August 1, 1999
ZDNN: Net piracy presents paradox to entertainers. As the annual Herring on Hollywood conference kicks off today, the question of who has control over content is taking center stage.

Seattle Times: Tech books come of age; bumper crop of new literature. Finally the computer culture is evolving a literary base where the story of people's lives makes technology interesting and not the other way around.

SJ Mercury: Software plan is a travesty for consumers. Dan Gillmor. UCITA, if enacted by the various states, would skew the relationship between sellers and buyers of software, whether you buy software out of a box or online.

Editor & Publisher: A Newspaper Dies, a Web Site Is Born. Steve Outing. Some weekly papers, college newspapers, and trade magazines have abandoned their printing presses and moved purely online, but this is the first known instance of a commercial daily paper going this route.

Microsoft Backstage: New Download Center Uses XML, ASP and SQL Server to Make it Easy to Find and Get Files. We needed a solution that automatically added downloads as they were published, and made it simple for site visitors to search so they could quickly find what they needed.

August 2, 1999
Business Week: Excite@Home May Be Back on the Market -- and Yahoo! Is Looking. One scenario, according to those familiar with the discussions, is for Yahoo! to absorb Excite and spin out @Home into an independent company in which Yahoo! and AT&T would have sizable stakes.

NY Times: As Hotel Bookings Move Online, So Do the Middlemen. At the Hotel Reservation Network, a Dallas-based service that books hotel rooms nationwide, the phones are not ringing off the hook the way they used to, and the company's president, Robert B. Diener, is downright pleased by the development.

Internet Week: Web Site Availability: Pay Now Or Pay Later. But outages are just the most glaring site problem. Slow response times, hard-to-navigate pages and bandwidth-hogging graphics will also discourage customers whether consumers or businesses-from doing business online with your company.

CIO WebBusiness: Complex Commerce. "In the past, you had an engineer or a sales rep doing [configuration] for the customer," says Satterthwaite at GartnerGroup. "Their time was measured in hundreds of dollars per hour. The difference is, your Web site's time is measured in terms of cents per hour."

CIO WebBusiness: Seth Godin: Feeding the Gorilla. We call that "Where's the banana?" When a gorilla goes into a psychology experiment, all he wants to know is, Where's the banana? If you look at most sites and ask, What am I supposed to do now? it's not instantly obvious.

AskTog: How Programmers Stole the Web. We have cut off all the doctors, lawyers, artists, mechanics, architects, teachers, psychologists, historians, philosophers, salespeople, farmers, film makers, and journalists who are those most likely to break new ground.

Industry Standard: What's Wrong With Recruiting Sites. Employers have to focus on making their sites easy to use. But not too easy, warns Creative Good, or else they'll end up with thousands of resumes – from the wrong candidates – in their in-boxes.

• Good Reports: E-recruiting: Online Strategies in the War for Talent

LA Times: Take My Site, Please. Search engine companies such as AltaVista, Yahoo and Excite@Home have become ensnared in a kind of arms race, trying to discover and defeat the latest tricks of what is now broadly known as "spamdexing"...

News.Com: Fast Search insists that size matters. The larger base may be good for researching scientific or obscure topics, but it won't alleviate the frustration many users experience when their searches result in thousands and even millions of seemingly irrelevant Web sites...

• Useit.Com: From July 7, 1999; Spotlight of the NEC report on the size of the Web. The study is widely cited for finding that search engines don't index all of the pages, but this focus on search recall is misguided: the larger the Web gets, the less important it becomes whether a search can retrieve all info about the query...

AskTog: Making the Right Technology Decision. ...you can develop your own SuperBrowser, a weblication (web application) that is fast, efficient, and capable of hiding from the user much of the onerous latency and sluggishness of today’s network connections.

NY Times: Hewlett-Packard Sees Its Future as an E-Commerce Revolutionary. But HTML and HTTP alone are unable to support electronic bazaars that can allow for transactions between thousands of independent buyers and sellers, who may have had no prior contact and want to do business on a single, one-time basis.

Internet World: Deconstructing Feed Magazine. Jakob Nielsen and Roger Black. JN: The Web deserves better. We need to drive new forms of expression that use links to build narrative environments instead of simply relegating the link to being a simple page-turning device.

Internet World: True to Her Word. Word editor-in-chief Marisa Bowe. While Bowe counts herself as an admirer and avid user of online text sites like Slate and The New York Times on the Web, she says they only scratch the surface of the Net's potential.

PC Week: Ease of use, part 2: Exploring new directions. The time learning these methodologies comes back a hundredfold in systems that are easier to develop, require less revision and generate more user satisfaction.

ZDNN: TV? PC? How do you get your Web? "If you’re splitting your attention between media, it’ll be harder to get people’s full attention with a TV commercial," says BBDO’s Gray. "We’ll have to think of multi-tasking as another dimension of ad clutter."

• Web Informant: From May 26, 1998; There is no demand for messages. Doc Searls.
• Useit.Com: From February 15, 1997; TV Meets the Web

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

August 3, 1999
PC Week: Wireless speeds ahead. "At first I was not convinced why I needed to have [wireless Internet access]," Mann said. "[But] it's the self-reliance; not having to depend on anyone else for a Net connection."

MSNBC: Billboards add new dimension to the world of multimedia. Only about one of every 200 viewers of an Internet ad actually clicks through to the advertiser’s Web site. "People kind of ignore them," says Michael Feldman, marketing manager at Fogdog, an online sports store that is beefing up its offline advertising.

SJ Mercury: Internet ad auction site goes traditional. Moving further from its roots as a bargain bin for Internet banner ads, Adauction.com said Tuesday it launched a division to sell outdoor advertising, including billboards, wallscapes, taxi tops and buses.

Wired News: Online Liquor Ban Approved. As expected, legislation restricting the sale of alcohol over the Internet sailed through the House of Representatives Tuesday, dealing a blow to online wineries and angering e-commerce advocates.

LA Times: Net Searchers to Index All 800 Million Pages. Nielsen said the problem with automated search engines isn't so much their reach, but an inability to make even the most basic decisions on what is relevant, important and worthwhile.

TechWeb: ExciteAtHome Engine To Search Entire Web. The index is being compiled using a combination of software and dozens of human editors, Carpenter said.

ClickZ: Telling It Your Way. Guiding web visitors through product information to easily create understanding can help visitors make a good decision quickly, and can help improve web site effectiveness.

• devhead: From May 4, 1999; How to Structure Your Website Jakob Nielsen.

• Web Review: From February 21, 1997; Love Your Labels. If you don't have to re-invent the wheel, don't! Take lessons from sites that are particularly easy to use and employ similar labels and labeling schemes.

Stating the Obvious: The Truly Personal Web. The ones who win will be those who figure out how to offset the risk (or perceived risk) of privacy violations with functionality that customers truly value.

ABCNews.Com: A World of Sensors. And the researchers at last week’s conference noted that planting unseen computers everywhere would be pointless unless real, useful benefits result.

WebWord.Com: The Stranglehold of the Priesthood Has Been Broken. Q&A with Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini. AOL figured having a usable interface would be a good thing. Compuserve did not. Compuserve has folded it's unfriendly little tent and became an ISP, while AOL has enough money in petty cash to buy Compuserve and a large portion of South America.

Salon: For your information. The information markets will connect experts ranging from tax accountants to dog trainers with people who are willing to pay for their help, and the info market providers will take a cut of the transaction fee.

Red Herring: Big Fish: Paul Bandrowski stands up for (digital) rights. "People need to protect their investments," he explains, painting the scene of a world where customers can order books or training films online and pay for them in increments as they view them. Reciprocal, Mr. Bandrowski says, will sit in the middle of these Internet-based transactions, taking a cut.

Mappa.Mundi Magazine: Maps: Internet Arcs Around The Globe from 1996. A team of researchers, Tamara Munzner, K. Claffy, Eric Hoffman and Bill Fenner produced visually striking, interactive maps of part of the Internet using arcs encircling an Earth globe.

ZDNN: Excite@Home, Yahoo! rumors squashed. [Excite@Home president George Bell] "We have been in talks with AOL, Yahoo!, and lots of folks about our start page." He added: "But there is no truth to the rumors of acquisition discussions reported in Business Week."

Builder.Com: Pump Up Your Content and Get Paid for It. Dan Shafer. I believe affiliate programs are the hidden gold mine of the Web. As more of them come online and as more builders of small-to-medium sized sites latch onto them and use them wisely, they are going to become a huge economic sub-sector.

• Useit.Com: From July 1999; Affiliates Programs

August 4, 1999
News.Com: Net number system faces infighting. A new system, which has been on the drawing boards for nearly a decade, seeks to remedy the potential shortage as well as alleviating other problems. But critics say its costs to businesses far outweigh its benefits.

MSNBC: Reuters reinvents its role to provide Internet news. It decided to flood the Internet with Reuters news on as many sites as would take it, leaving it up to other Web operators to actually run the sites, and worry about attracting visitors and finding advertisers.

• Release 1.0: From July 1999; The Web Goes Into Syndication

News.Com: Prices already being slashed on color CE handhelds. The cuts are a function of intensified competition, relatively low sales, and expectations for upcoming products, analysts say, as well as a reflection of overall confusion in the market.

Editor & Publisher: Online Sports Credentialing: Audience Is What Matters. Steve Outing. Some sports events, such as the NCAA Final Four tournament, remain closed to online journalists, but the majority of sports entities are beginning to wake up to the idea that online reporters have as much right to be in the press box as traditional-media journalists.

Red Herring: Would Yahoo's gain be Excite@Home's pain? If it were up to Ma Bell, say analysts speaking on background, the cable set-top box should be a jumping-off point for the user to access any type of information, be it Excite, Yahoo, Microsoft, America Online, or whatever. Stickiness would take a back seat to owning the pipe.

• NY Times: From June 9, 1999; A Hitch to Marital Web Bliss.

• Jupiter Communications Press Release: Digital Commerce Growth Will Be at Expense of Off-line Dollars

Wired News: A Palm in the Tool Belt. Construction companies have turned to the Internet and handheld computers to build structures more efficiently, and are pushing projects through ahead of schedule.

August 5, 1999
NY Times: Travel Agents Fault Discounts on Internet-Only Plane Fares. Travel agents reacted with anger and disappointment Wednesday to the latest airline offers of additional discounts on tickets booked over the carriers' World Wide Web sites.

Washington Post: The Light Bulb Goes Off Again. In category after category, whether it’s books, toys, music or shoes, Web natives are striking first, while traditional merchants worry about cannibalizing store sales or alienating sales and distribution partners.

• Internet Week: Bulbs.com Lights Up The Web

Editor & Publisher: Print Publications Drive Web Site Awareness. The survey found that 39% of consumers said they had visited Web sites after seeing ads in magazines, and 29% after seeing ads in newspapers. Twenty-seven percent of Web surfers said they visited sites after seeing ads on the Web.

• NetSmartAmerica.com: What Makes America Click?

• Internet World: May 10, 1999; What Do You Name a Net Firm? Hurry, the Choices Are Dwindling
• Industry Standard: From May 19, 1999; How Not to Name Your Net Play

• Time Digital: From August 2, 1999; Tempting Deal

Salon: Why won't Amazon help you compare prices? In short, Amazon seems to have given up on comparison shopping, lending support to the carping of observers who were immediately skeptical of the idea that a Web megastore could provide unbiased price comparison.

NY Times: Forgot a Password? Try 'Way2Many'. He sees himself as the archetypal wired citizen of the future. "I suspect that we will be totally inundated with passwords of one form or another in the next 10 to 20 years and possessing 129 passwords will be the norm..."

News.Com: Start-up companies plan to speed up the Net. Using satellite feeds, content caching servers, traffic-routing software, and other technology, companies such as Akamai, SkyCache, and Edgix are vying to colonize what they call the "edge" of the Net with Web content.

Upside: Magid Meets Andy Rooney. I'm tired of waiting for Java applications to run and dealing with stupid interfaces just to get some basic information.

Wired News: Advertisers Want Their ITV. [Josh Bernoff, principal analyst for Television Research at Forrester Research] Bernoff said it's easier than calling an 800 number, because you don't need to remember the number on the screen -- you only click the button. "It’s what we call lazy interactivity..."

PC World: An E-perk for First Class Travelers. To those harried business travelers racing through O'Hare, British Airways says take a load off--a load of books, that is. In a trial program running through August, the carrier is providing NuvoMedia's eBook full of content to its first class passengers.

Builder.Com: Critique of Deja.com. There is some great content on this site, and it supports ratings and discussions about a vast array of products, services, and people, but it just seems like they haven't sat behind the one-way glass and watched end users stumble.

August 6, 1999
Feed Magazine: This Year's Skin. Steven Johnson. But the question remains: if VCR remotes have been bewildering us for 20 years, do we really want them showing up on our computer desktops?

Wired News: Amazon: Everything to Everyone? "They're not planning on taking more than 'how do I plug the VCR in?' calls. But they'll get them anyway. And people are going to be frustrated if they can't get an answer."

Internet Week: CompUSA Splits E-Biz From Stores. ...CompUSA is maintaining the wall between its traditional and Web businesses. It is also keeping the two IT departments and infrastructures separate.

Red Herring: Excite@Home takes some body blows. Although Tom Jermoluk, CEO and chairman of the board, got in a few jabs of his own, questions remain whether Excite@Home can coexist with AT&T, particularly given Mr. Jermoluk's acknowledgment that his company simply has no desire to operate a "dumb pipe."

NY Times: Is Linking Always Legal? The Experts Aren't Sure. Until the courts provide clear guidelines, the experts say, powerful intellectual property owners like movie studios will fill the legal vacuum with their untested assumption that deep linking is illegal.

• Useit.Com: From July 25, 1999; Metcalfe's Law in reverse

USA Today: Niche Web sites draw advertisers. Advertisers who want to reach Internet users are finally learning an important lesson about the new medium: It's about class, not mass.

TechWeb: APIs Push 3-D Envelope Amid Setbacks. "Just bringing the OS into the 3-D world will be a great help in filling the chasm [between professional and entertainment graphics]," Trevett said. "Average users will wind up using 3-D all day long without realizing it."

ClickZ: Beware Long Brainload Times. It doesn't work because your customers are being flooded with an increasing volume of email each day. And that means each individual email will receive a little less attention.

• Useit.Com: From September 6, 1998; Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines

Upside: Marimba's Legal Nightmare. The battle pits a company called Novadigm Inc., of Mahwah, N.J., against Silicon Valley's Marimba. Raise your hand if you've heard of Novadigm. Raise your hand if you've heard of Mahwah, N.J.

RCFoC: Not Your Father's Wireless Data! Today, a cell phone can only be located within about a quarter-mile, but smaller cells and other techniques may eventually make it feasible to actually track your progress through the physical halls of commerce -- and to subtly guide your wanderings.

Boston Globe: Lang on the rise. Lang's job is to deliver some of the same services to anybody with an Internet browser. She's the president and chief executive of NewsPage.com Inc., a NewsEdge subsidiary that lets visitors create a personalized news portal on line.

W3C Acknowledged Submission: NaVigation Markup Language. Fujitsu Limited. In order to use the navigation service not only on cars but also on trains, on buses, and on foot with various mobile information appliances, a common data format for describing navigation information such as locations of points and route information is required.

Web Review: Color Calibration and a Web Color Primer. I doubt if you're staying up nights worrying about the color accuracy of your web site. But the popularity of e-commerce might change that.

August 7, 1999
InfoWorld: Webvan delivers logistics lesson to online vendors. Much attention has been paid to the "last mile" in network access -- the narrow data pipes that lead to the end-user's desktop. But for e-commerce vendors, there's a more pressing last-mile problem -- the physical distance from a distribution center to the customer's doorstep.

ChannelSeven: ServiceMetrics Addresses the Need For Speed. The public has been teased with faster modems, faster chip sets and faster download times all in the interest of ending the World Wide Wait (anyone sick of that term yet?) ServiceMetrics is trying to measure that wait and identify what causes it.

• Red Herring: From May 13, 1999; Keynote wants to be Kleenex of the Net

InfoWorld: Where is WinCE going? The second problem with the Microsoft technology treadmill is something that 3Com has exposed with its smash hit, the PalmPilot. Simplicity is the key to these things. The simpler, the better. The smaller, the better.

Industry Standard: Making the Web Safe for Commerce. InterTrust is banking on the hope that its technology will package most Net sales of digital goods. Though it charges a licensing fee for its software, InterTrust plans to make the bulk of its revenues by nibbling a percentage of each transaction fee generated by a licensee...

Advertising Age: Car sites drive ads to old-line media. Kenneth Esterow, VP-AutoVantage, said the service will end its exclusive reliance on online promotion--even though that will continue to make up the majority of its spending.

Industry Standard: The Slow March of History. At this stage in the Internet's evolution – when its potential effects seem enormous, and when everyone involved has a stake in hyping every new development – it may be useful to set a benchmark of how much, or rather how little, the Internet has already changed our lives.

Industry Standard: MSNBC's War Stories. They'd see MSNBC and say, 'We've already done a TV interview,' and I'd be insisting that I had different needs, and that the Internet needed to be represented." And the reactions from traditional journalists? "Generally, they'd do a double take..."

August 8, 1999
SJ Mercury: Let's Hear It for the Internet. With the Web, deaf Netizens gain the freedom many without disabilities take for granted. They can shop for products online and get as much information as they want, when they want, hassle-free.

NY Times: Money for Nothing. "We buy millions of gold pieces at a time at discount rates," says Schriefer, "and resell them at 800 to 1,000 pieces to the dollar." That makes Ultima gold more valuable than the Italian lira, which last month was going for about 2,000 to the dollar.

• Freedom Forum: From May 7, 1999; Video games hit mainstream with advent of virtual property. Jon Katz.

August 9, 1999
SF Examiner: Web outages send revenue down the drain. If your business is building an online presence, you simply have to meet and exceed customer expectations, and do everything you can to keep your e-businesses up and running.

Internet Week: Holiday Shopping List: Prepare For Spikes Now. [Preview of a series of reports on preparing for traffic spikes]. Consider yourself lucky-or particularly well prepared-if your high-profile online business didn't buckle under its own success last holiday season.

Industry Standard: Lost in the Web. Despite all that's great about Web browsers, they have serious flaws to which the rise of the ubersite can be indirectly, yet strongly, attributed.

Seattle Weekly: Why the Web sucks. Nielsen sees a future in which designers lose the page metaphor, integrating Web functions into operating systems (hear that, Microsoft?) and letting designers get away from the browser's one-size-fits-all menus and forward-and-back navigation.

Industry Standard: Softbank, Microsoft Plot Japanese Net Coup. Microsoft and Tepco were unavailable for comment. But news reports speculate that the wireless service will be run from base stations on Tepco's network of power lines, which already crisscross the country.

Business 2.0: Your Wireless Future. Taking network access, and ecommerce-heretofore confined to the home and office-out into the world at large may be as revolutionary a development as the Web itself.

LA Times: Simply Put, Few High-Tech Devices Are Designed for Ease of the User. It reminded me of why I'm a big fan of the Palm: It's an understated marvel. It does the few things I need with intuitive ease, without cluttering up my experience with a host of unwanted "necessities."

TechWeb: Centraal Becomes RealNames And Real Rich. Teare says content websites will even be able to make up for lagging banner ad revenue by imbedding keywords in news stories and other content, then receiving a small payment every time a reader follows that link. "We're going to go into behavior that isn't currently monetized..."

Industry Standard: The Brains Behind the Big Picture. AT&T Center for Internet Research. The group focuses on six areas: hacker detection, multicasting to enable better video broadcasting over the Web, network measurement, congestion control, Web caching and Shenker's field of performance analysis.

NY Times: AT&T-AOL Deal Would Rain on Excite@Home's Parade. Armstrong's view is anathema to the Excite@Home management team and to the venture capitalists from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who helped build the former At Home. They contend that the company cannot thrive as simply a "dumb pipe."

Industry Standard: Human Answerbot. Instead of courting customers, many companies have set up e-mail boxes that are more like roach motels: The e-mail checks in, but it doesn't check out. On the receiving end sit today's Webmasters, who are often a customer's only contact with a company.

Interactive Week: Excite@Home May Lift Ban. The ban initially was put in place almost six years ago to placate cable operator investors that were wary that streaming video might supplant their own programming.

Scientific American: When Publishing Could Mean Perishing. Proponents of publication point out that the information is likely to be readily available whether or not the database appears on the Internet, because many local newspapers have made it their business to learn about hazards surrounding chemical plants.

News.Com: Amazon, New York Times resolve copyright suit. Amazon.com announced today that it has settled its dispute with the New York Times over use of the publication's bestseller list.

• Salon: From June 23, 1999; Who owns the New York Times bestseller list? Scott Rosenberg.

Industry Standard: The Killer E-commerce App Is – E-Mail? Secure e-mail could be a good medium for a number of heavy-hitting business communications, such as prospectuses, medical records, shareholder communications, accounting forms, statements, proxies and confidential reports.

NY Times: Personalized E-Mail Ads: Low Cost, High Response Rate. Though e-mail overload threatens to dull the effectiveness of such campaigns in the long term, for now, companies are stepping up their e-mail efforts in hopes of establishing a dialogue with customers before their rivals do.

PC Week: Before the discussions: Big decisions. Even if people have unkind things to say about your products or services, it's better that their complaints be heard and responded to in an official forum rather than in a renegade "yourproductsucks.com" site.

TechWeb: Group Forms Spec To TV Anytime. Its basic premise is that with the rapid decline in costs for digital storage, "local storage would have a profound effect on the way that audiovisual content could be distributed to consumers..."

First Monday: Honest News in the Slashdot Decade. Trading on the principles of self-interest and distributed trust, they levy the expertise of thousands into producing honest, cheap daily news.

Editor & Publisher: Shell Oil Buys Banner Ads to Refute Articles. In an effort to present its side of the story after a series of articles critical of the company's business practices, Shell, the multinational oil and gas company, has placed a series of issue-oriented banner ads on the Web sites of Mother Jones magazine and the Environmental News Network.

Industry Standard: New Media, Old Rules. Yet even though there's a lot of cynicism about journalism, there is also an enormous demand for good information that is made accessible through good writing and editing – and is free of any hidden agendas.

Interactive Week: Expanding The Internet Business Model. Since coordinating the use of stored data on a massive scale is at the core of large e-commerce sites, the test center will be key to making sure new commerce sites are road-ready before the first transaction is registered.

Information Week: Legacy Systems: Reinvest Or Restructure? The consensus for many businesses, still, is to continue making sizable investments in their tried-and-true systems, including adapting them for Internet applications, to which they bring a level of scalability and reliability that some of the newer systems can't match.

August 10, 1999
Wired News: Here Comes the Netmobile. Next time you're trapped in a traffic jam, bored, alone, eyes casting listlessly about, take heart -- the adman will soon be coming to put on a show for you. At least if Scott McNealy and General Motors have their way.

InfoWorld: Car giant General Motors 'dot-coms' itself. It may be an interoperability nightmare on a galactic scale, but GM plans to link and integrate its 100 separate Web sites, many supplier and dealer channels, hundreds of factory inventory and ordering systems, and offer customers a "single view" of the car buying and servicing experience.

News.Com: DaimlerChrysler quietly accelerates Web strategy. Organic's CEO Jonathan Nelson said the company intends to expand DaimlerChrysler's capabilities beyond simple information retrieval to better use of software systems that manage customer inquiries, requests for support, and orders.

Time Digital: Can a Man Named Webb Keep eBay from Crashing? Now a former Gateway executive has been named president of eBay technologies to oversee all engineering and technical operations. At least eBay addicts will have someone to blame.

NY Times: Old Line Consulting Firms Become the Internet Mavericks. All the major accounting and consulting firms are turning into self-appointed Internet gurus and going after the same customers around the world.

[clip]: Breaking Out Of The Box. Companies live and die by communicating, he says, and now they need to communicate with businesses a world away as quickly and efficiently as possible. "None of our enterprises are islands – we have to deal with suppliers..."

NY Times: Ticketmaster Sues Again Over Links. Six months after prevailing in a suit against the Microsoft Corp. over the practice known as "deep linking," Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch Inc. filed a similar suit against a competitor, Tickets.com Inc.

Builder.Com: Globalize Your Web Site. So, the question isn't, "Should I make my Web site internationally accessible?" but rather, "How do I make my site internationally friendly and to what level?"

PC Week: The 100 top innovators in manufacturing. The list ranks manufacturing companies that, by virtue of the advanced technologies they have implemented or plan to implement, have distinguished themselves as innovators.

SJ Mercury: Digital stamps get Postal Service OK. The federal government's approval of an electronically generated bar code that functions as a form of currency in the real world is expected to help open fresh areas of e-commerce -- from micropayments, transactions under $1, to paper goods with physical value such as printable concert tickets...

Fortune: Web Ads Wise Up. ...AdKnowledge looks at two separate groups of people--those who see banner ads for a given Website and those who buy things on that Website. It then uses data mining technology to match them up. If the subsets match up well enough, your banner ads are working.

Red Herring: LivePerson reels in $19 million. In other words, in addition to hosting and managing a Web site's live customer-service chat functions, LivePerson will track chat conversations with customers and learn what types of techniques help you satisfy and "upsell" them.

Computerworld: Online Stores Add Off-Line Outlets. [Tim Harmon, an analyst at Meta Group] "What people in the mass market are going to come to expect in the future is to be able to order a product through any channel and to pick it up or have it delivered through any channel..."

USA Today: E-mail used as management tool. People are more honest when using e-mail to communicate bad news than they are with other methods such as the phone or personal delivery, says a recent study by Case Western Reserve University and New York University.

Forbes: There's gold in them thar hills. As local cable companies across the country expand their footprints to reach into smaller markets, a new market opportunity has arisen for companies that offer high-speed Internet access over this growing cable infrastructure.

August 11, 1999
FEED Magazine: Why China's Internet Problem Is A Lot Like South Carolina's. Clay Shirky. Fritz Hollings, Senator of South Carolina, and Zhu Rongji, Premier of China, have the same problem -- the internet has made their governments too small.

Upside: Swapping E-commerce Partners. To assume that selling on the Web is always direct misses one of the most important aspects of online business-- the affiliate network.

ClickZ: Stealth Under The Radar. The result is that many web sites, done correctly, represent the entire company (and the brand) better and more accurately than the traditional advertising does. It touches all aspects of the company, making an impact on everything from customer service to tech support to sales to marketing.

Salon: Artists do the rights thing. It's the question of "online rights" that has labels and artists concerned. Some record labels are already working to ensure that they have control over all of their artists' Web sites, revenues and online properties.

MSDN Online: Make a Deeper Web Connection. Robert Hess. The game is all about increased functionality and leveraging the tools at hand to get there. Today, the Internet has turned into an exciting tool that is underutilized by most non-browser applications.

Upside: Like Printing Money. While printing one-of-a-kind bar codes will first be used in stamps, the technology also could allow consumers to print their own concert and movie tickets after purchasing them online...

ZDNN: IBM has the e-ticket. Electronic ticketing has taken hold in North America, where a growing percentage of U.S. travelers are choosing them over paper to speed airport check-in procedures and to protect themselves against lost tickets.

Wired News: Yahoo in the Palm of Your Hand. Vishwanath's group is trying to carrying the Yahoo name beyond the Web browser. The group's latest effort is sparse, but does place the portal among a small group of large Web players toying with wireless content.

CNN: End of URLs as we know 'em? For end users, the standard means no longer having to remember or type in a series of dots, dashes and backslashes in order to find the information they need.

Red Herring: Real money for RealNames. Mr. Teare says that when trademark and branding disputes arise, RealNames will decide who gets control of common terms based on the "user expectation test." "Our prime directive is not to mess with the user..."

Forbes: Narus knows what you are doing on the network. Stone and Narus founder (and now chief executive) Ori Cohen are convinced that it is critical for the new-generation telecos and Internet service providers to know exactly what type of traffic is flowing on their networks.

Upside: AT&T's Dirty Handshake. By opening its services to AOL, it quiets the loudest proponent of an open-access system, while doing nothing to actually open up its systems to the other ISPs who want to offer services.

ChannelSeven: Sprint Loads the Big Guns In Wireless Broadband Battle. That means Sprint will actively and aggressively present its MMDS (Multipoint Media Delivery System) as a viable and low-cost option to small businesses and consumers, directly competing against ADSL, DSL and cable modems.

Business Week: Oracle: Practicing What It Preaches. Today, the E-engineering of Oracle is Ellison's newest passion. He has ordered his managers to radically revamp the way they use computers and the Internet. His deadline: The end of 2000.

Red Herring: Can Webvan deliver? Other analysts say major supermarkets are quietly watching the Webvan experiment. If it works, they say, the supermarkets could rapidly build e-commerce sites, put their logos on delivery trucks, and take a lead in the market.

PC World: Do Teens Determine Internet's Future? "Just as previous generations internalized the automobile and television, integrating it into ever aspect of their adult lives, today's 16- to 22-year-olds will become the first Net-powered generation."

Wired News: 3-D Imaging for the Rest of Us. If Siggraph's onsite computer laboratory is any indication, a convergence of CAD/CAM, 3-D scanning, and printing technologies is rapidly changing the way products and works of art are created.

ZDNN: Cyberspace: The future is now? Their project -- dubbed, somewhat obtusely, the Graph Evaluation Language or GEL -- aims to build a technology that can be used to create multi-user 3-D worlds where people can interact on the Internet.

Wired News: Mousing with Good Vibrations. But Logitech and Immersion want to carry the concept to other mouse-intensive applications. From Web surfing to graphic design and business applications, the company thinks tactile feedback can be tied to productivity enhancement.

Wired News: Pictures at a Virtual Exhibition. Welcome to Siggraph's Millennium Motel, where conference attendees experience mind-bending examples of where emerging technologies are taking art, entertainment, games, and society.

August 12, 1999
Site note: A new URL! Tomalak's Realm can now be reached at http://www.tomalak.org along with the current URL. The domain was registered yesterday so it might take another day or two before it's accessible to everyone.

ClickZ: Transferring Your Brand To The Web. Many businesses see potential new revenue as the main reason to go online. Transferring an organization's brand to the web is not a guarantee to greater economic benefit. Web sites need to be well-managed and consumer-oriented.

TechWeb: In The Driver's Seat With GM. Q&A with Mark Hogan and Rick Lee of eGM. I'm going to be a sponge and hopefully bring the message that GM is serious about being an Internet company. We want to create a broad array of partnerships that should be a win-win for the partners we select.

Salon: Don't link or I'll sue! Scott Rosenberg. That isn't stopping a still small but growing list of companies from contending that certain kinds of links are actually illegal. Go ahead and link to our sites, they're saying, but only if you link the way we tell you to. Otherwise, you'll hear from our lawyers.

DaveNet: InfoWorld and Deep Linking. I received an email from an InfoWorld insider, a friend, who said that the policy is serious. My correspondent asked not to be identified, and I'm respecting that.

SF Chronicle: Information Superhypeway. On the Web, press releases and news stories sit cheek by jowl, with similar headlines in the same font and type size.

Wired News: Firefly's Dim Light Snuffed Out. Five years and several new paradigms later -- and following the company's 1998 buyout by Microsoft -- the light is going out for good on the forums. The underlying technology will live on, however, powering Redmond's e-commerce efforts.

MSNBC: Online ad spending is expected to more than triple by year 2004. The report notes that growing numbers of advertisers are likely to insist on paying content providers and ad agencies based on the number of people who actually click on an ad or buy a product, rather than the widely used current system of paying a flat rate per 1,000 banner ads...

MSNBC: Broadcast group threatens to sue makers of personal video recorders. ...the consortium of media companies is worried that the PVR could radically alter the habits of viewers once they achieve sufficient penetration by essentially empowering viewers to set their own program schedules and how they want to watch TV.

Wired News: TV Execs Protect Their Turf. Industry analysts predict PVRs could eventually become as popular as VCRs, but the fast-forwarding and filtering capabilities could decimate TV advertising. Forrester Research projects that PVRs will lead to a 50 percent decline in TV ad watching over the next 10 years.

Information Week: Personal Business. Levi Strauss' Knowles sums up the appeal of personalization: "When we can leverage our most valuable customers, it gets financially interesting for us."

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

TechWeb: Group Puts 3D-Capable Browser On Fast Track. The X3D technology will enable small, lightweight Web clients to support advanced 3-D capabilities, and to integrate high-performance 3-D into broadcast and embedded devices.

Industry Standard: What Wins Web Popularity Contests? Why do some products get adopted and spread like wildfire over the Internet while others fail to take off at all? Why do some, like PointCast, take off only to fizzle out?

Salon: The burger machine. It's a weird devolution of Age of Industry automation: The manual work continues to be done by humans, who are carefully hidden away, while the job of meeting and greeting the customers is taken over by machines.

SJ Mercury: How do AT&T, Excite@Home fit together? Excite@Home has said it envisions a media network that will provide home and business customers with access to personalized services at different speeds on a variety of devices, including PCs, pagers, wireless phones and televisions.

Boston Globe: Lycos to pay for its search icons on sites. Users will receive two or three cents each time third-party visitors click on the icons to launch Lycos searches over the rest of the Web.

Wired News: PrivaSeek Seeks Attention. In beta since May, Persona Valet is just one of a gaggle of offerings from companies that are seeking to gain a foothold in world of privacy self-regulation.

ZDNN: Sprint dashes into Web-over-wireless. The new services, clumped together under the moniker Sprint PCS Wireless Web will allow users to surf special text-only Web pages on newer phones, using a browser provided by software-for-phones maker Phone.com.

Interactive Week: Your Serve. I agree with Jim Hake: Online order confirmation shouldn't be a customer nicety. It should be a must-have of doing business with consumers on the Web.

• Global Information Infrastructure: Standards for Internet Commerce

August 13, 1999
Internet Week: IT Haunted By Ghost Of Christmas Past. E-retailers now are focused on beefing up their sites for the upcoming season, with particular emphasis on strong customer service. That necessarily ties in lots of background functions that ultimately impact the quality of service...

Industry Standard: Sega Plays Favorites With Dreamcast. "We have a great desire to offer this product," says Dave Emanuel, a spokesman for AltaVista's Shopping.com. Emanuel says Shopping.com has been talking to Sega about getting Dreamcast in stock, so far to no avail. "I think they're limiting their distribution potential..."

ClickZ: Don't Automate This. On a recent afternoon, in yet another grubby and windowless room, Garden.com's customer service group is meeting. It's a motley yet earnest crew of 30 people. In peak season they collectively receive as many as 1,500 email messages a day, and they respond to them all.

ZDNN: eBook standard on the way. The specification's basic goal is to allow the diverse ranks of hardware developers, publishers, authors and readers to settle on one way of creating, formatting and annotating e-books.

Forbes: Pig in a poke. One of the ways that sites like Living.com and GoodHome.com hope to compete with the likes of Ethan Allen is by offering imaging technology that will give consumers a chance to replicate the experience of shopping in a brick-and-mortar store in a virtual way.

Red Herring: When outages hit, should investors run? Discernible value on the Web will therefore be measured not only by traffic, revenue, and foreseeable earnings, but also, according to Mr. Pinsley, by a company's ability to manage the applications and data that go into running its online business.

PC Week: Before disaster strikes. As companies in every industry have embraced e-commerce and the Internet, and as they've automated more internal processes with everything from e-mail systems to point-of-sale inventory and stock ordering systems, they have become increasingly dependent on IT to stay in business.

News.Com: What AOL stands to lose in browser war. [Ramanathan Guha, former principal engineer at Netscape] "The people who decide what icons are on the browser have a real power over what is consumed," Guha said. "In a world with one browser, there is a real danger of coming to a model where the way you get your stuff presented is by doing a deal with MSN."

ZDNN: The next wave in Net shopping. Now, two companies, Frictionless Commerce and Active Research are looking to fill that gap with online decision guides they say will help users figure out exactly what they're looking for.

Upside: The New Web Order. [Thornley, co-founder and CEO Looksmart] Users want data on a relatively static number of things," he says. "It's a large set of things, but it's knowable. Our job is to get the most useful stuff for as many of those needs as possible."

Web Review: PNG, SVG, and JPEG 2000—New Image Format Standards. If you've ever been tantalized by the multi-resolution capability of FlashPix, or frustrated by GIF's "all or nothing" approach to background transparency, then we have some good news for you.

• PC Magazine: From April 21, 1999; Image Compression: The Next Wave(let)
• Webmonkey: From February 22, 1999; Whatever Happened to PNG? Jeffrey Veen.

Industry Standard: Clashing Laws Complicate Global E-commerce. Now Bertelsmann is taking the lead in getting multinational corporations to help unify national regulations relating to global electronic commerce.

August 14, 1999
NY Times: On the Internet, Balancing the Free Flow of Data and Profits. In more extreme terms, if the sum total of human knowledge becomes instantly and universally accessible on the World Wide Web, will every fact become private property, to be leased or sold?

InfoWorld: Life after ERP. IT executives in the manufacturing industry, many of whom finally have an opportunity to look up from years of enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation, are discovering the new rigors of the fast-paced, customer-driven Internet age.

InfoWorld: Helping workers help themselves. But if you and your IT colleagues work with HR to set up an ESS system, don't simply assume employees will use it. In addition to working out technical details, consider how to give employees the training, access, and incentives to use the system.

USA Today: Net overtakes govt. document center. NTIS was established in 1950, at a time when the sale of government documents in microfiche and on paper was a necessity. Nowadays, though, most government agencies and entities have begun to post their reports on the Internet for free.

• US Department of Commerce Press Release: Commerce Secretary William M. Daley Announces Intention to Close National Technical Information Service

Wired News: Ballmer: Prepare for Rent-An-App. [Steve Ballmer] "That’s why we bought the Gaming Zone Web site, because we don’t think there will be a game developer that won’t be in some way connected to the Internet..."

August 15, 1999
SJ Mercury: `Inspired minds' are common ground in leading innovations. Dan Gillmor. Yet while many of the current superstar Internet companies will never live up even to their current valuations, I'm as confident as anyone that the Net's influence on the next few generations of humanity will rival internal combustion's impact on the past few.

NY Times: How Dot-Com Makes a Company Smell Sweet. The main argument Cooper anticipates is that the new names may in fact reflect a major shift in business -- that the companies were becoming more involved with the Internet.

• Purdue University: A Rose.com by Any Other Name. 109KB PDF document.

August 16, 1999
Internet Week: Customer Relationship Management: Satisfaction Guaranteed. "We don't want to have huge call centers,'' says Jonas, chief operating officer at Utility.com. "That's not our business model. We're a total Internet company. We reduce energy bills by reducing our transaction costs."

devhead: The Evolution of the Web. To jack in, in Gibson's cyber-future, means to use digital technology as an extension of yourself, as a tool to enable you to go beyond your own biological limitations much the way the spear transformed humans from the hunted to hunters during the Stone Age.

Forbes: Cutting the cord. It represents the collaborative efforts of IBM, Intel, Toshiba, Nokia and Ericsson. They have signed away all patent rights to Bluetooth and offer the technology for free to any hardware or software company that wants it--and is willing likewise to give up patents.

Interactive Week: Patents Hook Start-Ups. The Internet may still have the image of being a Wild West frontier, but fences increasingly are being strung up across the ranges of cyberspace in the form of patents.

Interactive Week: MIT, Minsky Getting In On Action. "I'm not looking to go after people who are infringing on our patents," he said. "I'm looking for companies that are interested in evaluating an idea and exploiting it in the marketplace."

News.Com: The evolving world of e-tailing. The interesting fact is that some distributors are not only "not going away" but are, in fact, thriving by embracing what is possible on the Net instead of running scared.

Internet World: Five Reasons Why Amazon Can't Have it All. But Amazon has flaws. The farther it stretches away from books, the more cracks appear in its plans. While it may always have intended to be much more than a bookstore, being a bookstore remains what it's best at.

Seattle Weekly: Ask and ye shall receive. It's all about building a brand known for proactive service, cross-promotion, and creativity. So when you log on and look for a book, the site will tip you toward items certain to be of interest on Amazon's auction site.

Upside: Killing the URL. Teare explains that he was trying to remove the dot-com tyranny of the Web. He argues that URLs were created for the pre-Web Internet and are really a lousy way to find Web pages in the graphically-oriented and supposedly easy-to-use Web.

TechWeb: RealNames Sells MP Prefix To MP3.com. Several weeks ago, RealNames signed a deal with MP3.com for the MP3 prefix. When a user types in "MP3" and then the name of an artist, album, or song, they will be taken directly to the MP3.com site, whether MP3.com has that artist or not.

PC World: URLS You Can Understand. The proposed standard, the Common Name Resolution Protocol, is intended to provide the behind-the-scenes links between typed-in words and the URLs that identify Internet resources.

SJ Mercury: The new world of search engines. What was once a simple concept -- using search and index technology to sort through Web sites, then ranking them by how useful they're likely to be to the computer user -- has gained a commercial edge because of the relentless pressure on companies...

SF Chronicle: Portals Climb Corporate Ladder. But for a corporate portal to be successful, it must be a place where employees really want to go. "The secret to success for a corporate portal is to have sophisticated data integration, an intuitive user interface, engaging content and easy navigation..."

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

ClickZ: Relationships? Don't Kid Yourself… We all go nuts about creating relationships with our online prospects and customers. But the level of relationship we would like to create has to match the level that our customers are willing to accept.

Wired News: Levi's Brave New World. At the lavish, frenetic, 24,000-square-foot, four-story complex, you are invited to deliver the most intimate details about you and your body in exchange for a dazzling entertainment experience and a perfect pair of jeans

Dallas Free Press: Ad zappers. The appearance of advertisements on Web sites several years ago prompted some dismayed Prodigy users to stick tape on their monitors to mask the new annoyances. Internet ads flashing, snapping, scrolling and stealing bandwidth are embedded today in virtually every commercial site.

NY Times: Overload of Hangers-On Creates Bumpy Ride for Internet Stocks. The infinite loop also seems an appropriate metaphor for the loaves-and-fishes, endless multiplication of Internet "businesses" and the inevitable indigestion; consolidations and bankruptcies and shakeouts and layoffs have become the expected and ritual machinations of the technology industry.

InfoWorld: Credit cards become virtual with eCharge. "[Credit card companies] failed on the Internet in many ways," said George Fleming, co-founder and co-chairman of eCharge. "We're going to be very aggressive in describing how they've been ripping merchants off."

NY Times: Conventional Retailers Use Web to Improve Service. Retailers of the so-called bricks-and-mortar variety are plotting their revenge not simply by creating Web sites of their own, but by integrating their Internet operations into their physical stores. Executives say that by mingling the virtual and physical retail environments, they can better serve customers in both.

Wired News: City Guides Losing Sight? "Tile ads were ineffective because they just don't have many click-throughs," said a Sidewalk employee who requested anonymity. To make a city guide work, the source said, you need other revenue streams.

Washington Post: Japan's Costly Connection. But the cost clearly is hobbling the world's second-largest economy as it struggles to keep pace with America in the fast-changing digital age. And it is only one of many impediments to development of Internet businesses here.

Wired News: A Confederacy of Gurus. On the site, the Slavets plan to provide consultants and freelancers with the resources to function successfully without a company or institution backing them up.

Salon: The teeny-weeny Web server. With a chip that costs about a buck and code so tight it could be handwritten on a 3-by-5 index card, IPic really could be built into everything from light sockets to doorknobs.

NY Times: Small Internet Providers Survive Among the Giants. The persistent -- and, in some circles, unexpected -- growth of small local ISPs continues to make for a complex market.

August 17, 1999
Information Week: Network Pressure. "But corporations can no longer afford the embarrassment of their commerce servers not being available. Because of this extraordinary exposure to doing business over the Internet and extranets, companies such as ours have to ensure that there is constant availability."

Wired News: Wireless in Seattle. Scientists and academics this week converge on America’s coffee capital to chat about the future of electronic books and present progress reports on developing mobile personal communications devices.

LA Times: Online Referrals Stir Journalism Ethics Questions. Dozens of Web journalism sites, ranging from little-known special-interest pages to the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, are quietly getting money for steering surfers to merchants.

Advertising Age: Coalition weighs online consumer ads. Coming to the web: Ads promoting ads. The Future of Advertising Stakeholders coalition is considering a public service-style campaign telling users about the issues of privacy and the consumer benefits of online advertising and targeting.

MSNBC: Time makes time for digital media. [Richard Bressler, Time Warner Digital] He argues that the amount of time spent on "horizontal" plays like Web portals is declining. "People are doing more bookmarking, they’re going straight to sites and they’re not going through or browsing through the horizontal players..."

Computerworld: Web Success Boosts Customer Expectations. But not all potential consequences of online success lie below the water line. Experts say that some, such as turf wars between a company's real-world and online ventures, are predictable — and preventable with some up-front policy setting.

Webmonkey: The Promise of Publishing Systems. Jeffrey Veen. If the promise of technologies like Spectra holds up, designers will be able to focus on design, developers will be able to focus on writing code, and both will be able to find common ground from which to collaborate.

SJ Mercury: Absurdity can be patented -- U.S. Office proves it. Dan Gillmor. Unfortunately, the system is broken. It's hard to believe the Patent Office has even read some of the patents it's been granting.

Editor & Publisher: Pitfalls of the Internet. For starters, we shouldn't mistake information for knowledge. Filtering the messages and data that we're inundated with will probably become the largest challenge most of us face in the years ahead.

• Boston Review: From Summer 1999; Internet Treasure. Andrew L. Shapiro.

Industry Standard: War of the Roses. While Gerald Stevens considers itself, ultimately, an Internet company, Philips says he just didn't see how compelling he could be on his IPO road show, getting up in front of a bunch of investors and asking, as he puts it, "'Would you please give me $50 million so I can pay AOL?'"

Industry Standard: Trouble for Toysrus.com. ...eToys had secured the top anchor tenant position on America Online (AOL) at a cost of $18 million over three years. In a note to investors, Merrill Lynch analysts wrote that they thought Toys "R" Us "should have been more aggressive in securing this advertising space for itself."

NY Times: Government Moves to Make Data More Accessible. "This way, the American people can find the documents they want via search engines that currently exist -- and the more powerful ones being created -- and download them for free."

ClickZ: Syndicate Your Content. One way to integrate sites through an affiliate program and meet the audience's desire for information is to create a content affiliate program that adds shared or co-branded content to the affiliate site.

Wired News: PlayStation II: A New Beginning. Earlier in the presentation, Sony Computer Entertainment's president, Ken Kutaragi, sketched a vision of a new era of computer-generated entertainment that will be ushered in by increasingly powerful hardware.

Salon: Local regulators and the Net. The paradox of the communications age is that even as the vast network of interlaced media and communications technologies becomes ever more national or even international in scope, local governments wield a progressively more fearsome regulatory stick.

Forbes: Jermoluk's ace. In any event, it's a make or break play for Excite@Home. They need the exclusivity with AT&T and without this their business model, not to mention investor confidence, falls apart.

NY Times: Welcome to College. Now Meet Our Sponsor. While at many universities students continue to use Web pages that the universities have created and paid for themselves, at these 500 institutions advertisers will be paying the bills.

Wired News: Tower of Babel Takes on Times. The writing is sophisticated, sometimes ostentatiously so. Recognizing this, the online edition has cut a deal with Babylon, an Israeli startup company, to provide a point-and-click translation of difficult words and phrases for its growing audience of international readers.

Red Herring: TiVo and Replay face TV showdown. The real issue, he adds, is that the devices will flounder because of their high prices and narrow range of functions. Hardware costs of $500 to $700 plus a monthly service fee are unrealistic to expect from most consumers.

News.Com: AOL teams with TiVo for TV. As part of the agreement, AOL and TiVo will collaborate to bring consumers interactive events by combining TiVo's personal television service with AOL TV's interactive television offerings.

ZDNN: Intel backing out of TV initiative. Intel, which cited the need for a universal standard, will start to wean broadcasters away from Intercast and toward the Advanced Television Enhancement Forum's specification...

August 18, 1999
ClickZ: Living The Web Lifestyle. Tomorrow's web consumers aren't (for the most part) the major consumers of today. They can't be marketed to in the same way that someone weaned on one-way broadcast marketing can be sold.

Forbes: Startup muse. Jackson, DeAndre and DeWeese might have based their business models on SABRE, but they have done one better on the original--they have eliminated the cost of the proprietary network and passed on the savings to their customers.

Editor & Publisher: Online Strategies for Consumer Magazine Publishers. Steve Outing. Establishing a Web vertical portal site is the best thing that most consumer magazines can do to succeed online. This does not mean recreating the print magazine online, but rather grabbing the position online of the dominant information source on a selected topic.

TechWeb: Epicentric Helps Create Niche Portals. Q&A with Oliver Muoto and Ed Anuff of Epicentric. What our customers are trying to do is provide a portal experience that keeps the users focused on the information, the content, and the services that are relevant to the service's mission.

Red Herring: Forget brand, the Net's about spam. Kevin O'Connor, chairman and CEO of online advertising network DoubleClick, affirmed that most online advertisers have concluded that ads used to build a brand may be best applied through traditional advertising media such as television and radio.

NY Times: Net Advertising Potential Is Large. So instead of sending consumers to their own Web sites to buy goods, companies like Procter & Gamble are spending money on branding campaigns to build awareness.

Red Herring: The 3G force. The development of a new third-generation network standard is making possible cheaper and more efficient delivery of wireless broadband data services including Internet access and two-way email.

Wired News: Microsoft Shows Off at Mobicom. [Microsoft Vice President of Research Richard Rashid] Furthermore, Rashid believes that wireless networking is on the cusp of revolutionizing the computer industry. "The number of people connected to wireless networks will grow to over a billion by 2004..."

Useit.Com: Spotlight of a business-process invention disclosure. Establish a reverse affiliates program where an e-commerce site links to some of the better specialized sites to use their content and recommendations as an enhancement and objective third-party advice for customers.

Salon: More on "deep links," journalists and IPOs. Scott Rosenberg. The more that linking becomes entangled with the law, the more we'll find the Web choked and stunted. Still, the closer you look at this issue the more nuances and exceptions emerge.

TechWeb: Dell To Offer Server Support Via The Net. Dell next week will launch OpenManage Resolution Assistant, an Internet-based program to deliver tech support for its PC servers, speeding up resolution of tech support problems by providing a direct channel from Dell's tech support staff to users' problem machines.

News.Com: Home Depot to expand e-commerce efforts. "Flexibility and convenience are what [consumers] want in a shopping experience at Home Depot," he added. "Integrating our Internet strategy with our stores enables us to do a better job of meeting these expectations."

Forbes: Dangers of a dumb pipe. One of the reasons why Excite@Home would not want to see an end to its exclusive contract with AT&T is that it could result in Excite@Home being forced to commoditize its bandwidth.

Industry Standard: Kozmo.com, the Even-More-Convenient Store. Unlike Webvan, with its exhaustive Safeway-like inventory, Kozmo takes the 7-Eleven approach, with a smaller, more targeted shelf of goods.

CBS MarketWatch: Cream of Japan Inc. not sweet on Net. Although more senior Japanese executives went online in 1998 than in the year before, only 15 percent of those surveyed said they felt "comfortable" and "familiar" with using the Web.

Industry Standard: Online Banks Get a Wake-up Call. "Fifty percent of the people who discontinued their use of online banking indicated they found the sites to be too complicated or the customer service dissatisfying..."

BBC News: Web trader spills beenz. Beenz.com has been threatened with legal action after taking back millions of units of its web currency, which were given away by mistake.

August 19, 1999
Today's Links Story: Southwest Airlines' Service Desk Closes

Net Company: Time for Zero Time. "Zero Time means that when something needs to happen, it can happen immediately," Pearlson explains. Adds Yeh: "Zero Time is not only about the compression of time. It's about the ability to react instantaneously, to provide value for every customer at every opportunity."

Net Company: Book Report - Time Keeps Getting Faster. "Recognize that neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost..."

Fortune: Internet Defense Strategy: Cannibalize Yourself. There are two choices: Yield to your instincts and protect those still-profitable technologies and models. Or preemptively overturn them yourself, even if it means eroding the very revenue streams upon which your company is founded.

RCFoC: Adapt, or Die! But to me, the newspaper issue is a good reminder that the Knowledge Age offers tremendous opportunities to restructure the old into new ways of meeting peoples' changing needs.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: The future is in sight at MobiCom. Creating wearable computers, engineering personal-area body networks, and mastering mobile networking for "smart dust" are just a few of the more exotic sessions being offered during the five-day conference.

Net Company: The Customer Experience. Building a great company on the Web isn't about "aggregating eyeballs," "increasing stickiness," or embracing any of the other slogans that masquerade as strategy. It's about rethinking the most basic relationship in business: the one between you and your customers.

Net Company: Four Rules for Great Experiences. Q&A with Phil Terry and Mark Hurst of Creative Good. "Web developers know the difference between Java and JavaScript, and they like downloading plug-ins. Customers come to a site and say, 'When do I get my plane ticket?'"

Net Company: The Experienced Customer. "A customer is in a self-service environment. So retailers must know what the customer wants before she tells them. From start to finish, the experience is the only thing that matters."

devhead: Fighting Back for Web Standards. If the W3C wins its fight, the P3P project can finally get back on track. But would a victory against Intermind have any real effect on how the U.S. government handles the patent process?

Net Company: The Brand Called URL. But a personal Web site -- a 24x7 storefront devoted exclusively to the Brand Called You -- may become the mother of all self-promotion tools.

SJ Mercury: E-commerce is bringing boom in warehouse space. Warehouse developers are expecting to cash in from the boom in electronic commerce -- even as they fret over the financial risks of housing heavy money-losing Internet companies as tenants.

Business Week: Nobody's Home: Solving the Online Grocer's Problem. ...it's still in prototype. It doesn't even have a distributor. Porter's onto a real problem, though. Before online groceries and other Net-based delivery services can take off, they'll have to devise delivery solutions.

Wired News: Cyber-School's Never Out. His forthcoming book, Teaching Online, predicts that half of all education will occur online in the 21st century and that people will learn better and faster in virtual classrooms with hundreds of students around the world.

USA Today: Newspaper designer moves to Web. In 1996, Black was hired to work with MSNBC's Web site. Black suggested that the site for the Microsoft/NBC cable and Web venture use more color, vary the type fonts, add live video and make some areas interactive.

CBS MarketWatch: A Digital New Deal for Japan. Keidanren, the Federation of Economic Organizations, has submitted a 20-point information technology wish list to Prime Minister Obuchi that'll cost the government 5.4 trillion yen ($48 billion) to wire itself, the nation's schools and, yes, the highways...

Washington Post: Leaping From News to Enews. Don't get him wrong, he loves journalism. But when it comes right down to it, says Hecht, journalists have been doing what journalists do for decades. "The Internet is something that's never been done before..."

NY Times: Easier Than Crayons: Graphics Grows Up. Ultimately, the real challenge for Siggraph is to integrate those cultures, so that people who speak different design languages can learn from one another. That will require good interfaces, and making good interfaces is harder than making fast chips.

NY Times: The Sound and the Fury: Beating Back the Beep. With its democratization over the last 40 years, the beep has moved from cutting-edge chic to downright tacky. And it may be headed for the scrap heap if sound designers have their way. "The time has come for the beep to die an honorable death..."

NY Times: Too Many Phones, Too Little Service. While no one knows the precise number of calls that are not completed, fade in and out or get cut off midconversation, such incidents are increasingly common complaints among wireless users.

Forbes ASAP: Sefi Visiger: ICQ's low-key creator. The downside is when their enthusiasm blinds them from targeting a specific audience. "Some startups think they have a good idea," he says, "but they try to brand it from the very first day, thinking it doesn't really matter what the user needs."

PC Magazine: E-Books Open Up. Yet industry insiders are still cautious as to the immediate success of electronic books. "We don't yet have a firm forecast for e-books. Despite work on standards, it will remain a niche product in the consumer space for some time..."

USA Today: Intel announces privacy measures. Intel Corp. will require Internet sites that carry its advertising -- including its popular ''Intel Inside'' campaign -- to warn consumers what personal details are collected about them online...

August 20, 1999
Today's Links Story: Thousands of new bestseller lists for Amazon

Useit.Com: Spotlight of privacy concerns with Amazon's bestseller lists. Maybe not a big surprise, but I could imagine much interesting use of the book sales for business intelligence. Purchase circles are a cool feature, but probably over the line as far as privacy is concerned.

ClickZ: Support In All The Right Places. Well, great customer support means more. And the Internet can be a powerful tool in your efforts. A quality approach to customer support should touch every aspect of your corporate environment, from purchasing to delivery, and from administration to sales.

ClickZ: Still In The Womb. The basic weakness of online PR today is its treatment of the web as just another channel for one-way, top-down corporate news release publishing.

ZDNN: Death of the television commercial? The problem is - in the eyes of the television and advertising industries - digital video recorders give TV viewers control over when and how they watch programs.

• Web Informant: From May 26, 1998; There is no demand for messages. Doc Searls. ...imagine what would happen to the TV business if mute buttons delivered "we don't want to hear this" feedback directly to advertisers. It would crash the whole industry's business model in a heartbeat.

• Internet Week: From August 16, 1999; Customer Relationship Management: Satisfaction Guaranteed

A List Apart: You Own Your Name. If the Web is supposed to make everybody equal, why is it so hard to register a domain in your own real name?

Forbes: Let's get small. [Naveen Jain, CEO of InfoSpace] He is banking that his portal-in-a-box product will be indispensable in the shift of Internet traffic from major portals to smaller, more specialized or vertical portals and destinations.

Editor & Publisher: Online Advice for Trade Magazines. Steve Outing. The biggest change in thinking that trade publishers must make to prosper in the Internet environment is to begin providing news on an instant (or at least daily) basis.

The Economist: The real Internet revolution. Many firms are now betting on the power of integrated shopping—combining stores, the Internet, catalogues, the telephone and eventually television.

Wired News: Hiring Crunch Hits Old Guard. Faced with a tight labor market and rapidly rising demand for Net-savvy employees, recruiters say they're fielding a constant influx of phone calls from graybeard companies seeking people to run their e-commerce and Internet ventures.

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

The Village Voice: 'We've Sold Out the Eyeballs'. [Steven Johnson, FEED Magazine] "Most of our investors got involved because they liked the product and they liked us. They saw us as a force for good on the Web." He adds, "The idea was always to keep it cheap and lean until the content and the market matured."

Industry Standard: Book Critics Gone Crazy. But these comments are proving so popular – and increasing so rapidly – that Amazon has found them all but impossible to police.

• Salon: From March 2, 1999; Terrors of the Amazon

August 21, 1999
InfoWorld: Web technology is no substitute for customer service. If you send e-mail, do you get a quick and helpful reply? Is it easy to find a phone number to call? If you call the help line, do the customer service representatives answering the phone have any clue how you spent the last hour on their own Web site?

ABCNews.Com: Merging With the Machine. Starner, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, is a graduate of MIT’s Wearable Computing Lab and one of the leaders in the nascent field of personalized, always-on, totally portable computers.

InfoWorld: Designing a growing back end. In a recent panel discussion, four technology officers at companies with dynamic, high-volume Web sites discussed what they have learned about scaling back-end systems.

Wired News: Microsoft Faces the Music. Reciprocal is working on a micro-transaction scheme that could provide music for pennies. "Credit card companies currently charge a quarter for processing transactions," said Paul Bandrowski, president and CEO of Reciprocal. But by aggregating transactions and only billing charges monthly...

InfoWorld: Planning for recovery. The fact that virtual businesses are virtually dependent on their systems and network infrastructure highlights the urgency of contingency plans.

August 22, 1999
NY Times: Newspaper Stocks: An Internet Story. The big question," Drewry said, "is not how big the Internet market becomes, but how much can newspapers capture."

Editor & Publisher: Bad News for Newspapers and Classifieds. [Charlene Li, senior analyst at Forrester] "If there's any piece of advice, it's look at their classifieds and realize it's going away," Li says. "(Newspapers) have two options: They can stem the flow, and they can develop online products around classifieds and monetize them."

Advertising Age: CyberCritique of Saturn.com. Why have all other media ducks in a row, but have the Web site so far behind? Why have a disclaimer greet people instead of some splash image about the new cars? Who let all this happen?

NY Times: Unreal Estate. Of course, moving online means grappling with a host of nimble and aggressive new competitors for readership and ads. "The big question," Drewry said, "is not how big the Internet market becomes, but how much can newspapers capture."

August 23, 1999
Today's Links Story: Saturn's Sixty-Four Word Web Strategy

LA Times: Web Travelers Follow Beaten Paths to Similar Sites. But where are users actually traveling? More and more often to the same places, according to research conducted for The Times by Web-tracking companies. We are seeing a rapid narrowing of attention on the Web.

• NY Times: From June 21, 1999; On the Web, as Elsewhere, Popularity Is Self-Reinforcing
• Useit.Com: From April 15, 1997; Do Websites Have Increasing Returns?

Computerworld: Net Patents Stir Debate. "They're issuing crap at the speed of light," said San Francisco-based patent researcher and consultant Greg Aharonian, referring to the Patent and Trademark Office's 1998 issuance of 125 patents for supposedly new ways of doing business on the Internet.

• Useit.Com: From May 31, 1998; Micro-Containers: An Example of Strategic Web Thinking
• SJ Mercury: From July 17, 1999; Patent War Pending

Upside: Online Ads On Target. Not every Web surfer is a buy/won't buy customer, Godin said, noting that much of online marketing is about having a conversation with users about what they want. He called this deeper kind of relationship "the power of maybe."

NY Times: Fiercely Independent, Yahoo Is the Web's Switzerland. [James Murdoch, president of News America Digital] "People don't want to go to a portal and only see Fox properties or NBC properties. The reason Yahoo has done so well is that they are independent -- and they have been religious about it."

ZDNN: Is Christmas do-or-die for portals? So every one of the top portal sites is launching — or at least revamping — their shopping sites in anticipation of a Christmas shopping season that promises to be "the Big One"...

SF Examiner: Don't forget the message. Your Web site is the face your company presents to the online world. If it makes a favorable impression, it will inspire a visitor's confidence in your company and, by extension, in the information or products or services it offers.

Interactive Week: Study: Speed Alone Won't Improve Ad Performance. Excite@Home and the Ipsos-ASI. What consumers want to see are ads that deliver information of value and interest to them, Bratton said. Flashy animation with no crisp marketing message played poorly in the research study.

Useit.Com: Do Interface Standards Stifle Design Creativity? Standards ensure a consistent vocabulary, but don't limit designers' freedom (and responsibility) in deeper design issues.

WebWord.Com: Web Usability: Past, Present, and Future. Q&A with Jakob Nielsen. The web changed the game. Things swung back toward the novice user; the user lacking knowledge of the system and the interface. With web sites, there is no training. You hit the site and it is in your face.

Industry Standard: Tupperware Ladies See Red. The hostesses of the plastic-container parties accuse Tupperware of forcing them to keep a lid on their online sales – often threatening legal action – while the company readied its own Net business.

NY Times: Multimedia Transmissions Drive Net Toward Gridlock. The difference, said Van Jacobson, chief scientist for Cisco Systems Inc., a leading maker of Internet traffic routers, is that conventional traffic "is polite; this stuff is impolite." "People writing software for that traffic -- they don't care," Jacobson said of streaming media.

NY Times: Online Sales Can Be Messy, Especially Those Pesky Returns. In short, they say, if Internet retailers want to attract more return customers, they are going to have to deal better with returns by customers.

PC Week: Outsourcing gives search a whole new fragrance. "There's nothing worse than really crappy search [tools] to ruin the experience of your site," said Lucas Graves of Jupiter Communications. "If it isn't any good, then it's better not to roll [search] out at all."

Salon: We have computers. Why aren't we more productive? In fact, new research shows that technology rarely saves businesses time or money. In fact, innovations often come at considerable expense. But they do help companies do new things that would otherwise be impossible.

Upside: Ad Avalanche. But everywhere you look, there are advertisements. Where does advertising end and life begin? It seems as if advertising is getting out of control.

Industry Standard: British Reporters Mull Financial News Site. A report in the Sunday Times, a competing newspaper, said that the journalists were planning a "mass walkout" induced by unhappiness over the paper's handling of its current Web business, FT.com.

Adweek: How Do You Say HTML in Japanese? Organic approaches the problem, for itself and for clients, as one of culturalization rather than translation, heading each outpost with an Organic old-timer but primarily staffing it with locals.

Industry Standard: The Paper Chase Moves to the Web. To manage that paper blizzard, Baker and other attorneys are increasingly turning to the Web. Litigation-support companies like CaseCentral.com are creating online document repositories, enabling far-flung legal teams to access and share files.

LA Times: Computing's Next Wave: Thinking Toasters. Called pervasive or ubiquitous computing, the movement promises a day when computing and networking with other devices will be constant, automatic and virtually invisible to the user.

Editor & Publisher: Internet is Brand-Building Tool. ZDNet, a division of Ziff Davis Inc., last week released the first research report in a series on the Internet's involvement in building brand recognition as well as its affect on purchasing activity.

• ZDNet: E*TRADE Seen as Brokerage Brand Leader

Forbes: Questions and answers. With the Internet moving further and further into e-commerce, FAQs also are becoming a standard way for businesses to provide information about products and services.

August 24, 1999
SJ Mercury: Nothing simulated about American Air's legal inanity. Dan Gillmor. Anderson says his site also boasts the largest of several Web libraries of Flight Simulator add-on files, many of which can be downloaded at no cost. In early August he got a letter from a Dallas law firm representing American Airlines, ordering him to pull any images with the airline's logo off his site.

• Salon: From June 23, 1999; Who owns the New York Times bestseller list? Scott Rosenberg. On the Net, fighting to hang on to every last chunk of intellectual property is a recipe for stagnation and failure.

[clip]: E-Business Essentials. One significant result of the study is that companies mistakenly think the tactics they use most are also the most effective. Banner advertisements, for example, are the most common form of online marketing. But they rank near the bottom in effectiveness.

• Advertising Age: From June 16, 1999; Levi's goes offline to plug Web stores

Fortune: Webware for Rent. Instead, it and other Web-savvy businesses are using the Internet to eliminate the burden of buying and running expensive, hard-to-maintain computer systems. They're turning to outsiders like Exodus for a wide range of services, from playing host to corporate accounting, personnel, and payroll programs to gaining quick entree to the world of e-commerce.

Forbes ASAP: Directories may be dull, but they're important. What may result is the Internet equivalent of pay-as-you-go lanes, where Internet users who can afford more expensive access will zoom around the web while others with basic service will be stuck in the virtual toll lanes.

Information Week: Built To Scale. Nevertheless, for E-commerce sites dealing with thousands of Web application users at any given moment while also dispensing hundreds of thousands of unique page views per day, achieving peak performance and allowing for future growth is a somewhat mysterious art.

Salon: 11 million Net addicts? Come on! Each August, the American Psychological Association convenes. And every year since 1996, someone has stood up to present findings that the Internet is dangerous and addictive.

Business Week: Eliminating the Middleman Online. The thinking goes like this: If a business buys 100 desktops direct from IBM, Big Blue has an opportunity to sell the hardware as part of an entire "solutions" package. But if that purchaser buys from some reseller, all it gets are the PCs.

Marketing Computers: Advertising in a Broadband Future. After viewing the pages and interacting with the ads, users were measured on recall, purchase intent, likability and annoyance factors.

Information Week: Wireless Travel. One way hotels and airlines are attracting Internet Age business travelers is by providing wireless connections in airline terminals, hotel lobbies, and guest rooms.

August 25, 1999
TechWeb: Dell Touts Its Web Operations. Dell has also moved more support functions online. Some 75 percent of order status inquiries are now handled solely via the Web. And this year, 34 percent of customers used online support rather than Dell's call centers.

Wired News: Big Brother, Big 'Fun' at Amazon. But Amazon didn't ask groups for permission before using employees' and members' orders to create the corporate profiles that appeared on its Web site last Friday, and not all organizations are enthusiastic about even summarized personal-purchase information appearing online.

Wired News: Programmer Reaches His Xanadu. After 30-years in development, the source code for Xanadu, an ambitious attempt to build a multi-dimensional hypertext system that in many ways parallels the Web, has been released by Internet visionary and enigma Ted Nelson.

News.Com: Ford granted restraining order for Web site. Lane, who has never worked for Ford, has been posting the mostly product-related documents obtained from unknown employees, Cain said. Ford wants the site shut down and is seeking unspecified damages from Lane.

Computerworld: Is software too hard to use? Next month, a group of corporate users, vendors and experts will convene in Redwood Shores, Calif., to test what they hope will become a common method for evaluating the usability of software.

Red Herring: One to watch. Based in Redwood City, California, Equinix plans to ease backbone traffic by allowing telecommunications carriers and providers of content, backbone, email, and Internet service to connect to each other at private, neutral exchanges.

• PC Week: From May 25, 1999; Startup to propose alternatives to Internet Exchange Points
• Interactive Week: From December 7, 1998; Peering Into The Future

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

• IETF: Internet Open Trading Protocol Working Group. The Internet Open Trading Protocol provides an interoperable framework for Internet commerce. It is optimized for the case where the buyer and the merchant do not have a prior acquaintance and is payment system independent.

ClickZ: A Little "Lagniappe". It's amazing to me how often companies forget the value of doing that little something extra for customers. In an effort to bash their way into our consciousness, so many marketers believe that by yelling louder, making outrageous claims, providing yet another service you don't need, or adding another feature, it's going to get your company noticed.

TechWeb: CIOs Skirt Strategic Planning. Only about half the companies responding to a recent survey said the CIO contributed to, reviewed, or participated in the formulation of the corporate strategic plan -- even though more than two-thirds of these companies acknowledge how important the Internet is to their organization.

TechWeb: Vendors Say Bye-Bye To Bandwidth. [Peter Williamson, CEO of Australia's Telstra] "There is always a shortage of bandwidth to North America because of the Internet and what I call dot-com fever," Williamson said. "We send 65 percent of our traffic into the U.S., but there is no return."

SJ Mercury: Something in the air on Net access. Nevertheless, the wireless carriers aren't exiling themselves to the fringes. Instead, they're competing by offering more speed, charging less, delivering sooner, and going places where the wires don't reach.

August 26, 1999
Salon: Is the Web "contracting"? Scott Rosenberg. But the pressure to put numbers on Net behavior continues to lead to questionable conclusions. The latest and subtlest example arrived in Monday's Los Angeles Times, in a study that claimed that the World Wide Web is "contracting."

USA Today: Net redefines retailer-supplier relationship. Internet shopping is turning manufacturers and retailers into virtual competitors as online shopping alters old-line retail relationships. While many retailers are working out ways to maintain the peace -- and share the online bounty -- others have bluntly warned their suppliers to stay off-line.

Wired News: Slashdot: All the News that Fits. "In a lot of ways, journalists have decided that journalism is something journalists do," said Slashdot.org editor Rob Malda in an email. "That's sort of elitist, but I won't piss on their parade and really contest that: We're just not journalists."

ZDNN: Amazon