June 1, 1999
News.Com: New WebTV boxes dropping hard drives. In addition, the hard drives included with the original boxes were never put to much use, Kaldor said. "They know it, and I know it, and it's a fact, even if WebTV won't say it: The hard drives were not getting used..."

Information Week: Virtual Cash Gets Real. For years, Web merchants have experimented with alternative payment mechanisms, but they've been slow to catch on. That's changing, as companies look for ways to keep the cash flowing at their Web sites--and as vendors offer new payment options.

• Editor & Publisher: From January 29, 1999; Micropayments: Publishing Business Model of the Future? Steve Outing.

PC Magazine: Big, Bright Displays. At the recent Society for Information Display conference held in San Jose, California, developers showcased some of the emerging technologies for making improved microdisplays, LCDs, plasma displays, and CRTs.

Internet Week: Don't Neglect The Delivery Piece Of The E-Selling Puzzle. The most progressive companies are linking their ERP and other systems with those of their suppliers to exchange product availability, pricing and other information in real time.

Online Journalism Review: 'For Sale' on the Web. All kidding aside, it is a sobering piece of information -- particularly for journalists -- to think that the financial security of the entire newspaper enterprise depends on classified ads -- those things that no one in the newsroom ever reads!

USA Today: Customer service shortfall hits Net sales. Sixty-seven percent of online purchases are never completed, largely because top e-commerce sites have made few provisions for real-time, online customer service and support, a new survey shows.

Wired News: 'Somebody Freakin' Talk to Me!'. LivePerson's software fills some of the online service void. Got a question about that new sweater? Hit the LivePerson icon and a chat window pops up, connected to a company staffer.

Wired News: Borders to Print Books On Demand. The system costs about US$40,000 and takes up about 60 square feet of floor space. Sprout claims on-demand books are virtually indistinguishable from traditionally printed books.

MSNBC: Borders to try a new weapon: printing books inside its stores. ...has taken a minority stake in an Atlanta start-up company called Sprout Inc. that will eventually let the chain’s stores print high-quality paperbacks in the store in about 15 minutes.

• Industry Standard: From April 2, 1999; Everyone's a Publisher
• Wired News: From June 16, 1998; The Book-a-Minute Club

ZDNN: Teens entering the virtual mall. RocketCash Corp. Monday announced the launch of a new online store that lets parents set up accounts for their children to go shopping.

• NY Times: From February 18, 1999; But First, Another Word From Our Sponsor

News.Com: Time Warner phases out Pathfinder. Pathfinder, Time Warner's long-beleaguered Web behemoth, seems to have closed its doors for good.

SJ Mercury: Easy answer to what makes the Palm V sell. Dan Gillmor. The principal worth of a device goes to qualities the PC industry has never, and probably will never, fully grasp: ease of use and reliability.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of an AskTog mail from a frustrated Microsoft UI Program Manager about the difficulty of improving Web usability. On the other hand, they could do more: for example build better authoring tools that promoted usable design, was integrated with a set of recommended design standards...

• Ask Tog: Frustrations of a browser designer

June 2, 1999
ClickZ: Give It to Me NOW! Everyone expects instant gratification, at least informationally speaking. Yet many Internet marketers are stuck in traditional fulfillment land, sending materials via paper mail instead of email or on the web.

ClickZ: The Consumer Backlash. Every time I click another link on the web these days I feel like I'm being over-promised and under-delivered.

InfoWorld: Oracle gains ASP partner, outlines future of e-business. But the most up-and-coming businesses reshape their entire workflow around the Internet, in which customers enter their own orders or service requests...

News.Com: Web services start-ups map battle plans. "We're about to enter a period of verticalization of the Web, with a proliferation of interest-specific content and e-commerce sites."

CIO WebBusiness: Get Fewer Hits. It takes a heretic in today's Web climate to tell your CEO that the less time customers spend on your site, the more satisfied they may be. It takes a radical to actually do something about it...

Editor & Publisher: Publishers Encouraged to Create 'Fourth Media' Ventures. Steve Outing. Those companies that will succeed to the greatest degree in the Internet are those that can commit 100% of their human and financial resources to succeeding in the digital publishing environment.

Forbes: Treasure chest of ideas. The result is a better return on research and development, but also an assault on the already overworked patent office and an increasingly litigious and obstructive high tech business environment.

• Useit.Com: From December 27, 1998; Predictions for the Web in 1999. Companies that don't claim their stake in the future will wake up in five years and discover that their competitors own all the patents they need to be on the Web.

Web Page Design for Designers: Body Language 2. The most important factors in any message, whether spoken, written or conveyed by purely visual means are just common sense, but still overlooked by many. I call them 'The Three Cs'. (Clarity, Conviction and Consistency).

Freedom Forum: Let's learn how to cover technology. Jon Katz. We can't seem to find a comfortable cruising speed when it comes to presenting technology to readers and viewers. Perhaps that's because we've thought so little about it.

News.Com: New slew of tech toys on Intel's agenda. "Alternative Internet access devices--Web phones, set-top boxes--those devices are going to have a hard time for the next three years, because the Web is immature..."

News.Com: Excite@Home mulls dial-up strategy. Some analysts and people familiar with the company believe Excite@Home should embrace slower-speed dial-up technology--and continue developing Web content for lower-speed connections...

Interactive Week: Multicast's Real Value. There's a growing sentiment that the greater value of IP multicast will be unlocked with Web content replication.

Business Week: Closed, Gone to the Net. What kinds of companies are making the leap with both feet? Those most vulnerable to being squeezed out by the Net--traditional middlemen such as travel and insurance agencies, which can broker information more widely, quickly, and cheaply over the Net.

Interactive Week: Yahoo! Takes Online Anywhere. Online Anywhere will become part of Yahoo!'s broader Yahoo! Everywhere strategy that aims to deliver the company's content and applications to a broad range of devices beyond the PC...

News.Com: Sprint put the Web in your pocket. Under the deal, Sprint's wireless subscribers can use a range of cobranded Yahoo Internet services, including email, accessing an address book and calendar, and reading financial, sports, and weather news...

CIO WebBusiness: Lawrence Lessig- Animal Farm Revisited. Q&A with Lawrence Lessig. The extent to which behavior in cyberspace can be regulated depends upon the architecture of cyberspace. Not just the protocols of TCP/IP, but the full set of customs and technologies that define cyberspace.

[clip]: E-Commerce and Auto Parts. The first of its kind, the website puts every part and accessory for every Hyundai car on the Web for purchase. Available to Hyundai's dealers and repair shops and individual customers, the website could very well revolutionize the repair shop industry.

Business Week: Terry Drayton's Net Heavies Could Help HomeGrocer Deliver. Drayton sees HomeGrocer linking up with Amazon.com and its strategic partners -- drugstore.com and pets.com -- to deliver some of their products and perhaps collect a fee.

June 3, 1999
RCFoC: Technological Whiplash! One measure of when a technology "makes it" is when it has garnered 50 million users. When electricity was introduced it took 50 years to reach that point. Broadcast radio took 38 years. TV took just 13 years. And the Web? About 3.

Industry Standard: Softbank, 7-Eleven Japan to Open Net Book Biz. Distribution is where the new Japanese service departs from the Amazon model. Customers who order books will be able to pick them up and pay for them at any one of 7-Eleven's nearly 8,000 convenience stores nationwide...

NY Times: For New Online Grocer, High-Tech Warehouse is Key. ...consumers have been wary of grocery services, partly because they do not want to set aside a two-hour window of time during which their groceries may be delivered.

Builder.Com: Critique of Catalog City. Every click produced what I expected to find. And at every turn, my options were clear and limited, and the most important ones were the most prominent.

Red Herring: AOL approaches content crossroads. The Spinner.com and Nullsoft acquisitions suprised some observers because they hark back to the days when AOL tried to buy and build its own content, an expensive strategy that the company has shunned in recent years.

PC World: RemarQable Discussion. Rather than succumbing to the allure of the portal model, RemarQ continues to chant its newsgroups-only mantra.

Wired News: Show Me E-Money. E-commerce companies have searched for a universal system for selling goods online that's easy to use and inexpensive to control. But "e-cash" has been an e-dud.

Washington Post: Information Highway Indeed. Soon, look for minute-ly customer service, minute-ly inventory updating, even minute-ly restaurant reservations online. But for an early glimpse of the Internet-time work style, check out the Net newsies.

ZDNN: Wal-Mart set to boost online effort. "It’ll be a new approach to the business. It’s a good opportunity for our customer service," Brown said, adding that Wal-Mart sees the Internet as "a significant opportunity" for its business.

TechWeb: E-Commerce Forecasts Seen As Too Conservative. Information is moving in the direction of becoming a free commodity, which is bearish for many traditional providers of news, sports, and financial information...

• Red Herring: From March 1999; Financial information doesn't want to be free, says Michael Bloomberg

Red Herring: Venture-backed Internet companies take off in Europe. Jupiter advises European Internet companies to adopt free access and unlimited-use policies to take full advantage of the momentum towards Internet usage and e-commerce.

Red Herring: ETranslate speaks the language of money. Based in San Francisco, eTranslate offers translation services to e-commerce companies wanting to develop virtual stores for foreign markets and to other organizations needing to translate documents.

NY Times: Web Growth Spurt in Spanish and Portuguese. Latin American governments, aware of the need to promote local Internet access and business so that more precious dollars do not flow overseas, are also beginning to look at ways to encourage more people to get on line.

News.Com: Search firm gets $25 million influx. "Every portal over time should be a customer," Moritz said. "We should be a key supplier to any company on the Internet that wants a search function."

Salon: Be true to your portal. Registered users spend around three times more time at their preferred portal than non-registered users, and visit three to six times as many pages.

Forbes: Survey: Personalization makes sites stickier. Nielsen/NetRatings compared registered users at Yahoo! and Netscape's web sites with unregistered users

News.Com: WebTV to add more entertainment options. In essence, WebTV plans to blanket the market with set-top boxes that will fit a variety of niches.

TechWeb: WebTV Drops Hard Disk For Flash Device. Initially, subscribers were really excited about having a hard drive in there. But it wasn't really that great for a television environment. It was kind of loud."

Red Herring: Qwest and VCs buy into Advanced Radio Telecom. This investment will finance the expansion and deployment of Advanced Radio's high-speed local wireless network, which addresses the critical "last mile" of Internet access.

June 4, 1999
Fortune: The Five New Rules of Web Technology. Stewart Alsop. Old-line companies can't afford to let newcomers be the only ones to integrate customers into every aspect of their business. So virtually every company will need systems that can adapt to the real-time access of a customer database.

Editor & Publisher: Alternative To Spinning Off New Media Units. Steve Outing. That means using the Internet across all departments, and using Internet technologies to better serve all customers — whether of old- or new-media products and services produced by a company.

News.Com: VW's Net engine idles. Analysts said the effort pushes GM ahead of Ford, and far beyond VW, which is cracking down on its dealers use of the Web as a sales channel in the UK.

Forbes: Pushing to PDAs. An explosion of various devices, operating systems, differently sized display screens and functions means that any given company may have to hire a handheld-savvy technical staff just to deal with back-end complexity.

Industry Standard: AT&T and AOL: Separated at Birth? [Ellen Siminoff, Yahoo] ...says that the important issue is how difficult AtHome makes it for consumers to get to Yahoo and other sites. "From all indications, they don't plan to lock off access," Siminoff says. "The question is, 'How many barriers will they put in the way of the consumer?'"

NY Times: Judge Says Local Officials Can Force AT&T to Share Cable Lines. ...a Federal judge in Portland, Ore., ruled yesterday that a local government could force the AT&T Corporation to share its cable lines with competing Internet service providers.

USA Today: Manufacturers move onto the Web. Tantalized by the chance to showcase all their wares, forge direct links with consumers and, yes, realize fatter profit margins, manufacturers are edging onto the Web -- not just to promote their products but to sell them.

Boston Globe: Web design as an art. Simson Garfinkel. [Philip Greenspun] "We are finding people that we are going to invest in for the next 10 or 15 years by helping with the infrastructure part. They will have the infrastructure of the best Web publisher."

Wired News: Digital Campfire Tales. [Dana Atchley] "Computers, to me, are a tool," he continues. "They've had a huge impact on storytelling. It's a great new platform that I can use for my craft."

Forbes ASAP: E-commerce liposuction key to stealth strategy. e-Chemical's plan is based on the web's ability to inexpensively target a hard to reach--but profitable--slice of buyers and then engineer a new delivery system to put the product in their hands more cheaply.

Wired News: Show Me E-Money. E-commerce companies have searched for a universal system for selling goods online that's easy to use and inexpensive to control. But "e-cash" has been an e-dud.

Forbes ASAP: New technology prints books while you wait. "The worst aspect of book publishing has been its distribution system." Typically, a retailer orders the number of books it thinks it can sell. But should the title prove to be popular, the store may not be able to order more if the publisher's inventory is depleted."

Industry Standard: Europeans Online Doubled in '98. The total number of Europeans online grew from 17.7 million in 1997 to more than 35 million in 1998, a growth rate of 99 percent...

Fortune: Brave New Work: Will Evolving Corporate Strategy Be Dar-win-win-ian? A growing community of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and economists are mining Darwin's evolutionary observations in ways that threaten to make much of contemporary managerial and marketing thought either obsolete or extinct.

Cal Law: Congress Does a Database Dance. Net companies also see the bill as a threat to their bottom line: Such legislation, they say, could set up a system of tolls that forces them to pay for information they collect from databases for use on their sites.

Boston Globe: As far as the Senate is concerned, 'Dr. E-mail' is in. ...GII makes a software package called EchoMail that analyzes, tracks, and responds to e-mail - in most cases without requiring a human to read individual e-mail messages.

News.Com: Microsoft takes stake in Wink. As part of the deal, Microsoft and Wink will promote interactive content and commerce for a new standard, known by the initials ATVEF, which allows interactive features over televisions.

Internet Week: Enterprise Users Poke Holes In E-Procurement. The benefits of e-procurement can be overwhelmed because "you have to integrate that with existing legacy systems, and then tie every process with easy work-flow forms for purchase approvals..."

ZDNN: Amazon, NY Times book a fight. The online bookseller said that it received a letter from the newspaper on May 28, ordering it to stop using the Times' list and to stop promoting the fact that it offers 50 percent discounts off books on the list.

Industry Standard: Will Web Startup Replace Copyright Office? Simply upload your file (whether it be an MP3, a Web document or an e-mail) to his server, and for $18.95 you get a digital timestamp identifying you as the creator, valid for 10 years.

June 5, 1999
Web Review: Information Architecture and Corporate Strategy: The Tail Wags the Dog. It's really impossible to develop a quality information architecture, much less implement a decent site, without having a clear picture of the business model that is driving the project.

Interactive Week: Can Wal-Mart Be The Next Amazon.com? Because of its "fully linked supply chain," the company knows where every item of merchandise is, almost in real-time. "They have great IT [information technology] capabilities," Tenser said. "It's really a matter of putting a Web front-end on what its information systems can already handle."

NY Times: Library Conference Examines Preservation of Digital Works. Around the world, research librarians are devoting much of their attention these days to thinking through the complexities of how to preserve humanity's cultural patrimony in an electronic age.

• Internet Archive: Building a Digital Library for the Future

ZDNN: Boycott! Euros urge Net-free day. Rather than making full use of the medium -- communicating with others, gathering information or just shopping -- the fees encourage people to simply hop online and snatch what they need.

InfoWorld: With AT&T leading the charge, it's full speed ahead for CTM Internet service. The chairman of a federal commission with jurisdiction told Vortex that he will not stop AT&T from deploying CTMs for Internet access or insist that AT&T let other ISPs resell its CTM services.

Red Herring: Launch Media swings into big bandwidth. ...Launch will announce a strategic partnership with Road Runner, the high-speed Internet service provider, to provide an array of broadband-enabled music content to Road Runner subscribers.

June 6, 1999
FEED Magazine: The Third Wave. Steven Johnson. But an intriguing new application called Third Voice has done away with the crutch, eliminating even the metaphor of "place," and producing a kind of distributed virtual community that is genuinely unlike anything that's come before it.

NY Times: Narrowing the Electronic News Gulf. Slowly, however, that great divide -- between the once-a-day multicourse meal of original material served up by newspapers on the Web and the quickly changing menus of original fare of the cable and broadcast sites -- is beginning to narrow.

Editor & Publisher: ONA 'Debuts'; Poynter Expands Reach. Steve Outing. The group's focus will be largely on editorial issues presented by online technologies, such as promoting the concept of separation between editorial content and advertising on news Web sites.

SJ Mercury: Another try to put some frontier back in the suburban setting. But we've seen time and again that the vast majority of people who make the crossing to the wired world don't want an unfiltered, unregulated community. They want their communities managed and mediated, planned and policed, focused and facilitated.

MSNBC: Even as stock price drops, Amazon still leads the Net. It’s dumb middlemen that are being eliminated by the Web, not all middlemen — and they’re only being eliminated when the producers of goods have a compelling reason to do the job themselves and an ability to do it.

NY Times: Television Networks Sell Tie-Ins on the Web. Faced with a downward curve of network viewership and looking for ways to generate more revenue from every program, the networks are rapidly turning to the Internet to sell goods featured on sitcoms, mini-series and dramas.

BBC News: VW fights online car deals. "Retailing over the Net is coming. car companies can try to dissuade dealers, but ultimately the whole dealer network is going to come under strain and the days of the exclusive franchised dealer are numbered..."

NY Times: Cisco and Motorola Agree to Buy Wireless Technology Company. Wireless mobile telephones have become popular, but no company has yet succeeded in broadly and profitably delivering torrents of Internet data using wireless links -- whether mobile or stationary.

June 7, 1999
Industry Standard: A Fast Takeoff for Airline Sites. But the airlines so far have been rather indifferent disintermediators. The rapid growth in their online sales has been a byproduct of universally recognized brand names and a loyal cadre of frequent fliers...

Industry Standard: Technical Difficulties. But a whole host of other user-interface problems stem from the fact that travel sites act as front ends to one of several computer reservation systems - decades-old legacy networks...

Industry Standard: Big Dumb Companies Wise Up. Companies will need to show digital world dominance, too - even if it comes at the expense of brick-and-mortar results.

PC Week: Sold on the simplicity of Web sites. ...Forrester estimates that usability labs charge between $25,000 and $50,000 for thorough testing. Compare that with the cost of a site tear-down and overhaul: $780,000 to $1.56 million.

News.Com: E-cash shows signs of revival. KCOM also will host MilliCent payment hosting services for content providers such as Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan's largest newspapers, which will make its archives available through MilliCent.

SJ Mercury: Catering to cyber-customers. To meet that influx, companies are adopting new customer service technologies, including online self-service based on artificial intelligence or live, one-on-one chat sessions with customer service agents over the Web.

SJ Mercury: Oracle Buys Thinking Machines Assets, Technology. ``Darwin uses current information to predict customer behavior on your site and to understand what they are likely to do or not do.''

Interactive Week: Package Lets Sites Engage Consumers. By clicking a button or entering a phone number, the software would allow the user to initiate a chat discussion or receive an immediate call-back.

Industry Standard: Why Intel Wants to Host Your Web Site. Q&A with Intel CEO Craig Barrett. Broadband will be a huge boost for e-commerce. In business-to-consumer commerce, consumers like to look, feel, touch, have true color, hear music and see greater realism when looking at things that are for sale.

Wired News: Striking for Cheaper Phone Rates "Despite the hype, free access is not the solution -- free services are simply the result of the whole problem of high phone rates."

Useit.Com: Spotlight of a report on the usage patterns of registered and non-registered users on portals. Without looking at a control group with similar pre-registration behavior, there is simply no way of knowing the causality underlying the observations.

Industry Standard: Shall We Play a Game? The failure of entertainment on the Web relates to its origins. Often developed by old-media companies, the early attempts used old-media development models.

Information Week: E-Business Evolution. If fulfillment systems and procedures, for example, aren't integrated with online storefronts, customers will be able to see that from the Web.

Internet World: Balancing Server Loads Globally. This is why real-time, transaction-intensive sites such as E*Trade now involve more than one regional work center. Content providers like USA Today distribute data repositories nationally and internationally.

Interactive Week: Nothing But Net: The Scarcity Syndrome. The giant sucking sound you hear is talent and capital being pulled away from established fields - and put into Internet start-ups.

SJ Mercury: Grocery `store' goes back to the future. Whereas Amazon.com can use central distribution centers and Federal Express to deliver books, online groceries have to go market by market. They will have to set up local distribution centers...

Wired News: E-Commerce, Japanese Style. ES-Books is intended to do an end run around a couple of obstacles that have hampered cyber-shopping in this country: a widespread preference for using cash payments and money transfers instead of credit cards, and a persistent apprehension about transacting business online.

Industry Standard: The Only Game in Town. Carl Steadman. Day trading represents the Internet Economy's relentless pursuit of efficiency. With the single click of a mouse, I'm able to lose $5,000 or $10,000 or more, easily.

PC World: Will Your PC Talk Back? IBM's showcase includes computers you can have a dialogue with and voice-driven automated services that let you bank by phone.

TechWeb: L&H Partners With Intel On Speech. ...both companies will concentrate on developing systems with embedded real-time speech-recognition capabilities that will be enabled for use over the Internet.

News.Com: First NSI competitor goes to work. Although the registrars were supposed to be operational by April 26, the process of getting them connected to NSI's master database has pushed back the schedule considerably.

June 8, 1999
FEED Magazine: The real and the pretend Internet. Clay Shirky. The internet is the locus of the future economy, and its effect is the wholesale transfer of information and choice (read: power and leverage) from producer to consumer.

Stating the Obvious: Just One Question for Christopher Locke. The same kind of deconstruction that's being practiced on the web today just for the hell of it, is also seeping onto the company intranet.

• Cluetrain: Cluetrain Manifesto

SJ Mercury: Creating Web-based documents: a new way of thinking and doing. Dan Gillmor. People are beginning to grasp the inherent advantages of another method: creating and updating Web-based documents on the Web itself, running Internet-based tools from inside a browser.

TechWeb: IBM GM On E-Business: Do Or Die. "The Internet is neither a fad nor a small segment of the market that can be ignored," Zollar said. "Pick a niche and do it better than anybody else."

devhead: Power To The People. Given such a powerful democratic medium, is it any wonder that governments everywhere are grappling with how to censor, control, and restrict the Internet and the web?

W3C: Web Architecture: Describing and Exchanging Data. Now that the Web has reached critical mass as a medium for human communication, the next phase is to build the "Semantic Web".

ClickZ: Make Your Site Customer-centric. Customer-centric web sites not only study the relationships between various products, they also study the relationships between customers and products or services.

News.Com: Start-up puts animation tools on the Web. "What we've built is an architecture that lets Web designers access the multimedia hardware on the user's machine directly," said WildTangent chief executive Alex St. John. "We've just made every Web designer a game developer."

Industry Standard: VW Puts Brakes on U.K. Online Car Sales. "My reaction was, boy, Volkswagen America is going to be very upset with these guys in the U.K.," said Lorimer. "VW America is one of the most progressive car manufacturers in the U.S. They have been savvy about the Internet."

DaveNet: Office 2000 is Not Fun. Office doesn't really embrace the web because the web isn't just about HTTP, HTML and XML -- in a larger sense the web is about fun!

Wired News: How Fast Is Your E-Broker? Critics of the new survey, however, say it doesn't take into account factors like layout and ease of use, which play a big role in determining how quickly customers can complete their trades.

TechWeb: Consumers Need Global E-Commerce Protection. The biggest challenges to electronic commerce are global connectivity between merchants and consumers, multi-currency settlements, language barriers, and legal uncertainty of which jurisdiction has responsibility for the transaction...

Business Week: TNT: A Dutch Courier That Could Be Cyber Dynamite. The strategy has European market analysts jazzed. TNT is using its monopoly and old postal business "as a cash cow to fund all sorts of electronic services..."

June 9, 1999
Upside: Web Ads Get Smart. "[Users] don't want to relinquish control of their computer. The viewer decides what comes next." And that, according to Pittman, helps dictate how you advertise and market to the audience.

USA Today: Web creator displeased with his creation. [Tim Berners-Lee] ''I wanted to create what I call an interactive space where everybody can edit,'' he says. ''And I started saying 'Interactive.' Then I started reading in the media that 'The Web is great because it was interactive,' '' meaning, you could click. Now, this was not what I meant by interactivity, so I started calling it intercreativity.''

NY Times: A Hitch to Marital Web Bliss. [Leo J. Hindery Jr., CEO of AT&T Broadband & Internet Services] Hindery has publicly questioned whether At Home should be so closely tied to a single source of news, e-mail and other services.

• Salon: From January 20, 1999; A corporate game of Internet Monopoly. Scott Rosenberg.

SJ Mercury: NBC, TiVo to team up on digital video recorders. It may also air more sought-after shows outside the network's prime time hours -- not to attract an audience then, but to provide more fodder for the TiVo recorders.

TechWeb: Intel Demonstrates PC Of The Future. Information would be displayed on the desktop in 3-D information hubs that could be ordered and reordered using voice-based commands. No Internet browser is necessary: Information is gathered and presented using intelligent agents.

TechWeb: CEO Says Wireless Net's Coming To Every Room. Mike Comstock, senior vice president of e-commerce at package-delivery company DHL, said that for e-commerce to reach the masses, there needs to be a fundamental shift in the way products ordered over the Internet are delivered to consumers.

InfoWorld: Intel exec extols I-commerce as wave of business future. Maloney stressed that in business-to-business electronic commerce, the merchant is solely responsible for a customer's experience, regardless of what kind of system the customer might use, since other merchants are only a click away.

TechWeb: Tech Guru: People Are Key To Knowledge Mgm't. "It's [knowledge management] the last gasp of industrial engineering" said Prusak. "It assumes a business is a machine and judgment and understanding can be replaced by an algorithm."

TechWeb: E-Commerce Threatens LAN With Heavy Load. Inktomi sees a new market emerging in Europe, one where companies with its experience in the United States can sell back-office transaction processing to high volume e-commerce sites.

Internet Week: Chipshot.com Hits The Green With Globalization. But the new site had to do more than simply translate English words into Japanese. It needed a new design and message that took into consideration the differences in culture, language, currency and commercial laws.

W3C: Common Markup for Web Micropayment Systems Working Draft. This document proposes an extensible and interoperable way to embed in a Web page all the information necessary to initialize a micropayment.

News.Com: Sony's digital path leads to record stores. In a deal with Digital On-Demand, the entertainment and consumer electronics giant is hoping to preserve its relationships with brick-and-mortar retailers while continuing its drive for digital music delivery in cyberspace.

Industry Standard: Wedding Site Enjoys Its First Time. Unlike competitors that work directly with manufacturers and wholesalers, Della & James is positioning itself as an extension of retailers' existing wedding-gift services...

June 10, 1999
Red Herring: Baby steps. But the biggest obstacle faced by wireless Internet services is that none of the U.S. companies involved are suggesting a realistic, economical application for the technology.

NY Times: Coming of Age in Palo Alto. "Usually people say, 'What is an anthropologist doing here?' " Dr. Nardi said. "But when I explain that I study how people use technology in order to get new ideas for products and services, it instantly makes sense."

Salon: Can history survive Silicon Valley? "We run the risk of, 200 years from now, knowing less about this place and this point in history than we know about 15th century Germany, where the printing press was invented..."

Freedom Forum: Future of journalism gets uncertain forecast. Newsrooms are being "democratized" by the Web, she said. From E-mail to listservs, the Internet allows journalists to become less isolated in their jobs, in turn "forcing us to accept responsibility for what we do..."

Wired News: E-Postage Battle Looms. In the meantime, the US Postal Service, which must approve all PC postage services, is maintaining a paternal distance by officially refusing to interfere with or attempt to resolve any disputes that might arise between its private patent holders...

ClickZ: The Next Wave: Hybrid Portals. An EIP, like a consumer portal, aggregates information into one easy-to-use page. The difference is that this information is relevant to the employees of a particular company or to people who do business with that company.

• Useit.Com: From April 4, 1999; Intranet Portals: The Corporate Information Infrastructure

Wired News: Web Publishing the Microsoft Way. Web-standards advocates worry Microsoft's proprietary extensions could Balkanize the Web. And some experts say documents created with Office's "save-to-Web" feature fail standards-validation tests.

News.Com: MSN: From content to software sales. Matt Kursh, business unit manager of MSN, said it is "conceivable" that Microsoft will strike partnership deals with existing businesses and develop what he calls a "broad-based Switzerland approach" to its Web strategy.

News.Com: eBay plays hardball with feedback ratings. eBay claims these ratings are proprietary and cannot be cited on other person-to-person auction sites, a stance that underscores larger, controversial issues of who owns data on a Web site.

RCFoC: The "E-Ticket" Ride Of All Time! What will be written about the Web, 62 years from now? I suspect that unlike the first fax, this future history will not show that the Web faded out...

Industry Standard: Net Economy Pegged at $301 Billion. Funded by Cisco Systems and conducted by researchers at the University of Texas, the project takes the first stab at quantifying the whole Internet-related sector of the economy...

SF Examiner: E-commerce is for real, venture capitalists say. "Through customer-friendly Web sites, one-click shopping, cheap prices, online finance and banking and other innovations, consumers will have tremendous control over their purchases. "The customer will truly be king..."

News.Com: The new definition of Net success. ...despite many of the Web portals offering impressive reach statistics, I believe the aggregate time spent on their services each month is the true measure of the company's ability to generate revenue.

PC World: Panel Voices Speech Recognition Issues. "We see a high drop-out rate among people buying the software," Fenn adds. "Up towards 50 percent do not continue using it." Several panelists admitted a reluctance to dictate to a computer.

June 11, 1999
Salon: The great Web "brain drain". Scott Rosenberg. What's happening in the Net job economy today isn't ultimately driven by money, but rather by what you might call the big-company bullshit factor.

Editor & Publisher: Those Who Left Newspapers, and Why. Steve Outing. But today, many technology-savvy people are leaving newspapers for another reason: frustration with the industry over its inability to keep pace with changes in the business environment brought on by the Internet.

Forbes ASAP: Leading competitors join forces for e-commerce spinoff. "It's clear our customers--the engineers and the purchasing managers--want to buy like this, searching across (multiple vendors)," Kauffman said. "If somebody else is going to cannibalize us, we might as well do it ourselves."

SJ Mercury: Furniture Brands: 'No' To 'Net Marketing. The largest U.S. home furniture maker said Friday it would not sell its products on the Internet and wouldn't do business with any company that didn't have a real showroom.

• Furniture Brands Press Release: Furniture Brands International Announces Internet Retailing Policy
• SF Chronicle: From June 9, 1999; Web Site Lets You Shop For Furniture at Home

Industry Standard: Here Come the Midwesterners. What's next for the interactive agencies is the necessary drudge work: the cataloging of passenger lists, the engineering of inventory systems and so forth. "Our advantage is that people around here are truly interested in getting to work on clients' back ends..."

News.Com: Global Sports sets eyes on the Web. In a move to focus strictly on its Web business, Global Sports today said it will divest all of its non-Internet assets and that Softbank plans to take a stake in the company.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of a survey of Web marketing by huge companies. Two main findings: Maintenance budgets are 72% of the cost to develop a site in the first place and Less spending on Web advertising.

Editor & Publisher: USA Today Online Listens to its logs. Since 1994, USA Today Online has listened to its user logs. The data collected has been used to make decisions about editorial content, staff expansion and transfers, and even budgetary expenditures.

Freedom Forum: Katz: On flaming and flamers — Part 1. Jon Katz. Good ideas and bad get flamed, as do good writing and bad. There is, in fact, no real connection between what's written and the volume or style of the flames it inspires.

Builder.Com: How to make $$$ with your web site. Products are important, but there's no substitute for carefully planned site navigation, a fully thought-out ordering and fulfillment process, procedures to ensure customer satisfaction, and fanatical quality assurance.

Webmonkey: Streaming Media Update. "It's so confusing," lamented my friend, a graphic designer. "I've got Winamp, a RealPlayer, QuickTime, and the Windows Media Player — all just to handle the media-rich email I get."

Web Review: Scarcity Thinking and the Internet. Scarcity thinking says that web businesses compete for eyeballs or mindshare in the same way that book publishers and potato chip manufacturers traditionally competed for shelf space. For every winner there's a loser.

News.Com: IBM harnesses Web data flow. "Web intermediaries can provide the 'smart pipes' that automatically transform and customize a broad range of Web-based content so everyone can receive the information in the way they need it..."

Industry Standard: Companies That Build Companies. In the Internet Economy, the hottest business concept of the moment is to create not consumer products or business services, but simply more Internet companies. Welcome to the age of the "incubator."

PC World: What's Ahead for Windows CE? Some analysts say Microsoft made a crucial judgment error when it chose to scrunch the familiar but feature-heavy Windows interface onto the small handheld screen.

Forbes: Risk E-business. The recent outages have not yet led to more Internet insurance policies. And they never may. Fear often has a short memory, and e-commerce providers compelled to consider a financial safety net usually overcome their fears quickly.

Interactive Week: Behind EBay's System Glitch. EBay engineers are having a bad week, and their saga is spelled out for all Web users to read in a series of sometimes riveting "system updates"...

News.Com: Firms work together on payment standard. The companies are expected to unveil a plan to create a standard for electronic wallets--software that contains credit card numbers, e-cash, other forms of payment, and digital certificates.

Internet Week: Trading Hubs Get Down To Business. They are building business trading hubs-also knowns as Infomediaries-that cater to business constituencies ranging from metal manufacturing to industrial machinery and trucking services.

EE Times: Motorola to invest $1B in wireless network. "Our objective is for people anywhere to feel like they are connected directly to the Internet, without a wired connection and without requiring dial-up access..."

June 12, 1999
Webmonkey: The Web Isn't Free. Jeffrey Veen. Doing business on the Web — being able to turn traffic into money — is affecting the very nature of how we design Web pages. And you can see the results everywhere you go.

Upside: Stockholm: Wireless Kingdom. For homegrown Swedish IT companies, the high concentration of mobile device users provides a homogeneous test bed for trying out wireless Web services.

NY Times: Big Fish in the Wireless Pond. Suddenly, the world seems smitten by the prospects of fixed-wireless technology -- the fast-growing industry niche that links users to high-speed telecommunications networks through disk-shaped antennae instead of expensive fiber optic or T-1 lines.

Red Herring: Futuristic technology gets a new voice. The market is still young, but some big players are starting to rely on the technology for vital customer service functions. But as more companies catch on, speech recognition could become an important ingredient in the future of e-commerce.

Online Journalism Review: Web Staffs Urge the Print Side to Think Ahead. Searchable databases, audio and video, e-mail links, background on the writer -- these are just some of the ways to enhance traditional stories for the Web. Increasingly, Web news staffers are urging their print brethren to think about and help gather such online elements.

June 13, 1999
Useit.Com: Disabled Accessibility: The Pragmatic Approach. New official standards make it easy to get the top priorities right and make websites accessible for users with disabilities (e.g., blind users who can't see images). But the single-design approach may be nearing the end of its life.

NY Times: Cable Convention Focuses on High-Speed Internet Delivery. Among the sessions this year are "Internet 2," "Introducing High-Speed Data Services" and "Topics in Broadband Data Networking." It takes only three letters to explain the shift: AT&T

NY Times: Developing a Repetition-Free Language for Web Transactions. "This will be particularly important for attracting new customers," said John Pettitt, chief technology officer for Beyond.com, a software retailer. "Every time you ask a customer to do something, you risk losing them."

NY Times: Illness Is Fast Becoming Apt Metaphor for Computers. In a world where computers, once isolated work tools, are increasingly the very engine driving modern business life, computer researchers say they are detecting an ominous trend toward programs that mimic viruses and pestilence in the physical world.

• 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.

Information Week: Digital Imaging For Business. Not long ago, these products were typically considered either high-end specialty gear for photojournalism or graphics projects, or as low-end electronic toys for consumers. But a growing number of companies are looking at the hardware as tools that can propel business initiatives.

Forbes: Picture Perfect. "We don't ever want to sell $100 cameras," Mead says. "It's true that as digital technology evolves, you get more performance per dollar-but that doesn't necessarily mean you want to make things cheaper."

June 14, 1999
Industry Standard: Open House: Realtors Learn to Love the Net. All of this will add to the downward pressure on commissions the industry is already experiencing. Smart agents will make it up in volume, says James Punishill of Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research: "People who don't will fall off the map."

News.Com: Patent Here, Patent There, Patent, Patent Everywhere. Internet business model patents also are much more likely to increase litigiousness than promote efficient commerce. It would surely be ironic to see all the efficiency gains of e-commerce wasted on unnecessary litigation.

Internet World: Detailed Database Can Be Key to E-Commerce Success. And in a world where a rival can copy an interface, a business model, or distribution plans in short order, structured data and the interactions it enables are emerging as a new kind of intellectual property-and maybe the only kind worth owning.

• News.Com: From May 21, 1999; Copyright bill may protect database owners

PC Week: Is this any way to run an e-business? Way beyond snappy Web interfaces, what will keep customers--retail customers and business partners--coming to a company's Web site is that they can count on a light being on whenever they call.

ABCNews.Com: Wireless Networks Catching On. This system of transmitter-to-receiver wireless data services is known as fixed wireless, and it has become one of the hottest strategies for telecommunications companies looking for new and cheaper ways to bring broad band Internet and data services to businesses.

Business Week: Getting the Right Ad Play -- without the Portals. Because the ad networks can track this over a wide group of sites, that gives them an opportunity to have a better understanding of how people react to ads. That's what advertising online is all about -- tracking and adapting on the fly.

Industry Standard: DoubleClick to Merge With Abacus. Abacus has a database chronicling the purchasing history of 88 million U.S. households. It sells the data to over 1,100 consumer catalogers that use the information to fine-tune their mailing practices.

News.Com: AT&T hails the "broadband millennium". "Where we're going is interactivity, a future where television breaks off the passive mode forever, and adds a dimension of consumer choice and control that, until, now, has been just talk..."

Interactive Week: AOL Plans High-Speed Service. AOL Plus will offer a limited set of streaming media features, along with more photos, graphics and animation than what is offered on its flagship consumer service today...

Wired News: Every Web Site a Chat Room. The software links a visitor to a Web site with other visitors and lets them strike up a conversation.

ClickZ: Pretty cool, eh? Create a clear, friendly voice that connects on a simple, emotional level. And make that voice and that connection part of every transaction and every communication.

Interactive Week: Cache Preens For Broadband. Cable operators are starting to try to relieve the backbone pressure they feel, because their last-mile bandwidth is so much faster than their upstream Internet connections...

Internet Week: Extending The Internet. But Jaffery says that will change substantially by 2003, when he estimates wireless data subscribers will jump to nearly 36 million. "The Internet will be the prevailing platform..."

News.Com: Microsoft launches service for pagers, cell phones. "As long as there's a pipe there from the services side, we can pump the information to [any] device," Vieira said. "What we're waiting on is for the hardware to develop."

News.Com: Compaq develops Linux handheld. The product intended "to explore futuristic ideas in handheld and wearable computing," Frazier said. About 75 prototypes exist.

Industry Standard: Book Burnout. Anyone who's used a Rocket eBook or a competing model knows that they're early-generation models in need of interface and ergonomic improvements.

Interactive Week: Web Retailing Goes Madison Ave. Route. AdOutlet.com plans to sell excess advertising space that is days or weeks away from its deadline to appear online - at prices up to 80 percent less than original levels.

ZDNN: Can Google's search engine find profits? They don’t want to become a portal. No content. And they want to avoid competing with other search engines to be the browser of choice for existing portals.

Interactive Week: Manugistics Puts It On The Line. "Manufacturers have traditionally had difficulty collaborating with the retail channel, because all they get is an estimate of what they think is selling. What they need is systems that can tell them in real-time what is selling in the stores..."

TechWeb: Chrome.com Looks To Tune Up Net Car Buying. "Autobytel is no more than an electronic front end to feed into existing franchise dealers controlling a particular geography," said Ross McDonald, Chrome.com's director of business development. "In our model, transactional control is in the hands of the consumer or the organization."

Wired News: 7-Eleven for Your Convenience. Modeled on a successful Japanese system, it goes beyond record-keeping to help store managers predict what fickle consumers will want tomorrow by tracking which items sell best -- or worst -- and adding in weather forecasts and schedules of local events.

Editor & Publisher: How Newspapers Can Retain New Media. Steve Outing. Here are some ways that newspaper executives can retain the best people, who embody not only journalistic excellence but also possess a vision for how newspapers can keep pace with the Internet industry and not get run over by it.

June 15, 1999
ClickZ: At Your Service. Not only are we missing the chance to build customer confidence in the web, we are also not realizing the cost advantage and customer loyalty benefits that result from great, personalized web-based customer service.

Industry Standard: Mass Appeal. An estimated 22 million more people will go online in 1999. That's a lot of new users - attracting them requires making your site easy to use. But most Web sites aren't built with the masses in mind.

Time Digital: One Less Reason to Leave the House. The real stroke of genius is the Streamline Box, a secure, keypad-locked container that incorporates shelving and a freezer, and which Streamline will install at no extra cost in your basement or your garage.

News.Com: Electronics dealers face tough market online. Challenges in moving online include keeping their regional store managers happy, working out regional pricing differences and possible channel conflicts, and planning to compensate employees who refer customers to the Web site to buy...

FEED Magazine: The Irrelevance of Nationalism Online. Clay Shirky. Once a country gets sufficiently wired, the economic force of the internet has little to do with ethnicity or national sentiment and much to do with the unsurprising fact that given two offers of equal value, people all over the world will take the cheaper one, no matter who is offering it to them.

Forbes: Ugly duckling or swan? Amid all the talk these days about broadband, the two technologies most often mentioned are cable and DSL. Wireless is gaining ground slowly, but the technology that commands the least respect is satellite.

News.Com: FCC's Kennard slams open access ruling. ...William Kennard predicted chaos and stymied growth for the Internet if local authorities were allowed to regulate broadband services.

Wired News: Barlow: Music Wants to Be Free. "This does not mean that I don't think that copyright has some value in cyberspace. But the revolution is about giving that control back to the people who create."

Industry Standard: Trouble for DoubleClick. Faced with declining banner efficacy and the obvious handicaps of trying to target consumer messages broadly across the Internet, DoubleClick, like any banner-ad network, is trying to prepare for the next wave of Web marketing.

News.Com: NSI-ICANN fight threatens Net growth. [Esther Dyson, ICANN interim chair] She went on to accuse NSI of stalling a test period for its a shared-registration system that would allow ICANN-accredited registrars to compete directly with NSI...

Interactive Week: Intomi Revs Up Search Engine. The new Directory Engine is based on "intelligence" that automatically searches for, finds and organizes high-quality documents into a directory that allows users to search the Web by topic.

• Inktomi: Directory Engine

USA Today: Site outages send customers scurrying. [Daniel Todd of Keynote Systems] "Two years ago, if a site went down, you would wait for the site to get back up. Today, there are probably five different companies selling the same item..."

Red Herring: Diamond sales shine online. Pricing is Internet Diamond's key differentiating factor at this point. According to Mr. Vadon, his company offers a 40 to 50 percent savings over retail diamond jewelry pricing. This includes the shipping fee.

Industry Standard: Soup-to-Nuts Electronic Trading. The market for buying and selling food and beverage products is $11 trillion. The company estimates that if it covers 15 percent of the U.S. market, it can generate $3 billion a year.

News.Com: IBM pushes hard drive envelope. The 37GB drive is one of the highest capacity drives to date, offering about twice the data storage found today on high-end consumer PCs.

Cal Law: Putting a Price on Our Internet Identities. The San Francisco-based Internet think tank Electronic Frontier Foundation is embarking on an effort to put a price on the average person's identity so that people can sue for damages if their privacy is invaded...

Computerworld: IT Revamp boosts Delta service. "Seventy-five percent of flights take off and arrive on time. So what you're looking at is an exception process, and it's not worth investing significant amounts of capital in exception processes..."

Interactive Week: Lucent Rides The Digital Airwave. ...has shown that it can deliver streams of data at rates nearly twice those of today's fastest dial-up modems without hurting the quality of existing analog radio signals carried via the same spectrum.

News.Com: Open Market scores new patent. The key element in the patent appears to be the ability for a shopper who has registered at one Web storefront to use the same "one-click payment" capability on other sites.

InfoWorld: HP adds muscle to Web printing program. Hewlett-Packard announced Monday a more powerful version of its Web PrintSmart software that allows users to consolidate and print information collected from multiple Web sites.

June 16, 1999
ZDNN: When the Web is always on. After years spent gearing their offerings to people who surf for hours at a time, America Online Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and other Web companies are mulling over what to offer people who surf in short, spontaneous trips.

Forbes ASAP: Malone's Musings. Do we really believe that we can long prosper in an economy that devalues experience: in people, in design, and in business ethics? Or will there be a crisis, then a backlash, when the old rules at last reassert themselves?

[clip]: Service In Cyberspace. According to Taylor, customer service should start at the beginning of the customer experience and follow through to after the sale. Taylor points to the "shopping cart" feature of an e-commerce site as holding the key to future improvement.

[clip]: Connecting IT And Business. ...what's distinctly unimpressive is the failure of companies to grasp exactly what they're paying for as well as how important IT is to their core business.

• CIO WebBusiness: From December 1998; Tomorrow Land. Q&A with Disney's Bran Ferren. The key decision makers have to get in the game and be online. If you cannot understand the behaviors, likes and needs of your customers, you're being isolated from the critically important community you need to reach.

TechWeb: E-Commerce Sites Not Living Up To Name. "In fact, most business-to-business e-commerce is only an extension of traditional, land-based channels. Few new customers actually are acquired through the Internet. Cisco Systems, for example, only allows transactions on its websites from existing customers."

Advertising Age: Levi's goes offline to plug Web stores. Levi Strauss & Co. halted online advertising for its new Web stores and now is regrouping, with plans to shift money into traditional media to drive traffic to its sites.

Computerworld: Insurance industry lags online. Insurers "rely on them as their primary distribution channel" and are reluctant to do anything that cuts them out of the sales process...

ClickZ: How Confident Are Your Consumers? In the consumer's mind, a confidence cue is what we rely on to tell us whether or not it's safe to buy.

[clip]: The Science Of Cyber Shopping. Q&A with retail consultant Paco Underhill. One of the things the Web is waking up to is, 'How do we sell to people who aren't completely Web-literate? How do make sure we aren't constructing for other Web designers?

News.Com: Akamai aims to end Web waits. With dedicated housing, the company can host content from customers like Yahoo at each of 20 points around the world. This allows a user to go to a site close to his or her own computer in accessing bendwidth-heavy content...

USA Today: Wireless carriers struggle to meet demand. Wireless phone carriers are struggling to cut costs and expand calling networks as customer rates plummet.

News.Com: Excite@Home exec takes on open access ruling. Q&A with Dean Gilbert, @Home. If anything like this ever came to pass it would destroy this business. I'm telling you there is no way this whole open access thing would do anything other than hurt the public.

June 17, 1999
NY Times: Banner Ads Are Under the Gun -- and on the Move. Now, ads seem to spread over a typical Web page like ivy: mixed in with the content in the middle of a page, off in the right margin of the browser window, or in pop-up windows that appear out of the blue.

News.Com: Sony eyes new online course. The e-commerce plan, which is expected within three months, will allow dealers to once again sell Sony consumer goods over the Web and will "likely" involve direct sales from Sony.

Boston Globe: No worry of being 'Amazoned'. Staples is trying. The company has created a number of features in its Web business that do not exist elsewhere. On-line customers, for instance, can easily get a history of their past purchases. They can get e-mail reminders to reorder.

• Useit.Com: From March 8, 1998; Better Than Reality: A Fundamental Internet Principle

Forbes: Adobe Targets the Net A key to Adobe's future success may be its ability to develop programs for specific segments of the market rather than trying to force consumers to buy a $630 program like PhotoShop.

Washington Post: .Com Live Interview with Jakob Nielsen. ...talking about the top mistakes of Web design, how the Internet architecture is evolving, and how the structure and design of the Web affects the way people use it.

News.Com: AOL sharpens ICQ ambitions. [Ted Leonsis, president of AOL's Interactive Properties Group] "This year is really a year to make [turn] that time online into page views, page views into impressions, and impressions into dollars..."

Freedom Forum: On flaming, Part 2: A code of ethics for dealing with flames. Jon Katz. A tech or not, the writer has to accept the fact that some, if not most, of his ideas will turn out to be incomplete, illogical, even wrong. This is the very different reality of the interactive writer: the willingness not only to receive criticism, but also to accept and study it.

Adweek: Selling Simplicity. "As the Net grows, it grows disproportionately," says Schiavone. "There's more garbage than there is good stuff. There's a sales axiom: too many choices create inaction."

XML.Com: E-Book Standards Edge Forward. After OBE 1.0 is completed, work will start on version 2.0, which will be strictly XML-compliant and reflect a rigorous separation of content and presentation format.

InfoWorld: Microsoft banks on ClearType to spur electronic books. ....the technologies will launch a lot of new areas such as eBooks, tablet PCs, ePads and ePaper, with eBooks to come out of the gate first with "major announcements" in about six months.

RCFoC: The Money Spinner. ...these moves (and others) towards cutting the cord for both mobile and fixed Internet users make the end result -- pervasive, Internet Anywhere access -- not a "maybe" but only a "when."

Wired News: Cheaper Net Access in Japan? But Net users in Japan shouldn't hold their breath awaiting a break in prices. Flat-rate access likely won't be introduced before 2001...

June 18, 1999
Editor & Publisher: Some Advice on Writing, Web-style. Steve Outing. The earliest Web writers — those who became at least moderately successful — were emulated by those who came after. Unfortunately, the pioneers didn't always know what they were doing, and their flawed style was mimicked by other Web sites.

News.Com: Starbucks CEO: Embrace the human spirit. Schultz, who sits on the boards of eBay and drugstore.com, said companies need to do more with their Web sites than just go for the hard sell.

Forbes: Aloha Akamai. For clients, the cost of doing business with Akamai is a pittance compared with the potential losses they face because of network slowdowns. Customers don't give web companies a second chance.

NY Times: Writer Seeks Balance in Internet Power Shifts. What's going on is a potential -- and in some cases actual -- radical shift in power, as individuals use technology to wrest control over information and resources away from large institutions like the Government, corporations and the media.

Interactive Week: 3Com, Aether In Wireless Venture. OpenSky, which will be based in Palo Alto, Calif., is 3Com's answer to WirelessKnowledge, the joint venture Microsoft and Qualcomm formed last year to develop a series of wireless applications for mobile professionals.

News.Com: Microsoft, 3Com back AvantGo. ...AvantGo has recently launched AvantGo.com, a free, interactive service to deliver personalized information to handheld users...

Interactive Week: Looking Into Tribble's Crystal Ball. "Three years from now, I'm going to have a cell phone that I'll use like a PalmPilot, except it will have a high-speed TCP/IP connection," he predicted. "It will be able to move data at 200 kilobits per second."

Information Week: Data Capture Grows Wider. From a data-analysis standpoint, the real potential in pervasive computing may lie in a company's ability to centrally manage and mine the data generated by mobile and embedded devices.

InfoWorld: President of Sun's Network Services Division takes on the data center. Q&A with President of Sun's Network Services Division John McFarlane. They're kind of naked data centers because the only thing they do is connect to the Internet. Right now, the biggest single problem these types of companies are facing is capacity planning.

ZDNN: Net e-commerce taxes called inevitable While the group's first meeting isn't likely to produce major news in itself, behind-the-scenes discussions could produce heated debate with the end result being that some type of e-commerce tax will be recommended to Congress...

Industry Standard: Africa's Internet Due for Rapid Growth. South Africa in particular is developing rapidly, with about 225,000 dial-up accounts and hosting between 700,000 to 800,000 of Africa 's 1.2 million Internet users.

June 19, 1999
InfoWorld: Banking doesn't get the Internet. In the online banking world today, there are legacy integration problems, but they're on the client side: I can't synchronize Web data with the personal financial management software of my choice.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of a US Air mailing that gave customers new account numbers. Any time you get sub-standard customer service with the excuse being "because of the computer," you know that you are dealing with a company that still doesn't get it with respect to the coming Internet economy.

Industry Standard: Cable Blackmail. It is still the Internet: Users can still access any IP address in the world. But access is through AT&T's ISP, and local caching will mean content on the local cable network will flow faster. The cable network will become a premium IP network; AT&T will collect the premium.

Industry Standard: Web Surfin' Barbie. Digital products fundamentally differ from physical products, which affects their production, distribution and even their very conception. A digital product is a piece of software, designed to manipulate data.

Red Herring: Making the enterprise whole. The Web is also behind a renewed focus on customers. No longer can businesses maintain an introspective view of their enterprise computing systems; they must now think of them as extending into those of their customers and business partners.

Red Herring: CRM rises to the top. This change is most apparent in "front office" business: the call centers, storefronts, one-on-one meetings, and Web sites where customer interaction occurs.

devhead: The Web Accessibility Initiative: A Reality Check. ...the WAI has been associated with growing--and misplaced--concerns that what's voluntary today may be mandatory tomorrow.

Industry Standard: Going Public. Carl Steadman. "This is an emergency," the voice starts in, not waiting for a greeting. "I've got MSNBC on the other line. I don't know what to say."

SJ Mercury: Vintners Fight Move To Crush Internet Wine Sales. ...says the number of commercial U.S. wineries has tripled over the last 20 years to about 1,700. Retailers do not have enough shelf space to handle all the different labels, so wineries are hoping to reach consumers directly through the Internet and other means.

June 20, 1999
Today's Links Story: InfoWorld: Redesign 404

SJ Mercury: Embarrassing sights for e-commerce. ``Now, the expectation is that there is no time that it is OK for the site to be down.'' As a result, Matteson said, ``The old notions of how we built computer systems are no longer valid because computer systems fail and our customers don't allow failure.''

• Internet Week: From April 8, 1999; E-Biz Sites Push For 100% Uptime. Downtime of just one minute could cost sites as much as $10,000, according to the Standish Group, a research consultancy. By that count, a two-hour blackout carries a price tag of $1.2 million.

NY Times: Net Companies Look Offline for Consumer Data. "Privacy is potentially a huge sleeper issue," he said. "You see a lot of talk and some government action on it, but it hasn't really caught fire with the public yet. This has the potential to touch it off."

NY Times: The Race for Top Bridal Web Site Heats Up. Rather, they come from the world of well-funded Internet start-ups founded by people in their 20s with personal experience in the ways of modern wedding planning. What's surprising, though, is how widely divergent these new-wave business models are.

June 21, 1999
ClickZ: The Web And TV. This is a very different business model from the mass marketing consumer one we know. As Esther Dyson has stated, it is based on giving attention, not getting attention.

Industry Standard: Getting to Know All About You. "This is not about banner ads," he says. "This is about recommendation engines. Most people are pretty impressed by what Amazon can recommend to them, but the window Amazon has on my book-buying behavior is pretty small. The kind of window they could have with the Abacus database is huge."

Useit.Com: Spotlight of recent product placement deals by portals. Instead of having their PCs dedicated to optimal productivity (with the intranet home page as the starting point), the machines will spout distractions attempting to get employees to go to websites unrelated to their jobs.

• FEED Magazine: From December 9, 1998; Apple's Soft Sell. Steven Johnson. Perhaps we are on the verge of another advertising encroachment, and in ten years the idea of a software app without a permanent banner will seem as odd to us as a city without billboards.
• Red Herring: From February 24, 1999; The Pixel Company rides the edge

ZDNN: New Notes will include Lycos. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, although a Lotus official said his company will collect a share of advertising revenue generated by users it sends to Lycos Web sites.

Editor & Publisher: The Argument for Allowing Web Content 'Reprints'. Steve Outing. More publishing executives are realizing that there can be financial benefits to allowing their content to be hosted by other parties — that by not allowing external publication of their owned Web content, they're "leaving money on the table."

NY Times: On the Web, as Elsewhere, Popularity Is Self-Reinforcing. ...the research indicates that the traffic distribution follows what is known as a universal power law. This means that a small number of sites command the traffic of a large portion of the entire Web population.

• Useit.Com: From April 15, 1997; Do Websites Have Increasing Returns?
• Xerox PARC: Novelty and Social Search in the World Wide Web. We show that it leads to a universal power law for the number of users that visit given sites over periods of time, with an exponent related to the rate at which users discover new sites on their own.

PC Week: Warning! E-com under construction. High-traffic e-commerce sites are pushing the technology envelope well beyond its means, sometimes inventing and relying on unproven systems in an effort to stay ahead of traffic demands.

Information Week: Customer Disservice. Self-service Web sites could become the E-commerce equivalent of the voice-response unit: a low-cost mechanism that makes it more difficult for customers to reach a service representative.

• Useit.Com: From December 27, 1998; Predictions for the Web in 1999. A flexible Web user interface would allow the user easy access to fixing the problem without having to call anybody.

Wired News: Digital's Long, Winding Road. The infobahn may be winding a lot more slowly into living rooms than pundits predict, according to the opening panel at the Digital Living Room conference.

Industry Standard: Frequent Flier. The past two decades have seen spending on incentive programs and other forms of direct marketing eclipse traditional advertising. Online, banner ads still account for most marketing dollars spent, but the balance of power is shifting.

News.Com: AOL to invest $1.5 billion in Hughes. The companies said AOL's high-speed Internet service, AOL Plus, will be available over Hughes' DirecPC satellite network early next year.

Internet Week: Get A Handle On Handhelds. Companies that have resisted handheld computers as part of their IT and Internet strategy can do so no longer.

Industry Standard: Media Walls Keep Falling. Now instead of merely buying ads in print pubs or on Web sites, commercial companies are becoming business partners in new-media ventures.

June 22, 1999
Builder.Com: Everyday Life in Cyberspace. Dan Shafer. My belief that this role of the Web as a future archeological dig is really important and influences some of my thinking about how we manage our Web sites.

• NY Times: From June 5, 1999; Library Conference Examines Preservation of Digital Works
• Salon: From June 10, 1999; Can history survive Silicon Valley?
• Upside: From December 20, 1998; When Good Sites Die

MSNBC: CMGI said in talks to buy Alta Vista. Sources Tuesday confirmed those reports, saying that CMGI is close to a deal to buy Alta Vista, along with associated Internet assets including Shopping.com.

Media Life: Think you hate banners? Then meet Jakob Nielsen. "You shouldn't hope for being so sticky that you really take over the user." The most any web site can hope for is to hang onto a surfer for 10 percent or at most 20 percent of their total web session.

Internet World: Devices Market: Not Quite Yet. "They're not browsing devices, they're not casual-use devices. Their job is to get something done. So usability is the real crux of the matter. Content providers are going to have to get wise to that real quickly."

News.Com: 3Com puts AOL in the palm of your hand. Under the deal, AOL members will be able to send and receive email from their AOL accounts on their PalmPilots.

Wired News: Coupons for the Wireless Crowd. "I don't see how a company flashing a pair of pants that are on sale over a wireless device, for example, is really going to translate any value to the end user..."

ZDNN: Allen, MCI invest in wireless Net service. But a new broadband Ricochet service is currently being tested in San Francisco. Utilizing a higher-frequency range, it allows ISDN-like 128 KBPS downloads, and is scheduled to be available in 12 cities by the middle of next year and 46 cities by 2001.

News.Com: DSL modem standard gets final approval. Instead of relying on a technician to install a DSL modem, a consumer would be able to buy the technology at a retail store and install it--saving phone companies a considerable amount of money.

Wired News: A Garden of Digital Delights. For his second Digital Living Room conference, technology journalist David Coursey has blended a sober examination of new consumer technologies with pure whimsy.

InfoWorld: AOL's Andreessen makes pitch for consumer convenience. They don't care about technology; they buy brands; they aren't systems administrators; they are put off when things are hard to do; and they are driven more by convenience than anything else.

Red Herring: Computing giants look past the PC. "Our mission is to help make a range of appliances that are very easy to use, reliable, and affordable. It's not about replacing the PC, but connecting other appliances in the home to the Internet."

Interactive Week: Fingerhut: Wal-Mart, eToys Are Us. Though it serves 90 million consumers through its network of more than 2,400 stores and 450 membership clubs in the U.S., Wal-Mart's distribution and fulfillment network was not designed to handle individual online customer orders on a mass-market scale.

News.Com: Nike expands Web site. The redesigned site features an upgraded database for locating more than 10,000 stores that sell the company's athletic footwear, and includes more Nike products for sale...

• Industry Standard: From January 10, 1999; Just Do It Online

Business Week: Why Seven Cycles Is Racing Ahead: The Net. Seven uses its Web site to let customers get deeply involved in the frame-building process, enabling them to design their own high-end bike frames and track their development all the way through the process.

June 23, 1999
Salon: Who owns the New York Times bestseller list? Scott Rosenberg. As technology keeps redefining the nature of owning information, fighting to defend every last chunk of intellectual property on the Net may look like a sensible strategy. But in the long run, it's like trying to hold on to a snowball in the sun.

• Useit.Com: From February 1995; The Future of Hypertext. There are two major problems with the current approach to copyright: first, "information wants to be free" as the hackers' credo goes, and second, the administration of permissions and royalties adds significant overhead to the efforts of people who work within the rules.
• Industry Standard: From April 9, 1999; Are You Experienced? Make no mistake: Information isn't the foundation of the new economy. Information is not an economic offering. As John Perry Barlow likes to say, information wants to be free.

Red Herring: From many, many. Businesses are seeking to give customers the ability to check on their orders, determine product availability, and obtain support, each with a single mouse click. This requires incredibly complex integration on the back end.

Builder.Com: 10 Questions about Information Architecture. Blending the technical and the visual with a keen sense for organizational structures and usability, IA is a multidimensional field that puts place in space.

CIO: Data Waste. If you're looking for a common example of data waste, check out your company's Intranet. Does its home page feature a news stream that races along the upper end of the desktop screen?

ChannelSeven: Jupiter's Future is in the Stars. The company introduced a new service this week called the Inflection Impact Index. Oversimplified, it tries to make the intangible tangible. It tries to identify market conditions that will affect the Internet economy before they happen.

Wired News: MS Backs Privacy with Ad Bucks. Microsoft's move follows a similar plan announced by IBM earlier this year. In March, Big Blue said it would pull its Internet ads from Web sites that do not post privacy policies.

PC World: Big Blue's Wireless Blue Skies. The Pervasive Computing division focuses on three converging technologies that it believes are essential to a wireless world: semiconductor, storage, and software.

Eye For Design: Branding and Usability. Jared Spool. The key to understanding branding on web sites is that web sites are interactive, not passive. There is always a direct experience.

TechWeb: Algorithm Hides Data Inside Unaltered Images. So unlike watermarks, which embed added information in every part of an image, only the complex parts of an image harbor the added information. Because information is hidden rather than appended, image size is unchanged.

June 24, 1999
Red Herring: Ebetween ad-mires your boots. Mr. Gharda denies that the company will be advertising to new computer users ("This is not an advertising play but a value-add to users," he says), but it is hard to formulate another description for grabbing unused space to promote companies and offering special deals to consumers.

Industry Standard: AOL'S Dish Deal: Bold or Old? But AOL's ability to focus on the mainstream relied upon the relatively open nature of what defined it; PC technology, telephone service and the Internet. By contrast, cable has tight legal control over use of its facilities.

News.Com: Netscape unveils new search engine. ...Netscape developed a new search engine based on its open directory software and closely held Google's search technology.

NewMedia Magazine: Mistakes In Identity. Find out what customers want and then give it to them, fast and efficiently. If they have questions, make sure they get answers quickly and easily -- either from your site or a live body.

SF Chronicle: Online Journalists Hope Association Will Improve Their Credibility. She can ask fellow members: ``How do you operate in a medium that has no deadlines? How do you set up your newsroom? What kind of use do you make out of things like hit reports on stories? What kind of technology do you use to publish your stories?

InfoWorld: IBM Internet leader details Internet vision. As Internet commerce becomes more pervasive, companies will need to integrate databases and processes that manage Web-based transactions with those that handle store-based sales...

DaveNet: Syndication and Aggregation. Every interesting link is a subtle advertisement saying "Come here, I have something interesting for you." That's why it's a win-win.

TechWeb: Intranets Fail To Deliver Business Value. "As a result, our different businesses have deployed what they think they need, which is duplicating effort, and users are accessing it on an ad hoc basis..."

• Useit.Com: From April 4, 1999; Intranet Portals: The Corporate Information Infrastructure

RCFoC: Real Computers Don't "Squish". By simply tilting Itsy in your hand, and by waving it in special gestures, you can naturally perform many of the actions of today's scroll bars, buttons, and mouse clicks.

Wired News: INET 99: Let Industry Lead. According to Nelson, it is clear to governments around the world that technology is moving way too fast to monitor, and consequently it's too difficult to regulate it effectively.

Wired News: INET 99: Open Doors on the Net. "In the rest of the world, the introduction of the Internet is more about freedom than anything else." The freedom to dream, communicate, and discover their identities were common themes among panelists...

News.Com: Net retailers sink resources into customer service. ...Cooperstein said online retailers need to work harder to please customers by simplifying the buying process through personalization, better order tracking, and one-click buying.

Wired News: CDNow to Enter Amazon's Jungle? In a marketing survey conducted for CDNow by researcher Greenfield Online, the CD seller asks consumers how they'd feel about buying books, DVDs, and consumer electronics on its site.

Industry Standard: Lycos to Yahoo: Prepare to Be Plundered. ...Lycos is considering raiding community sites, in particular Yahoo's GeoCities, for the most popular homesteaders, offering more memory for their homepages and even cash.

NewMedia Magazine: "I Ain't No Gringo". Regardless of the overwhelming power and technological advantage American companies enjoy on the Internet, "Netiquette" cannot simply replace etiquette in globalization...

NY Times: No Clicking Allowed in Artist's Browser. "There's the click-back and the go-forward. These are the semantics that have been created by the software, but they have nothing to do with the network itself. What I'm trying to say is that there are many other ways of interfacing with the network."

PC Week: Inside Intel: Is Internet hosting its ticket to continued growth? The message to resellers is clear. Intel will build huge data centers and provide information processing, storage and other computing services for resellers that connect customers to the Net.

June 25, 1999
The Economist: The net imperative. Part of the explanation is that IT investments, particularly ERP, have been inward-looking, concentrating on making each enterprise more efficient in isolation. By contrast, the Internet is all about communicating, connecting and transacting with the outside world.

MIT Technology Review: That’s Not How My Brain Works... Q&A with Jeff Hawkins, creator of the PalmPilot. Indeed, the PalmPilot, which recognizes patterns written by a pen or stylus, is a direct spinoff from Hawkins’ work in theoretical neuroscience.

• FEED Magazine: The Elaborate Machine. End-of-millennium science has given us a startling new vision of the brain's topography. FEED invites eight of the world's leading experts to describe the brain's most fascinating regions.

Forbes ASAP: Distributor of information may be one winner in e-commerce arena. "Information aggregation is becoming a commoditized business, since providers like Dow Jones and Reuters have roughly the same 4,000 sources in the oil industry."

Web Review: Understanding Comics. Q&A with Scott McCloud. Understanding Comics was the culmination of my obsessions with comics itself. But I found in doing the book that it branched out into to so many other areas of visual perception, that it had a pretty broad focus by the time it was done.

The Australian: Bloomberg predicts Internet maelstrom. Mr Bloomberg said the companies which prevailed were nevertheless destined to struggle because the Internet was not the perfect business medium many believed it to be.

• Useit.Com: From January 17, 1999; Give Me Your Billions: Internet Stock Valuation and Future User Characteristics

Industry Standard: Viva Portland? "To demand open access is to throw the franchise into litigation and uncertainty." In other words, if the city did not accept the transfer, AT&T would sue, and in the interim, withhold upgrades in the city's cable infrastructure.

MIT Technology Review: Internet Artifacts. While recent data are stored on disk for quick retrieval, the bulk of the archive is in a library of digital tapes that are too slow to search effectively.

News.Com: Dell reorganizes to face fast-changing market. These roll-outs will emphasize troubleshooting and support via the Web and may come as part of a package with a new product.

Editor & Publisher: Cannibalism Myth Just Won't Die. Steve Outing. There's nothing that newspaper executives can do about this trend, except embrace it — and stop fighting it.

Interactive Week: Centraal, M'Soft Strike RealNames Deal. ...next week is expected to announce a partnership with Microsoft to include RealNames listings in the MSN Autosearch feature of Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0.

TechWeb: Netscape Search Engine Too Late, Analysts Say. Search is increasingly becoming a standard commodity, McCabe added. Users expect major sites to have search services, she said, and they expect those services to get better and better over time.

Web Review: CSS: If Not Now, When? Splitting CSS into modules will allow implementors to tackle a module at a time, and then claim support for that module once they've correctly implemented the properties and behaviors described in a given module.

MIT Technology Review: E-toys Unite! Bluetooth is not a substitute for other forms of wireless communications. It operates over a very short range—roughly up to 10 meters.

Industry Standard: Lycos to Yahoo: Prepare to Be Plundered. ...Lycos is considering raiding community sites, in particular Yahoo's GeoCities, for the most popular homesteaders, offering more memory for their homepages and even cash.

June 26, 1999
Webmonkey: Why Designers Should Care About Mozilla. This needs to be done not to help Netscape build a better browser or prevent Microsoft from dominating the market but because it's the best way to ensure that the Web works the way you need it to.

Red Herring: Internet exchanges could combust the chemical industry. Many of the companies in this space are evolving from directory services, where buyers and sellers can meet to advertise product availability and demand but must conduct transaction offline, to 24-hour Internet trading exchanges.

Multi-University Research Laboratory Seminars: Building the Ubiquitous Internet. However to realize its real potential requires true ubiquity, not just in the workplace but to the consumer. This talk with outline many of the technology drivers and challanges behind achieving Internet ubiquity.

Multi-University Research Laboratory Seminars: Tacit Interaction. We emphasize two major element of the interaction: the degree of explicitness, pre-meditation, and intent with which the user deal with the computer, and the attention required to perform the current task.

Red Herring: Are ISPs dead? Suddenly, free dial-up access is the dirty little secret of the Internet business. It could knock the bottom out of Net stocks whose heart and soul -- not to mention their valuations -- rely heavily on a paying subscriber base.

June 27, 1999
Useit.Com: Content Integration. Web services often collect content from separate sources and present it to users in a single interface. Making such integration usable requires unified meta-content.

SJ Mercury: Awards target next generation of tech leaders. Dan Gillmor. [Philip Greenspun] He and a growing band of Web leaders say the future is in creating Web-based applications that people can use from browsers, where the central system does the sophisticated work.

SJ Mercury: INET'99 helps global Internet community hit home. Although there was no panel discussion on the subject, no white paper and no official nod from the program committee, it was apparent that the Net's leaders are approaching a cultural crossroads.

• Internet Society: The Internet is for Everyone. Vint Cerf at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy on April 7, 1999. The Internet is becoming the repository of all we have accomplished as a society. It is becoming a kind of disorganized Boswell of the human spirit.

MSNBC: Joseph Galli will join Amazon, reversing plan to take Pepsi job. The courting of Mr. Galli shows how the Internet has turned the management of corporate America on its head, with companies such as Amazon able to snatch prized executives from blue-chip companies such as Frito-Lay.

• Salon: From June 11, 1999; The great Web "brain drain. Scott Rosenberg.

DDJ TechNetCast: Unveiling the Latest Handheld Computing Platforms. Mark Bercow, Palm Computing. How has the handheld device evolved to what it is today? What are the open platforms for software development? Who are the early adapters for streaming content?

• TechWeb: From May 7, 1999; Guru: Engineers Won't Design Next-Gen Systems.

June 28, 1999
SJ Mercury: Net is blurring the line between products, services. Q&A with Vinton Cerf. For one thing, from the policy point of view, consumers don't know enough about what is being done with their personal information.

TechWeb: Internet Offers Power Of Choice. Q&A with Andrew Shapiro and David Shenk. Marketing pitches and management models that are presuming passive conusmers and passive employees are outdated, and business models that are based on these assumptions need to be rethought completely.

• Cluetrain: Cluetrain Manifesto

Ask Tog: Ads—Can't live with them; can't get rid of them. The reason you are seeing ads b