July 1, 1999
Web Review: Dethroning the Content King. [Mark Frost, the head of BBC Online] "The only reason AOL even has content is to have something to fill in between the advertisements," Frost said. Something that Frost calls "abbreviated living" has reduced the drawing power of real content.

News.Com: Yahoo in marketing trial with Proctor & Gamble. Yahoo will expand its relationship with Procter & Gamble by launching a series of sites sponsored exclusively by the latter's household products.

Wired News: Yahoo Gets Fat on Pringles. Yahoo will make money off the "microsites" in three ways: P&G pays a basic rate for every thousand surfers who see the sites, pays Yahoo to develop and maintain the site, and pays fees for return visitors.

CIO WebBusiness: Leaders of the Pack. If there's one trait all great Web ventures share, it's this: They make it easy, pleasant, even downright enjoyable for customers to do business with them.

Adweek: Behind the Yahoo! "As the Web gets more specialized, I wonder about their long-term prospects. It reminds me of Time Inc. and Warner Bros. when they couldn't get their shit together to offer good packages..."

• Salon: From February 22, 1999; Boo for Yahoo. Internet centralization is ill-spirited and, simply put, greedy. Our networked culture gains no benefit from the new face of Yahoo, but Yahoo Inc. surely does.
• Web Review: From December 4, 1998; Yahoo! is Dead. Long Live Yahoo!
• Useit.Com: From November 1, 1998; Why Yahoo is Good (But May Get Worse)

Adweek: The IQ Q&A: The New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. Q: Why isn't the newspaper being used as a vehicle to drive traffic to the Web-like having a URL built into the stories? A: I guess because none of us have felt we need it.

Wired News: Music Licenser Shakes Down Web. ASCAP, an organization that collects licensing fees for musical performances, is asking webmasters to pay for the right to link to online music, even if it is stored on another site.

• SJ Mercury: From February 15, 1999; Ticketmaster, Microsoft settle Web link suit

ChannelSeven: Bell Rings In Streaming Conference. [George Bell, president Excite@Home] He held out the possibility that exclusive content and proprietary content will become more important in the broadband world than it does in the narrowband world.

Industry Standard: I'll Take Broadband for $200, Alex. Despite optimistic presentations by technology companies like Nortel, Microsoft and RealNetworks, it was clear from the discussions onstage that content producers are wary of throwing their resources into broadband programming.

Wired News: Waiting for WAP. "It's going to be a very rapid adoption of technology as sites realize they can buy a lot of users with a very small investment."

Upside: What Wall Street Wants. Firms that are obsessed with comparison shopping and offering a better price on commodity items often forget to consider their overall consumer experience.

InfoWorld: WAP Forum releases new wireless spec. Version 1.1 now includes enhanced client-side state model and added support for a caching mechanism in the user agent...

Web Review: What Users Need vs. What They Want. According to Nielsen, true usability is determining what the customer needs, not adding feature after feature based on what they say they want.

Washington Post: Making Web Users Feel Right at HOME. Nielsen and Norman said the next big challenge for Web designers is to address "banner blindness..."

PC World: Microsoft Revamps Tech Support. "The problem was, these two camps spoke two different languages," Lindstrom says. A computer technician researching a printing problem might search for "print spooler," but an average consumer wouldn't use that term.

TechWeb: Japan Turns New Page With E-Book Test. The experimental launch will expand to become a nationwide field test in November, involving about 5,000 titles and 500 e-book readers.

News.Com: WebTV meets demands for RealAudio. ...RealNetworks will provide an upgrade of existing WebTV products to support the latest RealAudio G2...

July 2, 1999
Today's Links Story: Southwest Airlines' pencil hits the Web

PC World: Webscapes in the Works. Microsoft, for one, has a think tank studying future Web interfaces that the software kingpin may someday adopt. Researchers shared some of their and studies this week at the Web99 Design and Development conference here.

BBC News: Net users take over news. "We are not gatekeepers anymore, the city walls are down, we don't own customers, we don't control information."

• Salon: From May 28, 1999; Fear of links. Scott Rosenberg.
• Freedom Forum: From November 6, 1998; Nothing quite like Slashdot.org — experience it! Jon Katz.
• NetMedia99: NetMedia99 Coverage

NetMedia 99: Surfers teach journalists to ride the waves. Direct online contact with readers is benefiting journalists. As more readers get their news from the Internet, news provision is becoming a conversation rather than a lecture.

USA Today: Are CEOs paying heed to the Web? [Herb Kelleher, CEO of Southwest Airlines] "I still use a No. 2 pencil and a legal pad," writes Kelleher (in pencil) in response to a request for his favorite sites. "I call 800 numbers to order things from catalogs. That took me 10 years to learn."

• Southwest Airlines: Southwest Airlines Home Gate

USA Today: Portals suffer as surfers get savvy. Experts say the relatively flat growth of the huge sites that serve as clearinghouses for information is proof that as the Net matures, sophisticated users are turning directly to sites that meet their needs best.

• PC Magazine: From May 24, 1999; The All-Things Approach. And then there is this confused portal business, with every growing Web site trying to copy AOL, too. The irony is that many of them should have been specializing in one thing or another but couldn't resist trying to be AOL.

• USA Today: From June 9, 1999; Web creator displeased with his creation

Forbes: Reinventing the cursor. For users who've downloaded the 25-Kb file, Comet turns the three-quarter-inch square space occupied by that ever present black-and-white arrow that helps you navigate the Internet into a tiny graphic or logo to promote either a web site or its advertisers.

• Business Week: From May 10, 1999; Web Advertising's Newest Tool: Your Cursor. "I suspect that the first few times consumers run across it, they'll find it entertaining and appealing," he says. "But [a changing cursor] will lose its appeal if it becomes too common. Too much of it can be confusing and annoying..."

Microsoft Backstage: Microsoft's Internal Publishing Tool Expedites File Flow to Live Web Servers. With PubWiz, we can publish on demand just like when we used to edit files on the live Web server. But we have none of the liabilities associated with such a direct approach and all of the benefits of scalability and rules checking.

Web Page Design for Designers: Body Language 3. Sure, there will be lots of alternatives that don't work, but there are usually some that do. These are the ones that stand out like gemstones amongst pebbles on a beach.

July 3, 1999
Today's Links Story: Goodbye Studio Archetype

InfoWorld: Web applications often fail to scale, to CEOs' chagrin. But despite the dubious provenance of the study, the lesson is obvious: Web sites and the applications that drive them often run into trouble when faced with real-world usage.

Advertising Age: Rich media carve niche. ...the "almost gimmicky" but "fun" applications probably boost brand awareness. But "in the future if they're widely adopted they'll become a victim of their own success; it'll be ho-hum."

Project Cool: No Free Lunch. The various free services are a case in point. In every case, you put up your pages and the services sells banner advertising on your content. It often collects your data and your visitors data and resells this information in various ways.

• ZDNN: From February 24, 1999; Intel won't back down on chip ID feature. [Paul Otellini, executive VP Intel] "The people who are willing to give up their privacy for a free PC are our market..."

Fortune: New Search Tools. Two of the larger search engine companies have created new versions of their search engines that can be targeted at particular subjects, and a couple companies are using that technology coupled with researchers of their own to target specific business markets.

Internet World: Dissatisfaction With Banner Ads Is On the Rise. "In an interactive world, the consumer is doing something else," said Stanley. "The banner is blinking out of the corner of their eye."

Wired News: Starbucks Stirs Literary Brouhaha. But no sooner had Joe hit the stands than the protectors of the literary elite were waxing (eloquently) about Starbucks' attempt to buy itself some cultural and intellectual property.

Intenet World: Deconstructing Corbis. Clement Mok and Jakob Nielsen. Every section and every function is labeled with great accuracy. You are never tricked into clicking and pushing a button without being informed about the consequences.

July 4, 1999
Upside: Can't Stop the Music. That's part of what's so annoying about the SDMI: It's a clear grab for power and control by an industry that isn't used to sharing either.

Web Techniques: Web Test Dummy. Effectively and automatically measuring and comparing aspects of typical user experience is a tall order. But humans do behave consistently in many areas.

NY Times: Now, AOL Everywhere. But America Online prevailed, in large part because Case didn't waver on two central ideas: first, that the most important use of an online service is communicating with people, and, second, that it is better to be easy to use than to have the most sophisticated technology.

• Doc Searls: From November 26, 1998; Now What? Both companies are drunk with the prospects of "aggregating content," "capturing eyeballs," "branding" and other marketing BS for which there is little real demand — only enormous tolerance, trained by 50 years of television-induced narcosis.
• Salon: From December 1, 1998; The birth of an Internet network? Scott Rosenberg. But AOL's unsteady record in assembling content for its users isn't what made it top of the online heap. And its obnoxious marketing tactics -- every time you log on to the service, you have to squash pop-up windows you never asked for touting products you don't need -- have not won the hearts of many customers.
• Upside: From May 5, 1999; Pittman's Marketing Mantra
• Industry Standard: From June 4, 1999; AT&T and AOL: Separated at Birth?
• Online Journalism Review: From November 24, 1998; Portals are Power

Web Techniques: Tracking Users. Web logging was originally designed for Web engineers to diagnose problems and measure total throughput, not to provide insights that could improve the marketing performance of a site.

SJ Mercury: Messaging is on verge of notable era. Dan Gillmor. Emerging from that amalgam are some logical next steps: adding voice and even video. Ultimately, we're talking about a system that will fuel better communication and collaboration.

July 5, 1999
Builder.Com: Loving and Hating Redesigns. Dan Shafer. But the CNET folks responsible for the redesign kept insisting that there was a real functionality loss in our designs. They said that they had discovered in usability research and testing that users weren't as receptive as once thought to the tree-branch-leaf kind of site structure...

Arizona Republic: Many sites failures at usability. [Jakob Nielsen talking about Amazon.Com's primary focus on usability] "They are not geniuses. I've noticed them doing stupid things. But if they make a mistake, they fix it immediately. They know what works and what doesn't work."

Business Week: Time for Retailers to Face Their Web 'Terror'. Many companies, even as they forge ahead online, are clearly treading lightly to avoid this problem. Home Depot's relaunch of its Web site is designed to "drive traffic into our stores" execs say. A few brave ones are facing down the cannibalization threat and pushing online hard.

Forbes: Mining documents by understanding ideas. New media publishers like News Corp. use Autonomy's technology to sort and hyperlink more than 10,000 stories a day, a task that would otherwise require at least 100 editorial assistants.

NY Times: Improving Dialogue on the Internet. To move people beyond the graffiti-esque quality of much online messaging, they are developing software and discussion practices that encourage computer users to talk to, rather than at, each other.

NY Times: Will This Machine Change Television? But for those who have looked into PVR's and what they can do now and have the potential to do, the reactions ranged from acknowledgment that significant changes are coming to predictions of nothing less than the end of conventional television as it has existed for a half century.

• Useit.Com: From December 20, 1998; Spotlight of a TiVo field trial of their personal video recorder. It is not going to change society to find an easier way to watch the same TV shows, but it's surely worth buying a gadget that allows this.

July 6, 1999
Washington Post: Closing the Distance. [Jakob Nielsen on instant messaging] AOL's view "is like saying I have a black telephone and have no need to talk to anyone with a pink telephone," Nielsen said. "Ultimately, it will be universality that makes this medium succeed."

• SJ Mercury: From July 3, 1999; Messaging is on verge of notable era. Dan Gillmor.

NY Times: Improving Dialogue on the Internet. To move people beyond the graffiti-esque quality of much online messaging, they are developing software and discussion practices that encourage computer users to talk to, rather than at, each other.

ClickZ: Branding.com. A great web site with uncommon or negative brand is no better than a great brand with a poor web site. The most successful web sites today exhibit both great web design/functionality and great branding.

• Industry Standard: From February 12, 1999; The Net's Brand-New Brand
• AtNewYork: From November 14, 1997; It's Service Stupid Real Time Replaces Branding: A New York Story. Tom Watson.
• Industry Standard: From April 30, 1999; Brands Aren't Everything

• News.Com: From June 4, 1999; VW's Net engine idles

• Useit.Com: From August 1, 1997; Loyalty on the Web
• Rubric: E-Commerce Study. 284KB PDF file.

Forbes: Q&A with Tim Koogle. I think there's enough dollars out in the form of advertising, e-commerce and eyeballs to support several global branded players, but the list is not long. It's probably three to six players.

• Useit.Com: From November 1, 1998; Why Yahoo is Good (But May Get Worse)

Jupiter Communications Press Release: Technology Obstacles Slow Adoption of Digital Music Distribution. Graves warned companies that if they don't accept current standards and adapt to the inherent insecurity of digital distribution, they risk paying the price when the technology goes mainstream over the next five years.

ZDNN: Neptune: Home hub of the future? Typical of these non-standard form factors are a "Game PC" and "Media PC," both of which Microsoft is developing as part of a program called "Living Room Ready."

NY Times: Dr. Michael L. Dertouzos: A Pragmatist on What Computers Can Do. Q&A with Dr. Michael L. Dertouzos of MIT. [Talking about Bill Gates] We differ on that and on some of his views on "frictionless capitalism." He thinks consumers and suppliers are going to meet on this gigantic football field called the Internet and they are going to do deals together without an intermediary. It's a seductive idea.

• ZDNN: From March 24, 1999; E-commerce in The Third World? "They leapfrogged over a whole level of technology because the previous system was so terrible," Negroponte said.

• Cal Law: From June 4, 1999; Congress Does a Database Dance

ZDNN: AOL wants a new face on Netcenter. One thing that both Netscape insiders and its critics agree on is that if Netcenter is going to flourish, it has to find a way to make itself different from the other portals. "The world has plenty of generic portals," said AOL's Schuler.

July 7, 1999
ZDNN: Syndicating Web content is the next big thing. The advent of Studio One is intriguing because it could herald a new era of Internet content. When TV was invented back in the 1940s and 1950s, most programming was created directly by advertisers.

• Web Informant: From May 26, 1998; There is no demand for messages. Doc Searls.

• Advertising Age: From June 16, 1999; Levi's goes offline to plug Web stores
• Suck: From May 21, 1999; Ad it up! Does that banner yet wave?
• Media Life: From June 22, 1999; Think you hate banners? Then meet Jakob Nielsen

• USA Today: From June 4, 1999; Manufacturers move onto the Web. Ford, General Motors and DaimlerChrysler, whose Web sites steer consumers to dealers for new or used cars, are quietly mulling the possibility of selling online, though franchise laws require dealers to play a role.

• NEC Research: From December 1997; How big is the Web? How much of the Web do the search engines index? How up to date are the search engines? Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles.

Industry Standard: Search Engines Can't Keep Up With Web. The danger, according to Lawrence, is that surfers will be able to find only the most popular places to get certain types of information – which could result in biased research.

Salon: Dangling conversations. "The phenomenon of the discussions tracks very consistently with that of message boards and chat rooms in general -- users have this new capability and they go on and don't truly express their thoughts..."

• Useit.Com: From August 17, 1997; Community is Dead; Long Live Mega-Collaboration

USA Today: Kaplan betting on kidvid site. So Kaplan started believing that the Yahoos and Amazons -- the Web's version of Life and Sears -- were about to lose audience to specialized sites. Sounds heretical, considering the astounding growth of the successful mass sites.

W3C Press Relese: Testimonials for HTTP 1.1 Becoming IETF Draft Standard. [Larry Masinter, Xerox PARC] HTTP/1.1 solves a complex problem caused by the interaction of the often conflicting goals of Web clients, caches, proxies, and servers.

EE Times: One inch no cinch for IBM storage gurus. "The most-common reaction seemed to be that the camera people had worked hard to build an architecture based on very little storage space," Albrecht said. "After they had struggled to work with 4 Mbytes, they were not necessarily happy to get 340."

Microsoft Press Release: Toward a Paperless Society. Since ClearType was announced last year, Hill and the electronic book group have moved out of Microsoft Research and into the "eMerging Technology Group" at Microsoft...

ChannelSeven: Proctor and Gamble Holds Out for Real Deal Online. Yahoo! is not afraid to create new ad positions or sponsorship modules on the site. Some of the interfaces in the P&G campaign are brand new. And at Yahoo! the interface and subsequent user experience rules.

SJ Mercury: Would you like ads on mobile phone? The services could range from being free if consumers agree to receive advertising, to $3 to $10 a month without advertising. Or the mobile-phone company might charge a per-use fee of, say, 50 cents to $1.50.

MSNBC: Should ISPs be stopping spammers? In consumers’ minds, the responsibility for fighting junk e-mail — the get-rich-quick schemers, weight loss scammers and porn spammers — lies with Internet providers like MindSpring, EarthLink Network Inc. and America Online Inc

July 8, 1999
Freedom Forum: MP3 no threat to companies embracing interactivity. Jon Katz. Consumers of music, TV, news and other kinds of information expect more participation and choice. And as the music industry will inevitably learn, one way or another, they'll get both.

InfoWorld: Vendors take steps to move Web authoring into browser. [Dave Winer] "The way we achieve the simplicity is by analyzing the process of making changes to Web pages and creating new ones..."

FEED Magazine: How 19th-Century Politics Determined The 21st-Century. Clay Shirky. In the next century, as countries increasingly trade more in information than hard goods, the definition of proximity changes from geographic to linguistic: two countries border one another if and only if they have a language they can use in common.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of Clay Shirky's analysis of the impact of language on the Internet. Metcalfe's Law probably apply to human languages as well: the value of a language network's economy may be the square of its components.

WebWord.Com: Take a Ride on the Cluetrain. Q&A with Christopher Locke and David Weinberger. Once you realize that the web gives you a way to talk truthfully with other people, businesses that treat the web as another form of brochure or as broadcast medium seem completely clueless.

Computerworld: Writers' block: Fiction site won't let Web surfers view content if they use ad-blocking software. Mind's Eye announced yesterday that a new JavaScript program on the company's Web server will prevent visitors with ad-blocking software from reading story endings for free.

• Useit.Com: From January 25, 1998; The Case for Micropayments

ZDNN: Can Levi’s Web site shrink to fit? [Kevin McSpadden, director of e-commerce for Levi’s] "Consumers will tell you they want to see everything, but what we’ve learned is they didn’t have a clear understanding of what we make..."

Seattle Times: Search engines finding less on growing Web. [Kevin Brown, director of marketing for Inktomi] ...said that search companies have long been aware that they are indexing less and less of the Web. But he argued that users are seeking quality information, not merely quantity.

ClickZ: Branding Amid The Noise. Building brands now requires pull marketing that builds richer relationships that engage the customer on their terms. To get their attention, customers expect you to inform, entertain, and involve them.

News.Com: Drawing up Net services for architects, engineers. Internet services targeting business users are poised to take off over the next several years, analysts say, because of the increased efficiency and economies of scale that the Web offers.

Wired News: SDMI on SDMI: A Better MP3? Q&A with Leonardo Chiariglione, executive director of SDMI. Why all of sudden has the United States become so concerned with privacy? Privacy was never a concern before the Web.

RCFoC: Repealing Moore's Law? ...I am very optimistic for the continuation (or acceleration) of the constant growth in processing power and storage we've come to expect from Moore's Law.

July 9, 1999
SF Chronicle: Amazon.com Conjures Up Transatlantic Battle Over British Book. "This is an example of people getting the book they want when they want it,'' said Bill Curry, a spokesman for the online bookseller. "The world is going to have to change to keep up with the Internet. The Internet makes the notion of territorial rights archaic.''

• Atlantic Monthly: From September 10, 1998; Life, Liberty and the Pursuity of Copyright?
• NuvoMedia Press Release: From April 28, 1999; Company Announces Territorial Rights Management System for RocketEditions. Each online bookseller is assigned to operate only in a specific eBook territory or territories, and may only purchase books for resale in those territories.

Upside: Web Banners Suck. At the golf site Chipshot.com, they found that the "enthusiasts," the real golfers who go to the chat rooms to get tips from the experts and read articles about shaving a point off their handicap, were not buyers. The amateurs buy.

• Useit.Com: From February 7, 1999; Why People Shop on the Web

• Web Review: From October 30, 1998; Building a Synonymous Search Index. Peter Morville.

News.Com: Excite@Home to subsidize AOL members who sign up. Excite@Home claims that cable networks are open to unaffiliated Internet service providers, and therefore don't need regulatory interference, because @Home users can easily access third-party content such as AOL's.

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

PC Week: Dell aiming to boost service in real time. For starters, the company is working on a real-time online chat service that will link customers and technicians. Although company officials last week declined to offer specifics, they said the first phase of the project is due this fall.

Salon: The Web can't make racists. Scott Rosenberg. Enough members of the media and enough of its audience now have their own direct experience of the Web; any suggestion that it can "make" people do anything sounds, well, crazy.

ZDNN: Webvan feeds billion-dollar expansion. Webvan Group Inc., a fast-growing online grocery merchant, is placing a $1 billion order for Bechtel Group to build highly automated warehouses in 26 markets across the U.S.

• Business Week: From May 10, 1999; The Delivery Dilemma Could Box In E-Commerce

News.Com: Suretrade on solid ground after 3-day traffic jam. "We were having tremendous slowdowns, though the system was never down. We did stress-testing last weekend before making the changes, so we thought we were going to be all right.''

TechWeb: HotSamba Targets Manufacturing. Onesto said heavy goods manufacturers often require catalog functionality that supports millions of parts with complex viewing and searching features.

July 10, 1999
NY Times: Hidden in the Web. Max Frankel, former New York Times Executive Editor. All the New Media whose stock is soaring on Wall Street are parasites, feeding off the work and investments of the Old. As the Old grow weaker, the true cost to readers -- and to society -- will become sadly evident.

• Online Journalism Review: From April 9, 1999; Old Media Firms Dig a Grave With Shovelware
• Useit.Com: From August 23, 1998; The End of Legacy Media
• Adweek: From July 1, 1999; The IQ Q&A: The New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.

Mapppa.Mundi Magazine: I see toasters. Vinton G. Cerf. I see hundreds of millions if not billions of internet-enabled devices populating the Internet as the next decade approaches its last few years.

InfoWorld: How technology will change the future of IT. "IT is the strategic weapon for the battle of the customer," Canton says. With Internet commerce rapidly changing the economy, customer service will soon become the driving force behind any IT job.

• CIO WebBusiness: From December 1, 1998; Tomorrowland. Q&A with Bran Ferren, executive vice president for creative technology and R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering.

Mappa.Mundi Magazine: Maps: Tim Bray's Hyperlink Totems from 1995. Bray used statistical characteristics to map the key landmarks of the Web in 1995, highlighting the largest, most visible and connected Web sites.

July 11, 1999
Useit.Com: Web Research: Believe the Data. Do not ignore research: it can improve your site by several hundred percent. Even when a specific project does not have data from its exact customers using its exact site, it should use general data about the average behavior of Web users with common sites.

Salon: Do we really need an Internet time capsule? Isn't the Web itself already a giant time capsule of forgotten sites that never die, a mass of home pages documenting pop arcana from our past?

• Builder.Com: From June 21, 1999; Everyday Life in Cyberspace. Dan Shafer.

• PC World: From July 2, 1999; Webscapes in the Works. One of Microsoft's alternative interfaces uses the "Data Mountain" metaphor. The interface presents Web pages as icons that you drag onto a data map. You can group pages in any way.
• Microsoft Press Release: Microsoft, Xerox to Bridge Digital and Paper Worlds. In addition, Microsoft has licensed the Xerox PARC-developed WebForager, a user-interface technology that enables Web surfers to leaf through the virtual pages of the Net...

• Red Herring: From June 1997; Long-arm Tactics. In the cable world, he says, multisystem operators built an infrastructure, established a network to distribute other companies' programming, and then branched out into creating content themselves. In Mr. Leonsis's view, AOL has reached the content-creation stage.

• BBC News: From July 8, 1999; Touching the web

July 12, 1999
Industry Standard: A Modest Proposal? Agency.com's "Immersibility Index," is a methodology codeveloped with design specialists Nielsen Norman Group and consulting firm Gomoll Research and Design. The index will create benchmarks in four site-design categories: ease of use, branding, content and functionality.

• Immersibility.Org: About the Immersibility Index. The Immersibility Index is a method which allows people from varying disciplines to evaluate a Web site holistically.

PC Magazine: IBM Oversells the Net. John C. Dvorak. The Internet is one of the most important breakthroughs in human-to-human communications since the invention of radio, but that doesn't mean you can move your company to the desert.

Industry Standard: The Internet Cloud. [William Gibson] "Clouds are numinous," Gibson says. "But the cloud's main usefulness lies in its vagueness, like cyberspace – a word which is also useful for its vagueness."

USA Today: Companies seek access to Net fares. Corporations with big travel accounts typically negotiate with airlines for discounts of up to 30%. But travel managers can wind up embarrassed when employees find better prices on the Web.

Scietific American: The Future of Computing. Michael L. Dertouzos. When I say "ease of use," I do not mean incorporating more colors and floating animals into our systems. I mean true ease of use, even if the interaction is only via text.

SJ Mercury: IBM's strategy for evolving PC industry. Q&A with Phil Hester, VP and CTO for IBM's Personal Systems Group. With the cost coming down, we have gotten through a portion of the economic barrier. But the whole idea of complexity, or ease of use, is now more important than ever.

ClickZ: A Whole New Style Of Writing. So how did the first two examples get it wrong? They were written in a broadcast style. It's the kind of writing you find in a mass mailing. Not very targeted, and often full of pressure and breathless, insincere enthusiasm.

• Useit.Com: From October 1, 1997; How Users Read on the Web

News.Com: Specialty e-tailers broaden scope, dilute brands? [Ben Boyd, BarnesandNoble.Com spokesman] "We understand the bandwidth of our brand and we won't go beyond that," Boyd said. "We're not going to sell pet food."

Industry Standard: Gray Market Blues. While there is nothing new about gray markets, the Internet has created extra complications for manufacturers trying to control how their goods are distributed.

• SF Chronicle: From July 7, 1999; Amazon.com Conjures Up Transatlantic Battle Over British Book.

Interactive Week: 'Consumer Reports' Woos Subscribers. "Consumers are willing to pay - albeit a modest amount; but nonetheless they're willing to spend money if they value the information they are getting..."

• Useit.Com: From June 1, 1997; The Fallacy of Atypical Web Examples.

Internet Week: Keynote To Introduce Web Performance-Measuring Service. Dubbed Perspective 4.0, the new service can provide data on the effects of caching on site performance, mean and median page response times, and differences in performance in various geographical areas.

Interactive Week: Searching For Direction. "It's the content-commerce collision," said Chris Charron, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "The Internet will force together prime content players and prime commerce sites in specific vertical categories. Commerce is where the money is at."

July 13, 1999
Freedom Forum: Wired, Hotwired: same name, different game. Jon Katz. There's a need for a successor to help explain the next great wave of technological digital evolution. And an opportunity. Journalism didn't do it in Wired's heyday, and isn't doing it now.

High Five: Profile of Andrew Sather of Sapient. I like to think of the Internet than I do the Web because I think the Web is just one component. The Web may or may not stay with us. The technologies will continue to evolve, but I think the underlying infrastructure the Internet represents is what really is going to transform the world.

• Useit.Com: From September 20, 1998; Does Internet = Web?

[clip]: Reinventing Infrastructure. Companies have to realize that infrastructure is not just about IT platforms, Bell says. It's also about physical infrastructure and integrating and optimizing where value is created.

• USA Today: From February 28, 1999; Technology is 'demolishing' time, distance

Marketing Computers: ZD Leads Another Standards Group. To set standards for customer satisfaction, about 200 business, community and e-commerce leaders led by Ziff-Davis have organized under the guise of the Council for Internet Commerce.

Seattle Times: Used booksellers thrive in online market. While independent booksellers marketing new books lose ground to chains and Amazon.com, sellers of secondhand books appear to be thriving.

• NY Times: From November 17, 1998; Beyond Bestsellers: Online Buyers Mine the Backlist

News.Com: DoubleClick buys NetGravity. DoubleClick provides global Internet advertising solutions for marketers and Web publishers, while NetGravity provides interactive online advertising and direct marketing software solutions.

[clip]: Marketing By Permission. According to Godin, every commercial website should be set up with one goal: "To sign up strangers to give permission to market to them.

• Business 2.0: From March 1999; Debate between Seth Godin and Jakob Nielsen. 112KB PDF file.

ClickZ: General Motors Reaches Out to Young Buyers on the Web. By failing to provide dealer cost data, it is essentially telling increasingly savvy Internet buyers that they'll need to go to Autobytel, Carpoint, or some other third-party service for the information they really want...

SJ Mercury: Heat Wave in Ideas. Ultimately, IBM hopes that the results of Monday's session -- called Summer Jam '99 and held simultaneously at IBM research centers and development laboratories around the world -- will be more than an exercise in free thinking.

July 14, 1999
TechWeb: Door Is Closing On Portals, Analysts Say. "Portals project the same content to every visitor," said David Kilpatrick, a managing director at Fulcrum. "The community thing is going to happen; people will be more geared to personal preference rather than general portals."

• Useit.Com: From April 15, 1997; Do Websites Have Increasing Returns?

• InfoWorld: From June 26, 1999; Hardware vendors trade systems for revenues

ClickZ: The New Business Frontier. Service can't be measured on a purely objective scale and reported on by a web bot. Most of all, service can't be shrink-wrapped and boxed and sold to your competition.

Information Week: Web Commerce Means E-Service. Knowledge bases, chat technology, and click-to-talk products can all help improve customer service on the Web, but the key is for companies to make online customer service a priority.

• Useit.Com: From December 27, 1998; Predictions for the Web in 1999. Automated email responses are no better than having people interact with a website, except that the response times balloon into several minutes per interaction.

Wired News: Audiohighway: We Own Net Music. [Ron Moore, general counsel for Diamond Multimedia] "I guess that would be like Ford saying that since he created the first car nobody else can build cars," Moore said. "If you take a stance like that you better be prepared to litigate it."

Red Herring: Head's up. But the sad fact is that the majority of PR professionals blast the same message to every outlet without considering where their press release is going or how important it is.

• Doc Searls: From January 1992; The Problem with PR

• Useit.Com: From September 1, 1997; Why Advertising Doesn't Work on the Web

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

July 15, 1999
Columbia Journalism Review: New Media, Old Values. Non-journalistic Web sites like Yahoo!, America Online, and bn.com, the Barnes & Noble site, have people doing work that is essentially journalistic in nature, from writing stories to choosing relevant links. So who has the right to call himself an online journalist?

• Online News Association: Mission of the ONA
• USA Today: From May 19, 1999; Twosome tells wired world what's news

RCFoC: A Giant Step! Instantly, the geographic distinctions, based on who has a Knowledge Age infrastructure, disperse like smoke -- anyone, anyplace, can plug in and join the Knowledge Age economy.

Harvard Business Review: How E-Commerce Will Trump Brand Management. Summary of article. Customers will actively engage companies and aggressively seek information, allowing marketers to drastically reduce their often wasted efforts to capture consumer attention.

• Doc Searls: From October 10, 1997; The New Character of Positioning

News.Com: U.N. nixes Net tax proposal. The United Nations doesn't endorse any kind of global tax on Internet use to finance development aid, the administrator of the U.N.'s Development Program said.

TechWeb: Data-Mining Apps Flush Out Lost Sales. The plumbing-supply company uses data-mining applications running on its IBM RS/6000 server to help identify potential sources of lost revenue.

MSNBC: Are banner ads making a comeback? Yahoo president Jeff Mallet sees the Internet moving from a "spot buy, click-through environment" to a medium where major marketers develop strategic, long-term campaigns on a regular basis.

USA Today: P&G lathers online ad revolution. "It's hard to believe that consumers will choose a Pepto-Bismol experience no matter how cleverly crafted it is."

SF Chronicle: NextCard Files Suit Against Providian. ...NextCard accused Providian of duplicating key elements of one of its most effective Web ads, a banner that uses a descending thermometer to represent falling interest rates.

Wired News: Net's Change of Address. After four years of testing, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority on Thursday rolled out Version 6 of the Internet Protocol, the next-generation numeric addressing system for the global network.

Upside: E-books Breakthrough. Initially, ClearType will likely sharpen proprietary applications and operating systems, but Microsoft is considering making it more widely available.

Red Herring: Comet Systems' cursor points to more Web advertising. "Comet Systems is in the business of novelty and setting yourself apart," he says. "It is the only company I am aware of that has a dynamic cursor. It will be a novelty as long as that lasts."

USA Today: Employers fed up with e-résumés. Some companies are getting thousands of résumés dumped into e-mail boxes each day. Others are fed up with mass e-mailed résumés and yearn for a more personal touch.

Wired News: Kia Motors Sabotages Self. Between October 1997 and June 1998, the company's customer feedback email page fed comments into a publicly accessible location. The resulting Web page paints an unintentionally candid and embarrassing picture of the car.

Forbes: E-blame. "We're all trying to figure out what went wrong at Ebay and whether we are at risk," says Steven Abatangle, Webmaster at E-Loan, an on-line mortgage broker in Dublin, Calif. "My entire life revolves around trying to keep that kind of thing from happening."

July 16, 1999
The Economist: Caught in the web. The Internet, however, will prove more than a new distribution channel for news. It is going to undermine the economics that underpins the newspaper business.

• American Society of Newspaper Editors: From April 13, 1999; A Conversation with Andy Grove

Upside: Wal-Mart's Revenge. As mass-market customers come to dominate the Web population, they will change the brand decision process.

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

Freedom Forum: Internet revolution may work against speech rights, author says. "Every revolution encounters resistance from the powers that be," he said. "We'll see it from companies that don't like the fact that they can't predict the behavior of their consumers as they once did."

The Economist: Digital rights and wrongs. Digital-rights management, particularly the sort that refers each transaction to a third party, produces enormous amounts of "information exhaust", as Intertrust puts it. The company sees this as a good thing.

Editor & Publisher: The Effectiveness of Content Sponsorships. Steve Outing. The research sought to determine if these sponsorships were effective, and how Web readers of news sites felt about the ads and the content to which the ads are attached.

Fortune: Narus: These Guys Know What You're Doing on the Net. By placing special software on a network, Narus generates reports that do all this: track the amount of network bandwidth allocated to e-mail in a given month; differentiate between videoconferencing calls and voice-over-Internet phone calls...

Web Review: Ted Nelson to Reveal All at Perl Conference. He will explain, as far as possible in the half hour he's been given, enfilade theory and the resulting architecture of the two Xanadu systems that were sponsored by Autodesk during its ownership of Xanadu. All that code is being made open.

Microsoft Press Release: 40 Top Researchers Explore "Invisible Computing" at Summer Institute Hosted by the University of Washington and Microsoft Research. The sessions will cover everything from new user interfaces and sensors to network-based services and network infrastructures.

Editor & Publisher: Copyright Permissions Just Got Easier. When asked about future plans for CCC Online, Funkhouser sees the potential for CCC buttons being located at the bottom of story pages to put readers one click away from reproduction rights.

InfoWorld: IBM offers online-privacy consulting. The core elements are a privacy workshop that suggests ways to responsibly handle customer information, and an implementation plan that offers ideas for developing and carrying out consumer and employee privacy strategies.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of a task specific browser optimized for accessing auction information. I expect we will see many more such specialized user interfaces to supplement the generic browser.

Wired News: EBay Browser Tracks Auctions. While viewing an auction on eBay's site, a user can keep track of various bidding wars by clicking on them and adding them to the browser's Auction Tracker.

Web Review: XHTML: Our last, best hope for clean code. The W3C has taken the logical step of expressing the HTML 4.0 standard in XML instead of using the more complicated SGML.

• W3C: HyperText Markup Language Activity Statement

Wired News: Net Bands To Vie for Shelf Space. But with only 100 slots per site to fill on the kiosk, artist selection and placement becomes more political. "It's the reality of selling stuff..."

July 17, 1999
SJ Mercury: Patent War Pending. Welcome to the new era for patents, a field that has emerged as one of the fiercest and slipperiest battlegrounds between established companies and their online rivals.

• Useit.Com: From May 31, 1998; Micro-Containers: An Example of Strategic Web Thinking. In general, the Web is different from many earlier changes in the business environment in allowing for patents for many of the new business strategies because they are supported by technology.
• ZDNN: From May 17, 1999; Berners-Lee warns against Net patents
• Red Herring: From May 1999; I'm gonna sue your ass!
• Industry Standard: From April 23, 1999; The Problem With Patents. Lawrence Lessig.

Mappa.Mundi Magazine: Multicasting Matters. Multicasting is thus more than a potential cost saving for one particular user, it is an important way to allow us to scale the global IP network up to handle new classes of applications.

SJ Mercury: Online reliability will carry a price. Dan Gillmor. But asking for better quality isn't enough. People have to patronize the companies that provide quality, and have to be willing to pay more.

July 18, 1999
American Journalism Review: Fear.com. If newspaper executives haven't fully grasped the extent of changes in communication or the opportunity the Web represents, then the story of online newspapering is as much about culture as business.

• Wired: From September 1994; Online or Not, Newspapers Suck. Jon Katz.
• Online Journalism Review: From March 10, 1999; Online Journalism: The Medium and the Message. An all-day conference March 10, 1999, at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

• Fortune: From November 23, 1998; Thank God AOL Is Not Like FORTUNE Magazine. Stewart Alsop.

July 19, 1999
CBS MarketWatch: Magazines losing ad biz to Net. Advertising is starting to appear to be what it always has been: an expense, not a profit center. And transactions, especially online transactions, are becoming seen for what they are: good ways to make money.

NY Times: A New Model for the Internet: Fees for Services. [Mark Anderson, president and editor of the Strategic News Service Online newsletter] "Interactivity," such as it was, mostly involved surfing aimlessly from site to site. But as people became familiar with the Web, that became much less thrilling.

• Business 2.0: From March 1999; Debate between Seth Godin and Jakob Nielsen. 112KB PDF file.
• Useit.Com: From January 25, 1998; The Case for Micropayments

Business Week: The Information Gold Mine. ''Our store will be completely redecorated for each and every customer,'' vows Amazon. com's Bezos--but he says that could take up to 10 years.

Business Week: Collaborating with the Customer. Q&A with Martha Rogers and Don Peppers. It's not just using the information I know about a customer to figure out better-targeted harassment. Instead, it's about figuring out what this customer needs next from us, when, in what form, at what price, and how.

PC World: Big Sites Win Support Awards. "Delivering good support on the Web is an enormously difficult problem that often involves thousands of documents, complex navigation and search tactics, and an unusually demanding customer base..."

SJ Mercury: How interactivity is transforming politics of music. Jon Katz. The recording industry argues that the very future of intellectual property and copyright is at stake. Perhaps -- but so is the labels' frightful, staggeringly lucrative stranglehold over the acquisition and distribution of music.

Wired News: Old Guard Pshaws Digital Music. [Al Teller, founder and CEO of Atomic Pop] "How do we program for presenting music to meaningful constituencies of people, as opposed to the sort of blanketing approach that has been the approach [of the labels] for a long time."

Interactive Week: Chat Services Tap Into AOL. If major industry players, who have long-sought standards in the instant messaging sector move to tap into the AOL service, it could create the equivalent of a de facto standard for linking users on competing instant messaging platforms.

Red Herring: New York Times gets Abuzz. Abuzz is a knowledge management company. It builds question-and-answer software that routes questions to the appropriate expert within an organization.

Adweek: Enliven Announces New Features. "It's about control," said Excite@Home vice president of market development Susan Bratton. "Advertisers have a lot more control over the users' experience."

Interactive Week: Banner Ads Get Chatty. A key feature of the Enliven approach is the use of Java embedded in the banner ad to keep a line of communication open, making it possible to retrieve and display updated information on a real-time basis.

LA Times: Search Engines Win Round in Playboy's Trademark Suit. Internet search engines aren't in violation of trademark laws when they sell advertisements linked to such trademarked terms as Playboy and Playmate, according to a recent ruling by a federal judge in Santa Ana.

Interactive Week: Net Start-Ups Globalize The Web. "Right now we have a situation where many e-commerce companies either put the emphasis on the buyer for being responsible for all costs at the delivery point, or choose not to do business internationally..."

NY Times: MIT and Harvard Give Boston a Niche. Boston is full of editors these days, now that the city has become something of a center for publications about technology and business.

July 20, 1999
Editor & Publisher: Moving Beyond the Banner. [Tom Kohn, VP business development and ad sales at USAToday.com] "Agencies want results. (Ordinary) banners don't have the effectiveness." Kohn continues, "We don't have a problem with Homer Simpson chasing a doughnut and sliding into a banner."

• NY Times: From June 17, 1999; Banner Ads Are Under the Gun -- and on the Move. ...Web publishers and interactive advertising agencies have been under pressure to experiment with different types of campaigns -- and the results are increasingly visible on users' screens.

• Forbes: From June 14, 1999; Libertarian.net

• Useit.Com: From May 31, 1998; Micro-Containers: An Example of Strategic Web Thinking. The point is not to forecast the exact future of the Web but to understand the range of possible transitions such that you can be ready for them and such that you can drive your site in those directions that are promising.

News.Com: Net latecomers could miss holiday profits. The complex tasks of integrating Web orders with existing back-end computer systems, stress-testing the Web site, and creating back-up systems to avoid costly down time take too long to start from scratch now...

Industry Standard: From July 9, 1998; Fear and Loathing on the Web. Christopher Locke. But the Web isn't television. Individuals have strong opinions. That's largely why they came to the party in the first place. They couldn't care less about bland pages full of sterile corporate happy talk.

News.Com: ICQ gets vocal with telephony. America Online's ICQ today said it will partner with Internet telephony company Net2Phone to give ICQ users the ability to make phone calls over the Net.

ZDNN: New flap over e-commerce tax. The National Association of Counties, meeting in St. Louis, is expected to urge Congress to pass a law that allows equal taxation of online, telephone and physical store sales.

Wired News: Record Stores Keep on Spinning. But Pillar argued that digital retailing can't stand in for today's CD sales until the buying experience is completely comfortable for the general public -- "not when it is comfortable for the people in this room."

July 21, 1999
PC Week: Sinking support costs. As e-commerce continues to boom, creating customer-support volume and cost pressures, a growing number of e-businesses are discovering that the more sophisticated their software is for automating customer interaction, the better off they are.

Internet World: Nothing Personal. Automated e-mail responses don't improve at all on impersonal telephone menu systems. The Web is interactive by nature--can't it do better?

Internet World: A System Devised to Fine-Tune Search. When it comes to helping customers choose cards out of that heap, though, Sparks.com may be at a disadvantage: It has to create an online equivalent to the real world's nearly perfect search interface.

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

IBM developerWorks: A divided approach to Web site design: Separating content and visuals for rapid results. By separating the visual "look and feel" of a site from its content during the early stages of design and testing, designers can greatly speed up Web site creation.

• devhead: From January 21, 1999; Prototyping Web Designs. Jakob Nielsen.

IBM developerWorks: Finding out what users want from your Web site: Techniques for gathering requirements and tasks. Here are a few practical ways to quickly identify user expectations, both in terms of the content and the functionality of your Web site.

• devhead: From February 18, 1999; Survey Your Users. Jakob Nielsen.

InfoWorld: Microsoft buys U.K.-based STNC for mobile access. STNC's technology will be used in future digital cellular products to let users read e-mail, view calendars, and access the Internet...

Wired News: Doubleclick: The PC-TV is DOA. "It all just keeps diverging, and the same thing is going to happen on the Internet," O'Connor said. The inherent nature of the two -- TV being passive and the Net being interactive -- makes a blend of the two unlikely...

NY Times: Bill on Internet Liquor Sales Becomes Larger Cause. ...the issue has erupted into a high-stakes battle between major liquor distributors and small wineries and breweries -- and one with a potential long-term effect on states rights, Internet taxation and electronic commerce.

July 22, 1999
News.Com: Here come the dinosaurs. The recent partnership between Drugstore.com and GNC and Rite Aid is just one example of the new dynamic we will see more of on the Web. Internet companies provide the speed, customer interface, technology, and Web knowledge, and traditional companies contribute fulfillment and a trusted brand.

Boston Globe: Ad-based applications. Simson Garfinkel. But the biggest difference between the Andover Web-based applications and traditional computer apps is the advertising. Andover.Net is a network of advertiser-supported Web sites.

• FEED Magazine: From December 9, 1998; Apple's Soft Sell. Steven Johnson.

Interactive Week: 30-second Interview with Robert Burgess. Robert Burgess, CEO of Macromedia. The Web today is powerful, but it is still a silent, static, slow medium. It is difficult for consumers to enjoy it as much as, say, TV.

ZDNN: AOL blasts MS instant message service. [Ann Brackbill, senior VP for communications at AOL] "Microsoft is violating the cardinal rule of the Internet by asking AOL Instant Messenger users for their passwords and screen names. And its unauthorized access of the AOL namespace is akin to hacking."

• ZDNN: From March 29, 1999; Instant islands in the Net
• Microsoft Press Release: Microsoft and Several Leading Internet Companies Support Creation Of Industry Standard for Instant Messaging and Online Presence Protocols
• Netscape TechVision: From December 31, 1996; The Collabra Decision. Marc Andreessen.

Wired News: Brandwise.com a Tough Sell? But just how unbiased can the reviews be, given that among its financial backers is Whirlpool, one of the largest appliance makers in the world? Brandwise.com executives insist the company will provide honest reviews and reveal all -- good and bad.

Newsweek: History: We're Losing It. The fragility of electronic media isn't the only problem. Much of the hardware and software configurations needed to tease intelligible information from preserved disks and tapes are disappearing in the name of progress.

Upside: Ipix: Inside the Bubble. But Ipix says its secret weapon is its patent, which gives it a lock on the use of fish-eye lenses to create panoramas.

Wired News: IPIX: Our Patents Are Rock Solid. IPIX has vigorously pursued legal action against competitors that it believes infringe on its patented technique. That has angered both competitors and many VR developers.

Salon: Copyright -- or wrong? Until this legislation, online copyright laws were vague at best, but thanks to this law, Internet service providers are now required to remove Web sites that allegedly break copyright laws -- even before the copyright infringement has been proven.

RCFoC: We've Only Just Begun! If a growing number of people are looking to purchases services that can save them time, what OTHER businesses might the Web + local delivery, enable?

Forbes ASAP: Taking the pulse of America. According to Kiley, "The reliability of public opinion polling is based on the proposition that everyone has an equal chance of being selected. Since polling on the Internet is self-selecting, it tends to distort the sample."

July 23, 1999
Salon: Boom or bubble? Scott Rosenberg. If these executives aren't worrying about making money, what do they worry about? Two things, it seems: talent and users.

Forbes: Wanted: A lot of employees. One individual who recently interviewed with Amazon for an executive position recalls that the woman conducting the interview, a Microsoft alumna, said: "We have slots to fill everywhere," and that "this place is bedlam."

NY Times: New Media Helps Old Media Hold Off Forecasts of Doom. The rush among Internet companies to promote their brands to computer users is turning into a gold rush for television, radio, newspapers, magazines and outdoor advertising, not to mention the mainstay Madison Avenue agencies.

Editor & Publisher: Infoseek Pres: Provide News You Can Use. [Harry Motro, CEO and president of InfoSeek] Now, content is created by merchants and users, not just by reporters, producers, and advertisers. The future will dictate how content from each creator will be integrated...

MSNBC: From hack to honcho. The contention stems from this core belief: that in the Information Age, information providers naturally become more highly valued. That means journalists, librarians and other information providers are in higher demand and are attracting higher salaries.

• USA Today: From May 26, 1999; Anthropologists adapt technology to world's cultures

Interactive Week: AOL Blocks Rival's Instant Messaging Access. AOL also has asked Prodigy for payments to make the AOL messaging system interoperable with the Prodigy offering, according to Prodigy Chief Technology Officer Bill Kirtner.

Wired News: AOL Blockades Microsoft. He said that some time ago AOL did openly publish a protocol for instant messaging, but that "interestingly it wasn't the same protocol that ended up being used in AIM."

• Netscape TechVision: From December 31, 1996; The Collabra Decision. Marc Andreessen.

SJ Mercury: Challenge to business: `click and mortar'. Dan Gillmor. But when you put those together into something more seamless, combining technology and people, you can do things for customers that online-only operations can't match.

A List Apart: Execution Versus Concept. Seduced by our tools, we plunge deeper and deeper into realms of pure visual stimulation, forgetting that the image we labor over was once intended to communicate an idea.

Wired News: The Future of Broadband. But researchers are concerned that there may be too much interest in broadband's financial prospects, and not enough time spent worrying over how to supply the entertainment to engage media-hungry users.

Wired News: AltaVista Nixes Paid Search. AltaVista announced Thursday it would stop its controversial policy of auctioning off the results to popular search terms.

• Salon: From April 22, 1999; Is AltaVista on the take? Scott Rosenberg.

July 24, 1999
Online Journalism Review: The Mythical Press Box. Just imagine my bewilderment these past four years since becoming an online sports journalist as the very public relations and sports information people who welcomed me and often invited me into their press boxes now question my right to work there.

PC Magazine: The Networking of Everyday Things. The applications for pagers, cellular phones, watches, PDAs, and other digital inter-ruption devices are obvious, but imagine a warehouse that tells you where the carton you're looking for is located, no matter how often it's been moved.

Freedom Forum: New surveys show digital TV a bust. And in those homes with high-speed lines, people will discover and explore "an environment featuring visual imagery, audio accompaniment, and participatory interaction via an invisible interface," according to Forrester's summary.

• Forrester Press Release: Broadband Will Redefine The Online Experience, But Talent And Backing Are Needed

• Salon: From July 7, 1999; Dangling conversations

SJ Mercury: AOL battles rivals over instant messaging. As of Saturday afternoon, Microsoft engineers, who twice posted patches to get around the AOL blockade, were working to update their MSN Messenger software yet again...

InfoWorld: Back to the future: Why we reverted to the former InfoWorld.com Web site. An interesting sidelight has been discussion among readers and staff members about whether InfoWorld itself should cover this story. The answer is yes.

July 25, 1999
NY Times: A Planned Internet Yellow Pages Draws Federal Scrutiny. Aggravating an already charged political dispute over its monopoly control of Internet addresses, Network Solutions Inc. on Monday is set to introduce a new Yellow Pages-type directory for the Internet, built around valuable data that the Clinton administration insists belong to the public.

SJ Mercury: Why FCC isn't pushing AT&T to share its pipes. Dan Gillmor. If you want a reason to support Kennard, the best one is that he's trying to kick the phone companies -- among the most flagrantly abusive monopolists around -- into a competitive mode.

NY Times: Now, Endless Words From Our Sponsor. [Advertisements on Free-PCs] Colorful high-tech enticements swirl with animation, pleading to remove me from the task at hand, be it word processing, surfing the Net or sending e-mail.

• FEED Magazine: From December 9, 1998; Apple's Soft Sell. Steven Johnson.

FEED Magazine: Amazon's Expansion And The E-Merger. The need to hit $2 billion in sales is what motivates Amazon both to sell goods below cost, and to embrace so many new sales categories, from food to pets to prescription drugs to Game Boys.

July 26, 1999
Industry Standard: The Network Effect. As eBay learned, second-order feedback effects mean that people show up faster than hosts can add capacity – let alone solve existing problems. Welcoming the unexpected crowds is like drinking from a fire hose.

Information Week: Dirty Linen On The Web. Once again, we face the legacy of years of building systems that know all about how computers work and almost nothing about what humans need.

ClickZ: Permission Fades. If you want permission granted to translate into long-term sales and a growing ROI, you need to keep that permission fresh and renewed.

Forbes: From nuclear bombs to net assets. High-power algorithms and supercomputers, the muscle-bound, multimillion-dollar machines long used to design nuclear warheads and forecast the weather, have cracked the business market.

PC World: Wireless Standard Surfaces. Besides offering wireless connectivity among mobile phones, computers, headsets, and other devices, Bluetooth is also expected to provide wireless Internet access on a local area network.

ClickZ: Escaping the Cult of Click-Through. Online advertising has a leg up on traditional advertising; it is more measurable. We just need to use metrics that show its true strength.

• Upside: From July 26, 1998; Forget Branding!

Industry Standard: Clicks and Mortar. As you've probably guessed, the basic concept behind "clicks and mortar" is that the most successful businesses of this remarkable era will combine the power of the Internet with the ability to operate effectively in the offline world.

Forbes: Ghost in the machine. Neugents are learning algorithms. They have evolved from so-called neural networks, a technology based on pattern recognition that works much like human brain cells.

Internet Week: Call Center Breakthrough. In an ideal integrated environment, all types of messages, whether they're received via phone, fax, e-mail, online or as handwritten notes, would funnel into a centralized call center.

• PC Week: From July 19, 1999; Sinking support costs

July 27, 1999
[clip]: The New Face of Networking. Q&A with Novell CEO Eric Schmidt. I can tell you from personal experience, that it's very different when you don't have to think, pause, delay and wait for a dial-up and wait for an authentication. The right model is to always be connected, so it will always be there.

Wired News: Universal: Don't Link to Us. "Every time someone posts something on the Internet it's now for public viewing and most of the time I'm just pointing to the address," said Jean-Pierre Bazinet, owner of Movie-List. "I don't see how you can copyright or make restrictions on posting an address."

PC Week: UUNet kicks off ambitious data center expansion. "Over the last two years we've really seen that customers' Web sites have become much more mission-critical, and they have been looking to outsource their hosting at a higher level..."

Fortune: In the New Age Of Data, EMC Rules. One reason for soaring storage demand is that businesses just can't stop gathering data. Everybody knows that information, especially about customers, will be increasingly critical, but few are mining data effectively yet.

PC Magazine: IBM's 11-Terabyte Server. Yesterday, it launched what it claims is the world's largest storage system, the Enterprise Storage Server (code-named Shark), which is about the size of a shower stall and handles up to 11 terabytes of data.

News.Com: IBM buys Mylex, beefs up storage arsenal. IBM will purchase Mylex as it continues to beef up its storage business and adds to the arsenal in its increasingly important Technology Group.

NY Times: Rush Is On in Europe for Wireless Data Services. Improbable as it may seem, Valtonen is part of a very serious rush across Europe into wireless data services that is keeping the Continent, along with Japan, well ahead of the slower-moving United States.

NY Times: Forced to Compete in Wireless Technology, Japan Becomes a Global Power. Already, Japanese cell phones, which used to be second-rate and expensive, have evolved into devices to buy and sell stocks, reserve tickets for trains and airplanes, transfer funds between bank accounts and send and receive text messages and simple drawings.

SF Chronicle: Mattel to Sell Furniture Online. "Furniture in and of itself is a very nonprogressive industry,'' he said. ``Many manufacturers and some retailers want to protect their dealer network. It hasn't evolved with the times.''

News.Com: Net start-ups lure services execs. ...they do believe there's a growing movement as more and more senior executives of traditional services, consulting, and software firms seek the larger opportunities and greater creative freedom associated with Internet-related start-ups.

Fortune: How I Judge if a Website Deserves My Business. Stewart Alsop. If Wall Street can decide that dot.com companies are worth some multiple of my business with them, then I think I can construct an index that shows their value to me.

Salon: Should journalists and IPOs mix? Scott Rosenberg. The good news is that the dynamic of information flow on the Net makes it very hard to hide such conflicts for long. Rather than try to hide them, smarter institutions are learning to protect their credibility by disclosing early and often.

PC World: Palm Will WAP Up the Web. 3Com's Palm Computing division has quietly thrown its weight behind the Wireless Application Protocol, an emerging technology designed to bring Web browsing capabilities to mobile phones, handheld computers and pagers.

PC Week: Amid instant messaging brouhaha, Lotus debuts Sametime upgrade. Lotus, for its part, partnered with AOL in January to incorporate the Dulles, Va., company's proprietary communications technology in version 1.5 of Sametime.

Webmonkey: Sending Search-Engine Traffic to Your Site. The specialists call it search-engine optimization, but search-engine workers just label it spam because it usually involves some sort of trickery.

Forbes: Different from television. But beyond the question of what the actual delivery device will be is the equally important question of what kind of content will be offered.

Forbes: Q&A with Richard Gingras. Every medium is driven by the characteristics of user interaction, so when I look at broadband interactive services, for instance, I don't first make the connection to television. I make connections to a computer.

July 28, 1999
ClickZ: Be The Brand! A company's web site IS the brand. It's the hub of consumer experience, the place where all aspects of a company, from its annual report to its products to its support, intersect.

Executive Edge: Hatching the Helibus. Gartner Group. Helibus project gives its global partners the authority to design the details they build. Design engineers in far-distant locations contribute in virtually real time to a three-dimensional electronic mockup that goes together like the real thing.

Computerworld: Firms design service for engineering on the Web. The companies will announce e-Vis.com, a subscription-based service on the Web that will let manufacturers share engineering documents, product data and design information with project teams.

Online Journalism Review: AOL Wants It Any Way That Profits Itself. AOL, more than any TV network or other media organization, gets to shape the table of contents for information that its viewers will presume is important.

• Online Journalism Review: From November 24, 1998; Portals are Power

Editor & Publisher: Coming Soon: Eye Track Research for Online News. Steve Outing. Poynter and Stanford University have joined forces to conduct a modern version of eye track research on online news sites.

MSNBC: Venture turns to AOL for online polling. Advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding has a new tactic for delving into the hearts and minds of mainstream consumers: canvassing America Online’s more than 17 million users.

Business Week: SoftBook's James Sachs: A New Page for a Gadget Guru. [James Sachs, founder of SoftBook] Despite the slow start, Sachs remains confident that E-books in one form or another eventually will become ubiquitous.

• Useit.Com: From July 26, 1998; Electronic Books - A Bad Idea
• Wired: From July 1998; Ex Libris. The joys of curling up with a good digital reading device.

News.Com: Apple invests $100 million in Samsung. The investment will "ensure that Apple is on the cutting edge of flat panel display technology," Steve Jobs, Apple's interim chief executive, said in a statement.

Red Herring: Lycos starts $70 million venture fund. The fund has a broad target: Internet-based startups. "Our sweet spot is any technology that could benefit from a distribution deal with Lycos," says Dennis Ciccone, managing director of Lycos Ventures.

Wired News: Palming Prescriptions. Med-i-nets.com is developing pharm-i-net, an electronic prescription pad. The hand-held computer will have a browser-based application to send prescriptions to pharmacies using a secure Internet connection.

PC World: Sneak Peek at AT&T's Photo, Speech Wares. A preview of a photo management application and speech recognition research were among the surprise highlights at an AT&T Labs open house here this week.

July 29, 1999
News.Com: Home Depot wants its suppliers off the Net. Home Depot, in a letter to more than 1,000 vendors including Black & Decker, Scotts, and General Electric, said it may hesitate to do business with suppliers that also market their products online because they would then become competitors.

Wired News: Advertising Comes to Software. ZDNet is offering a range of financial, entertainment, education, and Internet applications, as well as games and utilities featuring Web-like banner ads or buy-now buttons.

News.Com: AOL convenes instant messaging advisory body. "I really think this thing's going to explode on these folks. It is not the way the marketplace wanted to see disputes like this handled."

PC World: Will Your Cable Modem Censor the Web? Without fully cutting off access to unaffiliated sites, the technology allows a cable company to make such destinations appear much more slowly on customers' computers than preferred sites, Cisco claimed in brochures distributed at a recent cable convention in Chicago.

FEED Magazine: The Struggle Against A Domain-Name Monoply. Clay Shirky. What makes the situation even worse is that the mythic indestructibility of the internet has lulled net users into a sense of complacency. We still can't grasp that a network which could survive a nuclear attack may yet be crippled by politics.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: A Pilot Project Adds Security to Electronic Textbook Publishing. ...professors are increasingly building their own course Web sites with "content modules" they create themselves or pluck from cyberspace, raising the question of whether publishers need to be involved at all.

Washington Post: .Com – Live with Jim D'Arcangelo of Media Metrix. What the portals are, generally speaking, is smart marketers who watch the research to see where traffic is going and what the trends show in areas where they do not have offerings.

W3C Acknowledge Submission: Annotation of Web Content for Transcoding. IBM Pervasive Computing. This proposal presents annotations that can be attached to HTML/XML documents to guide their adaptation to the characteristics of diverse information appliances.

News.Com: Lotus boosts learning with Macromedia buy. Lotus chairman Jeff Papows said the acquisition adds a missing link to its LearningSpace product family. "What we missed in our portfolio was the self learning component."

News.Com: AOL enlists Apple in messaging battle. ...AOL today said it is teaming with Apple Computer to develop instant messaging products that will allow "seamless" communication between Mac users and the AOL Instant Messaging service.

RCFoC: Moore's Law Expanding? And since 1998, it has grown to 2-times per year, meaning that right now disk drives are getting bigger/faster/cheaper FASTER than Moore's Law!!

CBS Marketwatch: DoubleClick's land grab. [Kevin O'Connor, CEO of DoubleClick] But he said the future looks bright for advertising on the Internet. "I've never seen an advertiser leave the medium," he said. "And budgets keep going up."

News.Com: VerticalOne to launch hub for consumer info. The service, launching next week from start-up VerticalOne, will let Internet users check their bank balances, stock portfolio, frequent flyer miles, utility bills, and Web-based email--all from one site.

Red Herring: UPS wraps up Tumbleweed for big return. Tumbleweed's so-called integrated messaging exchange software lets UPS customers place important documents on a Web site that can only be accessed by intended recipients through a password or an encryption key.

ZDNN: Will 'wireless only' take over? Lowenstein estimates that wireless subscribers -— who now total roughly 70 million -— will double in number over the next four years. Traffic on wireless networks is expected to quadruple during the period.

Industry Standard: RealNames Ready for Big Role. Centraal, the creators of the RealNames Internet keyword system, said it has appointed three Internet policy experts to a new board that will address concerns over the awarding of keywords and protection of trademarks.

July 30, 1999
Useit.Com: Metcalfe's Law in Reverse. Current attempts to split the Web into many isolated mini-networks undermine the long-term potential of the Internet which depend on universal interconnection.

Wired News: Diverting the Digital Streams. Some big Web site operators say that linking to anything other than their front page is infringement; they're losing advertising revenues and the chance to present their content their way.

ZDNN: One way high-speed Net access is stupid. So shame on @Home for putting a governor on the Internet. When you pay for fast access, you should be able to get it both ways. Anything less