January 1, 1999
Happy New Years!

Welcome to everyone visiting from Useit.Com!

Industry Standard: The Next Generation. Five companies ready to adopt emerging business trends: Epicentric, Financial Engines, eWallet, Moai Technologies and iShip.

Harvard Business School Publishing: Who Can Be an Infomediary? Companies playing the infomediary role will become the custodians, agents, and brokers of customer information, marketing it to businesses (and providing them with access to it) on consumers' behalf, while at the same time protecting their privacy.

Wired News: The Wired Digital Crystal Ball. Everyone at Wired Digital makes a prediction for 1999.

Washington Post: Perils of Prognostication. "All you can do is stay alert to each situation as it confronts you."

Industry Standard: Under the Wire. Carl Steadman. "Someday, that Lucite Ship-It award will be ours."

January 2, 1999
SJ Mercury: What awaits us (maybe) in new year. Dan Gillmor. (Probability you will click this link: 0.99).

NY Times: Rural Town Takes on Obstacles to an Internet Connection. ...Sometimes the places that most need to overcome geography have the hardest time doing it, because they are handicapped by their distance from the nearest trunk lines...

ZDNN: Searching within your Vicinity. Vicinity looks to get search engines hooked up to their geographic application allowing people to get directions to local businesses.

Project Cool: Happy New Year! Syndicating with XML, serving dynamic pages from a database and yes, it's 1999.

Microsoft Backstage: How We Built the New Home Page. Two Microsoft managers discussed how they launched the new homepage in November 1998.

Microsoft Backstage: "...And my boss said: 'Make the homepage 50% faster'". The story of the Microsoft.Com redesign from the developers point of view with implementation questions.

January 3, 1999
NY Times: New Technology Revives Old Debate. The debate now centers around whether methods of doing business over the Internet, known as electronic commerce, should be patentable.

Ask Tog: Fulfilling the Promise of Computers. Along with the rest of the January edition of Ask Tog with Bruce Tognazzini.

BarnesandNoble.Com: You can now route to barnesandnoble.com through book.com. And if four letters for a domain name is too long, try bn.com.

Stating the Obvious: Obvious Resolutions. The redesign is up with a new mission statement at theobvious.com.

Boston Globe: Nations strive to limit freedom of the Internet. ''The Internet is very frightening to many governments because it's an inherently democratic medium, so the first reaction is to reach out and control it.''

January 4, 1999
ClickZ: Give A Little Of The Human Touch. Ideally, web-based customer service should include both self-help and live-help capabilities.

Internet World: Refinements Over Breakthroughs for Multimedia. "I used to think the download was the kiss of death," he said. "I don't think so anymore." Card cited statistics indicating that 80 percent of Internet users have downloaded software.

Forbes: Web top workspace. Could the Internet create an entirely new business model for the rapid dissemination and delivery of documents?

News.Com: Go2Net acquires Web21 for $13.5 million. Web21 and their 100hot.com property which relies on proxy servers to rate sites in various cateogries purchased by Go2Net.

News.Com: Library Net access under renewed attack. Parent files suit against a California library for not installing filters after her son accessed pornographic images on library computers.

News.Com: Sun exec joins Internet Society board. John Gage, chief research officer and director of the science office at Sun Microsystems, has been appointed to the board of trustees of the Internet Society...

Internet Technical Group: Internetworking 1.3. December 1998 edition of the ITG's newsletter with several interesting articles.

January 5, 1999
ZDNN: Observers wary of Finjan's security scare. An Israeli security company finds an ingenious hack that has impacted no one and has yet to be spotted on the Internet, and everyone gets upset. But should they?

MSNBC: EchoStar-WebTV in set-top box deal. EchoStar Communications and WebTV Networks are preparing to announce a new generation of set-top box that will combine satellite reception, Internet browsing and eventually VCR-like recording functions all in one device...

News.Com: New year marked with redesign fever. "We redesigned the site so that pages load twice as fast," said Michelle Bergman, spokesperson for ABCNews.com...

Useit.Com: Spotlight of Microsoft's new MacTopia subsite. And it's a disaster to deviate this much from the general site design and navigation.

Red Herring: Only the paranoid surprise. Coverage of Steve Jobs' keynote speech at MacWorld.

Industry Standard: A 'Banner' Year for the Drudge Report. Banner ads show up at Matt Drudge's site and banner advertisers are asked if they like the placement.

Freedom Forum: The revolutionary MP3. Jon Katz.

ZDNet AnchorDesk: Five Hidden Forces Shaping Our Future. Jesse Berst. True distributed computing, netsourcing, new verticals, open source, electronic software distribution

Fortune: Don´t Wage a Price War Online. They can quickly compare prices. That instantly sucks the margins out of E-commerce. So don't compete on price.

News.Com: AOL, CBS in online news deal. AOL chooses CBS as their exclusive broadcast news provider.

January 6, 1999
Web Techniques: The Sting of Browser Incompatibility. A quick chat with some Web Standards Project members and the role they play.

Web Techniques: The Extensible Style Language. A comprehensive overview on the current status of XSL.

W3C: Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification. Proposed Recommendation.

ClickZ: Honey, I Shrunk the Internet. Sometimes gluing together existing technologies can be more compelling than inventing entirely new ones.

News.Com: RSA sidesteps crypto rules with Aussie unit. "This essentially puts RSA on equal footing," said Chris Christiansen, analyst with International Data Corporation...

Editor & Publisher: A Debate: Contextual Transactions On News Sites. Steve Outing. ...there are some big ethical issues involved in incorporating online transactions into contextual editorial content on news Web sites.

News.Com: Netscape wraps AtWeb buy. Netscape completes purchase of AtWeb which developed various tools for maintaining a website for $212.3 million dollars in stock.

January 7, 1999
Salon: Judging computers by their covers. Scott Rosenberg. The iMac is the shell of an "information appliance" -- an easy-to-use, just-plug-it-in way to get online -- surrounding a traditional personal computer.

Freedom Forum: Online First Amendment rights to be focus of Jan 11. conference. An audio archive of the conference will be available at Freedom Forum on January 13.

Industry Standard: WebTV Deal Adds Satellite Video Service. TV Pause, digital video recording, 8.6-gigabyte hard drive, downloadable video games (id Software's Doom is mentioned) and other services currently offered on WebTV boxes. WebTV also plans to include an MP3 player later this year.

San Francisco Examiner: Net Unemployment Will the Internet Put You Out of Work? ...would I be a customer here if I could get the exact same thing at home sitting in my underwear? If the answer is "no" it's time to move on.

Wired News: There's Something About Gary. For decades Gary North has made a living predicting modern society will end in panic and ruin.

RCFoC: I Love USB! Jeffrey Harrow and the RCFoC is back from vacation talking about USB.

InfoWorld: Macromedia integrates Web tool with Apple app server. Macromedia's DreamWeaver releases new extensions to work with Apple's WebObjects.

January 8, 1999
Anyone interested in a text-only/Avantgo version of Today's Links? Let me know at tomalak@tr.pair.com and include any implementation suggestions based on other Avantgo sites you currently use.

InfoWorld: Post-holiday hangovers afflict sites. The two overriding issues that most sites are dealing with today are the failure to integrate their I-commerce systems with their overall supply chains and miscalculating the demand these applications would put on their systems.

Business Week: Web Affiliate Programs: A Good Deal for Small Biz? There's more in it for those who are getting customers than for those who are sending them over.

DDJ TechNetCast: Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup creator of C++. Bjarne Stroustrup talks about his work environment and habits, Bell Labs, the creative process behind programming, the C++ standard, distributed computing, the momentum behind component object architectures and more.

• Real; Video and Audio feeds.

Upside: Lucent's Resurrection. Lucent recharges Bell Labs.

Red Herring: Free ISP makes good. The trick for NetZero will be to survive until the advertising windfall comes through.

ZD Interactive Investor: Zapata smells like an Internet fraud. Zapata issues a press release boasting of a new relationship with Amazon. But they forgot to mention that it's a standard affiliate program with 140,000+ current associates.

ClickZ: Sick To Death. Am I the only one getting irritated by the endless discussions about the "death" of banner ads?

Editor & Publisher: Ethical Problems With Online Transactions, Part 2. Steve Outing. Conclusion of a debate on the use of contextual transaction advertising by online news sites.

News.Com: New buzz word: "Destination" site. Many of the destinations being discussed here will look to replace content aggregation with using familiar content brands to attract Web surfers and TV viewers.

January 9, 1999
InfoWorld: Dell stays ahead of the pack by adding innovative online features. Dell's Premier Pages and use of the Ask Jeeves natural language search tool on their site.

Upside: New Media, Same Song. Open letter to the Recording Industry Association of America from David Coursey on MP3 and the recording industry.

PNG Development Group: Portable Network Graphics specification v1.1. ...it is expected to become a joint ISO/IEC standard by late 1999, if all goes well.

Useit.Com: Spotlight on why Barnes and Noble's search page does it better than Amazon. ...better use of progressive disclosure and content prioritization.

Metropolis Magazine: Crash Landing 54 unscheduled arrivals. David Carson, Richard Saul Wurman, Jakob Nielsen, Clement Mok, Erik Spiekermann, Esther Dyson, Nathan Shedroff and other top designers describe the things to watch for in 1999.

MSNBC: Illuminating tale for Web fans. Quick: Think of a new end-of-the-century technology that captivates entrepreneurs and investors and sends stock prices of pioneering companies to unimaginable heights.

InfoWorld: Don't leave customers hanging while you untangle your online customer service. "In the future, I'd like to see cases closed by the customer. Allowing customers to close it themselves keeps them in the driver's seat..."

News.Com: U.S. e-tailers plan British invasion. Amazon, Dell, Charles Schwab and Microsoft all working for a larger share of online sales in the UK.

Wired News: Another CDA II Challenge Coming. An alliance of high-tech firms and publishers on Monday will ask a Philadelphia judge to overturn the sequel to the Communications Decency Act.

January 10, 1999
Freedom Forum: The Internet and the First Amendment. Vincent Cerf will keynote the conference with a series of panels tomorrow starting at 9AM EST with live audio coverage.

• Real; Audio feed.

Useit.Com: Collecting Feedback From Users of an Archive (Reader Challenge). The collective brainpower of the Internet is an awesome beast that used to manifest itself on Usenet newsgroups.

Project Cool: A Little Bit of Soul. Open Source. And that some things are more than just cross-platform -- they are cross-human.

ZDNN: Internet Content Coalition Symposium. A symposium is being held tomorrow and ZDNet is providing coverage with live video and audio. Scheduled speakers include Christine Varney, Ira Magaziner and people from the ACLU, CNET, ZDNet, MSNBC, Warner Bros. Online, NY Times and Netscape Netcenter. There will be various live streams between 12:15 to 4:30PM PST.

NY Times: Digital Timestamps: Punching an Electronic Clock digital timestamp would function something like a notarized signature, establishing a document's existence or state at a particular time.

January 11, 1999
Interactive Week: Meta Group: Net Forcing New Issues. A new job title is being created in major corporations to deal with a byproduct of the electronic commerce revolution: the chief customer officer.

NY Times: Online, the Customer Isn't Always Right. ...By trumpeting the virtues of online commerce, Web sites have increased consumer expectations to levels that few retailers can meet.

NY Times: From the Lab to the Home, an Expansive View of Technology. What the researchers at NCR Knowledge Lab are working on.

ZDNN: Webzines face do-or-die struggle Content isn’t dead on the Internet, but electronic commerce is Wall Street’s current king.

MSDN Online: The Scoop on Script. Robert Hess. The Web has created a renewed interest in a general-purpose programming model for the operating system.

USA Today: Changing shape of the Web in '99. Although he reckons that changes ahead won't be as accelerated as they were during the Web's more formative years, Nielsen sees other positive signs on the Internet horizon.

ZDNN: Will government keep mitts off Net? Report from the Internet Content Coalition conference with Ira Magaziner and Christine Varney.

Freedom Forum: Integrity of information a top Internet issue, Cerf says. the issues of authenticity and anonymity must be addressed if the Internet is to fulfill its potential as a powerful tool of expression.

News.Com: Net firms jump on free speech bandwagon. Major online companies threw their support behind a federal challenge to the Child Online Protection Act today...

News.Com: Microsoft's portal push continues. Redesign of MSN.Com is unveiled.

USA Today: Web shoppers look for ease of use. Sites can't assume consumers will become complacent. Instead, they become more demanding.

• Cheskin Research and Studio Archetype/Sapient: eCommerce Trust Study

ClickZ: Musings On A Brand's Surface Area. The point here is that your web brand has more surface area, more points of contact than its offline correlate.

SJ Mercury: The future of technology. Q&A with Senior VP and director of IBM Research Paul M. Horn.

ClickZ: Setting Your Shop Apart I find I'm contradicting myself a lot these days. I think it may be a good thing.

News.Com: Digital divide as a symptom. Q&A with Don Tapscott.

NY Times: Amazon Surge May Reflect the New Math of the Internet. But other analysts see an underlying logic, even if it does not conform to conventional investing theory.

January 12, 1999
CritSuite: Critical Discussion Tools for the Web. ...allow individuals to comment on and view existing hypertext documents (CritLink), to navigate the Web using a graphical interface (CritMap), and to archive email exchanges using the features of hypertext (CritMail).

Useit.Com: From February 8, 1998; The Reputation Manager

BarnesandNoble.Com: Transcript of chat with David Siegel

Freedom Forum: Sooner or later, all online info will cost you, expert says. ...increasingly, it will be technology that protects copyrighted material, not copyright law..."

ClickZ: Is The End Near? Internet stock prices are insane. Click-throughs are dropping. Lots of ad inventory is unsold. Is the end of the world on nigh?

Builder.Com: Be a freelance Web builder. Some tips if your considering the freelance route of working on the Web.

Advertising Age: ARF forum examines Internet research effectiveness. Advertising Research Foundation to host Online Research Day on January 25. ...the companies will disclose results of online research for concept testing, brand awareness, purchase intent and other objectives.

Wired News: Data Slips Out of Agency Again. US Bureau of Labor Statistics posts producer price data a day early due to human error.

News.Com: Proxy-caching concerns not realized. Reports that copyright law meant the death of Net caching have been greatly exaggerated.

Wired News: Centraal Wins Keyword Court Spat. Judge rules in favor of Centraal in a patent-infringement suit from a keyword another keyword navigational aid firm.

News.Com: Compaq's Alta Vista strategy emerges. This will allow Compaq users to access AltaVista or Shopping.com e-commerce services simply by pressing a single button on the PC keyboard.

News.Com: MSNBC online gets new CEO. Jim Kinsella has been promoted to CEO of MSNBC on the Net...

Freedom Forum: Larry Flynt, journalism and us. Jon Katz.

WebWord.com: Visual Design and Web Site Creation. Q&A with Lynda Weinman.

USA Today: Underground e-mail catches on "ICQ is different things to different people..."

Interactive Week: Netscape Polishes Portal's Appeal. Netcenter announced a deal with When.com to provide a new calendar service scheduled to go live at the end of February.

Wired News: TED Bookstore Jumps Online. This year's TED conference drops on-side bookstalls for computers and a customized interface for barnesandnoble.com

Freedom Forum: Web self-rating called 'roadmap to government regulation'. "This notion that rating is a way for individuals to avoid government regulation is naive..."

January 13, 1999
ClickZ: Feed The Need For Immediacy. Electronic fulfillment can perform valuable functions that replace the need for paper-based fulfillment.

News.Com: AOL goes for selective marketing. ...deal with a private marketing firm to sell products and services available on AOL through a network of home distributors.

Peter Merholz: Maintaining Search Context. Some experience designing a search engine for Sparks.Com. ...what happens after you click on a link in your search results.

News.Com: BBB privacy project faces critics. The Better Business Bureau wants one thing from Net users--their trust.

Wired News: Centraal Piggybacks on Inktomi. Centraal licenses its RealNames technology to Inktomi

Upside: Web Site Development: Big Opportunity, Tough Business. "Web sites that are hard to use frustrate customers, forfeit revenue and erode brands..."

News.Com: Movie site suffers ignoble fate. Once you register a domain, you better hold on to it and reroute the traffic" once the film's run is over...

deseretnews.com: Web pundit endorses disrespect — in China. "It's very compatible with the Internet bottoms-up view of the world," said Negroponte...

Red Herring: Canon fodder. ...the new era cannot be reduced to a canon of numbered principles, because we do not yet understand the Internet.

USA Today: Metasearches often are best bet. "I think we're going to see the major search engines themselves develop more ways to deliver specialized results to users."

January 14, 1999
RCFoC: The Explosion! IDC expects Internet usage and Ecommerce to explode!

Editor & Publisher: Newest Guardian Sites Worth a Look. ...introducing some innovative news Web site features and site design strategies.

News.Com: Media, tech execs form e-commerce group. "The focus is shifting now from technology to policy," said Steve Case, AOL's chief executive. "This is reflective of the Internet coming of age."

Salon: Bandwidth in our time. Scott Rosenberg. Now that the telephone companies are finally taking on the cable industry, we just might get fast Internet lines in our homes before we're all dead.

Builder.Com: Web building in Europe. A chat with a co-founder of Sweden's largest Web design firm about building sites in Europe.

NY Times: Library Filtering Case Dismissed. ...a judge in Northern California on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit brought be a woman seeking to suspend Internet access at a local public library...

ChannelSeven: Do Your PR People Know What's Being Said About You on the Net? eWatch uses a proprietary search engine and its own "Web Pump," which it places on target sites to tap into discussion threads.

Federal Computer Week: A tangled Web. Agencies' failure to develop a stronger job role for federal Webmasters threatens the development of a digital government.

Washington Post: Trailing Amazon, but Catching Up. I guess I thought Amazon was simply the best.

Washington Post: Transcript of chat with Kevin Kelly. January 14, 1998.

News.Com: Study: Net population diversifying. "...you're going to see a broadening of offerings on the Web to reflect society as a whole..."

Wired News: Where Web Phantoms Roam. Kahle feels the early years of television were poorly documented, and he doesn't want the mistake repeated with the Internet.

January 15, 1999
Freedom Forum: Internet conference shows 2 visions of future of online speech. It was a striking contrast: In the morning, Cerf looking to freedom, and in the afternoon, Ornstein looking to regulation, both extending their visions to the Internet, where they collide.

ZDNN: Online calendars scheduled for launch. "People are starting to realize that bits are these ephemeral things and that they do degrade..."

Industry Standard: Training Your E-Dog. Web marketers that demand low or no commitment from visitors will achieve the greatest level of success in attracting new customers.

News.Com: Ellison: The Net will break Microsoft. "The Internet does in fact change everything in my industry, your business, our economy, our culture," he said.

Business Week: A Chat with "Cyberfuturist" Chuck Martin. The Net is not going to be an extension of a company's business -- it'll be the driver of the business.

Boston Globe: Looking back at cyberspace. Simson Garfinkel. A number of recent books shed different light on the birth of the Internet.

Builder.Com: Drumbeat 2000. Review of Elemental Software's latest release of Drumbeat 2000.

Web Review: Clearing the Air on ClearType. Further discussion on Microsoft's ClearType technology.

Freedom Forum: Getting wireless: for better or worse? You make the call. Jon Katz.

News.Com: MP3.com gets $11 million investment. "They're funding the prospect of a shift in the music business."

Useit.Com: Spotlight on "Why are all the books about the Network Economy bad?" With possible exceptions.

January 16, 1999
SJ Mercury: No choice perfect on encryption. Dan Gillmor. Whichever way we go on this issue that defies compromise, there will be consequences. That may be unfortunate, but it's real life.

NY Times: Click for Customer Service. Then Wish You Hadn't. ...noting that many sites fail to offer enough information so that customers can help themselves.

Advertising Age: New technology lets consumers ditch .com on Web. "She asked me why the heck do we have this http: thing. I didn't really have a good answer."

IETF: Human-Friendly Names/Identifiers BOF. Preliminary Meeting Minutes from 43rd IETF Conference held in December 1998 in Orlando.

Forbes: Danger: Stealth attack. Christensen terms a new product that sneaks into an established market a disruptive technology.

ZDNN: Sony to buy InfoBeat brand. ...refocus its business on e-mail outsourcing, specifically in providing corporate clients with high-volume e-mail services for marketing...

NY Times: U.S. Officials Try to Sell Encryption Policy in Valley. The Clinton Administration has a relatively informal mechanism for trying to convince countries to adopt U.S.-style rules on encryption.

Wired News: MIT Grads Aim To Cut Congestion. But while Web caches fill up with any manner of content, Akamai strategically distributes only content owned by its clients.

January 17, 1999
Salon: The telephone toll. For European Net users saddled with high phone rates, the meter is always running.

MSNBC: Travel shopping on the Web takes off. Airlines like Web ticketing because it reduces costs — and eliminates the commissions paid to storefront travel agencies.

ZDNN: David Coursey's Showcase '99. ZDNet will be providing streamed coverage on January 18-19. Details about the conference can be found at the Showcase '99 website.

BarnesandNoble.Com: Chat with Guy Kawasaki. On the book tour for Rules for Revolutionaries, he'll be chatting on January 29 at 5PM Eastern.

Seattle Times: Net innovations: Travel Web site represents a new method of pricing. ...remember the ancient proverb: Caveat emptor.

Useit.Com: Give Me Your Billions: Why MarketWatch.com is Over-Valued. ....but MarketWatch's valuation is an example of not just reality-distortion, but reality-denial.

Internet Information Payments Collaborative: Making Information Pay on the Internet. Roundtable summit on February 28-March 2, 1999 in Amherst, Mass. with Jakob Nielsen and status reports from W3C, CommerceNet, the Copyright Clearance Center Inc., ASCAP and the International Digital Object Identifier Foundation.

January 18, 1999
NY Times: At Home May Buy Excite. At Home reported to announce deal to buy Excite for $6 billion dollars on Tuesday.

Builder.Com: Open source content: getting you involved as Builder.com writers. Dan Shafer details new plans at Builder.Com that includes a story-submission process for writers.

ClickZ: The Art And Science Of Online Profiling. An outline on how online profiling systems work.

Salon: There goes the neighborhood. "And putting up message boards and chat rooms is a step towards community, but online community does not automatically happen just by throwing the tools at people. It requires thought."

SF Examiner: Building trust. Remarks on the Cheskin/Studio Archetype report. "I liken trust to reliability," he said. "It says what (a Web site) is going to do and not misrepresent itself."

Wired News: The Great Code Race. EFF and Distributed.net are both devoting CPU cycles to win the annual DES III Challenge.

Contentious: Announcing Content Exchange! A new service from Steve Outing or Amy Gahran launching in late January or early Febuary. The digital marketplace for online content creators and publishers.

Wired News: Thar's Gold in That Thar Data. Epiphany looks to mine companies' legacy databases with their software for direct marketing campaigns.

CNNfn: Intel sets encryption plan. Intel is working with RSA to include hardware and software encryption technologies in PCs.

Stating the Obvious: Just One Question for Doug Block

NY Times: A Warning to the Wired World. To win and keep customers in a wired world, companies must provide value. Most haven't figured that out, though.

NY Times: A Vision of Electronic Gear in a Journalist's Future.

Adweek: Web Crawling. Online companies are scurrying for control of Europe's embryonic Internet market.

Adweek: The IQ Q&A With DoubleClick's Kevin O'Connor

Interactive Week: Bridge Close To Buying Backbone Provider Savvis. Bridge, a financial news company, is set to buy Internet backbone provider Savvis.

Wired News: More Tales from Encryption. "Once you add encryption, it's no longer an open standard. And that's the whole point of MP3."

Washington Post: The Internet's Big Name Brand. A delegation of Japanese business people recently visited the room and, after the cage was unlocked, one after the other put a hand on the box and had a picture taken with Root Server A.

January 19, 1999
MSNBC: Investors prove far too Excitable. How much longer all this goes on is anybody’s guess.

ZDNet AnchorDesk: The Big-Name Partnership That Will Threaten AOL. Jesse Berst. But there's a blockbuster in the wings that could be even more powerful…

Builder.Com: Building for the 5.0 browsers

Salon: A corporate game of Internet Monopoly. Scott Rosenberg. @Home's purchase of Excite poses a new challenge to AOL and leaves Microsoft on the sidelines -- for now.

Wired News: Memo Calls Deal 'Tectonic Shift'. An internal memo sent to Excite executives.

RSA Press Release: RSA Code-Breaking Contest Again Won by Distributed.Net and Electronic Frontier Foundation. DES Challenge III Broken in Record 22 Hours.

NY Times: Lyrics Site in Copyright Dispute Is Closed. The International Lyrics Server has closed after police seized the site's servers in an investigation launched when several music-publishing companies filed suit for copyright violations.

News.Com: A Net home for hackers. Along with MP3.Com, Anti-Online also has venture funding and looking for a February launch for a network of hacking and computer security sites.

Editor & Publisher: News markup language may be spoken soon. News outlets work together to develop an industry markup language with XML.

SJ Mercury: Big online deal: @Home to buy Excite. At Home announces acquisition of Excite for $6.7 billion dollars.

Wired News: Pitching Books Smarter. Fitzgerald learned from the slick-page domain that owning a reader for life means pulling them in young and following up with a publication pitched to adults.

News.Com: Intel, Macromedia team for effects. Macromedia's Director 7 and Shockwave 7 player to include Intel's Web Design Effects software.

January 20, 1999
W3C: Universal Commerce Language and Protocol

Industry Standard: Media Blinded in Afterglow of AtHome-Excite Megamerger. Does AT&T + TCI + AtHome + Excite = AOL?

Upside: Reformation Overload. Clearly, not everyone was rushing to buy timeshares in Raymond's New Jerusalem.

Freedom Forum: Hysteria vs. explanation in reporting the online revolution. Jon Katz.

Editor & Publisher: Original Online Content: Growing, But Still Not Enough. Steve Outing. So I decided to take a look around the Internet and see how much original content is being produced by online news sites.

Wired News: Profile: At Home's Milo Medin. He was always saying, 'I want to bring packets to the people ... bytes to your doorstep...

PC World: Online Fun and Phones at Showcase 99. Another report from David Coursey's Showcase 99.

Webmonkey: E-Commerce Tutorial - Lesson 1. Getting Started and Making a Plan.

MSDN Online: Search and You Shall Find. ...ways to improve legibility and usability of hypertext navigation and to improve Web site search features with some simple techniques.

NY Times: Conference Underscores Growing Role of Encryption Report from the RSA '99 conference.

January 21, 1999
Editor & Publisher: A Status Report on Online Original Content, Part 2. Steve Outing. In the following examples are some interesting ideas for developing worthwhile online-original content.

A List Apart: Writing for the Web. Jeffrey Zeldman. They don't call it hypertext for nothing. The web is woven of words, yet nobody talks about them.

A List Apart: Redefining Possible. Lance Arthur. I do not come in peace.

NY Times: Lottery May Select 3 Companies to Run Web Domain-Name Registration. ...leaning toward an international lottery to pick the five companies that will get the first shot at ending the government-sanctioned monopoly held by Network Solutions Inc....

Salon: The unbearable realness of virtual being. Review of Julian Dibbell's "My Tiny Life". My Tiny Life" is the best book yet on the meaning of online life.

Industry Standard: Your European Valet. Setting up shop is one thing when you know the lay of the land. But what if you don't?

News.Com: NSI confirms database revisions. ...NSI stopped its WHOIS database from disclosing when a domain name was originally registered and whether the address is temporarily suspended, or in NSI parlance, "on hold."

W3C: WebCGM Profile W3C Recommendation. ...tailored to the requirements for scalable 2D vector graphics in electronic documents on the World Wide Web.

Wired News: Pouncing on MP3's Detractors. "For my mother to use MP3 it's got to be something like a CD..."

Industry Standard: Despite Economic Woes, Brazil Tempts I-Builder Organic. "Latin America is bigger than Asia from the way we see it," Nelson says.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of the Excite and @Home merger. Let's keep ISPs as common carriers.

Interactive Week: Amazon.com Continues To Fall On Pricing Concerns. "Amazon.com operates in a brutally competitive, low-margin, commodity business, and we believe, therefore, that a proliferation of the "at cost" strategy could scare the bejeesus out of investors and weaken the stock..."

Boston Globe: An efficient secretary. Simson Garfinkel. Wildfire voicemail system is smart, but often misunderstands commands.

News.Com: Will broadband determine Yahoo's future? Q&A with Yahoo's Jeff Mallett.

Freedom Forum: Literary publisher sues to overturn 1998 copyright law. Eldritch Press filed suit against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

ZDNN: Top 'Women of the Web' honored. Dr. Anita Borg, Barbara Boxer, Nikki Douglas, Melinda French Gates and Patty Stonesifer and Lavonne Luquis.

Webmonkey: E-Commerce Tutorial - Lesson 2. How to Sell, Sell, Sell!

January 22, 1999
Online Journalism Review: So You Want to Do Media in Asia.... Part I: Information Marketplace vs. Information Courtyard.

Webmonkey: E-Commerce Tutorial - Lesson 4. Build, Buy, or Rent?

devhead: Prototyping Web Designs. Jakob Nielsen. The more frequently you get usability data and iterate your design, the better the usability of the end result.

Freedom Forum: Information overload could make voters tune out, scholar says. While information technology is "enchanting and intoxicating," said Noam, his overriding and provocative question was, "is it liberating?"

NY Times: Web Publishers Testify Against Anti-Porn Law. "I believe we would choose not to put in any device that would slow users' access to our content," Barr said. "We would choose to self-censor."

ZDNN: Online music standards war brewing. Report from the Digital Music Showdown in New York.

Wired News: MP3 on Your Stereo. Groovy.. GoodNoise and Adaptec will develop a technology that lets regular stereos play MP3 files downloaded off the Net.

Editor & Publisher: Creation of Online News Association Moves Forward. ...whose aim is to encourage journalistic standards and principles in this evolving medium.

Time Digital: The Cool Site of the Year Awards. Has the Web sold out for Hollywood-style glamour? Not yet

MSNBC: AT&T may sell Internet-access lines to AtHome for $1 billion in stock. AT&T considering selling dial-up service to @Home.

High Five: Why Does It Hurt When I Say <P>? Jeffrey Zeldman. A Call for Standards.

Webmonkey: E-Commerce Tutorial - Lesson 3. Transactions.

January 23, 1999
NY Times: State Lawmakers Ready Scores of Internet Bills. "We saw some of the first state bills dealing with the Internet in 1995. There were three of them. Last year, the association looked at over 700 in each and every state that referred to the Internet in one form or another."

Useit.Com: Differences Between Print Design and Web Design. Anything that is a great print design is likely to be a lousy web design.

Wired News: Liquefying MP3. Companies supporting MP3 join together to create the Genuine Music Coalition.

Project Cool: Of Being Human ... Across All Media. We create our media. They are a reflect of what we are -- for better and for worse.

Industry Standard: Homeward Bound. "There was no point for us to try and out-Yahoo Yahoo..."

January 24, 1999
News.Com: Netscape to launch user-driven directory. Netscape plans to integrate directory listings throughout Netcenter, such as through the Communicator browser's smart browsing results, My Netscape personalized pages, and other Netcenter services.

• Netscape Open Directory. From the Open Directory Project page: 315,008 sites - 2,813 unreviewed - 6,476 editors - 40,116 categories.

ZDNet Anchordesk: Why the Popularity Engine Is a Natural Born Killer. Jesse Berst. DirectHit. Remember, an NBK is not an in-depth evaluation, just a recognition of a product's "genetic potential."

Washington Post: Business at Cyberspeed. Gary Culliss, CEO and founder of Direct Hit profiled. For Gary Culliss, the hardest part was telling his mother.

ClickZ: Beware The Subtext. As the writer or speaker, we assume that the subtext is hidden. But it isn't. In fact, the subtext can say more about us than the real text.

NY Times: Cool Awards, Chilly Audience. After all, as Leach would be the first to say, everyone loves a celebrity.

ClickZ: The Browser As The Beachhead. E-mail marketing.

SJ Mercury: Honoring Internet achievers. Cool Site of the Year, the Webby Awards and now the Dimmy Awards.

SJ Mercury: Mike Roberts is point man for the Internet. Mike Roberts, interim president and CEO of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

MSNBC: Are portals the Web’s Holy Grail? ‘We’re living through a period of portal chaos. The portal services ‘try everything because they can’t afford not to.’

January 25, 1999
Salon: Have my shoe talk to your refrigerator. Q&A with Neil Gershenfeld, co-director of the Things That Think consortium at the MIT Media Lab.

News.Com: Compaq spin-off announcement expected. Sources say Compaq will announce plans for an AltaVista IPO tomorrow.

Wired News: Net Ad Rates Continue to Fall. ...for the second year in a row, the overall rate that advertisers pay to hawk their wares on Web sites has declined.

AdKnowledge: Online Advertising Report Year In Review. PDF format. You can also read the hilights in a press release.

Columbia Journalism Review: Slate vs. Salon. The Leading Online Magazines Struggle to Get the Net.

Red Herring: Commerce by design. Yesterday's garage-shop creators of "Web faces" (essentially online brochures) are now powerhouses that produce "e-commerce centers," where customers and business partners conduct transactions and access resources.

SF Chronicle: Retailers Waking Up to Web's Potential. ``Retailers have viewed the Net in a confrontational way..."

News.Com: Mercury News building SiliconValley.com. New business and technology news site to launch in late February.

• Editor & Publisher: Mercury Center Revisited: Portal Vision. A column by Steve Outing from July 22, 1998 that addressed SJ Mercury's plans for SiliconValley.Com.

Industry Standard: Exit, Stage Right. Carl Steadman.

Industry Standard: Stick to the Net. One clear indicator of delirium will emerge as Internet firms begin to emulate their physical-world counterparts.

News.Com: Razorfish files to go public. The term "razor fish" is usually used to refer to wrasses, according to Webster's Third New International Dictionary.

IBM Intellectual Property Network: Style sheets for publishing system. Microsoft Corporation. The style sheets described herein are applied to individual display regions (controls) on a page. Unlike previous systems, the display regions in this system do not contain any text at the time the style sheet is applied. Rather, the text, or other media such as graphics, is poured into the display region when the title is rendered on the customer's computer.

Industry Standard: Is Hard Work Its Own Reward? A short list of Web innovators who haven't cashed in.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of the closing of Prodigy Classic. In other words, about 1/3 of the users have not upgraded yet. Further proof of my claim of increased user conservatism.

Freedom Forum: Countering counterfeit press releases — and more. "In Latvia, we have excellent Internet policy. We have no Internet policy."

Wired News: Can Post Office Stem Email Tide? With email flooding the nation, Canada Post will launch an ad campaign designed to resurrect a dying art -- letter writing.

Industry Standard: E-commerce Spotlight: Building Trust Online. Cheskin Research/Studio Archetype Report

TechWeb: E-Book Standards Process Faces Rough Road. "In truth, after all the committees, the real decision on electronic books will come from groups like the W3C...

Industry Standard: Is Bigger Better? Yet the downside is equally obvious. Consolidation in TV and radio has resulted in a discouraging homogeneity in programming.

Editor & Publisher: News Site Audiences Closing In On Print. Steve Outing. In case you failed to notice, some online news operations now have substantial audiences.

NYTSN: New `Conceptual' Search Tools Discard Old File Structures. From New Scientist. These pioneers all depend on giving computers a new interface geared to spatial searching.

Industry Standard: Liquid Audio Security Initiative - Real or Virtual? The campaign is really more PR than it is a business or technology breakthrough.

Microsoft Press Release: Microsoft's ClearType Team is Making Computer Displays Easier to Read. "At this point it was just a theory," Hitchcock recalled. "Then came the moment where I tried it out."

Wired News: 'We Can Work It Out'. "All we care about is having the companies pay what they can afford or what the industry requires."

InfoWorld: The company evolves, but Gateway's Web site stays the same. It's too bad that with all the changes in the company last year, the Web site was largely overlooked.

News.Com: The new world of big fat Web sites. The computers behind these sites represent more of a "Web farm" than a Web server.

Interactive Week: DoubleClick Broadens Its Horizons. ...it will try to expand its base of potential clients by brokering ad space even for Web sites that do not assign exclusive representation rights to DoubleClick.

News.Com: Seal of approval proposed for music. A Genuine Music Mark logo will be displayed on content encoded with the technology to show the track is not pirated, the coalition said.

SJ Mercury: Interactive services for the mainstream. Q&A with AOL's Steve Case.

January 26, 1999
Interactive Week: Privacy Proposal Faces Patent Challenge. ...the potential controversy surrounding Intermind's patent "has stopped P3P dead in its tracks" and will likely prevent P3P's widespread adoption, at least until the issue is resolved.

Freedom Forum: MSNBC: Online news audience now equals radio news listeners. "According to a statistical survey by MSNBC, online news is in a statistical dead heat with cable television and radio and is used slightly more often than magazines..."

WebTV Networks: It's Serious Biz: Designing Web Sites for Kidz. The most important thing to keep in mind when designing sites for children is that their cognitive abilities are different from those of adults.

Advertising Age: BBBOnline accepting privacy seal applications. Under the program, Web sites earning the seal must carry a privacy policy that clearly tells consumers what information is being collected and how it is used.

Salon: Microsoft has your number. Will Office's new registration scheme stop software pirates or hassle users?

ZDNN: Why Intel's ID tracker won't work. Yes, the processor number is unique and cannot be changed, but the software that queries the processor is not trusted.

Industry Standard: Making Order From Chaos. Chaos theory, otherwise known as the study of fractals, is working its way into a handful of mainstream applications that show great promise for the Internet.

FEED Magazine: The Sim Salesman. Steven Johnson. They may also bridge the gap between the Web-bound world of HTML and the burgeoning new universe of networked gaming.

News.Com: Microsoft wants piece of portal pie. AltaVista licensing deal also includes MSN Messenger service, an instant messaging client, that will be available at the end of this quarter or at the start of the next quarter.

Wired News: Sun on Privacy: 'Get Over It'. [Scott McNealy] The chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems said Monday that consumer privacy issues are a "red herring."

Interactive Week: Study Tracks 'Trust' In Web Design. "The more we studied it, the more we realized it has to do with security issues, navigation issues. It was no longer a simple thing to know where to put privacy statements and assurances of trust."

Web Reference: Audience Loyalty. Results from Forrester Research's Janaury Media Field Study. Frequently updated, high quality content that displays quickly and is easy to use are the main factors that retain your Web audience.

USA Today: Web site party rocks Silicon Alley. There's Robin Leach, the richly famous espier of the rich and famous, doing his master of ceremonies gig on the stage...

NY Times: Ads That Are Too Rich for Publishers' Pipelines. The 'fatter' the ad, the longer it takes for the Web page it appears on to load, and the greater the chance a user will click away in frustration.

Wired News: Speculators Inundate InterNIC. A small number of malicious groups are spamming the Net's sole domain-name registrar with phony electronic registration applications.

Webmonkey: E-Commerce Tutorial - Lesson 5. Building Your Customer Base.

News.Com: Compaq spins off AltaVista. Compaq announces IPO for AltaVista which includes licensing MSN Hotmail and dropping Inktomi technology as their primary Web search engine.

CamWorld: Anatomy of a WebLog. Typically, a weblog is a small web site, usually maintained by one person that is updated on a regular basis and has a high concentration of repeat visitors.

January 27, 1999
Industry Standard: Yahoo to Buy GeoCities, Sources Say. Yahoo to announce plans to purchase GeoCities on Thursday.

Industry Standard: TV-Web Convergence: Now? Ever? Report from the National Association of Television Program Executives convention.

New York Times: Hearings End in Online Pornography Case. Judge Reed is expected to rule on the case on Monday.

TechWeb: Google.com: Next Brainchild To Go Big? How many times have you done a search and got 10,000 or 20,000 results, many of which are not very relevant? There must be a better way.

News.Com: Delta cancels offline surcharge plan. Delta Air Lines said it ended a $2 surcharge on round-trip U.S. tickets not purchased on its Internet site because other airlines did not follow its lead.

Freedom Forum: Hail the polls: the public's word, edgewise. Jon Katz. Should journalists ignore what polls tell them, or should they be paying more attention?

TechWeb: New AltaVista CEO Touts Content, Commerce. Q&A with new AltaVista CEO.

Editor & Publisher: Fighters in Denver, Friends Nationally. Steve Outing.

January 28, 1999
A List Apart: Content: Who Pays? Glenn Davis. Luckily, we have a system that mostly works. It's called banner advertising.

Editor & Publisher: Micropayments: Publishing Business Model of the Future? Steve Outing. To proponents of "microtransactions," the existing Web publishing environment is a losing situation.

Salon: The Web's identity crisis. Scott Rosenberg. Companies that figure out how to deliver both convenience and privacy will win users' loyalty and prosper.

News.Com: Yahoo's e-commerce vision prevails. "We'll use the front-end publishing tools that the GeoCities guys have built [to create Web pages], integrate it on the front end, and put in all the Yahoo auctions, chats, clubs, and message boards."

SJ Mercury: Boston Globe learns hard URL lesson. Anal-retentive, part 2. The headline was quickly changed to ``www.bigmoney.com'' in the Internet version of yesterday's Globe...

News.Com: Yahoo, GeoCities count on e-commerce. "At the most basic level, this deal is buying an audience to bring customers for Yahoo..."

Wired News: Does Reach Really Matter? "Can you forsee a GeoCities user that doesn't use Yahoo?"

Wired News: Mascara Mogul Sues Excite. Estée Lauder sued Excite for trademark infringement after the search engine sold keywords related to the cosmetics giant to other companies.

CIO WebBusiness: Jakob Nielsen on Dinosaurs. Q&A with Jakob Nielsen. The best future has to be driven by human considerations. How will people live in the future?

CIO WebBusiness: American Airlines' $3 Million Makeover. "We were getting comments from customers that it was getting harder to find things..."

News.Com: What's ahead in the Internet space. rise of the vertical players, business model convergence, continued consolidation as companies look to get big fast and a sell-off in e-commerce stocks.

RCFoC: Gold Rush II. In my view, the Internet is as "Opportunity" for virtually every business.

News.Com: Yahoo buys GeoCities. Stock deal worth about $3.56 billion dollars.

Wired News: ICANN to Unveil New Rules. New guidelines from ICANN to be released on February 8.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of AT&T's flat rate calling program inside the US. The new trend to location-independent telecom pricing will be important for the next phase of untethered Internet use.

January 29, 1999
AtNewYork: Who'll Win the Net Wars? Meet the Infodustrials. Jason Chervokas. And without access to the old-fashioned industrial products of these Infodustrial companies, our precious information businesses are less than vaporware.

Freedom Forum: 'The Age of Spiritual Machines': Will we become bio-digital? Jon Katz. Forget the artificial vs. human intelligence debate — the question is how we should deal with the imminent technological ability to incorporate computerization into our very consciousness.

Web Techniques: Us, Them, and AOL in the Middle. Application servers solve the darnedest problems! And what's more, they're getting darned expensive!

Brill's Content: What's Really Related. Netscape Navigator's "What's Related" button.

Industry Standard: Netcos Descend on Capitol Hill. Six pure-play Internet companies have formed a lobbying group to press an independent agenda in Washington, D.C...

Upside: Trust Me, Send Cash. Alsop believes that Internet companies that can gain the public's trust will be extraordinarily successful.

Industry Standard: Yahoo Finally Gets the Network News. They say that Yahoo has been pursuing several deals for months and that it plans to make liberal use of its $500 million cash reserve and sky-high share price in 1999.

Industry Standard: Sony to Offer Music Downloads? ...the electronics giant "is studying a plan to allow Internet users to download music for a fee and record it onto minidiscs."

ZDNN: Internet groups fail to get open access to cable. Internet and online service providers suffered a setback on Thursday in their bid to get equal access to high-speed Internet systems offered by cable television operators.

Online Journalism Review: Golden Days for Web Freelancing. The Web has opened up new landscapes for writers.

TechWeb: Yahoo Gets 'Open Content' With GeoCities Deal. "We feel it really validates this model," said Tolles of the Yahoo purchase.

News.Com: Big Brother is taking a nap. With the Web, you can shed the insular nature of private life and bask in the grimy heat of notoriety.

Wired News: Fund Gap for Public-Interest Net. Deep-pocket benefactors like the MacArthur Foundation play leadership roles in boosting progressive media.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of Yahoo's purchase of GeoCities. Or alternatively, we can conclude that Internet stocks are over-valued.

January 30, 1999
NY Times: Worries About Big Brother at America Online. A good argument can be made that AOL needs to take on more responsibility for protecting free speech, whether courts require it or consumers simply demand it."

SJ Mercury: Openness of Internet double-edged. Dan Gillmor. Ultimately, regimes will learn the hard way that they can't stamp out information they don't like, not in the new world of the Information Age.

NY Times: Prodigy Legacy Lives On. "With the Web, we think we're living through this for the first time..."

InfoWorld: Online service woes dog vendor sites and hinder Internet sales. Web sites take too long to download, search tools are difficult to use, comparison shopping is almost impossible, and the whole purchasing process is tedious and error-prone.

Business Week: Fox Has a Super Bowl Web Site. Don't Tell Your Friends. ...Fox is employing a three-pronged strategy: underpromote the site, outsource the main Webcasting event, and beg, borrow, or steal whatever server space is available elsewhere.

Industry Standard: Biting the Government Hand. What would the Net look like if it rested on a truly level playing field?

NY Times: Lyrics Site in Copyright Dispute May Go Commercial. Possible outcome to the fate of the International Lyrics Server includes ownership or sanctioning of the site by the National Music Publishers' Association.

January 31, 1999
Editor & Publisher: Microtransactions Getting New Attention. Steve Outing. Alas, an effective implementation of microtransactions perpetually seems to be a couple years away.

Ask Tog: A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts. So you think you are an interaction designer? The rest of the February 1999 edition of Ask Tog is also online.

NY Times: Watch the Tube or Watch the Computer? "People don't watch technology, they watch channels..."

NY Times: Patent Absurdity. "I just have to wonder if the Patent Office has completely lost its mind..."

Online Insider: More Fun with Numbers. Now, according to the survey, the demographics of people using the Internet are beginning to resemble the mainstream.

devhead: Singing The Banner Blues. But don't fall into the trap of blaming users for ignoring (or deleting) ads. Banner-blockers aren't even the problem--they're just a symptom.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of a post on an experience with BarnesandNoble.com. Lie to a user even once and you have lost that customer forever.

ZDNet Anchordesk: Beginning of the End for PalmPilot? Jesse Berst. These days competition -- not necessity -- is the mother of invention.

MSNBC: Can iVillage withstand the heat? "You just buy the first one and the biggest."

BBC News: European Net strike called. Internet users in seven countries are being urged to take part in the first coordinated European strike in protest against high access charges.