March 1, 1999
Welcome to Internet World readers. Thanks for visiting! Lawrence (tomalak@tr.pair.com).

Internet World: Deconstructing Blowout. Internet World's design and usability experts talk about their favorite sites in a Blowout.

Jakob Nielsen selected Tomalak's Realm as his favorite site. Thanks Jakob!

News.Com: Net execs discuss profit growth strategies. "Eventually customers will realize, 'I can go to barnesandnoble.com directly,' and the portals will be cut out of that revenue loop..."

Internet World: Microsoft's Portal Play. ...Tevlin suggested that the same integration that made Office successful as a desktop suite would make MSN successful as an online suite.

Freedom Forum: New-media forecasts, content, values scrutinized. Report from 1999 Freedom Forum Technology Conference for Educators.

Freedom Forum: Jon Katz: We still need journalism online. "Interactivity is the most radical political idea on the Internet because what it does is change the relationship between vendor and consumer of information..."

Red Herring: Stay tuned for broadband on TV. [NCI CEO Mitchell Kertzmann] "What looks like a thin client today could be the first step to a home server..."

Adweek: CNet Revamps Site and Channels. "The old names were cool," explained senior vice president Matthew Barzun, "but it wasn't necessarily that clear to someone where they should look for information."

News.Com: Free email comes at a price. "The ability to generate ad revenue in email is limited just the way it is with chat and other communications tools where users are interested in utility, in getting something done, and are less apt to click on ads."

ZDNN: Web-TV integration remotely possible. Report from Jupiter Consumer Online Forum. [Tom Jermoluk, CEO of @Home] Essentially, anything that requires more work than a remote control won't cut it...

InfoWorld: Handheld ISVs offer new connectivity standard. The initiative hopes to enlist application developers with products in the handheld space to specify MAL as a standard architecture for accessing corporate and consumer data from mobile devices.

Wired News: Microsoft Won't Block e-Cards. "All the PhDs designing filters are no match for a clever spammer."

Industry Standard: Why E-commerce Forecasters Don’t Get It "Right". "Time and again, when press or clients ask about the differences [between the forecasts], it is because we are measuring different things..."

News.Com: @Home chief: Access prices will fall. ...executive Tom Jermoluk said he expects access prices for online services trending "towards zero" as advertising and other content more fully cover the costs.

Industry Standard: Interactive Advertising Practices Its Straight Face. Advertisers, researchers and the people who love them both have been pouring out of the woodwork for the past month to bolster the credibility of interactive marketing.

Ask Tog: Maximizing Human Performance. Basic principles and techniques for ensuring your customers enjoy the greatest possible user-efficiency from your designs.

Web Page Design for Designers: Conceptualisation. Joe Gillespie. ...the creative thinking process and what to do about that blank page.

Interactive Week: Is It Do Or Die In '99 For ADSL? Maybe it's the Integrated Services Digital Network disaster still lingering in the air.

News.Com: Study: Net population to double by 2005. The number of people using the Internet worldwide will double to 300 million by 2005...

Wired News: The Customer Is Always Right. It also connected the site to the same database that GTE customer service reps use in-house, giving users access to the same information.

Adweek: When Everything Old Is... Publishers who now offer only dirt-world versions of printed texts, he believes, will soon have to contend with such present-day realities as searchable databases and, ultimately, futuristic formats that build from the technology Octavo's publishing is based on.

Adweek: Survey: @Home Study Lays Down Broadband Mat. Another study from IPSOS-ASI sponsored by Intel and @Home on the "brand recall" of rich-media advertising.

News.Com: Top tech firms to link home devices to Web. The OSG would establish a common framework for these emerging standards for home networks, not supplant them.

Microsoft Press Release: Millennium Promises to Revolutionize Computing As We Know It. In addition to the previously announced Universal Plug and Play initiative.

Industry Standard: Inktomi Finds That Cache Beats Search. Over the past two years, Inktomi has focused on its network-caching business.

March 2, 1999
NY Times: A Growing Compatibility Issue in the Digital Age: Computers and Their Users' Privacy. At the heart of the argument is a fundamental disagreement over the role of electronic anonymity in a democratic society.

ABCNews.Com: A Policy in Need of Review. Fred Moody shares his experience with customer reviews on Amazon.

MSDN Online: Getting Ready for Internet Explorer 5. A summary of things that developers might be interested in knowing with the upcoming release of IE5.

Industry Standard: Dell's New Online Chief Puts the Squeeze On. "They've always handled the small stuff we didn't bother with, and now we're taking a chunk of that revenue away from them."

ZDNN: Yang: Yahoo! getting personal. He dismissed the notion that Yahoo! is focused on "stickiness," or finding ways of keeping users on the site longer, so that they see more advertising.

ZDNN: Media debates role of Web. [Richard Smith, chairman and editor-in-chief of Newsweek] When a sustainable business model does emerge, Smith predicted, it will have to include some form of online subscription revenues. "Giving away content is ridiculous," he said.

Freedom Forum: Merc Center: Making appointments with Web users. Report from 1999 Freedom Forum Technology Conference for Educators with Patricia Sullivan from Mercury Center and Jai Singh from CNET News.Com.

Wired News: Privacy Power to the People. One of the goals we have here is to be a one-stop shop to empower consumers with control over how their information is being used on and off the Web..."

Upside: No Place Like @Home. Q&A with @Home CEO, Tom Jermoluk. Now I [can] go into Excite's database and ask, "Who [are the Excite users] in Redwood City?" We tell [those users], "We're here." If they're already Excite [users], you know they can be [converted to] broadband [users].

News.Com: Study: Content still key for Web traffic. Jupiter chief executive Gene DeRose noted today that editorial content is still the main way sites set themselves apart.

InfoWorld: Adobe targets Quark, unveils new publishing tools. As a technology preview, Adobe showed its browser-based Web content management system, which is based on the previously announced, but never shipped GoLive Web Publishing System.

Wired News: ICANN Simmers in Singapore. The creation of heaven and Earth came off with relative ease compared to what's being attempted in Singapore this week.

PC Magazine: More Windows 2001 Revelations. John C. Dvorak. A look at another screenshot that claims to be the Entertainment Center for the Windows 2001 Neptune project.

Washington Post: Wall Street Journal Sets Daily Price On the Web. The Wall Street Journal today begins selling a "daily edition" online for $1.95, becoming a guinea pig for a new transaction network on the World Wide Web.

• Wall Street Journal: WSJ Daily Edition
• QPass: Qpass Launches the First Web-Wide Shared Transaction Network. Wall Street Journal, Morningstar and The Industry Standard join to sell select content over the Internet.

LA Times: Ad Blockers Challenge Web Pitchmen. [Jakob Nielsen] He believes the declining click rate has driven advertisers to adopt ever-more-aggressive measures to capture attention.

Editor & Publisher: Banner Ad Avoidance. In the short term, trick banners increase click-through rates. But in the long term, trick banners train readers to avoid interaction with online advertising.

Interactive Week: Online Ad Guidelines Published. The standards-setting group that aspires to develop commonly accepted practices for the online advertising industry...

MacWeek: InDesign makes Seybold debut. ...when the standard is ratified this summer, Warnock said, Adobe will immediately release plug-ins that provide SVG [Scalable Vector Graphics] support for all its core graphics applications.

News.Com: Phone-based Web access spec proposed. Creation of the VXML Forum which is working on a Voice Extensible Markup Language standard.

USA Today: The newsroom news revolution. The most exciting change, the study says, is the enormous growth of original content on Web sites.

NY Times: Internet Sellers Work to Allay Fears of Retail Outlets. Perhaps the biggest concern underlying this issue has to do with the still unanswerable question of whether the Web is actually expanding the size of the retail industry's pie...

NY Times: Amazon.com Site Tells Users of Book Promotion Payments. ...Barnesandnoble.com, has also just begun seeking co-op advertising dollars from book publishers.

DaveNet: Comparing Broadband and HTML. We're still in development, working on a prototype, our goal is to build a much more interactive, customizable and participatory workspace in the web browser.

March 3, 1999
NY Times: Whales in the Minnesota River? But on the Web, the clues for credibility are different, and so are the tools needed to assess the information.

Red Herring: Adobe fights Quark in print. "Why would we compete with companies that already do that well?" asked Adobe president Chuck Geschke. "Our strategy is to provide tools that integrate [with e-commerce software]."

RCFoC: Been There, Done That. And it's a great testament to the "leveraging power" of a standardized device like the PC -- a "meta-invention" that spawns an incredible amount of innovation, and a vast market which in-turn drives more people to buy PCs...

Salon: Amway joins the online multilevel marketing melee. The irony of Amway's announcement is that it took the company this long to figure out that it belonged online.

Webmonkey: Sneak Peek at SVG. An introduction to the Scalable Vector Graphics working draft from the W3C.

ZDNN: Affiliate programs greasing e-business. [Bo Peabody, CEO of Tripod and Angelfire] "The Web doesn't want to be centralized," Peabody said. "It provides the individual with the commerce link."

TechWeb: Online-Content Renaissance Under Way. ...software libraries with music and rich content similar to what exists today on CD-ROMS, as well as productivity software like Quicken will drive customer usage.

News.Com: PC makers warned of handheld attack. "Products equal revenue, but services equal profits," Stephens said, calling Internet services "the new battle ground."

ZDNN: Startup measuring the Web. Service Metrics has 15 servers in the United States and overseas, which constantly take measurements of Internet performance.

TechWeb: Companies Take Divergent Paths To E-Commerce Success. Is there a single correct way to create an e-commerce system?

News.Com: Caching caught in copyright debate. But since caching means copying, it is increasingly falling under the shadow of copyright law.

Wired News: Music Industry Plans DVD Audio. "If there were no protection, the music companies would not put it on, so we've put a series of parameters included on the disc for copy control and copy permissions."

Wired News: Clinton Tabs Privacy Point Man. Swire has been one of the most prominent authors on the tension between privacy self-regulation and government regulation of businesses.

High Five: Making good. Q&A with Mark Hurst president of Creative Good. My goal is always to keep in mind the constant frustrations of the average online user.

TechWeb: Regulatory Hurdles Hinder ADSL Deployment. Telecom analysts told the forum regulators should move to provide competitors with timely access to local carriers' copper twisted-pair infrastructure.

Industry Standard: ICANN Considers Compromise. A key part of DNSO – and the most hotly argued element – are the "constituencies" of interested parties who would be granted voting rights in the Names Council on DNSO issues.

Editor & Publisher: Solution to Portal Envy: Go Vertical. Steve Outing. Linking to other Web sites has traditionally been viewed by news publishers as against their best interests.

Wired News: Yahoo: Gettin' Sticky with It. [Jerry Yang] "Personal publishing represents the next big paradigm shift on the Web..."

ComputerWorld: Web sites need to think about midlevel users. David Siegel speaking at the Direct Marketing Association's Net.marketing conference. "Intermediates are where the loyalty is."

Salon: Molotovs and mailing lists. The dynamics and natural life cycle of mailing lists. The best barrier against such attacks -- having a human moderate the list -- is often the first casualty.

Wired News: Net Advertising: Who's Looking? The FAST proposal gets around the undercounting problem by asking the industry to uniformly adopt software that will keep track of individual viewers on cached sites.

March 4, 1999
Online Journalism Review: The Corrector: Slipup.com. "It's a medium in gestation and there aren't accepted standards for many journalism issues online..."

Industry Standard: Bricks, Mortar and Ivy Size Up the Web. University presses are particularly afflicted by the classic e-commerce problem: channel conflict.

Salon: Personal information mismanagement. Scott Rosenberg. What I need is a product that can store, sort, retrieve and organize all the myriad bits of data that course through my typical day...

News.Com: Microsoft navigates perilous waters. Microsoft's ambitious e-commerce master plan, unveiled today, knits together its software, online services, company stores, and media properties.

PC Week: Amazon.com founder spells out 'customer-centric' mission. Q&A with Jeff Bezos. If Amazon has 6.2 million customers, there should be 6.2 million highly customized stores. It's a myth that there is an average customer.

PC Magazine: Digital Paper. DataGlyphs are designed for encoding computer-readable data onto paper documents.

• Xerox Special Information Services: DataGlyphs

Wired News: ICANN's Success in Singapore. The board adopted a domain-name registrar accreditation policy listing the requirements for establishing new domain-name registrars in the .com, .net, and .org top-level domains.

TechWeb: U.K. Government Re-Examines Escrow Policy. The British government appears to have backed down on plans to impose key escrow on encryption users.

News.Com: Microsoft unveils new e-commerce strategy Microsoft has acquired CompareNet, a San Francisco company that provides product databases and comparison shopping information on its Web site.

MIT Technology Review: Wavelength Division Multiplexing. WDM takes this advantage a giant step further—multiplying the potential capacity of each fiber by filling it with not just one but many wavelengths of light, each capable of carrying a separate signal.

News.Com: Yahoo, PageNet to customize wireless service. Yahoo users nationwide will have wireless access to personalized content through their PageNet pagers and wireless devices.

ClickZ: Where the Eyeballs Are '99. ...today there is growing marketing, economic, and technological momentum to support a growing prominence of online content syndication.

Washington Post: The Media Gets a Message. Because one of hardest lessons for traditional companies to learn about new media is that it is fundamentally more about other people's content than their own.

San Francisco Chronicle: Cnet Tiptoes Into E-Commerce, But Can It Avoid Amazonian Mistakes? ``As a media company, we've been, from day one, very aware of . . . what the church and state line is..."

MSNBC: AvantGo’s software soups up palm, CE handheld devices. "What these new devices give people is mobile access to the wealth of information and services available on the Web..."

March 5, 1999
News.Com: Yahoo maps its future. "Yahoo is also cautiously pursuing opportunities for subscription fees and paid premium services..."

Red Herring: Getty gets e-commerce. Mark Getty says his visual content company, Getty Images, is pursuing a business model it decided on in the beginning; it's called e-commerce.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of WSJ's possible return to the Web, beyond a subscription wall. More than a year ago the Wall St. Journal decided to withdraw from the Web and put their content behind a subscription wall. In the long term (5-10 years), not being a fully integrated member of the Web will seriously erode their brand as people prefer to link to other online sources and as mainstream search engines (Excite's NewsTracker, etc.) feed readers to everybody else.

Internet Week: QoS Gets A Little Better Definition. A series of emerging Internet standards promises to give Web businesses better control over the service they give to their best customers.

TechWeb: Privacy Czar Warns Regulation Is Still Possible. The White House's newly appointed privacy czar warned that government regulation is still a possibility to protect the privacy of Internet users.

FEED Magazine: Getting What You Pay For. Clay Shirky. 1999 will be remembered as the year in which this shift from computer as product to computer as service began.

Industry Standard: What Happens When All of Journalism is Wired? But what about the rest of the journalistic world - the scribes and muckrakers not covering the Internet revolution, but merely benefiting from it?

Forbes: Microsoft vs. RealNetworks. [Howard Tullman, chairman and CEO of Tunes.com] "Real has got to wake up and accept that it's just a pipe. They can't compete with us."

Editor & Publisher: A Local Vertical Portal Strategy. Steve Outing. ...locally dominant news organizations are in the best position to take advantage of the vertical portal opportunity.

News.Com: Content sites adopting commerce practices. [Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang] "The Web has become so much more action-oriented, in large part because our users have scaled up in savviness and sophistication."

Upside: Webwide Applications. The PC with a browser has become the new NC.

News.Com: Creative's new tune: Portable MP3. Creative Technology to unveil their new line of MP3 players this weekend at a conference.

Wired News: Cable Modems Going Retail. Observers feel the move from proprietary to compatible devices should increase competition and result in lower prices.

InfoWorld: CeBit 99 focus will be on handhelds, Net connectivity. A preview of CeBit 99 in Hanover, Germany that is being held on March 18 to 24.

March 6, 1999
NY Times: Tuning in to the Fight of the (Next) Century. ...Sony has now realized that its core business is being profoundly transformed by digital electronics, in ways that pose both opportunities and threats.

Advertising Age: Commerce strategies drive Web sites. Media companies need to think like commerce companies to attract customers--and advertisers--to their Web sites.

Industry Standard: The Confidence Game. Online merchants that reliably deliver the goods will ultimately win consumers' confidence – and get their business.

InfoWorld: Is your site really working? [Mark Hurst] "Development teams work for a long time on the same site and they develop a sort of tunnel vision, where they don't see the problems that the site has..."

Online Journalism Review: Editors, Chief Cooks and Bottle Washers. "Writing and editing doesn't hurt, but if I had to choose one person for our site, I'd pass over someone with those skills for someone who understands the pulse of people's minds on the Web."

AtNewYork: Reviving the Promise of Bots: DealTime Adds a New Dimension. "A shopping bot is really a first-generation attempt to solve a particular issue..."

Industry Standard: While You Weren't Looking, WebTV Grew. WebTV has vaulted past MindSpring, Netcom and the Baby Bells and now ranks among the 10 largest Internet service providers.

InfoWorld: Microsoft's online store stumbles out of the gate. If the burdensome purchasing process isn't enough to discourage buyers, Shop.Microsoft.com's poor design probably will.

March 7, 1999
Site Note: Tomalak's Realm is now listed in Yahoo's directory. Computers and Internet > Internet > News and Media and in News and Media > Web Directories > Headline Indices.

Useit.Com: Trust or Bust: Communicating Trustworthiness in Web Design. ...the Web is turning into a low-trust society, and as long as the main business models rely on advertising and eyeball herding, the situation will only get worse.

Wired News: Creative's New MP3 Genius. ...the company will look into adding proprietary technology from the likes of Liquid Audio and others, so that the Nomad can play files in different formats.

Salon: Where are the Pathfinders of yesteryear? Web history disappears unless someone takes the trouble to save it.

• Pathfinder Museum: Historical Collections.

March 8, 1999
Useit.Com: Spotlight of an interesting advertising campaign from OnSale. OnSale's television ad draws data from their website with five products currently on auction displayed.

NY Times: New Models Rein In Cost of Internet Access. "In Europe, generalized free ISP services are closer to reality than free phone calls..."

ZDNN: 'Always-on' will drive broadband. [David Peterschmidt, CEO of Inktomi] ...the value-adds will be video and audio services, content filtering and "transformation." (The last refers to repackaging content from one network to another -- for example, making Web content viewable on a mobile phone.)

PC Magazine: More Win2001 Revealed! John C. Dvorak. Screenshot of the Windows 2001 Communication Center.

News.Com: E-cash comeback on the way? A Japanese firm has licensed Compaq's MilliCent form of digital cash for a full-scale roll-out of electronic cash in Japan later this year...

ZDNN: RealNetworks to play MP3. The market perception had been that Real sidestepped the MP3 issue to avoid a conflict with the music industry...

Industry Standard: Forbes Plays Both Sides of Ad-Edit Blur. ...the media has declared the online blurring of editorial and advertising as the hot-button topic du jour.

Wired News: How to Make MP3 Pay. Report from the New York Music Internet & Expo. But with all this MP3 attention, no one is sure how unknown artists will make money online.

PC Week: Order? What order? If a site is well-organized, easy to surf, and includes a mechanism to get questions answered quickly or check order status, that's half the battle.

Interactive Week: WebTV To Play Host To Home Networking. ...plan to release a combined system that will let users network any device that plugs into an electrical outlet...

News.Com: Microsoft to invest in Net music firm. Microsoft will announce today a $15 million equity investment in Reciprocal, which develops technologies for delivering music and other media content via the Internet...

NY Times: Internet Retailers Work to Turn Shoppers Into Buyers. "We're still in the early phase of e-commerce adoption, so a lot of people just get into the process and panic..."

NY Times: Internet Concern Plans System for Small Online Transactions. [Micropayment systems] ...are expected to be the means for completing 8 of every 10 online transactions -- though only about 25 percent of the total revenue -- by the year 2002.

Washington Post: Tales From the Crypto, Without an End in Sight. Now we're into a new round of the fight -- and I've lost count of how many rounds came before.

Washington Post: The Architect Who Lands Airports. "It takes the worst elements of shopping malls and places it into a very complex technological building. The emphasis on retail in airports has gone way beyond the reasonable."

Industry Standard: The Online Bookstore That Makes Money. Powell's has carved out a lucrative niche for itself in secondhand fare.

Wired News: Who's Taking Privacy's Pulse? A Web survey expected to influence the course of federal privacy laws was tailored and funded by industry groups that have battled such legislation for years.

March 9, 1999
ZDNN: Are banner ads' banner days over? [Web ad blocking software] "The intention is to give users choice and control over their Internet experience."

Editor & Publisher: Comparison Pricing Belongs on News Sites. Steve Outing. An increasingly popular solution to this problem is to craft e-commerce programs for news sites that allow a user to see multiple options for purchasing an item.

NY Times: A New Sony: The Walkman Goes Digital. [Nobuyuki Idei, Sony's president] "In the last three years, we have made a lot of effort to move from being a 'box' company to becoming an information technology company..."

Salon: Amazon vs. the ants. Scott Rosenberg. Sure, David can beat Goliath on the Web -- if he's got a New York Times columnist in his corner.

TechWeb: Activists Open Java To The Disabled. If you've ever used a telephone volume control on a phone in a noisy airport -- or rolled your bicycle onto a sidewalk via a curbcut or taken a shopping cart up a ramp to the supermarket door -- you've taken advantage of accessible, or universal, design.

CBS MarketWatch: Commerce clash with news? Credibility is an increasingly called into question throughout journalism, but Grabowicz says the "constant" deadlines of real-time online reporting increase the likelihood of errors.

ZDNN: Anonymous posting under attack. "But people have to realize the Yahoo! financial boards are not the Wall Street Journal."

Builder.Com: Beta testing your Web site. Sites that benefit the most from a formal process are those with complex architectures or diverse audiences.

News.Com: Inktomi revs up Shopping Engine. ...a back-end technology that provides customizable comparison shopping, product information, and transactions to Web sites.

Wired News: Building a Self-Actualized Web. What's the best method for transforming the Web from a collection of electronic documents into a smart information-delivery service?

Industry Standard: IDC Predicts New Rules for Success on the Net. Vendors will be asked to deliver 24-hour uptime, additional language and currency capabilities for electronic commerce, and to convert more visitors to buyers through the use of personalized, targeted offerings...

ZDNN: Secure music, off-key standards? 'Backwards compatibility would be good to have. Yet our approach [a portable standard as soon as possible] is the lesser of two evils.'

News.Com: Takeover target VLSI touts "Bluetooth". Bluetooth radio technology is designed to link mobile phones, portable personal computers, and digital organizers.

Salon: How can they patent that? In fact, they look as if any schmoe did "invent" them -- by taking some everyday occurrence and adding to it the phrase, "with a computer network."

Upside: Virtual Service Reps. The most basic bots can respond to questions, ask follow-up questions, suggest products and Web sites, and provide other information via a text-to-text conversation from a Web site.

NY Times: KillingGoliath.com. Whereas before he was doing at best $2,000 a month in business, since the story about him appeared on the Web he is now doing $2,000 a day from around the globe.

Wired News: Blue Barn: Playing Perfect Hosts. One of a small group of companies focused exclusively on jump-starting and maintaining discussion zones on the Web for major clients...

Wired News: Cell Phone: The Next Generation. The ITU is pressing to have worldwide mobile access available by next year.

March 10, 1999
Online Journalism Review: Not Good Enough, Amazon. If there were a doomsday clock for Web ethics, it would surely be approaching midnight.

Washington Post: Volume, Volume, Volume: A Web Buyers' Club. Economists say the Internet, with its instantaneous communication ability, is creating more efficient markets in which suppliers save money by gauging demand better and sending to market only the number of products that can be sold.

ZDNN: Byte bites back, as a zine. Schindler said Byte.com, while it existed only as an archive of old content, received an average of 600,000 page views a month...

Cal Law: The Standards Bearers. The short answer is to barter off IP rights in a standards swap meet -- although that's easier said than done.

ClickZ: Think!-It's A New Medium. The future will belong to those like Shneiderman who defy us to think about what's in front of us in new ways.

• Scientific American: Humans Unite! What people want in their interactions with computers, he argues, is a feeling of mastery. That comes from interfaces that are controllable, consistent and predictable.

Wired News: A Wired News Farewell. Steve Silberman. But I'll miss the buzz of working in a new kind of newsroom, where there are only a few crucial moments of decision between the torrent of information flooding in and the steady stream of stories going out.

Online Journalism Review: Online Journalism: The Medium and the Message. The conference is being held today at the U.C. Berkeley School of Journalism.

• Streamed coverage of the event. Real; Video feed

Wired News: The Multinational Net. The fastest-growing group of people online today don't access the Internet in English.

Wired News: The Postal Service Wants .us. Details are still scarce, and Wimer offered few more on Tuesday, but one likely plan would be to link email addresses to US mail addresses.

News.Com: Is privacy the price of personalization? "These message board cases are a dramatic demonstration that if you want privacy, maybe you shouldn't be swimming in those waters..."

March 11, 1999
SJ Mercury: A Web truth: The `X' files are out there. Dan Gillmor. [XML] It encourages Web developers to create -- and help their users get at -- information in easier, yet more sophisticated, ways.

A List Apart: The Creative Process. Creativity and ideas don't come on command, they seem to spring up when we least expect it...

Online Journalism Review: Ethics Debate: It's Time to Move On. The Web is a young medium, and new forms and conventions will emerge. But we need to help bring those blurred ethical lines into focus.

RCFoC: The Next Years Should Be Awesome, Indeed. What were the revolutionary changes that brought us to where we are today, where business and social institutions are having to reinvent themselves...

Industry Standard: Making a Global Web Audience Count. Measuring international traffic with officially recognized yardsticks (or, more appropriately, metersticks) is one of the major challenges these companies face.

News.Com: Firms develop privacy seal of approval. ...WebTrust is administered by accountants who do on-site audits of Net companies'...

Web Review: Information, Architecture, and Usability. ...designing usable organization and navigation systems for large online information environments is so important and so complex, that it requires information architecture design specialists with backgrounds in both IA and UE.

TechWeb: MP3 Will Die, Executive Predicts. [Mark Cuban, president and CEO of Broadcast.com] ...will fail because it will not scale as much as streaming media systems from RealNetworks or Microsoft...

SJ Mercury: Advertisers demand results from Internet ads. ...many advertisers are increasingly pressuring publishers to offer a performance-based ad buy package instead of one based on CPM, or cost-per-thousand...

San Francisco Chronicle: Boom in Online Media Stocks Raises All Kinds of Ethical Questions. [At the Online Journalism conference at U.C. Berkeley] Swisher said online writers are ``not the best journalists'' but instead are ``linkalists,'' whose stories are basically links to other Web sites.

Freedom Forum: Can journalism survive the Digital Age? Jon Katz. Technology isn't predictable. It never behaves the way we think it will, nor do people react to it quite the way we think they should.

News.Com: Content: A rising star. ...but as the population of experienced Web users grows, consumers are spending a greater proportion of their time at narrowly focused sites.

Industry Standard: The Web as Marketing Vehicle: Does Any Model Work? The Internet has spawned so many upside-down business plans, it's hard not to get motion sickness.

News.Com: Centraal aims to simplify Web queries. While the new Centraal system may appear to be a short cut to search results that users could pull up on their own with minimal effort, Teare defended the system as a method of direct navigation.

Wired News: UK May Loosen Crypto Rules. The proposal stresses that the legislation will be technology-independent, that consumers will be free to use any computer products they choose, and that no new wiretapping powers will be created.

News.Com: Microsoft, others invest in Audible. Industry observers note that Microsoft may be interested in Audible in order to have its Windows CE operating software in as many handheld devices as possible.

March 12, 1999
Association of Internet Professionals: The Zero Pound Computer. Dan Shafer. I should be able to walk up to any computer in, say, a cybercafe, an all-night copy center, or a client location, log onto the Internet, open a Web page (with appropriate password protection, of course), and work.

ZDNN: Digital deals, Texas style. "What South by Southwest is about is that you can succeed on the business side of things by doing your own thing..."

ZDNN: IE 5.0 will browse and broadcast. This will let the user click directly to a page offering a customizable online audio tuner...

TechWeb: XML Will Make Life Simpler, Editor Says [Tim Bray] The secret, he said, is to ask for a small amount of time from a large number of people.

News.Com: Long-awaited domain application released. Posted yesterday, the application finalizes accreditation requirements for companies that wish to compete with Network Solutions.

devhead: Cheap Usability Tests. Jakob Nielsen. It's a misconception that it has to be expensive or difficult to conduct a usability test of a website.

News.Com: Net filter firms, libraries seek truce. Symons said her group wants to preserve the right of libraries to choose what kind of filtering software, if any, to implement...

TechWeb: Tougher Website Coding. ...Web developers are stuck with a mixture of browsers across various platforms that make application development tedious.

Wired News: Satellite Failure Hits AP. With the GE-3 out of commission, the AP said it was turning to the Internet to get its news reports out to customers.

Forbes: Invasion of the trademark snatchers. The more controversial and fairly common practice that's concerning companies big and small is the sale of trademarked keywords to competitors of the trademark holder.

News.Com: CitySearch goes local with commerce. ...Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch will begin offering CitySearch Commerce, a group of e-commerce services for the local merchants whose sites it hosts.

ClickZ: Web Syndication For The Masses. Most providers syndicate only a portion of their content to build their brand while leaving users an incentive to visit their web mothership.

Editor & Publisher: Advice From the E-mail Experts. Steve Outing. In time, a customer's e-mail address will be as valuable to you as his phone number and physical street address.

March 13, 1999
SJ Mercury: A Virtual Industry Gets Real. "What are you going to wear to the Webbies?"

ABCNews.Com: Web Goes Graphic. Excitextreme offers a new graphical interface that presents all its information on a single screen, using relative space to organize data.

• Useit.Com: From November 15, 1998; 2D is Better Than 3D
• Fairfax IT: From March 2, 1999; Pentium III-only sites coming

MacWeek: Gecko to lead Netscape charge. ...Netscape said Navigator 5 is scheduled for a beta release by July and commercial Mac and Windows versions by year-end.

TechWeb: Microsoft Passport Piques Privacy Concerns. ...Passport acts as a digital repository for a consumer's data such as credit card and shipping information and some forms of online cash.

Wired News: Net Journalists Outwit Censors. ...journalists are now able to use the Net to ensure their work reaches as wide an audience as possible.

NY Times: On the Internet, Bigger Is Better. Letters to the Editor replying to Thomas L. Friedman's KillingGoliath.com column.

• Salon: From March 9, 1999; Amazon vs. the ants. Scott Rosenberg. Sure, David can beat Goliath on the Web -- if he's got a New York Times columnist in his corner.

March 14, 1999
Editor & Publisher: News Sites Say Their Reach Is Underestimated. Steve Outing. And sometimes, they blame Media Metrix's methodology for what they believe are under-representations of their true Web reach in their home markets.

NY Times: Netscape Applies Open Source Idea to Custom Page Service. ...Netscape will now invite almost any Web site to be its partner and offer content to users of the service.

NY Times: Rethinking the Portal Concept. "People are inventing their own content. On discussion boards, stock chat areas, family picture and discussion sites -- they've invented content in ways they couldn't have before, and that is going to be the most important thing for portals."

NY Times: Independent Booksellers Plan to Open Online Store. The electronic bookstore and a planned national marketing campaign are the first collective efforts of an ordinarily disparate group of independents.

ZDNN: Sound wave: Web dials into radio. The groundswell of interest in online radio has occurred because the tools to broadcast online have gotten easier to use, cheaper and more pervasive, and because audio quality has vastly improved...

ClickZ: Software: The No Brainer. White space is a scary thing to pay for in any medium. But personally, I think it's a good buy.

ZDNet AnchorDesk: How Stellar One Got a Head Start on Convergence. Jesse Berst. Lots of companies have taken a run at the convergence market during the last decade. But the usual method has been to build proprietary solutions.

MSNBC: Net ad execs: Don't believe the data. Despite falling online ad rates and declining click throughs, those in the Internet advertising industry say all is well.

Seattle Times: Calling all telephone users! Is anyone there anymore? Day or night, local or long distance, there would no longer be a line item on your telephone-company bill for voice access.

March 15, 1999
Salon: Stange fruit. ...broadcasters are trying to become retailers and retailers are trying to become broadcasters and Web sites are trying to become both.

PC Magazine: Mysterious Microsoft. John C. Dvorak. Microsoft is buying into home networking, and Neptune is a big part of its thinking.

Builder.Com: The multiple-page Web content dilemma. The problem comes down to a trade-off between what is (at least in one context) convenient for readers vs. the site's need to generate traffic in the form of page turns to stay in business.

ClickZ: Are GIF Banners Dead? ...I could probably make a compelling argument that animated GIFs have gone the way of the dodo.

TechWeb: Selling Keywords To The Highest Bidders. "Anything that seems to discredit the system will seem manipulative to consumers, and they will walk away."

W3C: HTML 4.0 Guidelines for Mobile Access. W3C Note. ...describes guidelines for content authors how to create HTML 4.0 contents to be acceptable to mobile devices as much as possible.

DaveNet: NewsSearch.UserLand.Com. This search engine is different from any you've used before. Think of it as a search engine with an editorial voice...

Industry Standard: How the Porn Sites Do It. "There are the 'top sites' lists (Top 50, Top 100), Web rings, indexes, banner-exchange programs, adult-verification systems, trade organizations, all sorts of partnerships and associations."

Interactive Week: Build Web Sites Around Customers. [Jakob Nielsen] "People building these things, for the most part, are not giving any thought to how people would want to use the site - to what information they are actually looking for."

Forbes: Desperate.com Now these companies embrace the hard sell on their sites, blurring the lines between covering things and pitching them.

• Industry Standard: From March 8, 1999; Forbes Plays Both Sides of Ad-Edit Blur

Time: Bill Gates' New Rules. Excerpt from Business @ the Speed of Thought. To make digital information flow an intrinsic part of your company, here are 12 key steps.

LA Times: 1 Number, 1 Phone: That's No Line. ...wireless communication is making its way into the mainstream as lower prices, improved service and new features have helped to blur the line between wired and wireless services.

Interactive Week: Call Your Info Agent Today. [Marc Singer, McKinsey & Co] "We believe the time may not be far off when consumers can start saying, 'You want my info? Then pay for it!' "

Interactive Week: Webmasters Under Fire, Under Pressure. Most Webmasters say their daily pressures continue to mount, and many fear losing control of their sites' priorities...

March 16, 1999
ClickZ: Seek And You Shall Find... Eventually. But the fact remains that dealing with the search engines is probably the last great arcane annoyance of web marketing.

ZDNN: Content is back -- and indies are thriving. The Web has erased the cost and distribution barriers between smaller content producers and their potential audiences, and now increasing advertiser interest means even small publishers can turn their readership into dollars.

NY Times: Taking Web as a Given, Museums Go After Net Audience. Among the conference's most widely discussed sites were those designed to attract virtual visitors by emphasizing the Internet's social elements...

Wired News: The Case of the Pilfered Filter. A word filter available to users of the new ICQ99 chat software appears to be an illegal duplication of a controversial list that was part of Cybersitter 2.12...

ZDNN: Catching up with the creators of the Palm. "Why put 16MB of memory in [a handheld] when it only drains the battery and people don't need it?''

Wired News: Truste's Test: Going After MS. One of the big questions is whether they have the will to impose some kind of sanction.... Will they stand up and show they're prepared to do something here?"

News.Com: ICANN suggests body to lead domain debate. The DNSO will be a "consensus-based policy advisory body within ICANN" and will include a General Assembly made up of Net users or individuals who want to contribute.

InfoWorld: HP works to make the Internet more automatic for users. ...a new global strategy here called Internet Chapter 2, with the hopes of leading a transformation of the Internet into a "do it for me" network.

SF Examiner: Pundits predict dire future for Internet. [Doug Rushkoff] But, he contended, the opaque technologies of Web browsers soon made the Internet a broadcast medium, controlled by businesses looking to focus their advertising messages.

Freedom Forum: Internet primeval: Creators' writings still guide us. Jon Katz. Licklider wrote — almost with awe — that the programmed digital computer could change the nature and value of communication...

Interactive Week: MSNBC On The Internet Goes Local. ...launching a Web-based video service that will provide access to video news programming from 10 of NBC's largest affiliates.

Industry Standard: Paul Allen's $750 Million Goes to Go2Net. Like AtHome's relationship with Excite, Allen's cable ventures will use Go2Net as an entry point for consumers who use his cable-Web service.

March 17, 1999
Site Note: You can now search at Tomalak's Realm with a new service called NewsSearch. Thanks to Dave and Brent at UserLand! The engine will contain all stories mentioned here, at Scripting News and Hack the Planet since March 13, 1999.

Red Herring: The naked truth about online commerce. ...it's not yet clear whether people will be seduced by content into buying related products or will run screaming from a perceived breach of the Chinese wall between advertising and editorial.

News.Com: Oracle hands out Web access to handhelds. The technology--based on the Oracle 8i database and application server--uses Java and Extensible Markup Language (XML) to deliver Web access to the devices...

PC Magazine: Battle of the Mobile Operating Systems. "While it's not certain that alternative operating systems to Windows CE such as EPOC will succeed, the Palm OS shows that it can be done."

W3C: Common Markup for Web Micropayment Systems. Working Draft. This specification provides an extensible way to embed in a Web page all the information necessary to initialize a micropayment (amounts and currencies, payment systems, etc).

Wired News: MS Ballyhoos Digital Audio. In addition to creating a new audio format to compete with MP3, Microsoft is building a sophisticated backend system into Windows 2000 that will be able to encrypt, manage, and track digital files...

WebWord.Com: Interaction Design: The Guru Speaks. Q&A with Alan Cooper. Historically, we have not used interaction design to create pleasing, helpful, comfortable software, and that bad tradition has been inadvertently brought to the Web.

Wired News: UK's Royal Mail Does E-Commerce. The Viacode system, which began this week, secures email and online transactions using public key cryptography...

News.Com: IE 5 sneak peek shows new content features. ...it will be showing off a browser with some new ideas on how to present Web content along with one or two others borrowed from the competition.

News.Com: BBB Web site privacy program finally arrives. The long-awaited BBBOnline privacy seal requires applicants to indicate when they gather consumers' sensitive information, how they use it, and how they protect it.

March 18, 1999
RCFoC: "HTTP-Colon-Slash-Slash-Dot" -- Not! Imagine a day when we've forgotten the phrases "URL" and "HTTP," but where we simply type (or speak) what we're looking for and it appears.

ClickZ: Why Bad Web Sites Happen To Good CEOs. CEOs who like their web sites aren't in a hurry to move on to something else once the site is uploaded and live.

A List Apart: Them Changes: Maintaining Sanity When Clients Change Spec. However you choose to manage change, you need to build a process that your client can agree to and participate in.

Editor & Publisher: Getting Golfers to 'Stick' to Your Site. Steve Outing. ...Golfserv's concept is to license the technology to local publishers and topical Web sites, creating a national network of local and niche golf sites supported by national and local advertising.

Builder.Com: IE 5.0 improves on earlier releases but complicates Web builders' lives. Innovation is fine, but it must come on top of--and not as a replacement for-standards compliance.

Editor & Publisher: With Microsoft's Backing, Reciprocal Moves Forward. The company creates digital rights management solutions for content providers, with a current focus on the publishing and music industries.

Interactive Week: Slate Sees Success With New Strategy. Although Slate initiated the change only in mid-February, traffic for the month increased 32 percent.

TechWeb: Turning Surfers Into Customers Is No Small Beenz. The scheme is similar to collecting Air Miles, except it will enable shoppers to buy products at any website that uses Beenz.

News.Com: The Internet Infrastructure Gap. ...the underlying need for an improved Internet infrastructure, especially for new services that enhance Web surfing and online commerce.

Upside: The Webbies: Hollow Statues. The Internet has a way of mocking those that purport to understand (or overtly adorn) it.

News.Com: Taxpayers reluctant to file over Web. Consumers are becoming more comfortable with electronic filing, but "they are still hesitant to rely on the Web for such an important transaction...

Adweek: Content's Comeback. ...it looks as though the Internet will come full circle, to the medium's beginnings as a place to publish content about the niche of one's desire.

Wired News: Motorola: Fighting Back Online. ...it would make its digital phones compliant with the new technology standard Wireless Application Protocol...

MSNBC: Getty Images goes digital. "We knew that digitization would completely alter our business model, irrespective of whether customers ever bought images digitally..."

ClickZ: A New Kind of Customer Service. With database marketing, the marketer can capture information about how the visitor is using the web site, then use that data to structure and refine future information flow.

March 19, 1999
Internet Technical Group: Banner Blindness, Human Cognition and Web Design. Donald Norman. The fact that the searchers missed the supposedly salient information has nothing to do with big, colorful and salience: it has to do with schemas, frameworks, and expectations.

Red Herring: MaMaMedia builds out virtual playground. "They are nonlinear, technologically fluent, and accustomed to controlling their media."

Industry Standard: Spin Magazine Dives Into Web's Crowded Waters. "When we started with AOL, they were a lot smaller and they would actually pay us for syndicated editorial. They no longer need to do that, and the relationship didn't make sense to us anymore..."

W3C: Web Characterization: From working group to activity. Web Characterization is concerned with looking at the overall patterns of Web structure and usage...

Industry Standard: That Thing You Do. For lack of a better term, let's call this new form "aptent" – software applications to create and enhance content.

InfoWorld: Ask Jeeves expands into customer support. "We create an open knowledge base of the information on a Web site. What we're trying to do is help integrate all of the investments that have been made on a company's Web site."

News.Com: BellSouth portal seeks to slash Net fees. If the site proves financially successful, it could be BellSouth's first significant step toward using new revenue streams to drive down Internet access fees.

Business Week: How to Win the Portal Wars. Q&A with George Bell CEO Excite. I would tell you that it doesn't seem to me to be strategic to own that content as long as you can license it.

SJ Mercury: Highly Interactive Ads Boost Click-Throughs. Highly interactive ads on the Internet capture greater consumer attention than simple, animated banner advertisements, according to a study by Wired Digital.

NY Times: Bill on Protecting Databases Resurfaces in House ...how to protect databases from pirates without limiting access to information that has historically been part of the public domain.

Forbes: Web Wars: AP and Reuters. By changing the model from a wholesale content provider to a visible content partner with key firms, the company entrenched itself as a major web presence...

Time Digital: E-Commerce Crashes the Party at 1999 Webby Awards. ...media sites need to aggressively build customer bases online and stop thinking of their audiences as aggregations of mainly anonymous users, who might just click on banners.

Wired News: MacWeek Returns to Print, Kinda. "[With PDF] we're printing without the print or distribution costs."

XML.Com: XML Support in IE5. Tim Bray. ...but the real value-add of XML in the browser isn't so much displaying it as processing it right there in the browser.

March 20, 1999
Web Standards Project: Does The WaSP Hate Microsoft? We may have been naive in believing that the vital importance of the issue overrides any need to consider our "editorial tone."

InfoWorld: Don't be a slow poke: Keep your site up to speed or lose visitors. Many companies' Web sites take too long to download, for a variety of reasons. Regardless of the cause, a slow site is frustrating and irritating for your customers.

InfoWorld: Retooling retail. "Even though [Internet retail] is less than 1 percent of total retail, it has everyone thinking about it..."

Forbes: Absolutely, positively overblown. Delivering packages to residences, where most Internet consumer-shopping packages are sent, isn't a very profitable business for FedEx.

Industry Standard: Psst … Want to Buy a Keyword? ....estimating that 20 percent to 30 percent of search engines' ad revenues come from keyword ad sales and perhaps 5 percent come from trademarked words.

March 21, 1999
Useit.Com: URL as UI. Users continue to type and guess URLs and domain names, so Web usability can be improved by better URLs...

IETF: Common Name Resolution Protocol BOF. Held on March 16, 1999 at the IETF meetings in Minneapolis. Services are arising that offer a mapping by common name into Internet resources...

ZDNet Anchordesk: How Eservice Could Put You Out of Business. Jesse Berst. Ecommerce concerns itself mostly with the transaction itself. Eservice is about everything before and after.

ZDNN: Web business: Have site, will travel. ...companies say the biggest challenge is trying to achieve that same level of personalization they strive for locally to work on a global scale.

ZDNN: Peacock’s portal picks up the pace. Snap has rushed to launch Cyclone, a version of the portal specially designed for high-speed digital subscriber lines...

ABCNews.Com: Fractals Flowing Online. The AT&T researchers plan to use fractal patterns to make all networks — including the Internet — faster and more efficient.

FEED Magazine: Maps & Legends. Steven Johnson. For four years we've been looking at the web from a street-level perspective, roaming from page to page to page. What we need now is a little bird's-eye-view.

Adweek: Content's Comeback. Call it "comm-tent": an almost seamless blend of editorial, product placement and electronic commerce neatly converged into one Web site.

March 22, 1999
Red Herring: Things go better with cash. The three-year-old company helps sports and entertainment Web sites create copyrighted interactive multimedia features...

Salon: From Agenda to Zoot. Scott Rosenberg. Readers also shared with me a vast range of thoughts, tips and suggestions on how they keep their lives and ideas organized with the software currently available.

News.Com: Yahoo, Broadcast.com eye strategic fit. "Content drives viewership, and Broadcast.com has a lot of content, and I think any portal company that is looking to attract a lot of traffic to the site would love to partner with Broadcast.com..."

ZDNN: Deja News will add calendaring feature. Deja News has licensed eCal Corp.'s Internet calendaring engine for its community site...

InfoWorld: Network Solutions draws criticism for consolidated Web site. Simmons also wondered why basic functions such as a domain name lookup were not re-mapped to the relevant page on the new site, rather than merely to the new home page.

Industry Standard: Mysteries of Springfield Project Revealed. ...Beebe is outlining plans for a company that will "enable small businesses to become e-businesses."

Wired News: Microsoft Off Truste's Hook. ...Microsoft's controversial Windows data-collection practices compromise consumer trust but that they do not violate the company's license agreement with Truste.

Industry Standard: Network Solutions Hijacks the InterNIC. The rerouting of the Web site for the domain name registry service InterNIC by Network Solutions Inc. over the weekend has potential competitors up in arms...

InfoWorld: Printers to get their own Web addresses. "Eventually, if you had a printer that is IPP compliant, that printer will have a Web address and anyone around the world who can get on the Internet can print to that URL..."

Industry Standard: Monitoring the Monitor. WebSide Story aggregates those figures – and lots of other data – gathered by its HitBOX Tracker traffic tool...

Useit.Com: Spotlight of Technology Platforms for 21st Century Literature conference. ...we need to find new forms of expression for interactive text.

• Brown University: Technology Platforms for 21st Century Literature conference. April 7-9, 1999 in Providence, Rhode Island.

Internet World: Web Sites Explore Faster, Cheaper Way To Retrieve Data. ...the developers of high-performance Web sites may soon be paying a lot more attention to main-memory databases.

LA Times: Firm Has Designs on E-Commerce. Forsaking millions of dollars in cash fees, Organic instead has taken stakes or potential stakes in five companies...

LA Times: The 'World' in World Wide Web Becomes More Visible. With improved browsers, better translation technology and a growing body of foreign content, surfing offshore keeps getting easier and more rewarding.

SF Examiner: By mining their Web sites for data, Net businesses are refining their demographic profiles. As the Web's content broadens, visitors and shoppers will cease to browse aimlessly and instead gravitate toward sites that deliver products and services customized to their needs.

NY Times: Affiliate Referrals Generate Big Profits. ...1999 may be the Year of the Affiliate, as Web merchants realize that one way to balance the books is to recruit other sites to help sell their goods.

NY Times: Novell to Offer Data-Privacy Technology for Internet. Novell hopes the technology, called Digital Me, will gain acceptance as a standard means of controlling identity on the World Wide Web...

Industry Standard: Nielsen Rates the Web. The alliance combines Nielsen's leadership position in the ratings business with new measurement software and reporting technology from NetRatings.

Wired News: Fast Talk on Fast Wireless. In the past week, just about every cell-phone manufacturer has unveiled a master plan for breaking into the wireless Internet business.

NY Times: From the New Media Back to the Old. It's not really a Web or Net book. It's a book that happens to stem from a Web site."

March 23, 1999
Wired News: The Buzz from the Desert. ...Washington Post chair Katherine Graham shared her deepest fears about news on the Internet. Online news degrades the authority, accuracy, and standards of traditional newspapers...

PC World: IE5: Branded for Life? With users' portal loyalty low, according to experts, it's a shame that you can't easily switch from, say, a Yahoo browser to a Snap browser.

News.Com: Digital appliances in Apple's future, Ellison says. "Right now I use an NEC flat panel, and I see what's coming from Apple," and it is impressive."

ZDNN: Local Internet services struggling. "They're banking on the promises of online marketing, that you can go one-on-one with users and be familiar with their previous purchasing habits."

Salon: The King of Computer Labs. Review of Michael Hiltzik's new book Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age.

MacWeek: Untangling the Web. ...the fact that the Web is both overwhelming and free makes it very hard for it to support anything beyond the latest news, as reported in snappy 200-word stories.

InfoWorld: Gartner Group mulls end user computing devices. Making all those devices work together and share data is one key to their future success.

TechWeb: Ask Jeeves Licenses Search Technology For E-Biz. "Ask Jeeves is probably going to be most relevant in a universe where questions are somewhat definable, and perhaps limited in scope..."

News.Com: Dell delves into affiliate marketing. "An affiliate program has a better rate of return for marketing investment dollars than most others..."

USA Today: 'It's the customer, stupid!'. Though electronically disembodied, transactions across the Internet are nevertheless between people. Any company that disregards that fundamental fact will crash and burn in cyberspace...

Freedom Forum: 'Dare to know' — Enlightenment 2.0. Jon Katz. All around the Net, there's a growing sense that something historic, even extraordinary, is occurring.

SJ Mercury: Cable-Internet issue is vital, but not utmost. Dan Gillmor. How our society decides the cable-Internet issue matters a great deal. But the divergence between the information rich and poor should be just as important.

ClickZ: A Different Animal. This is another attempt to apply traditional media measures to a new medium that can't be measured by traditional metrics.

ClickZ: The Magic Of Marketing Automation. So in addition to web site personalization, you have the ability to create email campaigns, track web leads, integrate direct mail and fulfill collateral requests, and so on.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of a Media Metrix Web traffic estimates for sites between 1996 and 1999. These traffic estimates are good supporting evidence for my argument that Internet stock is over-valued because future users are likely to prefer other sites than the currently popular ones.

Upside: Tax the Net! No state sales tax. No Internet access tax. A moratorium on all new taxes for at least three years. This is the privileged paradise of e-commerce.

March 24, 1999
Washington Post: Amway Discovers the Web. The plan is to link to stores elsewhere on the Web, yet have a unified "checkout."

Industry Standard: Talk.com Isn't Cheap. "We know generally that with a name like Talk, not just on the Web but in the world at large, it is a nightmare to have such a common word as your title..."

W3C: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Proposed Recommendation. The primary goal of these guidelines is to promote accessibility. However, following them will also make Web content more available to all users, whatever user agent they are using...

Salon: Bringing mailing lists to the masses. But even though the ads may be "targeted," not everyone is excited about the idea of turning their e-mail-based communities into marketing venues.

ZDNN: E-commerce in The Third World? [Nicholas Negroponte] "They leapfrogged over a whole level of technology because the previous system was so terrible..."

PC Week: Negroponte offers unconventional take on life in the Digital Age. Seven years ago his colleagues chuckled when he predicted there would be 1 billion people on the Internet in the year 2000, Negroponte said, but that number is well within reach today.

Information Week: Principled Interfaces. User interfaces can learn to create themselves, but only if we reorganize the apps they depict.

Industry Standard: Analyst Insight: The Net Ad Industry Needs a Single Language. Did Site X get 1 million visits during the month? Ten million visits? Or was that 50 million pageviews?

News.Com: Finding a path for Time Warner? A successful Web strategy has eluded Time Warner; the media giant suffered a great deal of criticism for its unwieldy Pathfinder site.

InfoWorld: Half of Visa's disputes, fraud result from I-commerce. [Mark Cullimore, director of emerging technology at Visa] "It is all down to the problem of authentication, which has become the most important issue in the financial industry."

Brill's Content: Community vs. Commerce. Limiting a site to internal links may deter exit but inevitably leads to disappointment. No store can stock everything. No business can satisfy its customers' every need.

Forbes: Rentware on the Internet. ...they had no idea that their little experiment offering business tools over the Internet was going to become a vortex for the latest fad: applications that run over the web.

Wired News: Your Data, Your Choice. [Danny Weitzner, a domain leader at the W3C] "I think [digitalme] is good news and it's going to give P3P a boost. I don't think we have to worry about leaving P3P behind here."

PC Magazine: Your Printer's Internet Address. ...is pushing a new Internet protocol designed to let Internet users send files and messages directly to a remote printer.

Forbes: The technology that won't die. ...worldwide fax transmission minutes grew to 395 billion last year from 255 billion in 1995, and will leap to 647 billion by 2002.

Interactive Week: Open Text Puts Knowledge To Use. [Tom Jenkin, CEO of OpenText] "In many ways, the knowledge management market is not unlike the database market of 10 years ago. It was a market that was very niche-oriented."

Fortune: The E-Consultants. They used to be those geeks who designed your Web pages. Now they're "Web strategists" running $100 million consulting firms.

Wired News: MP3 Search Engine Under Fire. The global recording industry opened fire Wednesday on Internet music piracy, launching proceedings against a Norwegian partner of US search engine Lycos.

Wired News: RIAA Sets the Record Straight. Q&A with Hilary Rosen, CEO of RIAA. The only value in attracting eyeballs is in advertising. You do the artist a disservice that way. Consumers don't want to buy a car, they want to buy the music.

March 25, 1999
Today's Links Story: Going Vertical

Online Journalism Review: The Media's Unraveling of Two Important Hacker Stories. ...both show the decisive new role being played by people who would have never been called "journalists" three years ago.

Fortune: Naming Names. If your name doesn't infringe on anyone's trademark, then you still have to pray you're in time to snag the Internet domain...

PC World: Brits Warm to Web TV. ...WebTV's research shows entertainment features like movie listings and soap opera gossip are a major draw.

News.Com: Users fume over customized IE 5. "The people who wrote in were nothing short of ticked off. They're asking, just because you downloaded the software from this particular site, should it turn into a huge billboard for that site?"

News.Com: Wireless pact first step to global standard. "The most important thing is that we'll be able to move forward and get a standard without the threat of lawsuits and companies withholding their intellectual property..."

InfoWorld: W3C's Berners-Lee urges agent-readable Web sites. "It's amazing how much you can do with a search engine -- and it's also amazing how much you can't do with a search engine..."

PC Week: Berners-Lee hits the stump for metadata framework. In other words, Berners-Lee sees a time in the not-to-distant future when Web sites can be devoid of screen-scraping technology, bad links, and difficult-to-find information largely due to RDF and its related technologies.

Web Developer: Network Solutions...what were they thinking? They also managed to break everyone's access to RFCs. Nothing like alienating the technical community as well.

Upside: Moore's Law Still Kicking. ...but I can't believe that we can really hit a bandwidth glut, with the amount of new content coming online...

News.Com: Photo archive makes Web debut. An employee of Time's syndication unit will then call and arrange to deliver the photo either digitally over phone lines or through regular mail.

PC World: E-Commerce Visions: Wearable Wallets, Vacant Malls. Negroponte says the "real" e-commerce boom will happen when computers sell for well under $100, telecommunication costs spiral downward, and payment and delivery of goods and services over the Net are streamlined.

Wired News: High Bandwidth Bureaucracy. "If you're not going to use the same pipes, at least use the same trench."

March 26, 1999
Industry Standard: Carl's Believe It or Not! Carl Steadman. "I'd like to be your evangelist. Instead of selling products, you could be selling the dream."

Industry Standard: Data Deluge: Research Firms Release Slew of E-commerce Info. So with studies on U.S. e-business becoming so plentiful, what's a research firm to do? Expand into international markets, of course.

InfoWorld: Relationship management unites on Web. Mirani pointed out that one way to leverage Web sites is to use them for problem-solving, rather than as expensive call centers.

News.Com: Domain names are proprety, court rules. In a court filing Network Solutions essentially argued that it leases domain names on a "conditional" basis, and therefore they can't really be owned by anyone--except NSI.

Photo.Net: Architecture and Implementation of Online Communities. Philip Greenspun. My experiments have shown that a workable metric of the effectiveness and sustainability of a community site is the ratio of material authored by the publisher and material authored by site users (community members).

News.Com: Intel opens site to give Pentium advice. Excite is launching a concept site that offers 3D Web search and navigation. "The Pentium III processor lets us shift more of the work of generating the interface to the user's desktop computer..."

TechWeb: Ethernet Guru Envisions Pay-Per-E-Mail. For e-mail, something that has been relatively cheap to use, Metcalfe said predicts people will be willing to pay for electronic postage for better service.

Fortune: The Trouble With Web Advertising. While paying people to view content is unorthodox, new-media companies are hell-bent for market share.

RCFoC: A New High-Tech Dog Food? But as the technologies and social elements around Ecommerce bloom (such as widely-used digital certificates, common micropayment techniques, fatter pipes to allow for a richer shopping experience, better 'bots,' higher-resolution displays, etc.), I suspect that many a paper catalog will follow the venerable Sears tomb into pulp-oblivion.

News.Com: WSJ's Real problem with online news. At the risk of turning this into one of those increasingly common and dreary "media on media on media" columns, could the problem here be that the Chronicle's new media column didn't quote its sources accurately...

MSNBC: Time Warner heads down several paths. ...Time Warner is developing what it described as "vertical portals," sites that will "drill down" to specific consumer interests...

News.Com: Browser interface development made easy? ...drafted the Extensible User Interface Language (XUL), which would let developers create a browser's user interface using common Web development languages.

Red Herring: You're not a community site? Community sites are now trying to shrug off the negative connotations of the community title -- or get rid of the name altogether.

NY Times: On the Web, It's Buyer Beware. But Where? What is an American consumer to do if he believes he was ripped off by a foreign Web site?

News.Com: How the Internet empowers. Ubiquitous access to fast two-way communication will forever transform the way our society works.

A List Apart: Using Flash and DHTML for Good, Not Evil. However, as with HTML, Web builders can also misuse these technologies to build sites that end up being less user friendly.

Wired News: MIT to Unwire the World The aim is to give the area's doctors, teachers, and farmers centers equipped with IP connectivity.

March 27, 1999
SJ Mercury: Online threat to print journalism will have consequences. Dan Gillmor. Context, perspective and the ability to sift out something resembling truth are essential, which is why the editorial role will not disappear, whatever the medium.

NY Times: New Home for a Lost Generation of Innovators. "Computer people in their 20s and 30s, they don't look to Japan but to Silicon Valley for ways to work the Internet."

Useit.Com: Spotlight of the ClueTrain Manifesto. ...I predict that most big companies will still not get it because their internal management structures are too well built and capable of resisting customer-centricity until it's too late.

• Cluetrain: The Cluetrain Manifesto. However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both.

Boston Globe: The coming change in business news. In the next 10 years, however, on-line journalism will become a journalistic force unto itself. Nowhere will this be more true than in the category of business and financial news.

Upside: Loser Interface. If the Web is to become a real mass medium, like today's phones, it has to adapt itself to the consumer first and technology second. This means idiot-proof design and backward-compatibility.

Industry Standard: When You Wish Upon the Web. Goldstein says he's already sold out his advertising space through the summer, and his goal is "to double pageviews within a year's time."

Advertising Age: Apparel makers add e-commerce. How will e-commerce affect the already strained relationship between apparel manufacturers and retailers?

AtNewYork: Alley's Leading Financial Site Eyes Commerce and Broadband Tom Watson. "We prefer to get as broad an audience as possible, so we don't tart it up with a lot of blinking winking things that don't work. We want to be easy to use, we want to be the facilitator."

ABCNews.Com: Network Solutions Registers Dissent. "They’re a wealthy company with very high-quality, expensive lawyers," says Michael Roberts, president of ICANN. "I’m sure there’s a legal explanation for what they did."

NY Times: Foie Gras and Chips, Anyone? ...Ms. Sassella has received an education in how difficult it is to convince Europeans, who have a wealth of small shops and age-old shopping habits, that they should shop on the Web.

InfoWorld: Glitzy Webbies paint only a partial picture of the Internet's future. Internetworkers, by contrast, use Internet technologies to connect people, enable new ways of doing business, make existing processes more efficient, and in many cases to restructure...

Wired News: The Onion Hits the Big Time. The Onion was founded on the principal that self-important hard-news journalism is a perfect candidate for mockery.

InfoWorld: Don't know a Boolean search from shinola? You'd better Ask Jeeves for help. ...Ask Jeeves looks at your query and tries to match it against a list of questions in its database.

March 28, 1999
Editor & Publisher: Do You Really Need to Be No. 1? Steve Outing. Should dominant local news sites be concerned that they are being beaten in their own back yards by national Internet players?

ZDNN: Instant messages, instant profits? The technology's rapid adoption since then certainly suggests that it fulfils a basic need.

News.Com: Amazon.com to offer online auctions. Curry said Amazon has developed its auction capability in-house, and is not working with eBay.

NY Times: Big and Small Booksellers Take Battle Online. "If you type in 1-2-3 the same thing happens." (He's right. Such a search elicits this hot link: "Books about 1-2-3 at Barnesandnoble.com.")

NY Times: 2 Makers Plan Introductions of Digital VCR. The idea is to permit people to use television the way Web surfers now use the Internet.

ClickZ: The Great Advertising Opportunity ...the globe is going digital, and one standard -- the Internet Protocol (IP) -- will soon reign supreme.

NY Times: Internet Companies Reinvent Math. The volume model has always had its detractors, most of whom have been painted as hopelessly parochial neo-Luddite party poopers, or worse.

ChannelSeven: A la Carte Menu of Ebusiness Growth Factors Presents an Array of Possibilities. Negropante expressed suspicion toward the Jupiter Communications and Forrester's of the world that predict explosive growth for the wrong reasons.

March 29, 1999
Salon: Why Bill Gates still doesn't get the Net. Scott Rosenberg. Review of Bill Gates' new book. The closest "Business @ the Speed of Thought" comes to breaking a sweat is when Gates describes Microsoft's Herculean effort to turn its business in the direction of the Internet.

Builder.Com: You Have No Privacy. Have a Nice Web Life. Dan Shafer. The belief in Web land is that commercial Web sites that don't catch on to the real value in snooping on their users' behavior patterns will find themselves considerably behind the curve in an increasingly competitive environment.

Business 2.0: What Works Now: 100 Ideas You Can Take to the Bank. Common themes developed quickly. Consider this list an amalgam of working ideas, gut instincts, and proven successes. What works now on the Internet in 1999.

ZDNN: A killer app for consumer relations? RemarQ Communities Inc., which now integrates message boards and Usenet discussion groups into customers' sites, sees customer relations as a major part of its future.

News.Com: Sapient scoops up consulting firm. ...Sapient beefed up its Web-based offerings today, scooping up San Francisco-based consulting firm Adjacency...

TechWeb: New Tool Simulates Web Surfers. The tool, called SiteProfile, offers an advantage over human focus groups by providing consistent numeric measurements of usability...

Industry Standard: Amazon.com Makes a Bid for the Auction Market. But unlike other online auctioneers, Amazon.com will offer its shoppers a "guarantee" against fraud by sellers.

SJ Mercury: Q&A: On technology in the classroom. Q&A with Larry Tesler, co-founder of Stagecast Software. ...Stagecast Creator is an extremely easy way for teachers to build visual simulations to complement their lessons.

News.Com: WIPO readies domain report amid criticism. ...critics say under WIPO's proposal there are no safe harbors for someone who has registered a domain name for personal use...

Wired News: Amazon on the Move. Until it bought into drugstore.com, Amazon saved every pixel of ad space on its Web site to promote its own book, CD, and video businesses.

Computer Shopper: Adobe's New View. According to Adobe, if e-commerce is to be successful, it is essential that consumers have the ability to easily access, view, and print the high-quality content that accurately represents the products and services they are interested in buying.

Internet World: Early Web Graphics Format May Yet Have Its Day. Broad adoption may be yet to come: "It took JPEGs four years to get there; it took GIF just as long..."

Industry Standard: The Networked News. If there's a threat to journalistic excellence today, it has to do not with technology but with business models.

ZDNN: Instant islands in the Net. The world of instant messaging looks, at the moment, like Hawaii: a number of islands, some larger than others, but none directly accessible from the others, and each with its own character.

NewMedia Magazine: It's Not About You. It's time for companies to rethink their Web site strategy (presuming they even have one). They need to focus more on their customers and the needs and desires of those customers.

Interactive Week: The Net: Software's New 'Platform'. ...are hitching their futures to the notion that online connections can emerge as a viable vehicle for distributing an increasingly broad array of software applications.

SF Chronicle: Consulting firm shows clients the future. ``Our business bridges that gap between what technology can do and what business needs to have done..."

Interactive Week: A Tale Of Two One-Click Initiatives. ...no one technology provider has been successful at creating a standard wallet or payment mechanism to allow consumers to shop with a single click across retail sites.

LA Times: NSI, U.S. Near Pact on Domain Names Controversy. [Esther Dyson, ICANN interim Chairwoman] "We're challenging Network Solutions' interpretation that they own the [InterNIC] registry..."

Adweek: Analysis: Measurement's Tangled Web. Industry observers can now only hope the hype doesn't turn into another energy-depleting rivalry.

NY Times: Internet Companies Reinvent Math. "No profit for the foreseeable future" is now a boilerplate disclaimer in the prospectus of an Internet company preparing an initial stock offering.

Interactive Week: MSN Moves Past The PC. Microsoft's online arm has launched development work to deliver versions of the MSN.com Web service on alternate devices, including cellular phones, pagers, handheld computers and Microsoft's WebTV platform...

March 30, 1999
Useit.Com: Spotlight of Jeff Bezos' remark that "the No. 1 thing is the customer experience. ...Amazon now forces users to scroll through more than an inch of irrelevant blurbs for their online auctions that have no relation to the book the user is looking for.

CIO Web Business: Mazed and Confused. You don't know because at your company, as at most companies, no one has ever asked customers whether your Web site is easy to use. And what you don't know can cost you.

CIO Web Business: Self Serving Sites. These sorts of customers don't want to conduct business relationships through the mail or over the phone anymore. They want to do it on the Net.

NY Times: Discussion Areas on News Sites Aren't Just for Rants. Rather than simply "talking back" to editors, readers can talk among themselves.

CIO WebBusiness: Defend or Attack? Q&A with John Hagel. But the moment you move into an attacker mind-set, it really forces you to ask the more fundamental questions about what business you're really in, who your customers are, is there a new kind of customer you could be serving through the Internet.

Information Week: Online Data's FineLine. Still, companies embracing E-commerce realize that exploiting customer data is one of the advantages of that online, real-time medium.

ClickZ: The Network Vision. ...web marketing can learn a lot from the process on linking, interdependencies, and just downright realizing that it's not the network technology, it's the people.

InfoWorld: No single formula for Web projects. "In the future, Internet service firms will have to combine business consulting, technical, and creative skills..."

ZDNN: Robin Abrams on the 'Zen of Palm'. Q&A with Robin Abrams, President 3Com's Palm Computing. You will see dramatic variations in product designs coming from the licensees, but not us. Palm Computing-branded devices will remain constant.

TechWeb: Compaq Demands Sales Support From E-Stores. Compaq Computer said it plans to begin reauthorizing Internet retailers by early May, imposing program requirements that limit Web stores' ability to undersell its products while demanding top-notch customer support...

Wired News: IBM: From Cobol to Cool. Now IBM Interactive faces competition from thousands of little design shops around the country, not to mention emerging powers like USWeb/CKS and Razorfish.

News.Com: Onsale unveils bid-bearing banner ads. Viewers are encouraged to click through as pricing information on a number of products from Onsale's auctions is displayed on the banner.

Business Week: The Crucial Mission: "Provide Customers with What They Want". Q&A with Jeffrey Bezos. I can understand why they want to do E-mail, and I can understand why they want to do stock quotes. I think there are a lot of people competing in that space, and it's an important space, and that's a good business. It's just not our business.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of the traffic on McAfee's download site after Melissa. The general lesson is that the Web is susceptible to flash crowds and to have contingency plans to handle huge bursts in volume.

Wired News: NetSol Spams Name Holders. "It seems to me they are using the "whois" database for their own marketing purposes. It's not what this system was intended to be used for."

Wired News: AltaVista Crawls Deeper. The AV Photo and Media Finder scans the Web for about a dozen different media formats -- WAV, RealAudio, RealVideo, QuickTime, ASF, MPEG, AVI among them...

fatbrain.com: We Changed Our Name! Make it easier for you to find us, type our name and remember our URL. (Let’s face it, ComputerLiteracy.com is tough to type correctly!)

USA Today: Hypervisionary sees bandwidth bonanza. Falling costs result in less-time-consuming delivery of information, far more diverse channels of information and much greater ability to intelligently choose what particular information best suits our needs or desires at any particular moment.

MSDN Online: Technology's Next Steps. Robert Hess. ...I see a richer and more client-exploitive experience in which there isn't a browser acting as a portal to content living elsewhere;

Freedom Forum: No new ideas in Bill Gates latest book. Jon Katz. Looking at these rows of $30, 470-page books, it's almost defies belief that there's nothing inside any of them.

Wired News: Getting to Know What People Know. Its flagship product is a sophisticated project-management program that stores each employee's résumé, skills, work history, performance ratings, and availability.

SF Chronicle: A Flat-Out Simpler Approach to Wireless Phone Service. Industry watchers say flat-rate pricing has evolved because wireless companies finally are responding to consumers...

MSDN Online: Redirecting Traffic: Custom 404 Messages for IIS 4.0. With the merge of the Site Builder Network (SBN) and MSDN Online, some 7,000 files on the former SBN have moved from the main microsoft.com cluster to a cluster called msdn.microsoft.com.

MSDN Online: Behind the Design Scenes of the New MSDN Online Site. ...look at the design process, team dynamics, user interface, and graphical approach taken through out the design process of the phenomenal and massive information-rich MSDN Online site.

March 31, 1999
Today's Links Story: User Experience: Going once, twice, sold!

NY Times: Memory Takes New Shape. ...Sony Electronics, Iomega and International Business Machines, are trying to provide just that. They have developed new forms of mini-storage memory and are jumping into the market...

Washington Post: Losing Sleep in a Mattress War. Barragan, as you might expect, is not happy that his Washington franchisee is going nose to nose against the Dial-a-Mattress operation that launched him.

Editor & Publisher: AP's Web Content Restrictions; User Review Caveats. Steve Outing. Online editors at news Web sites who handle AP copy have begun noticing more content labeled "online out" — or similar wording — indicating that the content is not to be used on Web sites.

Industry Standard: Yahoo-Broadcast.com Deal Puts Spotlight on Content. ...Yahoo tomorrow is expected to announce that it will purchase Dallas-based Net company Broadcast.com in an all stock deal valued at $5.7 billion.

Wired News: Are You Who You Say You Are? The group concluded that "knowing who you are really dealing with online" is a major barrier to growth in the current epicenter in the Internet gold rush, e-commerce.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of a Nielsen Media Research on the click through rate for web advertising. Getting down to 0.15% as early as February is almost too good to believe in terms of vindicating my statements since 1997 that advertising doesn't work on the Web.

MSNBC: Can eBay stand the heat of Amazon? ...eBay has been working on making its site navigation easier and forging deals with what vice president of business development Steve Westly calls "vertical" or special interest sites.

TechWeb: The Net Continues To Transform Business Models. "Technology is not how you differentiate yourself by and large. It's how close you are to your customer."

Computer Reseller News: Microsoft To Add Wireless Links To MSN. ...creating an Internet service called MSN Mobile that will deliver Web content to a variety of wireless devices...

News.Com: The customer is never right, Part Deux. This month's tale of two shopping ventures is even more basic: one online, the other off. Which was worse?

NY Times: Netscape Throws Open Party After a Year of Open Source. Vidur Apparao, one of Netscape's programmers, said he is happy with the widespread involvement of outsiders because it makes it easier for Netscape to build industry-wide standards...

Ask Tog: Maximum Security. Security people must work with people trained and talented in human factors to see that real security—and even privacy—are achieved.

News.Com: Will media giants bulldoze communities? "The value is a combination of drawing traffic through content and rallying people around a common interest to exchange ideas or communication around that content..."

ZDNN: IBM to yank ads over privacy rules. IBM Corp. has decided to pull its Internet advertising from any Web site in the U.S. or Canada that doesn't post clear privacy policies.

USA Today: Keeping 'pry' out of the privacy debate. Internet tools are being developed to thwart online tracking and data collection, which are becoming more sophisticated and more prevalent...