet.
That is why many experts are beginning to question the current state of competition policy and why even some regulators are wondering whether it is time for a new antitrust approach to the new economy — an approach that tries to take the future into account.
Web Informant: Side-by-Side Shopping.
Interestingly, few people have focused on this aspect of eCommerce. Yet, it plays to one of the best traits of the web: the ability to do your research as a consumer, to find everything you want to know about the actual product category that you are interested in purchasing.
NY Times: Will Bricks-and-Mortar Merchants Grow Complacent.
It meant they had at least a little more time to construct their own Internet strategies. But now that the consumer e-commerce landscape looks like it has been struck by a neutron bomb, industry analysts say bricks-and-mortar merchants are breathing a bit too easily.
December 26, 2000
Industry Standard: The Price Is Wrong.
Flat rates offer buyers of information and communications services the same peace of mind that fixed prices offer buyers of products. No matter how confusing the variety of factors that go into a service – say, time or distance – the price remains the same.
Content Magazine: Dumb and Dumber Ideas.
Evan Schwartz. So, we have crawled through the Web’s wreckage in search of turkeys—by which we mean e-commerce predictions that missed their mark by an embarrassing margin. We have identified four of the most misleading and ruinous predictions of the past several years.
Interactive Week: Peer Pressure.
"I don't think Microsoft cares about 'providing leadership' so much as becoming a player over time," said Clay Shirky, partner at investment firm Accelerator Group, who has been monitoring P2P companies. "At a guess, Microsoft will buy whoever's good when the smoke starts clearing."
InfoWorld: Stats show backbone provider UUNet seems to be biggest spam haven.
The Spamhaus Project isn't the only watchdog that believes UUNet customers are responsible for large volumes of spam. Statistics for abuse complaints logged at SpamCop.net have in recent months seen UUNet with 10 times more complaints than any other source.
The Register: Sneaky cable crypto scheme in the works.
The cable television industry is moving ahead with a controversial plan to implement a copy protection scheme that will allow movie studios and cable providers to control what viewers are able to record off future digital cable TV networks.
Seattle Times: Ready for a 3-D stock exchange?
The operations center used to be a bank of computer screens, each monitoring a part of the trading operation on the floor of the exchange. But for the past few months, Allen and others who keep the exchange running smoothly have worked with a computer-generated three-dimensional view of the floor.
December 27, 2000
Editor & Publisher: Online News Advice For 2001.
Steve Outing. While I, too, am tempted to succumb to the desire to make predictions for the digital news industry in 2001, I'm going to take a slightly different approach. Rather than predictions, what follows are my recommendations about what the online news industry should be doing and focusing on next year.
Evhead: Pricing Matters.
I've been thinking a lot about pricing lately, and the statement above is inline with my intuition (and experience) on the ever-tricky issue. It also brought up a lot of thoughts I've been having about pricing and assumptions that are often made about what does and doesn't work on the web...
Computerworld: Making a Case For Selling Online Content.
As someone who works for a Web content start-up, I have observed five major classes of business-relevant Web content success. If you're thinking about selling content online, I would suggest that you begin by measuring yourself against the following criteria...
- Linux Journal: From October 2000; Myster.
Doc Searls.
News.Com: Egghead tight-lipped about hack investigation.
Representatives for Egghead and its outside security consultant, Kroll Worldwide, said that while they have continued to gather information about the breach, they have no updates on how hackers were able to break into Egghead's systems or on how many customer accounts were compromised.
Business Week: For Softlock, the Rights Stuff Wasn't Good Enough.
With Chili Pepper, SoftLock is writing a new chapter. In early December, the company secured $7 million from original investors and began operating as Digital Goods. Griffith says the move reflects the company's new direction -- to help publishers generate sales through "contextual marketing."
Washington Post: The New News Thing.
These seem like sensible investments in today's rapidly evolving field of cyber-publishing, and The Post's Web site is certainly among the best of its kind. What is less clear, at least to me, is how all this will affect print journalism and people who rely on newspapers to know what's happening.
Business Week: The Woman with All the Right Answers?
So, after Kirkbride reshaped her original idea for the Web and licensed some of the intellectual property back from Platinum, Broad Daylight was born. As Kirkbride describes it, Broad Daylight's software does away with the frustrating problem of answering the same question over and over again.
December 28, 2000
News.Com: New technology could help squelch digital music piracy.
The plans are initially likely to affect removable or portable data storage, such as Zip drives or the Flash memory cards used in MP3 players. But the standards could ultimately serve as a way to keep consumers from copying copyrighted files directly onto their hard drives...
The Register: EFF's Gilmore calls for CPRM hardware boycott.
"No copy protection should exist ANYWHERE in generic computer hardware! It's up to the BUYER to determine what to use their product for," writes Gilmore. "It's not up to the vendors of generic hardware, and certainly not up to a record company that's shadily influencing those vendors in back-room meetings."
USA Today: Sounding the cyber-rights alarm.
The entertainment industry, she says, thinks it ''should control every single copy, wherever and whenever it's played, and have a pay-for-use system so that no one can ever share anything again,'' says Samuelson, 52. ''I think that's a fascist world. I wouldn't want to live in it.''
LA Times: User-Unfriendly.
Welcome to the 21st century, where nothing works right, critical components of everyday life are far too complicated for average people to operate, and the guys responsible for foisting the whole mess upon the world don't really seem to care.
Wired News: Free Links, Only $50 Apiece.
Online news sites are turning to a novel way to make some extra cash: requiring fees for links. The Albuquerque Journal charges $50 for the right to link to each of its articles. Localbusiness.com and Latino.com are more generous, and permit one to five links without payment.
Forbes: Everywhere Network.
The idea, dubbed OceanStore, is an architecture for the next next-generation Internet. It is aimed at solving one of the Net's looming big problems:how to reliably and securely retrieve data from anywhere in the world, on any computing device.
- Computerworld: From January 31, 2000; R&D Gems
MSNBC: Broadband carriers may face shakeout amid the tech slump.
Investors’ amazement over the promise of fat pipes delivering Internet music, video and other applications has been replaced by a sober analysis of the network operators’ ability to generate substantial revenue and earnings and pay back their often huge debt.
News.Com: Authors criticize Amazon's used book sales.
In a letter earlier this month, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, whose board of directors includes Michael Crichton and Garrison Keillor, called on Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos to put a higher priority on selling new books.
December 29, 2000
Industry Standard: E-Book Publishers Face Piracy Panic.
Moreover, no one knows when, or even if, e-books will catch on, so publishers risk spending a lot of money to fend off a threat that may never emerge. In other words, projecting revenue losses for an as yet nonexistent market is guesswork based on a host of uncertain variables.
NY Times: Looking Forward.
Pamela Samuelson, Marc Rotenberg and others. Cyberlaw Journal recently asked a panel of legal experts to predict the most significant or interesting developments in Internet law and policy for the year 2001. These are excerpts from their forecasts.
O'Reilly Network: In Praise of Freeloaders.
Clay Shirky. Attempts to prevent freeloading are usually framed in terms of preventing users from behaving selfishly, but selfishness is a key lubricant in P2P systems. In fact, selfishness is what makes the resources used by P2P available in the first place.
O'Reilly Network: Peers not Pareto.
Clay Shirky. If I leave Napster on over the weekend, I typically get more downloads than I have total songs stored, at a marginal cost of zero. Those users are better off. I am not worse off. The situation is not Pareto Optimal.
Philadelphia Inquirer: Locked out.
Active Web users have to manage about 15 passwords for daily use, according to Forrester Research Inc., an Internet research firm. By some estimates, half of all service calls to Web businesses are from people asking some version of the question, What's my user name and password?
USA Today: Net journalists allowed to cover Olympics.
Internet organizations will be accredited at the 2002 Winter Games, despite being denied lucrative video rights to the Olympics. The IOC said Wednesday that it had agreed to accredit a limited number of Internet organizations for the games, so their journalists can ''produce some original text and content.''
NY Times: Artificial Intelligence Hasn't Peaked (Yet).
Other fruits of artificial intelligence research abound as well. Whether you are struggling to beat your Palm organizer at chess, watching your word processing program correct your spelling or playing a video game, you are witnessing the ways in which artificial intelligence has insinuated itself into daily life.
December 30, 2000
IBM developerWorks: The user experience #2.
In this article I will go into more detail, identifying and comparing specific aspects of the GUI and Web environments, and suggesting some design strategies for dealing with the differences. Many of the differences result from fundamentally different user models.
DDJ TechNetCast: The Semantic Web.
Archived presentation in RealAudio and MP3. W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee presents his vision for the future of the web - a "self-navigable space" of self-described, "machine-understandable" fragments of information in which documents convey meaning through XML markup.
Industry Standard Grok: See You at the Top.
On any normal Labor Day, Matt Hyde would have been out climbing. But in 1996, he spent the holiday weekend indoors, working around the clock with a team of programmers and designers. His job: to put Recreational Equipment Inc. – the specialty sporting-goods retailer better known as REI – online.
Argus ACIA: Information Architecture and Personalization.
This white paper demonstrates the use of information architecture components as a foundation for thinking about personalization. After defining the information architecture components, it describes a model that combines the components into a complete personalization system.
Internet Week: Johns Hopkins Cures Its Search Woes.
The latter case was certainly true for Johns Hopkins University this past summer: ABC Television was preparing to air a six-part series on the school's medical center, and the existing search engines weren't capable of handling the number of hits the exposure was sure to generate.
December 31, 2000
Context Magazine: Smart Homes? A Stupid Idea.
Larry Keeley, president of the Doblin Group. Dazzling scenarios for the future are presented with breathless fervor. Yet anyone who looks at decades past instantly notices that predictions such as these tend to be utter nonsense. Indeed, many of today’s predictions have been around for dozens of years without moving any closer to reality.
The Economist: Shame about the statistics.
Facing slim prospects of raising more money before they reach profitability, e-tailers desperately need to prove themselves this year. What a shame, then, that most of the indicators are so perplexing. There is no shortage of numbers out there but making sense of them is tough.
Detroit Free Press: Internet freebies will be limited.
BlueLight.com plans to announce a reward system next month that it hopes will turn its free Internet subscribers into online Kmart shoppers. The dot-com arm of the Troy-based Kmart Corp. is mulling several possibilities to limit its free Internet access service to 25 hours per month in January.
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