April 1, 1999
Jamie Zawinki: resignation and postmortem. April 1st, 1999 will be my last day as an employee of the Netscape Communications division of America Online, and my last day working for mozilla.org.

Jamie Zawinski: From March 31, 1999; netscape and aol. Everything that is good about the Internet, everything that differentiates it from television, is about empowerment of the individual.

Microsoft Backstage: MSDN Online Case Study. The site has undergone several major redesigns, including one in mid-1997 to emphasize original editorial content and another in March 1999 to offer personalization features.

Webmonkey: Managing Customer Feedback. The key to timely and professional customer support is to empower users: Let them answer their own questions.

Useit.Com: Readers' Comments on URL as UI. Make it easy to link to your site in systematic ways so that server-side programs on other sites can computationally generate links to specific services on your site.

News.Com: A small world of their own. Q&A with Stephan Paternot and Todd Krizelman of TheGlobe.com. ...we've married together the breadth and the depth that you find in portals with user interaction--and then, wrapped around that, e-commerce.

News.Com: AOL, Mozilla lose key evangelist. Longtime Netscape client engineer and Mozilla.org pioneer and evangelist Jamie Zawinski handed in his resignation today...

Wired News: Public Access TV -- on Steroids. Multimedia search engines are poised to do for audio and video what the original search engines did for the written word.

News.Com: Start-up aims to break info bottleneck. ...the software combines unstructured information, such as Word documents, Web pages, and other text-based content with structured information, such as that contained in corporate databases, and delivers it to users through one integrated application...

News.Com: Amazon auctions more like a mall. "They should do their homework, but if they end up paying more, that's the auction world."

News.Com: Start-up helps bring Web to handhelds. Proxinet's technology translates Web content on the fly and thus can be used for live Web surfing without having to hook up to a PC...

RCFoC: The Story of the Internet. The thing is, it isn't MP3 that's the villain here; it just happens to be a "good enough" encoding technique that came along at the right time and opened a doorway for online music delivery.

Industry Standard: Microsoft to Offer Free Music on Launch.com. The free singles will be secured with Microsoft's new ecryption technology, reportedly called Secure ASF, which will allow the artists' labels to control the file's terms of usage.

ZDNN: MS facing the music from bands. ...record executives are annoyed that it is independently releasing software before the coalition has agreed on a standard.

ZDNN: Affiliates: a better way to advertise online? So is there a downside? Well, for one, consumers could rebel against sites clogged with dozens of buttons and banners flogging products, the same way some reject sites loaded down with ads.

Wired News: Death to Sleepy Stock Data. ...the first step toward creating new ways to navigate databases and the Internet. Eventually, the company hopes to create a new class of visualization tools that will put the current generation of portals and search engines to shame.

Wired News: Mozilla's First Birthday. Q&A with Mitchell Baker and Eric Mann of Netscape. Why do a lot of people use Apache? Because my Web server is so crucial, because if I need to tweak that puppy I can tweak it. The same thing is going to happen with future [Web browsers].

CIO Web Business: You Thing Tomaytoes, I Think Tomahtoes. A former reference librarian and researcher in Apple Computer Inc.'s advanced technology group, he relished the chance to pioneer a Web-based knowledge management system.

News.Com: IBM pulling Web ads: trend or quick fix? ...many companies have no interest in providing full disclosure to surfers on how they use information collected on their sites because their business model depends on gathering that data.

News.Com: Mergers and acquisitions, Internet-style. The nature of the Internet lends itself to regrouping, consolidating, chasing new markets in new ways.

April 2, 1999
Advertising Age: IBM privacy policy draws industry cheers. "Our objective is not to cancel advertising, but to give people a financial incentive to do something that we think every site ought to be doing..."

IETF: Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol. The working group will develop an architecture for simple instant messaging and presence awareness/notification.

• ZDNN: From March 29, 1999; Instant islands in the Net.

TechWeb: ICanBuy.com Markets To Kids -- Carefully. A San Francisco start-up is entering perhaps the most controversial arena on the Web -- marketing to minors.

Network Solutions Press Release: Network Solutions Implements New Registry System. ...Network Solutions’ registry site will contain documents and links pertaining to the Shared Registry System transition effort.

• Network Solutions: NSI Registry.

News.Com: Another key Mozilla figure departs. "When we should have been focusing on one product, we were working on versions 4.06, 4.5, the 5.0 browser without Raptor, and Raptor."

InfoWorld: Move to link IE 5.0 to desktop applications frowned upon. "Anything you would want to do with the advanced features for Web collaboration is unavailable unless you use Explorer 5.0..."

News.Com: Lycos's loop has users reconsider rivals. So much for "cooptition"--Lycos is using its search engine to keep users from defecting to its competitors.

PC World: People With Disabilities Reach for Web Access. "If companies are designing or putting their information on the Web internally or for the public, or doing e-commerce, then it's suicide to make an inaccessible Web site. It's throwing away those customers."

PC Week: Microsoft widens Windows CE's reach. Another goal of the upgrade is to offer a more Web-like look and feel...

Industry Standard: ESPN.com Users Cry Foul. As for the question of the poor response, Reis acknowledged that as the technology has become more sophisticated there hasn't been the need to carry as large a support staff as, say, two years ago.

Online Journalism Review: The Pulse of Tablet Technology. The multibillion-dollar question... is how good does an electronic display have to be for tablets to be widely adopted?

Web Review: If You Meet a Data Bigot on the Road, Kill Him. Self-styled "data bigots" seem to have no compunction for simply dismissing the entire field of information retrieval and the knowledge its practitioners have accumulated over the past decades.

• Web Review: From February 5, 1999; Brief "Data Does Not Equal Information" Digression

Wired News: Credit Card Fraud Bedevils Web. But security experts say designing Web sites that require several pieces of information about the card and the potential buyer helps a lot. Those items can then be run through screening software that looks for anomalies and red flags, generating a fraud risk score.

Marketing Computers: Visio Takes Apps to the Web. "When [customers] are handing over the dollars, we'll know clearly what they are using and not using..."

Industry Standard: Web Dispatches From the Front. ...both ABCNews.com and MSNBC.com have recently sent reporters to the Balkan hostilities zone, where they are producing material just for the Web.

TechWeb: Sharp Seeks Shelter From LCD Storm. Sharp Electronics Corp. took the wraps off a new LCD architecture this week with an eye toward broadening display usage in portable equipment and television sets.

A List Apart: Rethinking the Interface. Avoid complicating things by adding what you think are "better" buttons, or a "more interesting" navigation bar. Unless it succeeds in providing intuitive navigation, it simply doesn't succeed.

Upside: Human Search Help. The companies find information on the Web differently, but both boast of their ability to "humanize" the Web search experience.

PC Week: IBM launches a Clever search. HITS looks for good sources of information and pairs them with sites featuring strong compilations of such sources.

April 3, 1999
Today's Links Story: Shrinking SalonMagazine.Com

SJ Mercury: Digital Storytelling. Though it uses today's technical wizardry, digital storytelling derives its power - as with any other narrative form - from story, characters, situations, mystery, evocative images - in short, the age-old poetics of human drama.

SJ Mercury: Web portals use mass marketing to build identity. The future of the Web is now in the hands of the people who sold you Wheaties, Crest, Tide and Planter's Peanuts.

Upside: Bandwidth Overkill. "If the price drops, all sorts of things change. All sorts of things can happen, things that have been waiting in the wings."

Industry Standard: Servicing Appliances. Fundamentally, the ability to access all information from anywhere and have a single unified and synchronized information repository is critical to making appliances useful.

InfoWorld: You've got to understand Internet Epidemiology in order to monetize the Web. The next two steps will become increasingly important as advertising fades. You have to "memberize" your site's visitors, and then "monetize" their visits.

SJ Mercury: Globalism, tribalism collide in events. Dan Gillmor. The ancient and the modern are colliding everywhere, as tribalism confronts globalism, but rarely with such reverberation as in the past week.

InfoWorld: A swarm of WASPs will add to the buzz on the business Net. ...what's emerging is an array of Web applications that perform functions uniquely suited to the world of the Internet.

Wired News: Memory Boost for Palm V. But thanks to the ingenuity of Palm hackers, the miniscule memory chip can now be replaced with a whopping 8-MB module.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of a Forbes article looking at factors influencing Internet penetration in Europe. ...European pocketbooks are hit twice as hard, making it no surprise that there are still more Americans online.

Industry Standard: Everyone's a Publisher. Through a combination of on-demand printing, digital production, traditional distribution and online marketing, upstart Internet outfits such as Xlibris and ToExcel.com are radically revising the way books are produced and marketed.

April 4, 1999
Today's Links Story: Auction Sidebar

NY Times: Salon Plans Its First Extensive Marketing Campaign. Talbot is counting not only on the new Internet address but on a national advertising campaign, a newly designed site and a larger staff to help attract many more visitors to his digital publication.

NY Times: Internet Retailers Hide True Costs of Purchases. The Internet may be developing a similar syndrome -- call it clicker shock -- as retailers acquire a reputation for hiding shipping and handling charges until the final stage of the transaction.

NY Times: Project Aims to Unhitch Computing From PC Harness. The objective is as broad as it is audacious: to reinvent all facets of information technology, from chips and software to computers and networks.

ClickZ: Making Wrong Assumptions. Assumptions are rampant within the thinking of people who write words - or fail to write words -- on web sites.

Useit.Com: Intranet Portals: The Corporate Information Infrastructure. An intranet should have a single home page that integrates a directory hierarchy, search, and news.

Business 2.0: What Price Spam? Privacy activists and most ISPs hate it. But few can agree how to regulate, legislate, and filter it. In a week-long online message board exchange, Business 2.0 brought together four players who hope to turn the spam debate in their favor.

ERICA Seminars: How to make the world a better community! Bo Peabody and Justin Hall. ERICA is the first-ever international award for non-profits to help develop and realize their visions through the power of the Internet.

Wired News: IBM and MP3? Maybe IBM's microdrive -- unveiled last September -- allows for much more data to be stored in a small drive the size of a matchbook.

Project Cool: Hold On To That Dream. Today I was looking for some management books and right there, next to Peter Drucker's classic works, I get offered an exciting chance to buy "Flatso Frog."

April 5, 1999
Today's Links Story: Hello salon.com

Salon.Com: Netscape to its online community: You're evicted. "There was no warning ahead of time -- I think Netscape should have said, months ago when AOL bought the company, that the forums might be shut down. Then we could have prepared for it."

NY Times: A Milestone on the Road to Ultrafast Computers. Chips based on this new technology, known as tunneling magnetic junction random access memory, or tmj-ram for short, would be ultrafast, consume very little power and retain stored data when a computer was shut down.

News.Com: IBM kicking off Net video research. International Business Machines is setting up two projects to test new technology that could make the Internet faster and better able to run video images.

ClickZ: Mobile Marketing: Any Time, Any Place, Any Device. These key factors fuel the growth of mobile commerce because the new wireless devices are the next point-of-sale (POS) devices.

Webmonkey: IE 5.0 - Good, But Not up to Standards. But as improved as IE 5 is, it still falls exasperatingly short of meeting W3C standards for HTML, CSS, and DOM.

ZDNN: Portal 'Cold War' gets organized. "The portals are in a foundation period; the companies want to get all the services and applications they can, to be competitive with the other portal sites..."

News.Com: Mapping MSN's changes. "If these guys don't get a boss, the answer is no, the reorganization doesn't change things much because they're not media guys..."

PC Week: AOL buys When.com calendar service. ...the company plans to make the calendar service available across its product offerings, including the recently acquired Netscape Netcenter...

News.Com: NSI, Commerce discuss domains. Over the past few weeks, both parties have been meeting regularly to discuss those changes and to map out the opening up of the registration system to competitors.

Wired News: Amazon's Auction a Bust So Far. Amazon spokesperson Paul Capelli said the company hopes to engineer changes soon to make the auction items more relevant to the book listings they appear with.

TechWeb: Microsoft Gears Up For Server Suite Upgrade. Microsoft also is readying Polar, another server tool that will facilitate knowledge-management capabilities such as document tracking, collaboration, and analysis.

Time Digital: Salon: Onward and Upward. "On the Web, the section name and your site name also serve as your navigation labels. It's not like you can have a cute decorative name and a clear navigation at the same time."

ZDNN: Controlling the customers' click. A growing number of new providers are offering tools for testing the end-user experience on closed networks, all the way from development to deployment.

ZDNN: Missing the hits with the wrong url. One consumer products giant is working to register about 60,000 of its product names...

Adweek: No Beginning, No End. ...advertisers are finding it's ask and ye shall receive, as publishers scuffle for juicy campaigns and the hard-to-come-by ad revenue they generate.

Internet World: Keeping a News Library in Order. The combination of RetrievalWare's natural-language processing and semantic network technology, which allows queries on the user end and file indexing on the database end to be highly refined, is behind the high-velocity searching.

Salon.Com: Welcome to the new Salon. Letter from the Editor. We don't think the word "magazine" properly describes what we do any more.

Interactive Week: IBM Design Insider: Keep It Simple, Stupid. In essence, Karat's bill of rights calls for designers to rethink their entire approach to computing, in an effort to create an interface that fits the needs of the user rather than the other way around.

Interactive Week: MSNBC Cashes In On Server Cache. By using cache - the memory buffers that can store timeless content at remote sites sprinkled across the Web - site operators can limit the drain on their central servers that can happen when users click to request new Web pages.

Editor & Publisher: Give Us Headlines, We'll Send You Readers. Steve Outing. And increasingly, other entities are sending Web users directly to stories inside news sites — bypassing news site home pages. It's simply the way of the Web, and publishers are foolish if they try to prevent other sites from steering new users to them.

Interactive Week: Follow The Cyber-Brick Road. "The fact is, going forward size won't mean as much as it once did. What you really will need is a handful of people with a great deal of experience and knowledge of a particular market."

InfoWorld: XML tools to relieve Web pains. WavePhore is standardizing previously disparate news feeds into XML for delivery to news-oriented Web sites. NewsPak uses Cogent, its coding agent, to pull specific information from the articles for the document's meta data.

• WavePhore: XMLNews Initiative

News.Com: Yahoo targets handhelds, WebTV. "...we remain committed to forging agreements with companies such as Online Anywhere, that offer Yahoo content display integrity and maximum extensibility in the PC environment and beyond."

News.Com: Hand-wringing over Handheld PCs. "The whole reason people didn't like the clamshells in the first place was small screens and keyboards."

Wired News: Crypto Set for a Quantum Leap. "...we are using quantum physics to provide an absolutely secure method of key distribution."

April 6, 1999
FEED Magazine: Cold, Hard Cache. As microchips and networks permeate society, the paper produced by the Fed will fade in relevance, and each of us will relate to our assets more like a savings and loan.

Editor & Publisher: Tribune Takes on Online-Exclusive Breaking News. Steve Outing. The market for local Web breaking news is largely working people who have Internet access at their desks, but typically do not listen to radio or watch television while they're working.

InfoWorld: Consumer sales on the Internet may force the industry to reinvent itself. "What pure Internet retailers get, and traditional retailers may not, is that the Internet provides a great opportunity to extend the retail experience beyond just products and prices to include things like deep information and relevant content..."

InfoWorld: Semio to take manual labor out of data categorization. Semio next week plans to launch its Semio Taxonomy, a technology designed to automatically categorize structured and unstructured data for the creation of directories on intranets and Web portals.

Wired News: Click Here for a Privacy Policy. ...if P3P software eventually becomes widespread, a P3P-compatible browser could digest a software version of a site's privacy statement.

News.Com: Amazon's auction options were limited. ...analysts believe the online retailer had good reasons for developing auctions in-house, rather than buying an off-the-shelf solution or buying eBay outright.

ZDNN: Web 'zine Slate prepares a new screen Kinsley said Slate's readers fall largely into two groups, people who want New Yorker-type articles on the Web, and people who want the 'metafeatures,' such as Today's Papers and Summary Judgment.

PC World: A Roadmap for Net News. Instead of displaying a chronological list of headlines as other Web sites do, NewsMaps.com shows thousands of articles or discussion group postings at the same time, grouped into topics and organized into a topographical map.

ZDNN: MS backs cyber privacy technology. Under their proposal, the P3P spec would be incorporated on Web sites through a Web-based tool called a Privacy Wizard which would automate certain elements of the implementation process.

ZDNN: Portal commerce deals lack results. The reason for the disappointing commerce numbers, according to the market researcher, are often overly ambitious deals that have little chance to be realized.

Forbes: Prime Time Anytime. As more people are able to skip certain shows and easily fast-forward past the ads, the competition for the top shows will become even more intense while overall ad revenues will decline because less people will be viewing them.

SJ Mercury: Manifesto on `global conversation'. Dan Gillmor. Cluetrain, deliberately or not, caters more to that self-indulgence than I'd like. I still recommend it. You don't have to agree, much less act on its advice, but you'll learn something.

Wired News: Shaping Online Privacy. This year's CFP conference, which starts Tuesday in Washington, is especially focused on international Internet regulation and privacy protection.

PC Magazine: High-IQ Homes. "Products are getting smarter, but there's a limit to what they can do for people if they're just working by themselves..."

April 7, 1999
NY Times: Books to Bytes: The Electronic Archive. But the survey also showed that the libraries were not sure about how to preserve digital materials to insure their availability in the future even as such materials become a larger part of their holdings.

MSDN Online: WebDAV: Evolving the Web into a Read and Write Medium. Simply stated, WebDAV makes the Web a collaborative, writeable medium. Today the Web is really read-only, where people mostly download and read stuff.

Builder.Com: The Internet Movie Database. And don't get me started on the Refine Search interface, which includes such user-hostile terms as "substring," "fuzzy search," and "regular expression."

Internet Week: Databases Expand Into E-Commerce. ...most e-commerce sites see dynamic personalization as the end phase of a three-part process, preceded by defining an architecture and effectively managing content and transactions.

Webmonkey: Exchanging Data with WDDX. In simple terms, WDDX is used to transfer structured data between different portions of a Web application that can be distributed to a variety of Web servers.

News.Com: NSI may blink in domain page dispute. ...NSI is expected to yield some ground over the controversial InterNIC Web site the company recently took over...

Netscape DevEdge: The Great Internet Fashion Show. Perhaps never before has sheer style been so central to interface design. The chief reason for this, of course, is that there's been very little of substance that even a good interface designer could do to make the web more useful.

Wired News: Yahoo's Offline Communities. Bekman says services like Yahoo Clubs have lost the experimentation grace period where experienced users will accept intermittent performance.

News.Com: Microsoft gives Hotmail a facelift. With this week's upgrade, the site is working harder to do just that, feeding users an MSN Web search bar on selected pages along with links to MSN e-commerce services.

Red Herring: Yahoo gets over the PC. "Right now, we look at it more as retaining users than [getting] a lot of new ones," she says, noting that most people who use handhelds and set-top boxes also have PCs.

ZDNN: Predicting what's next for e-commerce. ...sites that give consumers the ability to buy or do something online that they might hesitate to do offline seemed popular.

Savannah Morning News: Watts Wacker's view of the future. Q&A with Watts Wacker. So making money on the information is really key and I liken to what we call meta-data: putting two different discrete databases together that make more information as a result of the merger.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of the redesign of Xerox's website. I wouldn't say that Xerox completely wasted the $5M they spent on the redesign because the site does seem better, but it's amazingly poor for the high prize tag.

Wired News: Bulk Buying Comes to the Web. The company believes it can get huge volume discounts from manufacturers by aggregating online shoppers' orders into one huge purchase.

Studio Archetype: User-centered design transforms Xerox Web site. Based on our user research, we organized information about products and services on the new site around the tasks that motivate customers -- basic tasks such as printing, copying, and faxing.

• Xerox Press Release: Xerox Debuts $5M Corporate Web Site Overhaul

High Five: Rise of User Preference We are entering a new phase in the development of the Web's fundamental interface assumptions, and as time goes on users will begin to take for granted what we do tomorrow as a experiment in new technology.

Editor & Publisher: Microsoft Starts with a Clean Slate. The redesign also will accommodate more advertising approaches, including vertical ads along the right side of a page, sponsor links, advertorial pages, and more prominent banners.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of Usability improvements in the redesign of Salon. Missing: subheads, bulleted lists and other aspects of writing for scannability; liquid layout that adapts to the user's preferred window size.

News.Com: Conference monitors privacy concerns. ...panelists feverishly pointed to evidence about international governments building widespread surveillance systems for email, phone, and wireless communication...

W3C: Platform for Privacy Preferences Working Draft. P3P enables Web sites to express their privacy practices and enables users to exercise preferences over those practices.

April 8, 1999
Internet Week: E-Biz Sites Push For 100% Uptime. ...captains of e-industry are overhauling their hardware, network infrastructure and applications to handle escalating Web traffic, eliminate expensive outages and prepare for future demand.

Atlantic Unbound: The MP3 Revolution. Charles C. Mann. More than that, though, MP3 is a marvelously clear example of how an apparently small technological change can have unexpected and explosive impacts on society. Indeed, MP3 might become the first innovation on the Net that actually deserves the appellation "revolutionary."

News.Com: Netscape shuttering Netcenter forums. The company promises a "more robust offering that leverages both AOL and Netcenter resources" when it reconstitutes the forums next month.

Web Review: Field Report: South By Southwest. "Shopping on the Web shouldn't be just quick—it should be fun. It should inform. Shoppers should be able to turn into knowledgeable consumers."

Industry Standard: Surf's Up at Work. ...Media Metrix conducted an analysis that found at-work Internet users, on average, accessed 40 percent more Web pages and spent 35 percent more time online than at-home users during February 1999.

Wired News: Net Users to Top 200 Million. The UN's annual economic and social survey of Asia, released Thursday, said that more than 200 million people will be connected to the Internet by the year 2000.

TechWeb: Internet Will Be Wonderful, Dangerous. Global conflicts and taxes will become catalysts for change on the Internet in the coming years, said Cerf.

ZDNN: Service the key to selling online. "Online service must exceed traditional service in order to get consumers to switch."

News.Com: Start-up: Every firm needs its own portal. InfoImage joins a small but growing group of vendors that are developing knowledge management software packages that target particular areas within organizations.

Fortune: Copyright Protection Is for Dinosaurs. Stewart Alsop. But now we live in a new world where copying is next to impossible to stop. Indeed, copying is so easy that perhaps a government-enforced monopoly on creative efforts doesn't make sense anymore.

PC Magazine: Microsoft Holds Court. ...demonstrated one of WinHEC's glitziest technologies: a 3-D software user interface designed to use home- and hallway-metaphors to help users navigate the Web, documents and other kinds of information.

CBS MarketWatch: Enhanced EDGAR on the way. He wants to become "the Rand-McNally of the Internet," providing mapping services that "take a step above the Internet and look around, to show the spatial relationships between different pieces of information."

ZDNN: The need for robust design. Today's IT products, both hardware and software, are amazing when they're doing what they should--but they often don't exhibit the graceful degradation of function that distinguishes industrial-strength design.

RCFoC: The Silicon Age. But even though it takes more effort to drive to another store, I just saw a similar example of "real-world fickleness" in the exodus of empty-handed people from this bricks and mortar store.

PC Week: Microsoft outlines plans for digital content management. ...announced the Windows Image Acquisition Architecture, which will build digital imaging functionality -- including the ability to edit, print and publish images -- into future versions of Window 98 and Windows 2000.

ZDNN: Free speech and privacy forever linked. "Governments will increasingly be pressured to find individual Internet speakers," which means "an increasing assault on online anonymity..."

InfoWorld: UPS tools integrate shipping information with I-commerce sites. OnLine Tools is the latest version of a set of applications available to users to integrate their storefronts with the country's largest shipping company.

SJ Mercury: Salon marries Well in aim to boost revenues, image. He said people who receive free content are somewhat willing to look at ads, but those who pay for a gathering place do not want to be subject to commercial intrusions.

April 9, 1999
Industry Standard: Bogus Clickers Are Cheating Ad Networks. ...a growing number of clicks are coming not from potential customers, but from pieces of shareware that mime customer behavior and help their users collect the fees.

TechWeb: UPS Delivers E-Commerce Tools. "UPS is giving us a data stream and letting us configure it the way we want our users to see it..."

Online Journalism Review: Old Media Firms Dig a Grave With Shovelware. Editors must have the nerve to allow readers to modify the form and content of news so that they can understand it in a personal context.

Industry Standard: Inktomi's Dr. Eric Brewer Sees the Future. "In the last year, we have gotten all the scale and availability and presence issues under control, and we've turned the guns on relevance. It's already having a big impact internally, and it's going to make a difference."

News.Com: NSI alters InterNIC domain site. Under a change made early this afternoon, InterNIC visitors are sent to a page that explains that InterNIC is a cooperative site between NSI and the U.S. government.

AtNewYork: The E-Commerce Skeptics Just Might Be Right. Jason Chervokas. The underlying fact of the online commerce revolution is that it has begun to wrest value and control of the retail channel away from brick-and-mortar retailers and placed it, not in the hands of the online retailers, but in the hands of the distributors of products.

Industry Standard: The Battle for Mom-and-Pop Web Shops. But new software companies, portals, startup service providers and ISPs are making a renewed push for a market that proved more difficult than many observers anticipated.

Interactive Week: Yahoo! Gets Personal With Broadcast Services. Early targets for the grassroots multimedia integration include incorporating audio and video offerings into online classified ads, Web-based auctions and the portal's real-estate listings...

ZDNN: Microsoft eyeing Net calendar service. A person familiar with the matter said the company planned to combine an in-house team that had begun working on a calendar service with Jump's dozen or so programmers.

[clip]: User Friendly. Q&A with Jakob Nielsen.There are still too many companies that aren't even on the Web yet and too many companies that have a bad website that doesn't serve their customers in a decent way.

ClickZ: Give Them The M.O.S.T.. This week's article takes a look at one way in which direct marketing can encompass elements of the online customer experience that are often ignored.

Editor & Publisher: Exclusive Web Content Sales: A Newspaper Opportunity? Steve Outing. His concept, which he is currently pitching to the newspaper industry, is that there is money to be made by offering selected newspaper content to content-hungry Web sites on an exclusive, enterprise basis.

News.Com: U.S. privacy policy trailing behind. The Net is breaking down commercial and regulatory barriers, making it virtually impossible for countries to be islands unto themselves when it comes to online consumer protection and civil rights issues.

Forbes: Digital butler. "They'd get thousands of responses to their keyword searches, and after clicking on two or three pages, they’d give up..."

Wired News: Birth of an RFC Nation. Request for Comments submissions to the Net standards body, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), typically proposed standards for various plumbing specs of the now-ubiquitous network of networks.

NY Times: Ruling Against Domain Name Speculator Could Set Precedent ...a state court judge in Virginia has confirmed what most people have long assumed: domain names are a type of property that is owned by domain name holders and may be sold by them.

April 10, 1999
SJ Mercury: Web and access to it are taking new shape. Dan Gillmor. A raft of new, Internet-connected devices will be hitting the market in coming months and years, providing a variety of data and services we can only begin to imagine today.

NY Times: Searching for the Essence of the World Wide Web. "The sheer reach and structural complexity of the Web makes it an ecology of knowledge, with relationships, information 'food chains,' and dynamic interactions that could soon become as rich as, if not richer than, many natural ecosystems..."

• Xerox PARC: Internet Ecologies Area. The Internet Ecologies Area's research focuses on the relation between the local actions and the global behavior of large distributed systems, both social and computational.

InfoWorld: Web multimedia goes mainstream. "It's about time we start using more multimedia to convey information," Nielsen said. "Good multimedia design is similar to film design. The goal is not to be flashy."

InfoWorld: Companies get a clue about the Net: It's not just business as usual. The Cluetrain Manifesto boils down to a simple realization: Markets and companies are comprised of people -- not users, eyeballs, clients, seats, or consumers.

ChannelSeven: NY Times and Forbes Believe Branded Content Can Drive Traffic. "Pop-up or standard banners get people clicking on a logo, and with that you are not sure what you are going to get..."

April 11, 1999
NY Times: Online Merchants Grow Uneasy as Web Portals Sell More Goods Themselves. Some say they are not eager to see the potential e-commerce competition from the very Web sites that carry the merchants' customer traffic.

NY Times: Record Companies Are Wary of New Microsoft Technology. One factor upsetting record companies, according to executives, is that Microsoft has not said that it will comply with the initiative's standards once they are announced.

NY Times: Potential Profits Seen in Fan-Oriented Web Sites. Warner is even willing to let users incorporate sounds and images of its characters into their own home pages, something many other media companies officially ban because of copyright concerns.

ClickZ: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Buttons. Does this mean that every button and link on your homepage should be directly derivative of amazon.com? No. Just use the main signposts that they use.

Editor & Publisher: How to Manage Transition to HTML E-mail. Steve Outing. While arguments over use of HTML e-mail vs. text e-mail are each compelling, the safe route to take today is to offer both...

April 12, 1999
NY Times: British Venture Takes On Microsoft in Wireless Data Market. [Colly Myers, CEO of Symbian] "This will define a whole new networked economy, where the wireless information device is the consumer's 'physical portal' to a world of information and services."

Red Herring: Palm opens. Palm Computing will open its handheld organizer platform to licensees, and there will be several Palm "clones" within nine months...

USA Today: The Internet's 'nextgen' apps. Making the Internet truly a global medium will not only demand smart technology but perhaps even smarter societal choices.

MSNBC: Getting ‘permission’ to make a Web pitch. "Direct marketing is a more stable revenue stream than banner advertising, which is completely dependent on the number of people who come to the site."

Industry Standard: The Times They Are A-Targeting. The ads, which will run primarily in print publications, are not intended to garner new online readers, but rather to lure potential advertisers who've yet to commit to selling on the Web.

Webmonkey: Gecko Lays Out the Future. While the preview version of Gecko looks good, it'll be months before it can be considered a real browser for consumers.

Industry Standard: E-books Open a New Chapter. The two biggest electronic book publishers are expanding this week into the distribution of corporate and personal documents.

Forbes ASAP: Dynamic 100: Yahoo, Internet Services and Content. One of the great things about doing a directory is that you know what people are looking at. The log files clearly told us that our site visitors were looking for sport scores, stock quotes, and Yellow Pages.

News.Com: Cyberian Outpost offers free shipping. The computer products site will swallow the cost of overnight shipping, which starts at several dollars per item in an attempt to dispel consumer confusion about the actual cost of its products...

Industry Standard: Are You Experienced? As John Perry Barlow likes to say, information wants to be free. Only when companies package it in a form customers will buy – informational goods, information services or informing experiences – do they create economic value.

Business Week: Why Famous Brands Often "Fracture" When They Hit the Web. "What looks stupid is when you are something different online than you are offline, but you're not being up-front about it..."

Interactive Week: Web Inspires Corporate Adventures. The latest examples include KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, which has unveiled a division, NewFlowers.com, to link buyers and sellers of fresh-cut flowers...

Scientific American: XML and the Second-Generation Web. The combination of more efficient processing, more accurate searching and more flexible linking will revolutionize the structure of the Web and make possible completely new ways of accessing information.

Wired News: Shooting AOL's Messenger. Meanwhile, Microsoft is working behind the scenes with standards-setting bodies to establish a standard protocol, called Rendezvous. Its motives aren't purely altruistic; by creating a universal chat room, AOL's closed network would lose much of its appeal.

News.Com: MSN's Messenger late to the party. According to Microsoft, the lag is the result of scalability issues with the integration of Messenger into MSN Hotmail...

News.Com: IBM, RealNetworks in online music deal. Under the agreement with IBM, RealNetworks will develop consumer software based on IBM's Electronic Music Management System...

Industry Standard: Music Giants Fight a Corporate War Online. This week, the group intends to finalize "Version 0.1" of its specification. "Why the low number?" asks Chiariglione. "Because at the moment we have nothing."

Industry Standard: I'm Going to Silicon Valley! Carl Steadman. The PA system squeals to life. "Good morning. I'm Keith, and I'll be your driver and guide on today's sight-seeing tour of Silicon Valley.

Forbes: The Internet from Anywhere. "The VXML Forum's efforts will not only help to provide a crucial mobile component to Internet access, but will also offer Internet access to the 58% of people who own a telephone but don't own or have access to a computer."

Advertising Age: Web merchants make affiliate programs boom. ...Forrester is finishing a report on affiliates, said anecdotal evidence shows affiliates contribute as much as 30% of a site's total sales.

Wired News: The View from AboveNet. The San Jose, California, company is in an esoteric business, but a lucrative one: It establishes express lanes between ISPs to minimize congestion to high-traffic sites or one-time Net events.

April 13, 1999
News.Com: Lycos personalization features on tap. The service lets people create a customized Web page on Lycos with private email, chat rooms, Internet shopping, and other features. That Web page can then easily be published as a personal home page on Tripod...

Wired News: A Search For the Highest Bidder. ...AltaVista, is preparing to auction the search results for the most-requested search terms to the highest bidder.

Internet World: When, If Ever, Are Splash Screens Good Design Elements? "People really dislike getting a page that has no useful content on it. In my opinion, they very often do more harm than good."

Wired News: Opera Hire Sings to Standards. On Tuesday, Opera said that it had lured away a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to become the company's chief technology officer.

MSDN Online: New Browser, New Features, New Choices. Robert Hess. Every time a new shake-up comes to the Web, it provides an opportunity to review all of the existing solutions, and to figure out how to move forward.

PC Week: AOL's Leonsis: 'Spring training just ended for the Internet'. The Internet, he said, is uniquely positioned to get consumers' attention, provide in-depth information and transact purchases, but companies must make those steps easy for users.

TechWeb: MIT Launches $40M Communications Initiative. The software and hardware devices, Dertouszous said, will let people access their information independently, facilitate collaboration, and will feature a high degree of customization and automatation.

SF Examiner: High-Tech Reporting Frenzy. According to many academic experts and business leaders, journalists haven't been able to keep up with the pace of technology, and often have no idea how new products and services will affect consumers and the marketplace.

Wired News: Analysts Rip Network Solutions. If you're a chef, it's a bad idea to burn a restaurant critic's salmon steak. If you're a tech company, it's equally ill advised to bungle service to a powerful market-research firm.

News.Com: Privacy holes signal need for standards. ...Although the United States dominates in Net innovation, usage, and investment, its data protection policies are lacking and are beginning to trail those of the rest of the world.

News.Com: RealNetworks sings MP3 tune with Xing buy. RealNetworks will acquire Xing in exchange for common stock in RealNetworks with a maximum value of $75 million.

April 14, 1999
CBS MarketWatch: What's the news on Internet news? "What we've got with the Web is the ultimate vending machine," Coate said. "And that's not a glib analogy. You want a simple, obvious, easy to use interface where the result is known and quick."

NY Times: Alta Vista Invites Advertisers to Pay for Top Ranking. "We've tested a number of concepts so it will be very clear to users this is not the index results. These will be boxed, say, or there will be a red thing that says this is an advertisement."

PC World: Lycos Lures With Personal Options. "Content is still king when it comes to personalization." He estimates that about 1 percent of all surfers actually take the time to personalize a Web page.

Wired News: Take My Email, but Not My Data. Participants in the study said that the idea of Web sites sharing data was their biggest concern when submitting personal information.

InfoWorld: Berners-Lee traces Web's course at MIT event, receives chair In the face of the Web's explosive growth, issues of accessibility, internationalization, security, privacy, stability, and large-scale collaboration are critical to the realization of the medium's promise...

ZDNN: Intel's vision: 3-D, talking Internet. For example, how to cut down on the information overload that comes with the vast amounts of content flying around on e-mail and the World Wide Web? Simple: just represent all the information in flashy, rotating 3-D carousels...

USA Today: Untangling the habits of Web users. Are the habits caused by today's limitations of the medium, or are they human behavioral traits reflected in Net usage?

Wired News: Grove to Newsies: 'Get With It!'. Newspapers need to hold companies more accountable, calling attention to things such as business visions that haven't materialized.

Editor & Publisher: Want Control of Your Content? Let Go of It! Steve Outing. ...but increasingly in the coming years, there will be significant revenue opportunities for publishers willing to sell their content to anyone who wants to republish it on their Web site.

Information Week: Assembly Online. Companies in a variety of industries offer Web configuration and build-to-order services to meet a growing demand for personalized products.

Editor & Publisher: NY Times Changes AOL Pages to Web Format. Meislin says the process of formatting Times copy for its Web site and for AOL was largely automated, but still "required a significant amount of human involvement."

ZDNN: AOL serves up 2 billion URLs a day. AOL reported Wednesday that its users request an average 2.6 billion Web URLs per day this year, up from 800 million in 1998.

Wired News: QuickTime 4.0 Plays MP3. QuickTime supports Windows and the Mac OS and has undergone significant changes in its interface and under the hood...

USA Today: Privacy raises many online issues. [Tim Berners-Lee] He's concerned about some search services' practice of secretly letting their "platinum partners" buy top positions in search results, making them appear to be the best site to find what's being searched for.

NY Times: America Online Is Facing Challenge Over Free Labor. A decision against AOL could set a precedent for the online industry that might force companies to rethink the way they use volunteers...

Wired News: Domain Name List Is Dwindling. A Wired News investigation found that the .com versions of nearly all popular words have been taken. Of 25,500 standard dictionary words we checked, only 1,760 were free.

April 15, 1999
TechWeb: Post-PC Era Needs A Vision, Expert Says. [Donald Norman, Nielsen Norman Group] "There has to be effortless communications between devices, and that requires standards," he said. "The problem is we have too many standards, and I think standards need to be mandated by a fiat."

Industry Standard: Reebok Steps In to Save Its Brand. In an effort to assume greater control of its online sales, Reebok International is preparing to launch a historic initiative: It will handpick a select group of online vendors to sell its products.

Web Review: Home Page Reader 2.0. Home Page Reader allows people who are blind or visually impaired to browse the Web using a text-to-speech engine instead of mouse clicks.

ZDNN: AltaVista gunning for Yahoo! Schrock, who said the number of keywords will initially be limited to 500, insisted that users would not be shortchanged because of commercial considerations.

InfoWorld: Web-switch vendors to beef up hardware. The new breed of Web switches, a variation on "server switches" designed to link up servers with load-balancing and redundancy, offers the capability to discover detailed information about Web sessions so one can be treated differently from another.

Freedom Forum: Journalists, nonprofit Web sites discuss sharing resources to cover 2000 elections. "We would prefer to always have it on our site. We're not going to point to competitors online. You don't see newspapers touting their competitors."

NY Times: Web Phones: The Next Big Thing? "Is it just a phone with a standard screen, or a big screen? Is it even a laptop with an embedded wireless modem, or something altogether different we haven't thought of?"

Wired News: Net Keywords for Everyman. So far, about 20,000 RealNames have been sold to trademark owners.

News.Com: Firm simplifies community Web addresses. Not only is the $100 annual fee nearly three times what it costs to register a domain name per year, but RealName search bars are relatively hard to come by on the Web.

InfoWorld: Imaging group seeks standard file format. DIG's goal is to have a file format that manages both the image data and metadata, as opposed to other file formats that purely deal with the image data.

SF Examiner: Intel's Grove gives newspapers advice. [Andrew Grove] "(High-tech executives) hype shamelessly over the story of the day because we know we'll never be asked about it again."

News.Com: Open source Mozilla browser headed to market. Not only will NeoPlanet release a product based on Mozilla's code, but it will assign four full-time employees to work on the open source project.

April 16, 1999
TechWeb: Group Eyes Standards For Voice-Activated Handhelds. VoiceTimes' professed goal is to standardize the technical specifications for voice-activated handheld devices...

Alta Vista: Paid Placements. Simply put, those companies willing to pay the most are highly likely to have information relevant to the users' interests.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of the response time rule on the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce site. Unfortunately, the reaction is less than immediate (i.e., slower than 0.1 seconds), making the user miss many of the pop-ups.

Wired News: AltaVista Hazy on Sold Searches. Slides of a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, used to sell the keyword auction to Doubleclick advertisers, show that the sold positions appear in a similar typeface, size, and placement to the unpaid results.

AT&T Research: Beyond Concern: Understanding Net Users' Attitudes About Online Privacy. ...we look beyond the fact that people are concerned and attempt to understand how they are concerned.

ZDNN: Web site trades stock in jocks. "These sites can build very targeted communities, which is compelling to advertisers and retailers..."

@NewYork: New Money for Content Raises the Stake for FEED. But even with the renewed focus on business development and sales, developing content remains the passion of FEED's founders.

Wired News: Lycos Embraces Open Web Index. [Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo's director of surfing] "If the goal is to get to pages on the Web and somehow catalog every document on the Web, then I agree that a contained finite approach will not scale..."

Time Digital: "AOL Anywhere" Screen Phone. You can never have enough bandwidth but I'd still gladly trade in even some of my home 56K if it got me something else even better -- persistent connection.

Editor & Publisher: Off-Screen Space Used for Ads. Steve Outing. It's starting to offer advertisers placements for narrow and deep ads on the right side of its pages where individual articles appear.

• From December 5, 1998; ChannelSeven: ZDNet Serves Up Tasty BannerWraps

SJ Mercury: Brave new world. [Manuel Castells, Professor at UC Berkeley] ...Castells says, the way these networks function has profound implications for everything from national sovereignty to how people form their identities.

RCFoC: The Spring of the Internet. ...it reminds me of what's happening on the Internet, which itself is getting ready to burst forth with a quarter billion people by 2003 according to Datamonitor's "Future of the Internet" report.

News.Com: New top-level domains on horizon. The IETF working draft proposes to create four new TLDs strictly for the use of tests and examples...

Upside: Adjusting the Image on the Flat-panel Display Market. As the supply-demand dynamic works itself out, suppliers in Asia and the United States are trying to figure out which segments to target and where the profits will be.

News.Com: eBay mulls fixed-price auctions. eBay has been surveying user reaction to sales of fixed-price items on its site...

Forbes: E-tailers turn to auctions. The next wave of web auctions will be from regular retailers, which customarily assign a fixed price to products.

TechWeb: ACM Gets Into E-Commerce. The 80,000-member, 52-year-old educational organization, based in New York, is adding e-commerce to its list of special-interest groups.

Salon: Must AOL pay "community leaders"? The Department of Labor, however, is specifically interested in the question of whether volunteers were working as employees.

Washington Post: AltaVista to Sell Advertisers Spots in Search Lists. [Jakob Nielsen] "Instead of having advertising separated and clearly delineated, they will now have advertising as part of the basic service. Even if they mark it extremely clear, it is a highly confusing thing."

Washington Post: Judge Strips Look-Alike Web Name. "This is going to give a precedent to established companies to go out and get these typo pirates."

TechWeb: U.K. Start-Up Offers Organized Wireless Email. A British start-up has launched a Web-based e-mail solution that indexes everything received and is designed to allow users to search inboxes using any wireless device that runs a browser.

Wired News: Another Privacy Hole in IE 5.0? An obscure feature in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.0 Web browser informs Web sites when users bookmark their pages.

News.Com: NSI readies company profile service. Network Solutions is slated to announce Monday that it will launch a service that publishes additional information about companies that have registered for URLs.

April 17, 1999
News.Com: Apple to open QuickTime code. Apple Computer this week is expected to put the popular multimedia software in the open source domain...

SJ Mercury: Online News Sites Examine Separation Of Advertising, Editorial. The issue is also exacerbated by the fact that many consumers appreciate contextual advertising and believe the Web sites' ability to link to other relevant sites to be a useful feature.

InfoWorld: Consumers, unite! Use the Net to drive down prices of goods. Accompany builds ad hoc blocs of buyers who team up to secure volume discounts on products.

InfoWorld: IBM's redesign results in a kinder, simpler Web site. IBM's Web presence has traditionally been made up of a difficult-to-navigate labyrinth of disparate subsites, but a recent redesign has made it more cohesive and user-friendly.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of AltaVista's paid placement links. The new AltaVista design still degrades the service, however. There are now four paid links that distract the user from the actual search results...

ChannelSeven: Alta Vista's "Search Ranking" Move Met with "Wait and See" Attitude. "They need to be careful not to alienate visitors with this move because it really will only result in an incremental revenue stream for Alta Vista..."

Advertising Age: Virtual Vineyards pumps bottom line with e-mail. As more marketers develop more e-mail newsletters, the overall click-through rate will surely decrease.

MSNBC: The wireless Web rebellion. But even the wonkiest of crowds became rebellious when Medanich described 3Com’s pricing structure, which will charge consumers 30 cents per downloaded or uploaded kilobyte (the first 50K will cost a flat $9.95 per month).

InfoWorld: Going global overnight. Obstacles to pocketing that money range from an inability to handle direct international orders, to language and cultural barriers that hinder basic communications, to varying stages of Internet adoption and infrastructure.

April 18, 1999
SJ Mercury: Function over form will shape design of appliances. Dan Gillmor. Someday, technology companies will stop designing their products for engineers and start making them for the rest of us.

Useit.Com: Stuck With Old Browsers Until 2003. ...but for the next four years it will be better to focus on improving content, information architecture, navigation, and search; all of which are independent of the browser.

NY Times: Despite a Passion for the Net, Many Online Volunteers Want Pay. When does taking part in and enjoying a community transcend hobby status and become work?

NY Times: Internet Escrow Services Are Catching On. ...in terms of dollars and impact, the real electronic-commerce action these days is the business-to-business transactions quietly taking place among companies...

ClickZ: A Stranger In Town. For those of us who work with web sites five days a week, familiarity with the territory blinds us to the real experiences of our visitors.

NY Times: The Net's Real Business Happens .Com to .Com. ...in recent months, Internet escrow services have gained a following in person-to-person selling circles.

ZDNN: 'Handicapped access' hits the Web. The federal government, in an effort similar to that undertaken to open up access to public buildings and public transport systems through the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), is now focusing on the Internet.

Seattle Times: MIT's Oxygen: The computer as your lifeline. Oxygen homes in on a significant element: the ability of the network to know where you are and what kind of a device you need to use, at any time.

April 19, 1999
MSDN Online: Design and User Interface Inspirations at Microsoft. Recently, Donald Norman spoke to a group at Microsoft Design Day 99, and challenged the audience with his comment that Microsoft listens to its customers too much -- subsequently creating software that is too complex and feature rich.

ClickZ: Peas In A Pod: Behind Personalization. Shoppers returning to the Peapod site to shop again may notice that the screen has changed ever so slightly, with a popup menu describing the functions of the new buttons that have appeared.

• Useit.Com: From October 4, 1998; Personalization is Over-Rated

News.Com: E-commerce comes home. A new generation of e-commerce start-ups is moving beyond commodity retail goods to capitalize on the home market.

Red Herring: Ask Jeeves has VCs throwing money at its novel search engine. The company currently has two sources of revenues: it licenses its search technology to businesses and sells advertising on its consumer sites...

Editor & Publisher: Why Online Journalism Is a Great Career Choice. Steve Outing. Online journalism today is not just about practicing quality journalism, but figuring out how to craft a new media industry.

Interactive Week: After The PC: A World 'Bathed' In The Net. [Tim Berners-Lee] Now, he persists in trying to make the Web a place where anyone can interact with any idea, any page or anyone else at any time.

Internet World: How Does a Web-Geek Site Handle Success? It's the communal character of the site that is one of its greatest assets, explained the site's creator, Rob Malda...

Wired News: Digital Music at the Crossroads. The flat-fee pull world is the way music is headed. Music will be a service, not a product," said Griffin. "As wireless connectivity delivers what we want, wherever we want, our desire to own digits decreases...."

ABCNews.Com: Requiem for the PC? [Donald Norman] "They should be talking to their non-customers, because those are the people that want something different, and they’ll be driving the market."

SF Examiner: Where the Net economy is going. The good news is that in the coming year Internet commerce will become easier to use, less intrusive and much more relevant to your day-to-day life.

LA Times: Parallel Universe. Because the company doesn't operate a "destination" site--as do search engine developers AltaVista and Excite--it doesn't compete against potential customers and can position itself as a technological Switzerland in the portal wars.

News.Com: IPO on Salon's next page. With its planned IPO, Salon--which remains unprofitable--joins Net publishers such as thestreet.com, CBS Marketwatch, and ZDNet, which either have gone public or plan to soon.

USA Today: Deals give e-books a boost. The nascent e-book industry has been signing deals and readying new products this month in advance of BookExpo America...

Interactive Week: Netscape Promotes Open Directory. The idea is that a community working together and using common standards can make more progress than a single company using its own resources to develop a custom solution.

PC Week: Exchange gets the (real-time) message Microsoft's instant messaging will also use a "federated" approach to transferring messages over a network, according to sources, rather than making messages go through a single central server.

PC Week: LCD shortage hits portables. The shortage of LCD panels is also limiting the adoption of flat-panel displays by contributing to flat, if not slightly higher, prices for the panels...

News.Com: Microsoft may resell RealNames. Topics under discussion include having Microsoft's LinkExchange unit sell RealNames to its 1 million-plus small business members.

Wired News: Cable Boxes See What You See. Digital cable boxes to be provided to new cable customers in mid-1999 will track viewing tendencies by default although customers will be able to opt out -- if they read the fine print of their service agreement.

April 20, 1999
NY Times: Browser Foes Drop Enmity to Run Start-Up Together. ...Tellme intends to use some combination of natural-language and speech-recognition technology to give users a simpler way to find information on the World Wide Web or retrieve it from a computer, probably with a telephone.

Salon: Online gaming's store-shelf chains. The future of online is retail sale plus free online play. This is the business model that works.

Editor & Publisher: Photo Archives Look to Collect Consumers' Cash. Steve Outing. ...it marks the first time that a major photographic archive has taken advantage of the potential for selling direct to consumers for personal use, made possible by utilizing new automated content transaction technology.

ClickZ: The Electronic Connection. ...the Cluetrain Manifesto asks for us and the corporate world to shut up and start acting like human beings.

FEED Magazine: The Hit Parade. Clay Shirky. The web removes technological bottlenecks, but creates attention bottlenecks -- unlike TV, whose universe is so small that it can be chronicled in a single magazine, the web is a vast and unmanageable riot of possibility and disappointment.

Wired News: Sega Zips Up Web Integration. Iomega will piggyback on the Dreamcast game console using a 100-MB Zip drive that attaches to the system. The attachment will allow game updates via the Web.

News.Com: Will NSI rivals have a fair chance? "If the point is to have competition and to make sure that the registry is open to everyone on nondiscriminatory terms, it probably doesn't make any sense to have one of the competitors in charge of the registry..."

PC Week: A boom in interactive paging is predicted. The primary goal of the group: to work with PDA manufacturers to embed Motorola's ReFLEX communications technology into a variety of handheld devices that provide hassle-free, two-way wireless messaging.

Good Reports: E-recruiting: Online Strategies in the War for Talent. Jakob Nielsen and Mark Hurst. The report shows the strong and weak points of seven top online recruiting sites.

Freedom Forum: Newspapers losing core business that they could keep. Jon Katz. Editors know that Grove is right in challenging newspapers not to be something other than papers, but to be better papers.

ZDNN: The death of a newspaper. John C. Dvorak. This sounds good on the surface, but when editors and reporters have no knowledge of a subject, they also have no idea what's important and what's not important. Thus the story selection is usually weak and uninteresting.

Forbes: True color. J.Crew wanted a low-cost, simple fix that wouldn't require Web shoppers to download and install complex color-correcting software. "That would be too much of a schlep..."

Forbes: Unaccountable. So far, though, advertisers must contend with wildly contradictory numbers from rival services and Web sites themselves. The ratings game is marred by multiple methodologies, conflicting claims and clashing definitions.

TechWeb: Net Group To Choose Domain Name Competitors. The government and NSI have had to work out which property is public and which is the company's intellectual property and how much NSI can charge competing registrars for use of its database during the transition...

Contentious: Christopher Locke... rides the Cluetrain. Q&A with Christopher Locke. Make the point to them that inhuman communications just aren't working anymore. The market isn't buying it — they're laughing at it.

W3C: Voice Browser Activity. W3C is working to expand access to the Web to allow people to interact with Web sites via spoken commands, and listening to prerecorded speech, music and synthetic speech.

MSDN Online: A Web Developer at Internet World. The main thing I didn't anticipate was a shift in my perception of how the Internet is changing everything.

News.Com: Web email changing fast, eyes profits. The advent of premium services comes as the free email services struggle to turn their popularity into profitability.

Interactive Week: Corbis Puts Images In Consumers' Hands. Corbis is partnering with Qpass, a provider of payment services for small transactions, to offer more than 350,000 images for individual use.

April 21, 1999
Salon: Is AltaVista on the take? Scott Rosenberg. What's interesting about "relevant paid links" isn't their greed; it's their admission that people still aren't getting what they want from search engines.

Washington Post: The Fact Is, Free Fax Attracts. These firms hope to subsidize the free service with a mix of ads embedded in the faxes or with premium services for which they charge fees.

• Useit.Com: From March 7, 1999; Trust or Bust: Communicating Trustworthiness in Web Design But as soon as I put their phone number on my business cards (and thus in thousands of rolodexes), I will be at the mercy of any degradation in service, spam faxing, and who knows what else in the future.

Red Herring: InterNAP wakes up transmission quality. InterNAP offers an Internet traffic routing system that enables its customers to bypass completely the often congested public NAPs.

News.Com: Lycos flies on traffic report. But the report, by New York-based Media Metrix, once again raises long-standing questions about Web site traffic measurement--specifically concerning the lack of standards for it.

USA Today: E-tailers size up Web shoppers. Say hello to a high-tech cyberbazaar, where sites size you up as soon as you walk through their virtual doors and price items accordingly...

PC Week: CyberCash chief: E-commerce must be simpler. ...Melton said the industry must avoid those killers of simplicity, such as client-side software (ironically, CyberCash was one of the first creators of an electronic wallet), monolithic e-commerce applications...

Upside: Passing the Torch. With Web sites such as LinuxToday and Slashdot.org channeling huge volumes of readers to selected news stories, a quiet collective-bargaining relationship is emerging between advertising-based news sites dependent upon reader volume...

ahref.com: The Broadcast Mentality. The decisive question for web producers is this: Do you see your audience as receivers of your information, or as producers of their own?

Interactive Week: Netcenter Lets Members Build Own Sites ...Site Central users will be able to take advantage of Netcenter content, borrowing dynamic content such as automatically updated sports scores and news headlines...

Wired News: US, EU Still Stuck on Privacy. That concerns US Internet companies -- and other data-rich market sectors, such as the airline industry -- which prefer a private-sector-driven, self-regulation approach to consumer privacy.

News.Com: NSI skyrockets on fee collection decision. ...allows it to charge a one-time $10,000 fee for rivals to connect to its computer systems and an $18 fee to list an address in the registry of domain names for two years.

TechWeb: Companies Get Identified To Break Net Naming Monopoly. The first five are AOL, France Telecom's Oleane, Internet Counsel of Registrars, Melbourne IT, and register.com.

April 22, 1999
NY Times: 'Typo Pirates' Run Into Trouble With Corporations and Courts. ...it looks like the courts are giving a thumbs down to the practice, at least when the typos divert customers to potentially offensive sites.

MacWeek: Let a million flowers bloom. ...QuickTime 4.0 continues the illogical precedent that Apple set with Version 3.0: Forcing users to pay for basic functionality that should be included for free.

Web Review: Duties of a Good Host. All these practices are great for self-expression and social debate, but they raise the question of whether you could be legally liable for content you don't even know exists.

Web Review: Microservers: Why Thin is In. "If you need to add functionality, you will be able to purchase a device that provides that service. We think that is going to be the trend in the coming years: fixed function devices that are inexpensive and tailored to specific uses."

FEED Magazine: Brave New Worlds: A Special Issue on Video Games. ...a two-part theme issue on the industry, the aesthetics, and the future of videogames.

[clip]: Gateway to the Enterprise. EIPs are sprouting up all over the corporate landscape as a way to provide centralized access to all types of online information...

PC World: Find It and Mind It on the Web. ...users have the option of continuously monitoring all their Direct Hit searches using NetMind's change-detection technology.

RCFoC: TWO Godfathers!?! [Linux and Windows] I see this as an important reminder that nothing in the world of Convergence is sacrosanct -- even the most entrenched "givens" can be challenged.

News.Com: Apple sees big rewards in QuickTime plan. First and foremost, QuickTime is essentially an ad for Apple. Whenever someone watches a clip via QuickTime, the logo appears.

Interactive Week: Microsoft, MyPoints Team Up To Reward Customers. The alliance may represent the first step in broader efforts by Microsoft to use online reward programs in promoting its software applications and services.

News.Com: Will Disney's Go Network pay off? At this point, there's no turning back for Disney. All its Web properties have already added a "go" in their URLs (such as "disney.go.com").

Washington Post: Live Online with Roger Black. Q&A with Roger Black. The Net is great at delivering what I like to call "information transactions." You go in with a particular question, get satisfaction, and get out.

News.Com: Inktomi buys Impulse Buy. The Impulse software enables merchants to target promotional programs such as limited time offers and special offers to Internet users who are likely to be interested.

April 23, 1999
ChannelSeven: Form Still Follows Function. Well-designed commercial websites appeal to first-time visitors immediately. They have to, or a first-time visitor stays just that.

Industry Standard: The Problem With Patents. Lawrence Lessig. Washington is obsessed with intellectual-property rights. It lives under the mistaken idea that stronger IP always means a stronger economy.

News.Com: Microsoft sued over digital rights software. MediaDNA, a small start-up software firm, contends in a suit filed in federal court in San Diego that Microsoft is selling "digital rights management software" that copies MediaDNA's technology...

Industry Standard: Ulterior Motives. Carl Steadman. "How does it feel to be the only person not to have gotten rich in the Internet Economy?"

Industry Standard: Reebok on the Run. The company fears unauthorized discounting that undermines the value of its brand. The threat is particularly acute online.

Builder.Com: Ten Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Web Site. Let's face it, we're all making this up as we go along. And in that kind of chaos, mistakes come with the territory.

ZDNN: Picture this: Kodak's digital future. Q&A with Kodak CEO George Fischer. In my opinion, that's where the real value and the real push of digital imaging is. In network services.

Industry Standard: Ratings Firms Raise Their Game. ...the episode this week with Lycos and Yahoo demonstrates how difficult it is for the uninitiated to sort out which numbers are meaningful changes and which are just "spin."

News.Com: The content that would be king. ...Wall Street's reception of Salon.com, one of the first established Web magazines, could provide an important indication of content's coming of age on the Internet.

A List Apart: Designing Your Audience. It's a question of audience, or if you prefer, a question of audience model. Are you designing for users, readers, or viewers?

Fortune: Go Ahead! Chuck Your PC Software. Stewart Alsop. I'm beginning to believe that maybe everything we want computers to do can be done through the Web browser. Everything.

ClickZ: Do Incentives Work Online? But if you base your belief in the efficacy of online incentives on your experiences offline, you're building that belief on a bundle of assumptions.

XML.Com: WavePhore Backs XMLNews Initiative. XMLNews, developed by David Megginson, is an XML specification that describes the text and metadata of news content.

PC Week: Intel unveils worldwide Internet services initiative. In September, the processor maker plans to deploy the first of what will become many worldwide centers built to provide data center service...

Wired News: Collective Computing Breaks Up. But now they want to bring the idea to a wider range of computing-intensive applications, such as chip design, rendering of computer-animated movies, weather simulation, and simulations of nuclear blasts and bridge construction.

Time Digital: Q&A: Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto. The challenging part is figuring out how to create a game that people will understand.

News.Com: Diamond to protect copyrights on Rio. Diamond has contracted with Intertrust Technologies to incorporate copyright protection software in its Rio player...

April 24, 1999
Online Journalism Review: What If You Couldn't Trust The New York Times? For circumspect online editors of newspaper sites, however, the e-commerce debate boils down to hundreds of tiny ethical, practical and fiscal questions, with few black-and-white answers.

SJ Mercury: The Internet is a find for anyone who loves rare books. Dan Gillmor. ...modern media offer value beyond the original books: translations, the ability to search for words and phrases, hyperlinked annotations and more.

Byte: ClearType: Whose Idea Was It? The writers of many "industry" publications have no knowledge about what they are discussing in print, particularly when trying to put work in any proper historical context.

Upside: Dot Con. The typo bandits represent domain name speculation at its sleaziest. But they are hardly the only speculators out there.

Seattle Times: Federal ruling bars Web marketing ruse. "From a user perspective this is great," said Nilo Zaratan, manager of search technology for Infoseek. "It will let us do a better job of helping people get to information."

NY Times: Pirate-Proof Music on Web? So Far, That Does Not Compute. At a meeting last week in Los Angeles, several participants said, it became clear that consumer electronics companies were bent on developing a class of portable music devices that would be free of restrictions and easy to use...

Advertising Age: Net gains credibility as ad medium. Next week, the industry plans to show as barriers come down, the Internet is being taken more seriously as an ad medium.

April 25, 1999
NY Times: Web-Page Distribution System Could Unclog Internet Traffic Jams. The answer proposed by both Sandpiper and Akamai is to distribute the contents of a Web site to server computers dispersed throughout the Internet, so that information does not always have to wend its way through the network from one site.

NY Times: European Union Advances E-Commerce Policies. Most notably, the cost of Internet access is currently too high for many Europeans, and the offerings put forth by many top retailers, analysts say, are not yet good enough to make consumers swallow the Internet access costs.

Forbes ASAP: Startup spotlights a 'World Server' that brings you the globe. Chip Shot had two choices: build and maintain a separate site or try to get translators and programmers to successfully split their existing site.

MIT Technology Review: Generation Next on the Web. A key goal of HTTP-ng is to make the Web more hospitable to automated "agents" that have been developed at MIT and elsewhere to seek out information and conduct transactions on behalf of a human user...

MIT Technology Review: The Fractal Net. Why can’t the Internet provide more consistent service? One reason is a lack of insight into the overall pattern of traffic on the Internet.

ClickZ: Think Before You Write. Get sloppy when you write for the web and you could impact the work of many people -- and the long-term success of the entire site.

Useit.Com: Spotlight on why Bruce Tognazzini likes writing long Web pages. The average site is cursed with extremely impatient users who want to get in and out and get answers or buy products fast.

Boston Globe: MIT tech magazine, on plateau, finds killer app: commercialism. ''With technology being such a hot topic these days, they had to go more commercial..."

ZDNN: Lycos launches Web radio network. The appeal is simple: most of the people who listen to Net radio are thought to be office workers, who have high-speed connections to the Internet, and often aren't able to tune in ordinary radio channels.

April 26, 1999
NY Times: Time Warner Closing Pathfinder Site. The Web audience, said Ms. Allen of Forrester Research, has "a different set of expectations: they look for utility and convenience and savings, as well as content."

Builder.Com: HTML Writers Guild Seeks AWAREness. Dan Shafer. ...there are strong, selfish advantages to be gained by making your site accessible; but, not all of your efforts apply only to those who visit your site and who happen to have a disability.

• HTML Writers Guild: AWARE Center. Accessible Web Authoring Resources and Education Center.

CBS MarketWatch: Q&A with Scott Kurnit, CEO of MiningCo.com. Only recently because we made some people aware of that boycott, [now] they list a fraction of our sites. In my opinion, either they're just plain bad or they're editorially corrupt.

Wired News: Commerce Tech Boss Checks In. Trust is the intangible force sustaining the Internet economy, e-commerce policy maven Elliot Maxwell said Monday at a Hambrecht & Quist technology conference.

News.Com: Lucent unveils new caching technology. Lucent's IPWorX detects and anticipates Internet traffic volume and is able to replicate pages in high demand...

Industry Standard: Forecasting the Future. So what happens next? We polled some of the leaders of the Internet Economy and asked them that question.

News.Com: Amazon makes Net triple play. Amazon.com today said it agreed to buy Exchange.com, Accept.com, and Alexa Internet...

Industry Standard: Amazon.com Snaps Up Three More Firms. The company's Related Links navigation technology, with its store of users' surfing preferences, could add to Amazon's personalization and merchandising capabilities, as well as its affiliate marketing network.

News.Com: Inktomi inks deals to boost searches. Inktomi signed deals today with Network Computer Incorporated and Spyglass in an effort to bring corporate-level information searching systems to the home.

News.Com: Time Warner to shutter Pathfinder. "Over the next 6 months we will phase out the Pathfinder name, and we will continue with our promotional strategy to promote individual brands..."

DaveNet: Ben Rosen is Back. The rapid growth in functionality that rose around HTML and HTTP, the web, is over. Now the changes come slowly because the market has become slow at adopting change.

Interactive Week: Is The Net Still Paved In Gold? ...debate whether the dream of reinventing the Net lives on or is constrained by the maturing of this fast growing industry.

Industry Standard: The Information Exchange Economy. A series of initiatives, built on the basic tenets of direct and database marketing, are converging to transform the browse-and-surf Internet into a giant information exchange...

News.Com: Microsoft jumps into online scheduling. ...announced its plans to acquire Jump Networks, maker of a technology that lets users access their email, address books, and calendars from any Internet-connected computer.

Interactive Week: E-Com '99: State Of The Art. "Everyone is in such a hurry to get on the Web, but getting your Web site integrated with your back-end systems, particularly inventory, should be the priority..."

Intel Press Release: Intel and Metacreations Announce Availability of Specification for Scaling and Streaming 3-D Content. Intel Corporation and MetaCreations Corporation announced today the immediate availability of a specification for scaling and streaming 3-D content on the Web...

• MetaCreations: MetaStream file format

Interactive Week: Service Opens ISP Caches To Publishers. Sandpiper Networks and America Online have teamed up to open AOL's estimated 300 network caches to the companies that provide content stored in them.

Industry Standard: The State of The Standard. Our plan was to launch an information services company that would serve these new leaders, the architects of the Internet Economy, and then grow with them.

ZDNN: RCA set to ship WebTV sets. ...the WebTV circuitry, along with a telephone line connection, will be built into all television sets larger than 27 inches in size.

Interactive Week: New Lycos Division Broadcasts Broadband. With the Multimedia Products Group, Lycos becomes the latest portal to fashion a strategy for addressing opportunities made possible by the increasing availability of high-speed access.

April 27, 1999
NY Times: Changes in Search Industry Create Strange Bedfellows. But even the most profitable search service could never afford to pay a staff large enough to keep up with the 5.4 million sites that are now estimated to be online, not to mention address changes and dead links.

NY Times: High-Speed Access Begins to Alter the Role the Internet Plays in the Home. But the most far-reaching effect on the daily lives of broadband users is this: the Internet is no longer something they have to get to; instead, it is always there.

Salon: The Web Numbers Game. "It's data that is methodologically flawed, but people who spend money use it to spend money..."

InfoWorld: IEC: Panelists offer tips on dealing with the Net. ...the panelists stressed that company executives really have to understand the online experience from the users' point of view -- and look at their own Web sites that way.

PC World: The Web's "Research" Engine. Northern Light is a search engine and a pay-as-you-go database service in one package. For that reason, the portal bills itself as a "research" engine.

IIPC: Internet Information Payments Collaborative Roundtable Summit. Publishers are confused by the array of unproved options for managing and selling information on the Internet. The summit is designed to clear some of that confusion.

NewMedia Magazine: Beauty is Only Skin Deep. "Having a sense of personality on the site is useful to the extent that it helps users understand what's going on, but harmful if it gets in the way of user goals."

Wired News: Emotions Over a Wire, Solved? Cromarty said that for years to come, such low-bandwidth animations will be the only realistic way to send large chunks of video over the public Internet.

SJ Mercury Online Food Retailers Shun Advertising. ``The banner ad model has become noneffective,'' said Steve Taormina, Wild Oats' Web site producer. ``Click-through rates have fallen below 2 percent for banner ads.''

Advertising Age: BellSouth banner ads test customized cursor arrows. The cursor changes into the animated logo when users move over a BellSouth banner on a Flycast affiliate site...

• Comet Systems: What is the Comet Cursor?

NewMedia Magazine: Customers Are From Venus. Rather than relying solely on "the Big Guy's" multimillion-dollar relationship re-engineering ideas, Internet teams should take charge on understanding customer relationships by tackling smaller projects.

Computer Currents: RCA Backs Off From WebTV Claims. "The whole idea of buying components (in the consumer electronics market) is very much still a common practice."

Business Week: Should You Pay for a Privacy Seal of Approval? Privacy-seal programs are mainly selling their "brand" of business integrity.

Forbes: The fight over rights. When rights--the legal rules that govern the use of and payments for intellectual property--meet digital media, the result is chaos.

Wired News: Domain Name Glitch Plagues Users. Some domain name handles started disappearing over the weekend, and Network Solutions has yet to determine how many domain name holders have been affected.

TechWeb: Compaq To Reauthorize Internet Channel. For example, companies seeking consumer authorization will need to set up a toll-free customer support number staffed by manufacturer-trained representatives...

TechWeb: Webspective Distributes Content To Inktomi. The enhancement lets companies deploy so-called reverse proxy caching, in which selected content is pushed into a Web cache and served from there.

April 28, 1999
Webmonkey: Market Research on the Web - Part 1. ...we'll cover the hunting and gathering of qualitative data, which involves the triple-threat use of focus groups, usability testing, and email feedback.

• SiteCentric: Who is SiteCentric? [Authors of the market research report for Webmonkey]. SiteCentric can increase sales and usage by giving you the information you need to identify and remedy areas of user attrition on your site.

NY Times: Newspapers Urged to Transform. Newspapers need to invest much more in research and new ventures if they are to succeed in the world of the Internet...

News.Com: Deja News double take. ...Deja News is preparing to announce sweeping changes to its services, including the addition of a user ratings feature, e-commerce offerings, and even a name change.

Wired News: Deja News Monitors Email Links. Programmer and code-sniffer Richard Smith noticed over the weekend that the email address hyperlinks that are on every message Deja News displays use "redirect" hypertext code...

News.Com: Some retail chains not sold on Net. But in many cases, retailers are late to recognize how profoundly the Internet is changing the business...

ClickZ: Appearing Live and In Person. There are three major channels to online customer service: self help, email, and live help.

ClickZ: Web Advertising '99: Day 2. [Jared Spool, User Interface Engineering] His message was this: Pay attention to how you brand your company or products on the Net, because what you don't know about branding online can hurt you.

Wired News: Inside Amazon's Shopping Cart. Privacy experts say the purchase fits Amazon's plan of becoming, more than an online retailer, an aggregator of information about Internet shopping habits.

• Wired News: From April 9, 1998; Microsoft Buys Into Privacy

TechWeb: Intel's Grove Ponders Future Of Net Favorites. [Andrew Grove] "All companies will be Internet companies, or they won't be companies..."

Computer Reseller News: IT Panelists Differ On Future on E-Business. [Gary Eichhorn, president and CEO of Open Market] "Eighty percent of web sites [are poorly designed]," he said. "These sites have to be redesigned to accommodate existing bandwidth."

Red Herring: Sandpiper raises cash from new customers. However, many Web publishers are hoping that growing deployment of cable modems and Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) will solve Web performance problems without the need to pay a subscription fee to Sandpiper or Akamai.

Business Week: Defining Terms in the Battle for Eyeballs. [Evan Neufeld, Jupiter Communications] "Remember that this is indicative data, not finite, definitive data."

MSDN Online: From March 1, 1999; An Informal Process for Good User Interfaces. This issue will introduce a basic development process that helps good UI make it into products.

MSDN Online: From January 1999; Why Are Good User Interfaces So Hard to Make? Three Insights into Good Design. To make something that is useful, we have to invest energy in thinking broadly and maintaining perspective.

April 29, 1999
Webmonkey: Market Research on the Web - Part 2. So, when marketers and site developers need to know, with relative certainty, the answers to specific questions, they should turn to quantitative methods of research.

ClickZ: Who's Community Is It, Anyway? ..."Once your 'community' gets the idea that they are more 'cuustumahhhs' than community members, they are more likely to become ex-members of a community."

NY Times: Court Lays Down the Law on Labels for Web Sites. A central question in the debate is whether a Web site operator may use the trademark of a competitor in a meta tag.

NY Times: GeoCities Members Complain Over Ads for Adult Sites. Zanca said the company sees this as a service to users who want to find such adult material, but that those who do not seek it out are shielded from it.

Interactive Week: DejaNews Database Sparks Debate. Rather than being a sinister plot to invade people's homes, the database likely sprang from an oversight that inadvertently led to its production...

News.Com: Intel peers into the home of the future. Intel's Architecture Labs is in the process of developing a reference design for a new wireless tablet device that allows users to access local information and Internet content.

Red Herring: Competitors eye DoubleClick's success. A rise in online advertising, coupled with the lack of established measurement tools, is likely to provide more opportunities for those looking to get a piece of the growing market for distributing online advertising to networks of Web sites...

News.Com: Microsoft's unofficial privacy chief. Since then, Klein has been leading the company's efforts to turn out products that let consumers manage the amount of personal information they want to share with Web sites...

MSNBC: InterTrust pioneers in protecting copyrights, distribution online. This approach, called superdistribution, turns consumers into potential co-publishers, and lets other middlemen divide up royalty payments and track usage data.

Red Herring: Why did Amazon.com buy? While Alexa got buzz for winning deals to put its software into both Microsoft's and Netscape's browsers, it only recently embarked on a campaign to sell advertising.

Editor & Publisher: Reuters, Times Mirror Invest in Northern Light. The investors see Northern Light's search technology as superior to large portal search engines b