September 1, 1999
BBC News: Hitch-hiker's guide to the Internet. "On the Internet, there is no 'they'. There's only a very, very large 'us'," he says. Thankfully dodging the all-too-predictable conclusion that this will revitalise tired notions of democracy, Adams considers the fact that chat groups and single-issue Websites create communities of interest.

Salon: Holey Hotmail. Scott Rosenberg. But there's one huge disadvantage that the Hotmail saga neatly illuminates: Once your data is on someone else's machine, its privacy and safety is utterly in the hands of that someone.

• FEED Magazine: From August 31, 1999; Hotmail And The Revenge Of Viral Marketing. Clay Shirky.

USA Today: Web ad rates may be pay-per-view. In the next four years, the Web will shift from the advertising model on which most off-line media are based -- the cost per thousand impressions -- toward a pay-for-performance standard.

Editor & Publisher: Washingtonpost.com's 'Afternoon' Web Edition. Steve Outing. Feaver says the Web site has had Post reporters filing stories for mid-day coverage for some time, but this was limited to occasional, significant stories. PM Extra basically takes all the top stories of the day and provides staff coverage of them in advance of the print edition on a daily basis.

NY Times: Some Analysts Cut Through Fog of Growth for Net Retailers. Their method is simple -- perhaps deceptively so. They are taking the two numbers that E-tailers love to trumpet (because they are always growing) total revenues for a quarter and total customer base and dividing one by the other. The results are eyebrow raising. They go straight down.

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

Editor & Publisher: Online Journalists Find Comraderie. The San Francisco meeting was only the third event of the ONA. The panel focused on the art of online storytelling, which some believe is lacking at online news sites.

Salon: Micropublishing comes of age. Unknown self-publishers without promotion budgets by contrast are locked in a Catch-22. If readers can't see what they're getting, it's hard to interest them. But if would-be buyers can get the book or document without paying for it, then sellers don't make a cent.

PC Week: Web publishing takes center stage at Seybold. ...Tim Gill, chairman and chief technical officer of Quark Inc., who said that, in essence, the Web is becoming "PrintTV." Although immediate accessibility to content will be a main feature, sites also have to figure out how to repurpose content to get more value.

TechWeb: Traditional Printers Wrestle With The Web. Four trends will determine the future of Web publishing, said Norman Meyrowitz, Macromedia president. They are production values, dynamic websites, the degree of difficulty of Web production, and the ability to design for several form factors.

CIO WebBusiness: Internet2 and Counting. UCAID's goal: to develop fundamentally different technologies that can be dropped into the current Internet protocol infrastructure as they become ready for prime time.

ABCNews.Com: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Privacy concerns aside, I find both these features oddly addictive — not because they help me buy more stuff, as Amazon apparently intends, but because they set me either to pondering or laughing.

September 2, 1999
Business 2.0: No ExSKUses. Glenn Fleishman. Almost no online stores, and certainly none of the major brand names, leverage the power of the information relationships contained in their product databases in a way that benefits the consumer, or even reflects the manner in which consumers make choices.

Business 2.0: Marketing Makeover. Q&A with Sergio Zyman. Of particular importance is providing information to consumers to help them make buying decisions, a task to which the Web is ideally suited. But Net-based businesses are falling into some of the same traps as traditional businesses. Attempting to compete on price rather than service or other intangibles...

Salon: Jupiter shoots for the moon. In many ways, the criticisms that are leveled at Jupiter can be leveled at just about any market research company -- and often are. "Do I think the Internet analyst market is a scam?"

Business 2.0: Culture Club. Those with the greatest success in traditional markets often perceive ecommerce as a threat to their stature, power, and ultimately their jobs. Paradoxically, in the face of this transition, it is often the highest achievers in marketing or sales who voice the greatest skepticism to investing in a new market approach.

ABCNews.Com: New Keys to Content. "Many Internet users think that, if there is no practical way to charge for content, they will get it free," Net pundit Bob Metcalfe wrote recently in his "From the Ether" column. "The reality is that without [online] payment systems, a lot of premium online content will be not free, but unavailable."

Business 2.0: Portal Pretense. [Mark Breier, CEO of Beyond.com] Breier's lip service raised a question many ecommerce vendors are asking today: Are the long term, megamillion-dollar deals that give exposure on high-traffic portal sites such as Yahoo!, Excite@Home, AOL, and Lycos worth it?

• ZDNN: From April 6, 1999; Portal commerce deals lack results
• News.Com: From April 16, 1999; Why portal deals are falling flat

RCFoC: The Next Battle Is Joined! But the chat-changes likely won't end here. How long before one of the new voice-chat services adds still pictures, and then video? And, how long before businesses realize that this voice-chat service represents a global "conference call" system that is completely free.

NY Times: The Digital Brain Drain. Few suggest that basic sciences are disappearing from the classroom. But a sense is growing in some business quarters that the sheer ubiquity of computers has deflected attention from more traditional sciences and skills.

PC Week: Turnkey services relieve Web congestion. It was only a matter of time before someone realized that distributed networks could be shared. There are tens of thousands of Web sites, but only a few attract flash crowds on any given day.

Forbes ASAP: Pogo's prospects jump. They [interstitials] are, however, being very well received by Pogo players, who are served these ads in between Bingo rounds. "People really watch those because it's such a short time between game rounds that they can't go anywhere else..."

September 3, 1999
ZDNN: Net emerging from its 'Stone Age'. During a panel discussion Kleinrock and his fellow Internet pioneers mapped out their predictions for the future of computing. They predicted a coming era of ubiquitous wireless access, bumper bandwidth and Net access as prevalent as electrical outlets.

MSNBC: Will the Net end ticket scalping? Some ticketers want to use the concept of the online auction to sell tickets at what economists call the "market price" — that is, the maximum price the market will bear, given the laws of supply and demand.

DaveNet: The Dark Side of Syndication. All concentrators have one thing in common, they like to point in, not out. Economically they are incentivized to capture flow, not distribute it. It's against their interest to point outside of their sites, but guess what, that's their whole purpose!

News.Com: eBay cuts off outside search service. Leading online auctioneer eBay is clamping down on outside companies that use search engines to find items for sale on its site, arguing that the technology affects site performance.

Forbes: Call 'em like you see 'em. It's a catch 22. If RealNames becomes the most popular way to get around on the web, it could have a monopoly. But if the system is opened up to competition, it is rendered infective.

ZDNN: Palm.net rival in the family. First of all, it will offer flat rate CDPD service through four carriers. Palm offers only measured service for Palm.net, which can add up for heavy users. [...] Secondly, it will enable direct access to corporate e-mail accounts.

Time Digital: Prodigy's Final Days. To make matters worse, its arcane protocols didn't work with the Net. Not that Prodigy didn't try to evolve. It introduced a Web browser in December 1994, well before AOL or CompuServe. But more ambitious plans to scrap the proprietary service and go straight to the Net were never executed.

Editor & Publisher: New Wave of Content Ready to Be Sold Online. Steve Outing. What this does mean is that publishers can start thinking in new ways. If they have content that's worth a cash price that they've kept off the Internet for piracy fears, they can begin to sell it online.

Salon: How to empower a couch potato. People like Eisner are interested in Replay because it offers to solve, in a roundabout way, what has been the biggest riddle in television: how to deliver something akin to "video on demand..."

MIT Technology Review: Rewriting the Bible in 0’s and 1’s. Since the 1960s, Donald Knuth has been writing the sacred text of computer programming. He’s a little behind schedule, but he has an excuse: he took time out to reinvent digitial typography.

EE Times: Microsoft builds R&D Dream Team in Beijing. [Kai-Fu Lee, managing director of MSR China]"We will focus on three research directions, including next-generation multimedia, a next-generation user's interface and new information-processing technologies particular to Chinese processing technologies..."

September 4, 1999
AtNewYork: When Information Is King, Consumers Gain Leverage. Jason Chervokas. And how companies react to this changing environment will make all the difference in the world. Those that embrace openness will successfully make the leap to cyberspace; those who try to replicate the old models of customer relationships are doomed to failure.

Mappa.Mundi Magazine: Getting Tufte. Tufte himself acknowledges some of the difficulty when he points out that the relatively low resolution monitors most of us are using today require that information comparison be set out on progressive screens. "It’s one damn thing after another", says Tufte and it leaves the user wondering "where am I?"

Useit.Com: Spotlight of SoftLock's website mentioned recently in Steve Outing's column. Besides having a useless website, I also fear that SoftLock has a useless product. The only concrete info I could find was in the customer support section which stated that it may not be possible to read copy-protected documents after running Norton Utilities or other disk utility software.

• Editor & Publisher: From September 3, 1999; New Wave of Content Ready to Be Sold Online. Steve Outing.

News.Com: Web shoppers frustrated with lack of online service. But as the Web becomes America's shopping mall, frustration is growing. Nine percent of consumers said they were not satisfied with online customer service. A major source of dissatisfaction is that advertised goods were not in stock--one in 10 orders could not be filled...

Advertising Age: Colgate leaps by rivals with 1st chief Web officer. In his new duties, Mr. Haber will be responsible for both Web marketing and e-commerce, implementing "a global strategy for shaping the way we will do business online," he said in a prepared statement.

InfoWorld: Giving research the business. The prevailing thinking is that the influx of more business concerns to the early stages of the research process increases the return on advanced technology investments and brings technologies to bear on complex business problems more efficiently.

InfoWorld: Lucent to expand Web-based tech support to entire line. The service will support, among applications, live chats with technical personnel who could instantaneously forward files to chat participants, or live Webcasts with engineers on products, as well as education and training.

September 5, 1999
NY Times: Hailed as a Surgeon General, Koop Criticized on Web Ethics. Among the complaints are that his hugely popular health information Web site, DrKoop.com, has frequently blurred the line between its objective information and its advertising or promotional content, and that his ties to business have not been properly disclosed.

Contentious: Editing Online Documents: Strategies and Tips. Online readers often experience disorientation or "wayfinding" problems when traversing links. Therefore, as an online editor you should ensure that your readers remain fully oriented and in control as they navigate through your document (or to other documents).

Lighthouse: OK, it's up. Now keep it up! Maintenance isn't easy. It isn't romantic. Once a Web-builder gets proper systems in place, it isn't technologically challenging. But the Web needs more of it.

• Contentious: From August 5, 1998; Content is a service. Q&A with Jakob Nielsen. I believe "content gardening" could be a valuable role, even though currently almost no Web sites are doing it. Old content has substantial value.

NY Times: The Wizard Turns Out to Be an Artist. Architecture is about "creating spaces in which people will do things -- live, work, play," said Glenn, who works in the company's San Mateo office, and though creating a game environment is much the same, "the game world can be anything you want."

September 6, 1999
LA Times: AOL Struggles to Stand Out in Cyber-Crowd. [Hal R. Varian, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems] "There is no company that can provide everything to the consumer. Early on, AOL was doing it all, but the Internet has changed all that."

NY Times: Online Retailers Find That Customer Reviews Build Loyalty. The problem for Internet retailers is how to harness the opinions of those real people without letting the negative comments chase prospective buyers away. The solution, some e-commerce companies are finding, is to allow customers to have their say, and hope that it ultimately builds sales.

Interactive Week: Internet 2003: Industrial-Strength Net. Still to come are redundancy, self-healing networks, a new Internet communications protocol and deeper security - because e-commerce sites will be required not only to handle hundreds of millions of customers and billions of different devices...

Web Techniques: The Web Is Not TV. In this uncertain environment, how comforting it is to pretend that the Web is just a super-duper form of television, that ISPs are equivalent to the broadcast networks, and that Web sites and portals are equivalent to the TV studios that create sitcoms!

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

SJ Mercury: France seeks English limits on Web. Dechamps, whose group has successfully sued companies for using English while advertising in France, maintains current laws aimed at preserving the French language should apply to Internet sites as well.

• Feed Magazine: From July 7, 1999; How 19th-Century Politics Determined The 21st-Century. Clay Shirky.

Industry Standard: The Logic of Logistics. Technology gurus continue to think that strong branding is the key driver of e-commerce success. But the way electronic commerce is unfolding, operations may be the magical ingredient in a Web retailer's branding strategy.

Industry Standard: Digital Cash Is Back. Not only are customers often reluctant to enter their credit-card information for such a small purchase, but merchants and issuing banks can't make money on such tiny transactions after processing fees are paid.

Wired News: Quixtar: Half-empty or Half-full? "Once you sour the well for those people, so to speak, you've probably lost them." For that very reason, most companies launch Web sites with little fanfare, working out the kinks before telling the world to have a look. Not Quixtar.

Industry Standard: Design for a Better Living. Carl Steadman. It's not about ability, but sensibility! Perhaps you regularly envision new user interface metaphors. Do you see users floating through an information space, bringing an end to the tyranny of such outmoded notions as icons and windows?

September 7, 1999
Information Week: New Mantra: Usability. While you could train your clerks, you'll have no opportunity to train customers to use your application--so its design had better be intuitive. Moreover, customers at your site are discretionary buyers and will abandon the order process any time they run into difficulty with your software interface.

SJ Mercury: Advertisers fear Web surfers aren't paying attention. Companies are questioning whether the traditional banner ad on a Web page is the most effective way for them to deliver their message. They worry that consumers, fed up with irrelevant ads, may be tuning the banners out.

Internet World: Web Ads Push Onto The Desktop in a New Way. But what if Quake and Quicken were free? Would you put up with ads? A growing number of publishers and ad software firms think so. They believe that advertising in desktop applications will reduce the price of software and turn shareware and store-bought shrinkwrap into freeware.

ZDNN: Judge puts brakes on Ford. [U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Edmunds] "In the realm of law, we are only beginning to grapple with the impact of the communications revolution, and this case represents just one part of one skirmish..."

• AtNewYork: From September 4, 1999; When Information Is King, Consumers Gain Leverage. Jason Chervokas.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of notes from a special-interest group tour and presentation at WebTV. WebTV is a paragon of usability methodology: regular user tests every week.

Adweek: Data Chase. How, for instance, would you marry that same Mets fan's past offline behavior, such as buying tickets to three games, to his or her Mets-related activities on the Web? "The prevailing wisdom is that-with a little bit of duct tape-you can make it work..."

News.Com: E-tailers lure customers with free shipping. Analysts say the strategy could be risky for some e-tailers. Not only does free shipping set customer expectations high from the start, it's also expensive.

Byte: What Is The Internet Good For? The Internet is a much cleverer and potentially more useful network than the ones that preceded it, but I see it as an extension of our communications capability, not the creation of a wholly new communications medium.

Internet World: A Blurry Picture. Web publishers are trying to convince photographers that copyrights are all the rights the photographers need, online or off. But the argument is specious, because business models are in flux in the online world--and because the copyright law has yet to be truly tested...

News.Com: On the Internet, there is such thing as free labor. A growing number of Net companies, including Netscape, Lycos, and Deja.com, are using volunteers instead of salaried staff to build their content directories.

Forbes: Handspring tips its hand. Handspring has sworn most of Silicon Valley to secrecy, yet it inadvertently has tipped its hand through material posted on its web site.

PC Magazine: LCD Panel Pricing Peaks. The price of LCD monitors will continue to be at least three times as much as equivalent CRTs--a price differential that will be difficult to justify in typical business applications.

September 8, 1999
Useit.Com: Reputation Managers are Happening. Epinions and Google join eBay in maintaining independent ratings of the quality of products, websites, and auction sellers, leading to better customer service and helping users make informed buying decisions.

Wired News: EFF: Piracy Not the Problem. [EFF executive director Tara Lemmey] "How do we lock these rights up? I think the real question is how do we ease the function of payment. People don't normally steal things that are easy to pay for. Combating piracy means making it easier for people to pay."

NY Times: Microsoft to Start Net Hotel-Pricing Service. One factor, however, that might impede Microsoft is that Priceline has been granted a patent on the central mechanism of its system: the concept of a "conditional purchase offer" in which a consumer is committed to buy something if the seller can meet their specifications.

• Salon: From August 27, 1999; Jay Walker's patent mania

USA Today: Gutenberg project's goal: all books online. The project hopes eventually to input every book as soon as it falls out of copyright and enters the public domain, making the entire backlog of human written endeavor available.

• Wired: From February 1997; Hart of the Gutenberg Galaxy

• TechWeb: From July 16, 1997; Insider Profile of Brewster Kahle
• Internet Buzz: From July 24, 1998; Alexa and Netscape Smart Browsing: An Interview with Brewster Kahle

USA Today: Only 19 degrees of Web separation. The findings, reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, suggest that the Web is so interconnected that any desired information is nearby even though there are 800 million documents available.

ZDNN: Palm creators prep faster, cheaper Visor. Handspring has developed a number of new touches, such as a new Palm-III like form factor that includes a built in microphone and a slot that can accommodate a range of peripherals, called Springboard modules.

September 9, 1999
[clip]: One-To-One With Don Peppers. Q&A with Don Peppers. Today's customer-oriented business strategies result from a unique convergence of technological developments and social evolution. The Internet gives consumers unprecedented control over the flow of information that reaches them.

• Business Week: From July 19, 1999; Collaborating with the Customer. Q&A with Martha Rogers and Don Peppers.

USA Today: Yahoo! may raise ad rates. Yahoo! is expected to release its new advertising rates for the next year on Sept. 15. The Santa Clara, California-based company's advertising rates are expected to increase about 15% to 20%...

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

USA Today: Sites turn to referrals for traffic. ''It's a Tupperware party on steroids,'' said Forrester Research analyst Chris Charron. ''The reason it's valuable is that affiliate networks take advantage of the diffuse nature of the Internet. According to our research, it's the best way to drive traffic to a site.''

• PC Week: From March 4, 1999; Amazon.com founder spells out 'customer-centric' mission. Q&A with Jeff Bezos.
• Useit.Com: From July 11, 1999; Affiliates Programs

Useit.Com: Spotlight of Carmen's Headline Viewer for XML-syndicated sites. Specialized clients can have a user interface that is optimized for a certain class of users and a certain class of tasks - this will always win over a general-purpose UI.

Wired News: Dreamcast Rocks Around the Clock. ...Sega’s Web site, which was unreachable for a good part of Thursday as traffic increased ten-fold over normal, according to the company. By the end of the day, Sega’s home page was accessible again, but still very slow.

September 10, 1999
FEED Magazine: RE: Douglas Rushkoff and Andrew Shapiro. ...FEED's Editor-In-Chief Steven Johnson sat down with Rushkoff and Shapiro to discuss coercion, control, and what, if anything, will allow us to shape the world we live in.

Salon: Network computing returns -- yet again. Scott Rosenberg. But before we rush to embrace the brave new world of network-centric computing, let's think harder about what we're giving up -- and to whom.

Editor & Publisher: Does posting a story make it fair game for the competition? So the question is: Was there an ethical breach here or is this just smart newspapering? Who owes what to whom in the increasingly competitive world of online, minute-by-minute deadlines?

Online Journalism Review: Clearing a Minefield: The Ethics of Owning Stock. Itemizing a list of "don'ts" for reporters also holds risks, says Leo Wolinsky, managing editor for news at the Los Angeles Times. "When you ban particulars like that you really have to ban them all," he says. "Some guidelines are pretty good even though they are somewhat vague."

Intenet Week: A Think-Tank Vision: More Comfortable Connectivity. All are zeroing in on the implications of a world in which there are perhaps a trillion network-connected devices, in which "mobile computing" is anachronistic. Computing will be everywhere, embedded in all sorts of man-made things.

AtNewYork: What I Did on Summer Vacation: Lessons for the Dot-Com Retailers. Tom Watson. The lesson here is that slapping up some SKU numbers and shopping cart software doesn't make me want to shop -- convenience does. The online shops that offer it will win in the long run, because customers won't just trust the brand, they'll trust the experience.

Builder.Com: Why Web Content Is Different. Trying to make a Web site into an imitation of a print publication is a recipe for failure. If it would work better in print, it might as well be in print. Instead of trying to chase print, take advantage of what the Web offers that print can't match.

Interactive Week: Pure Net No More. The day of the pure Net company is ending. Within another three years, five at the outside, it'll be impossible to make the distinction between a Net company and a non-Net company.

• [clip]: From April 5, 1999; Usability Guru. Q&A with Jakob Nielsen. Yes, maybe not today, but in a year or two. There are very few businesses that shouldn't have a website. Most companies' websites will become their most important interface with the customer.

NY Times: Yale Law Professor Is Main Architect of Global Filtering Plan. In a recent phone interview before he departed for Munich, Balkin said that filtering will be an inevitable feature of the Internet, given the glut of information available and the need to protect children from potentially harmful content.

Upside: Bash Before You Buy. Regardless of the inspiration, it picks up on the right trends and needs, not to mention that it rides the basic tidal wave moving the Web: Putting power into the hands of the people using the Internet.

MSNBC: Gentlemen, start your (Net) engines. "Car companies want to sell the car, not the Web site," says Peter Brown, editor-in-chief of Automotive News, explaining the Web’s absence in most auto ads. "The Web is looked at as a marketing medium, not as a way to sell cars."

Forbes: Speed racer. The firm has set up a mini-Net of sorts, 900 servers in 15 countries. Early on-liner Prodigy tried a similar tack way back in 1986. But Akamai harnesses far more computer power and a secret weapon: proprietary algorithms that let its servers map the Net for the least-busy routes...

RCFoC: The Pocket Fairy Godmother. In our case, the change from pulp-paper to Epaper books will also be about access, but about access to far more "information" than we could realistically carry around with us in the old form.

September 11, 1999
Industry Standard: Instant Delivery. But stocking products known to sell well in particular regions – such as surfing books in West Coast warehouses – will help bring delivery costs down. Companies can rely on quick ground deliveries rather than having to pay for expensive air-freight deliveries from a centralized warehouse.

ABCNews.Com: Texaco’s 3-D Pod Improving Oil Exploration. The advent of 3-D visualization technology has slashed the time required to interpret that data. Information that once took two weeks to analyze can be processed in one day.

Washington Post: On Web, Newspapers Never Sleep. On the Web, newspapers are competing with a bewildering variety of offerings, many of which provide updates from the Associated Press or Reuters as well as their own material.

• Freedom Forum: From March 2, 1999; Merc Center: Making appointments with Web users
• Editor & Publisher: From September 1, 1999; Washingtonpost.com's 'Afternoon' Web Edition. Steve Outing.
• Editor & Publisher: From September 10, 1999; Does posting a story make it fair game for the competition?

InfoWorld: Talking around the Web becomes a reality. [Roger Matus, VP Marketing at Dragon Systems] "Speech vendors are trying to learn how they are going to interact with the Web. Talking to a graphical user interface on a PC is not the ultimate solution. The question is, where is it going to go?"

September 12, 1999
SJ Mercury: Network computers may supplement, but won't supplant, PCs. Dan Gillmor. Cable and DSL Internet connections to homes will boost demand even more. Even a slow dial-up connection shows us the value of attaching information tools to networks. Multiply that value by a big number when the connection is fast and always on.

NY Times: Group Puts Disaster Data on Internet. Advocates of releasing the information say the compilation of the summaries, which were not suppressed under the new law, could show the public that the information was kept off the Internet more to avoid embarrassing chemical companies than to impede terrorists.

NY Times: Barnes & Noble to Phase Out Use of the Times List of Books. Barnesandnoble.com, the Web company that the chain spun off in a public stock offering in May, plans for now to continuing offering discounts based on the New York Times best-seller lists...

NY Times: Two Companies Show Progress in Group Buying. Because portals need return customers to bolster their advertising revenue, they have been willing to view group-buying sites as partners rather than as tenants. Both companies have negotiated partnerships in which the bidding will occur on a portal site...

InfoWorld: Quality of service hits extranets, electronic commerce. Currently, Ariba customers can prioritize their Web traffic based on URLs; capabilities will be added in the fall to allow those priorities to apply to packets past the Web server and throughout the Cisco routers in the enterprise.

September 13, 1999
Wired News: Patent's Net Result: Nothing? But rather than be a windfall for DoubleClick, the patent may well end up as the latest addition to the reject pile of overbroad, unfounded Internet patents. When examined in court, these patents are showing weak odds of standing up to legal scrutiny.

LA Times: Will Cyber Patents Stymie Hollywood Giants? If Sightsound and others are able to defend their patents, they could have monopolies on markets that may someday be worth billions of dollars. More likely, they could be in a position to levy licensing fees on others who want permission to pursue similar businesses.

Interactive Week: P&G To Offer Build-It-Yourself Cosmetics. "The products and lines won't exist until each women comes on and customizes them for herself," Estruth said. "The beauty of the Internet is that it is one-to-one -- fulfillment systems doesn't have to be available in every store outlet."

TechWeb: Technology Guru Touts Media Literacy. Q&A with Douglas Rushkoff. My suspicion is both educators and the people who fund education understand once you start teaching someone how to deconstruct the McDonald's commercial one day, the day after that, they'll be deconstructing what the teacher says...

• FEED Magazine: From September 10, 1999; RE: Douglas Rushkoff and Andrew Shapiro

Salon: Broadband warrior. Q&A with Tom Jermoluk, CEO of Excite@Home. Because we're inventing this technology we feel that we're the best ones to create the technological environment from the content side as well. [But] we aren't content creators. We're a partner for content creators.

W3C Note: Eskimo Snow and Scottish Rain: Legal Considerations of Schema Design. Within this paper I examine the mechanisms by which our computer agents will express and understand what we wish to say in order to form online agreements.

Editor & Publisher: What Is 'Internet Content'? Steve Outing. The Internet offers 5 million channels — but you can definitely find something "good on." If you've got a narrow interest, there is content online to cover it. And that's where a good many online content providers will make their livings.

IDG.net: Media Lab founder: Europeans fear youth, risk. "There are 200,000 paid subscribers in Mexico," he said. "Each account has an average of six users," he added. Six people pool their money to get one "timeshare" on the account. "Is that 200,000? Or is it 1.2 million possible customers?"

Wired News: Untangling the Web We Weave. Given the ongoing explosion in content, the pertinent question is not whether ratings and filters will be used but when and how they will work. And the questions will apply to everyone, not just to parents concerned about their children viewing risque´ material.

Industry Standard: The Art of Fulfillment. Many online retailers are struggling with the dilemma of when to outsource order fulfillment and when to bring it in-house, as well as the bigger question: What's the most efficient way to get orders into customers' hands?

Interactive Week: Santa's Helpers Get Their Feet Webbed. "Companies have been so busy concentrating on improving their e-commerce systems and adding new features to their Web sites that a lot of the logistics problems have not been addressed..."

SF Chronicle: Readers Still Prefer the Printed Word. Sure, Web publishing will grow in prominence, and more and more people will use e-mail. But many readers will remain reluctant to give up their books, newspapers and magazines.

Industry Standard: Thinking Different(ly). About the same time the G3 storm broke, a sharply negative post was made on a NetBeans' forum by an unhappy NetBeaner. Like the G3 post, this was not designed to make NetBeans look good. Yet the company let the message, and the discussion, flow. This critic was not silenced.

Interactive Week: Exodus Moves Toward Better Content Distribution. A host of large Internet service providers, including America Online, Cable & Wireless and Telia, already use the Traffic Server platform for caching. Eventually, Inktomi plans to persuade these individual network operators to leverage each other's caches for content distribution.

ABCNews.Com: Magellans of the Web. But just as Columbus, da Gama and Magellan used those tools to bring astonishing discoveries to Europe, modern cyberspace explorers have begun to track the online ocean to bring some sense of order to cyberspace, blazing trails that search engines and Internet users will follow in the future.

Byte: The Victorian Internet. I expected a few cute (and probably overstretched) parallels between the nineteenth century's telegraph and today's electronic superhighway; but Standage brings up points in common that are nothing less than astonishing.

September 14, 1999
SJ Mercury: Behind the news: A common thread of interconnectedness. Dan Gillmor. Yet the distinctly different strategic moves of these two companies had at least one common thread. They contemplated an emerging world in which people will get access to information from a variety of devices and platforms, not just one.

Internet Week: Amid The Chaos, Take Time To Dream A Little. If you're not thinking about how your company could better leverage Internet and other information technologies for competitive advantage, you're selling your company-and yourself-short.

• Useit.Com: From May 31, 1998; Micro-Containers: An Example of Strategic Web Thinking

ZDNN: Online newspapers fading fast. John C. Dvorak. Note that the Associated Press "gets it" and has a reporter writing the story on the spot and sending it into the AP offices within minutes of the end of the game. Are the AP reporters faster writers?

• Online Journalism Review: From May 20, 1999; Is Reliance on the AP Draining the Life from Online News?

Business Week: Wanted: Better Job Listings. In a series of lab tests with dozens of ''average'' Web users, the job seekers called up a company's recruitment site and tried to find and apply for a job that suited their interests and talents. They succeed in completing an application just 26% of the time.

• Good Reports: E-Recruiting: Online Strategies in the War for Talent. Mark Hurst and Jakob Nielsen.

Forbes: Narrowband dinosaur? Since Real's whole reason for being is to create a simulated broadband experience for dialup customers, is there any need for Real once everyone has broadband?

TechWeb: Researchers Recognize What Is 'Write'. Character recognition is expected to show up in applications as diverse as combined cell phone/handheld PC/GPS products and sophisticated mail-sorting machines being developed to handle the growing number of packages ordered over the Web.

September 15, 1999
Salon: The modest inventor. As a book, "Weaving the Web" is part history, part manifesto, part autobiography. That unusual amalgam is hinted at by the book's unwieldy subtitle: "The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web By Its Inventor."

Internet World: Take My Content... Please! While the giveaway of branded content has clear benefits for Web page builders who want to make their sites more interesting and graphically appealing, how great a benefit it will be to advertisers is unclear.

Forbes ASAP: Lycos tool highlights emerging consumer trends. "Our goal is to create an up-to-date list of the people, places and things that Internet users are interested in," says Levine. "It's a great way for people to stay current. For marketers, this tool can be used to get an idea about emerging consumer trends."

• Lycos: The Lycos 50 Daily Report

MSDN Online: How to Avoid Foolish Consistency. A foolish consistency is one that serves no benefit for the end user. Making things look and work the same is pointless if the user can no longer accomplish their tasks. Rank making things useful above making them consistent.

Scientific American: High-Speed Data Races Home. So right now system designers and broadband entrepreneurs are left to figure out how much money people will pay to go faster--which basically boils down to determining how much happier higher speeds make them.

SJ Mercury: Workplace learning power is topic of SRI futurist panel. A small group of managers, vendors, futurists and hardware researchers discussed the issues they are grappling with as companies begin to transform workplace training with new methods called ``learning on demand..."

Harvard Business School Publishing: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy. Q&A with Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster, authors of Blown to Bits. Incumbent leaders must recognize that in the new economy, the only sure loser will be a "fast follower." Strategists must begin to think like insurgents rather than incumbents if they are to survive.

Wired News: Sprechen Sie Internet Deutsch? The influence of the Internet on German manifests itself in both appearance, because the language now looks different, and in substance, because Germans have snapped up English words to describe the customs of the digital age.

Newsweek: The Dawn of E-Life. The Internet is built on both a philosophy and an infrastructure of openness and free communication; its users hold the potential to change not just how we get things done, but our thinking patterns and behavior.

ClickZ: Cast A Wide Web. The brilliance of the affiliate concept is that it wraps both sales and marketing into one neat package that takes advantage of the unique capabilities of the web.

TechWeb: Wireless Internet Is On The Way. Skip Bryan, WAP Forum board member representing Ericsson said his company was into the launch phase and seeing rapid growth in content providers and portals working with WAP.

September 16, 1999
Forbes: Lessons from the real world. What’s the secret to making money from online content? No one has cracked that mystery yet, but increasingly, content providers are taking a look at traditional media companies to find workable business models.

Business Week: How Secure Is eBay's Edge? The deal's most tangible strategic benefit is that AOL has agreed to stay out of the auction business for at least two years. In other words, eBay has paid $75 million in protection money to AOL.

Wired News: Crypto Law: Little Guy Loses. The new rules, which still require government review and approval, would mean a programmer or company has to wade through Washington's bureaucratic swamp and most likely hire a not-inexpensive lawyer as a guide.

SJ Mercury: U.S. encryption limits to be eased. The new policy, scheduled for unveiling today, would dramatically ease restrictions on overseas sales of sophisticated encryption products, the technology that scrambles electronic data so it can't be read without authorization...

PC Magazine: Your Word, Your Mouth. I love the epinions.com idea. Once again, we're seeing how our normal, run-of-the-mill behavioral patterns can be recreated online in a more efficient way.

Freedom Forum: N.Y. Yankees score with Web site; newspapers could, too. Jon Katz. Yankees.com shows how a well-designed, interactive site can make a traditional product (a ball game, a book, a newspaper) more accessible and appealing, instead of simply more digital.

• PC Magazine: From September 13, 1999; Fading Newspapers. John C. Dvorak.

News.Com: Lands' End gives Web shopping the personal touch. The features will enable two people at separate locations to shop together and compare notes on what to buy through instant chat.

News.Com: Time Inc. decentralizes Internet business. [Don Logan, Time Chairman and CEO] "Simply put, this means that the responsibility for the various magazine Web sites, currently housed at Time New Media, along with their attendant business and editorial functions, will return to the respective magazine divisions..."

PC Magazine: Analyze This. Andromedia (through its LikeMinds technology) and Net Perceptions, two of the leaders in collaborative filtering, offer products and services designed to look at what online consumers say they like and show they like, then compare that data with what others like.

LA Times: P&G to Pay Agencies on Performance, Not Commission. P&G executives are betting that the compensation plan will correct flaws in an existing system that favors costly television advertising over less expensive marketing programs done through the Internet, direct mail and other options.

ABCNews.Com: Weathering the Storm. For most brick-and-mortar companies, preparing for a storm like Hurricane Floyd amounts to shutting down, protecting key equipment, perhaps sandbagging the front door in case of floods and getting employees home safely. For high-tech companies it’s not that simple.

• Industry Standard: From September 6, 1999; Flirting With Disaster

September 17, 1999
SJ Mercury: Government still assuming there's an encryption compromise. Dan Gillmor. It's the same old saw -- the incorrect assumption that we can come up with a compromise on encryption. We cannot. Either you allow unfettered encryption, in which case you cannot guarantee law enforcement access to communications, or you do not.

Editor & Publisher: Old Media Needs to Hear More Pure-New-Media Thinking. Steve Outing. Early on the first day of the San Francisco conference, after hearing a few presentations, it hit me how differently the venture-capital-backed Internet new media content crowd operates and thinks than does the news industry.

Industry Standard: The World's Wide Web: The Great Fire Wall of China. Somewhere beyond all this Beijingology lie two fundamental concerns for China: How does it maintain control of what could be its most influential industry of the next century, and, just as important, how does it control the information passed along the Web?

• FEED Magazine: From August 11, 1999; Why China's Internet Problem Is A Lot Like South Carolina's. Clay Shirky.

MSNBC: A Web windfall: print gets a shower of dot-com ads. Akamai Technologies Inc., an 18-month-old Cambridge Mass., company that provides Web-site infrastructure, is devoting 95% of its marketing budget to print.

• CBS MarketWatch: From July 18, 1999; Magazines losing ad biz to Net. Don't buy the hype. No matter what anyone says about a forthcoming "content revolution," ad-sales supported publishing is not a good way to make money in 1999.

PC World: Tell Me A Digital Story, Daddy. "Your story is worth telling--it's a part of your identity," Bricklin says. "The Web is a phenomenal way to do that … it's a quantum improvement for communication."

Wired News: IBM on Being 'E'. ...Old Guard corporations are paying close attention to companies like IBM, Charles Schwab, and other established names that have managed to pull off the tricky transformation.

NY Times: Judges Pick David Over Goliath in Domain Name Suits. "Holders of a famous mark are not automatically entitled to use that mark as their domain name; trademark law does not support such a monopoly," the judge wrote.

Forbes: IPIX on the bubble. It lets viewers not only navigate inside photos, but click to see and hear things like product demonstrations, the item in a different color or a close-up shot of product details like hinges and seams.

• Upside: From July 22, 1999; Ipix: Inside the Bubble. Photographers buy the publishing rights by purchasing software "keys," which range in price from about $2.50 to $50. That means the company's cash register rings each time an Ipix image is saved.

Salon: The peacock's hall of mirrors. NBC, like many media companies, knows how to move "eyeballs," as the ad people like to say, from place to place, but knows little about what to do with them once they get to NBC's sites.

September 18, 1999
Project Cool: Media Peepholes. Isn't the web supposed to about diverse voices and different views? Isn't disintermediation - the process in which we can gather information directly without the middleman - supposed to be the future? What's going on here?

• Upside: From June 29, 1999; We Are Not Content!

Wired News: No Shortage of Lightbulbs Here. The one-day conference, hosted by the Tech Museum of Innovation and sponsored by KCBS news radio, focuses on the ways in which our lives can and will be improved by technology.

September 19, 1999
SJ Mercury: Revolution is coming in TV viewing. Dan Gillmor. When you couple the vast storage capacity of tomorrow's HDR systems with the sophisticated electronics and software they'll need to handle TV-oriented chores, they also start to make sense in another role: servers.

September 20, 1999
Industry Standard: Let's Get Personal. Christopher Locke. While the concept has taken a while to sink in, most companies with online pretensions have finally realized a truth astoundingly obvious to wired markets: The Web is not TV.

Useit.Com: User-Supportive Internet Architecture. The basic ideology of the Internet is bit transport; we need a utility-focused human-centered ideology for its fundamental architecture and protocols.

Business Week: The First Amendment Still Reigns -- On and Off the Net. [Robert Lane of blueovalnews.com] If he gets the same rights as traditional journalists, then it "forces all businesses because of the Internet to operate orally only and have no business records," said Ford attorney Ernie Brooks...

• AtNewYork: From September 4, 1999; When Information Is King, Consumers Gain Leverage. Jason Chervokas.

Editor & Publisher: Internet Content Tips From the Pure-New-Media Crowd. Steve Outing. Here's more from the Internet Content 99 conference held in San Francisco last week. As I wrote in my previous column, news industry representatives were a small part of the crowd at this show, yet there was a wealth of information relevant to them.

Salon: Mr. Fix-it. Q&A with Maynard Webb, chief of eBay technologies. In a traditional computing environment you know where your inputs are coming from and you can control them. But in the Web world, anybody can touch you from anywhere.

Computerworld: Will we access our saved data in 20 years? There's the rub: Digital information -- from the historically interesting to the economically vital -- is at risk of disappearing or becoming inaccessible because of the deterioration of storage media like magnetic tapes.

• Salon: From June 10, 1999; Can history survive Silicon Valley? "We run the risk of, 200 years from now, knowing less about this place and this point in history than we know about 15th century Germany, where the printing press was invented..."

ZDNN: IBM cashes in. Not even a year old, this new division has an ambitious goal: Become the arms dealer to the IT industry. To reach that pinnacle, IBM is leveraging the industry's broadest patent portfolio—along with the specter of enforcing those patents.

News.Com: The next big thing. If you recognize that real-world B2B commerce dwarfs real-world B2C (business-to-consumer) commerce, then it seems only logical that B2B Net companies should offer value creation alternatives many times larger than we have seen with the measly consumer.

Industry Standard: Flack Attack. A few days later, the company's publicist e-mailed to encourage me to write about the name change, saying she was "just hoping to get this on your radar." Unfortunately for her, I was just trying to figure out how to shoot it off my screen.

Information Week: Push For Performance. Scalable servers make it possible for businesses to build sites that support thousands of visitors, but a dearth of sophisticated add-on tools has made it difficult to assess system performance and understand-and react to-customer behavior.

NY Times: A Parent's View of the World Wide Web as It Reaches Adolescence. Berners-Lee believes that the next stage of the Web, if properly handled, holds the promise of greatly increasing the creative productivity of groups, corporations and of society in general.

ZDNN: As Net turns 30, it's just beginning. [Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future] "The good news is that with each turn of the technical crank, the system gets faster," Saffo said. "It gets easier to use. It gets more integrated."

September 21, 1999
PC Magazine: Content or Connection? I'm convinced that when we buy Net access, we aren't looking at content (the Web itself is literally a world of content, far wider, deeper, and more interesting than anything any ISP can layer atop our Net connection), but rather for fast, reliable, transparent connections to the Net.

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

Freedom Forum: Is 2000 the Net's big election year? Don't believe it. Jon Katz. Most Washington politicians and the reporters who cover them are too mired in their incestuous talk-show-dinner-party-spin-the-news atmosphere to get what the Net is about or figure out how to use it politically. Someone else will almost surely figure out how to do it.

• Industry Standard: Net Election. The Standard has paired up with Slate to cover the candidates, interest groups, and businesses of the 2000 elections as they unfold online.

Boston Globe: Database compilers fight for copyright protection. Until lately, this had not seemed unfair: Databases, after all, are generally gatherings of information created by someone else. But the rise of the Internet has prompted heated debate over whether those laws should change.

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

Industry Standard: The Andy Grove Show Hits London. While branding may be everything in cutting through the clutter of the Internet, that doesn't seem to keep new entries from shooting to prominence. This may be because of the Internet's efficiency in dealing with the clutter it creates, Grove said.

ZDNN: New e-book standard launched. The Open eBook Authoring Group, a consortium of companies involved in the fledgling eBook industry, announced Tuesday morning the final Open eBook Publication Structure 1.0.

• Open eBook Initiative: Open eBook Publication Structure 1.0.

ZDNN: Want to bargain for bags of groceries? The program allows shoppers to pre-negotiate prices, which are then honored at any of the 600 participating stores. Priceline will get royalties from WebHouse Club and warrants to acquire a majority interest in the firm...

SJ Mercury: A cell phone to serve many masters. As the wireless industry trots out the first Internet-ready ``smart phones,'' an even smarter breed lurks over the horizon: mobile phones that can add features and functions in the blink of an eye.

NY Times: New Fight Over Encryption Rules. Now that the Administration has promised the technology industry a major relaxation of its export controls, privacy and civil libertarian groups may be left to finish the fight over access to encrypted data on their own.

Forbes: IBM's giant gamble. The idea of cooperating with your competitors--"coopetition" is what the strategists call it now--goes back a long way in high technology, in the form of cross-licensing of patents.

Freedom Forum: German group's Internet-rating plan gains support, critics. Critics said that, contrary to empowering parents, the Bertelsmann plan would empower governments and international agencies with a mechanism ready-made for global censorship of the Internet.

September 22, 1999
Editor & Publisher: Family Circus: They Just Don't Get It. Steve Outing. If Keane/King succeed in shutting down DFC, other Web sites will pop up in response. If the strategy is to use legal means to stifle parody of Family Circus, it can't work because those people who want to make fun of Keane and his comic strip will merely create new ones.

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

• TechWeb: From June 28, 1999; Internet Offers Power Of Choice. Q&A with Andrew Shapiro and David Shenk.
• From September 10, 1999; FEED Magazine: RE: Douglas Rushkoff and Andrew Shapiro

Business Week: Jay Walker: The Priceline Mogul Races for New Markets. What's more, he has filed a stunning 250 patents to protect the other ideas that have been developed at Walker Digital, his research center. It's all part of his quest to profit from new ways of doing business.

ClickZ: The Pulse Of Customer Feedback. It's amazing to me how many sites are created (or re-created) without anyone stopping to ask the people who really count -- the customers -- what they need.

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

NY Times: A Feeding Frenzy Made for Consumers. You name it and someone has started a Web site to sell it: cars, furniture, bags, garden equipment, groceries, even Partyjunk.com. There are thousands more, and nearly all of them are planning to lose money for years. Still, nobody denies that a business revolution is underway.

Forbes: E-commerece for dummies. Bhatia says it has a three-pronged strategy: first, build a technology platform that can handle millions of users simultaneously. Add to the mix some of the best online and offline brands and then attract consumers.

Wired News: Cisco Agrees to Buy Webline. Cisco Systems Inc., the world's largest maker of computer networking equipment, said on Wednesday it agreed to buy closely held Webline Communications for US$325 million in stock.

Interactive Week: Wireless Access Set To Explode. The number of Internet users that access the public network over wireless links will grow from 3 million subscribers today to more than 50 million subscribers by the year 2004...

Webmonkey: Introducing XHTML. Jeffrey Veen. Rather than the usual rushing to "improve" the spec with a few ill-conceived add-ons, the W3C has decided to slow down and fix the broken stuff.

Upside: E-business Strategy Boom. Psst. Want some advice on how to make money on the Internet? Give advice. For Internet advice-peddlers, the gold rush is on.

ZDNN: Andersen CEO bolts for Webvan. The man who helped create the world's biggest consulting firm, then single-handedly ignited internal warfare, is leaving Andersen Consulting to join in on the Internet bonanza.

• News.Com: From September 2, 1999; Old, new consulting firms compete for talent

• Business 2.0: From September 1999; Portal Pretense

September 23, 1999
FEED Magazine: Why Ecommerce Won't Save The British Pound. Clay Shirky. The Tories are relying on the pound's symbolism as a barrier to foreign competition. But what they don't mention is that embracing ecommerce and rejecting the euro will increase international competition faster than embracing the euro and fighting ecommerce.

First Monday: The Visible Problems of the Invisible Computer: A Skeptical Look at Information Appliances. The interaction of the coffee pot, the car, the smart fridge, and the networked camera will create a new layer of complexity. In the rush towards the digital era, we will continue to live right on the edge of intolerable frustration.

• ABCNews.Com: From August 3, 1999; A World of Sensors

Salon: From beta to bonafide. But let's hope, now that it's graduated from beta to bonafide, that the search engine won't start to clutter up its gorgeous, streamlined look with "buy" buttons, sponsored links and the other useless features that so many search engines rely on for profits.

• Interactive Week: From May 10, 1999; Google On Searching: Do It Fast

RCFoC: There's No Turning Back! The implications for today's Web sites are obvious: if they don't address the cultural and language differences of a global customer base -- they won't HAVE a global customer base, since the competition is only a click away!

Business Week: P&G Gives Birth to a Web Baby. ''We want to learn to do something born and bred on the Net,'' explains Lafley. It's a strategy that's not only pioneering but smart, some experts say. Internet companies need to break the mold of traditional marketing...

Boston Globe: Web banking comes of age. Simson Garfinkel. For people who are already using Quicken, these Web-based systems can be something of a step backward - or they can be a step forward. It all depends on how the bank sets up its Web site.

USA Today: Dot-coms drive TV ad rates. Broadcast television and advertising, businesses supposed to be crippled by the Web, will instead rake in big bucks from Internet companies in the next few months. A flood of dot-com advertisers is driving up the price of prime-time TV ad slots.

September 24, 1999
InfoWorld: Ford, Microsoft deal signals rise of real-time computing. But as evidenced by the signing of an agreement between Ford and Microsoft, announced last week, manufacturers are making fundamental changes to respond to Internet-empowered consumers, who are now telling companies, "You make what we buy."

Internet Week: In The Eye Of The Storm. Floyd, the most closely tracked hurricane of the Internet Age, is leaving a trail of lessons about how to prepare for and manage Web-site traffic spikes. Among the secrets to stability: on-the-fly site design modifications and proactive infrastructure upgrades.

Web Review: Digital Storytelling Is Here to Stay. A barrage of annoying animated GIFs, on the other hand, add more noise than anything else, and are good examples of what to avoid. But really adding life is creating a connection between the creator and the viewer of the web site.

• CIO WebBusiness: From December 1998; Tommorowland. Q&A with Bran Ferren of Disney.
• Useit.Com: From August 23, 1998; The End of Legacy Media

Upside: The Ballmer Crash of '99. There are still not enough stocks to invest in. The current companies alone will not generate all that new wealth. But they get all the investment dollars anyway, because an Internet-hungry public has no place else to put it.

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

TechWeb: Competing Root Servers Threaten ICANN Control. Internet groups and computer professionals questioned Friday whether the Internet could run on competing roots instead of a single, shared root system in a move to break the control exercised by the group charged with its administration.

NY Times: A Search Site for Search Sites Is Accused of Trespassing. In its legal papers, mySimon says, in essence, that Priceman is guilty of unfair piggybacking, because in many cases it merely passed on search queries from its site to the mySimon site, and then presented the retrieved information as if Priceman -- not mySimon -- had performed the search.

Red Herring: Domain names want to be free. IDirections, a tiny Silicon Valley startup, has begun offering consumers free domain names. CEO Daniel Hoffman says he's financing the freebies with advertising and promotions.

Wired News: The 'Arcology' of Cyberspace. His view that cybernauts should pay more attention to the real world sparked heated dissent among his young visitors, many of whom were still in the throes of building the Web. Thus, Soleri's 1997 Paradox conference became a kind of us-and-them affair.

• USA Today: From September 22, 1999; City where Net meets future

CNN: Disputes over rights arise as stations turn to Web broadcasts. Disputes over Internet programming rights, though still rare, are on the rise as more radio and TV stations run their over-the-air feeds on the Web as well.

Industry Standard: The NFL Blitzes the Web. For now, the purpose of the free trials is to determine if there's a strong enough demand to charge people for Webcasts, as the league does in the U.S. with its exclusive digital broadcast partner, DirecTV.

September 25, 1999
InfoWorld: Men and women: Online, we should be more than markets. However, on the Internet, it's possible to know each customer individually -- or at least to give the appearance of doing so -- through the use of personalization technologies. That should spell the death of demographics, if merchants can wean themselves from reliance on its statistical crutches.

Red Herring: Will the Web wilt Wal-Mart? "They won't command the market share online that they do offline, because there are options for customers on the Internet that didn't exist before," says Grant Slade, vice president of marketing at iVendor. Online, most products are just a few clicks away, instead of a ten-minute drive.

• Upside: From July 16, 1999; Wal-Mart's Revenge

NY Times: College Board Web Company. Instead of a pure educational mission, the organization would now have the added motivation of money. That means trying to sell products to students lured to the site, say, to register for the Scholastic Assessment Tests...

InfoWorld: Internet commerce climbs to $1.3 trillion by 2003; users to total 500 million. But wait. MIT Media Lab founder, Nicholas Negroponte, and Compaq CEO, Michael Capellas, among other speakers, said IDC's forecasts are way too low.

InfoWorld: NSI's violations of basic Net etiquette leave readers confused and very angry. If you take out all the things NSI now says were not meant by "real-time" communications about one's account, I don't know what's left. So what were NSI's true intentions in phrasing the opt-out provision the way it did?

September 26, 1999
SJ Mercury: The Digital Age is changing all the old rules. Dan Gillmor. But the very nature of the Digital Age increasingly forces us to pick one side or the other -- a troubling set of Hobson's choices. On such matters as privacy, security, free speech, money and property, we will soon have to make Yes or No decisions where we've found a middle ground in the past.

Yahoo News: The Top 10 Internet Myths. James J. Cramer, TheStreet.com. In fact, from my experiences as a founder of TheStreet.com, I can tell you that it is harder to do business on the Net than off it, and anybody who tells you otherwise is a dreamer or a fraud.

September 27, 1999
USA Today: Web sites promise better storm info. "We'll find a way to reach them more aggressively," pledges Erik Blachford, marketing director for Expedia, the Microsoft-owned Internet travel Web site. Analysts say Hurricane Floyd spotlighted the shortcomings of Web sites, some of which had no news about the weather event that canceled hundreds of flights.

Internet Week: Don't Overlook Simple Solutions To Complex Problems. But hurling more capacity at performance, reliability and scalability problems doesn't always fix them. Sometimes, the best solutions marry technological planning and creativity with rudimentary procedures.

NY Times: Nike, Long Wary of E-Marketers, Links Up With Fogdog. Nike Inc., which has consistently blocked Web-only stores from selling its goods, has reversed its stand and will let Fogdog Sports, an online sporting goods dealer, sell the full Nike product line. But Nike extracted a high price for the right to buy its shoes: Warrants to acquire 12 percent of Fogdog's shares.

• Industry Standard: From April 15, 1999; Reebok to Give the Boot to Renegade Vendors. Tim Harrington, CEO of Fogdog.com, a San Jose, Calif.-based online sporting goods retailer, applauds Reebok's decision. "They want vendors to prove themselves, which is what I would do if I were them..."

Industry Standard: Television and The Web Do Mix. A new study by New York-based Cyber Dialogue's CyberCitizen Entertainment Program supports this view, but with a big twist: Among some consumers, heavy Web and television consumption may go hand-in-hand.

• Industry Standard: From October 26, 1998; Expert Insight: Leveraging TV-Net Synergies. Scott Reents, Cyber Dialogue analyst.

Salon: Thinking outside the cube. Q&A with Philippe Kahn. But right now, wireless Internet is all about innovation because it's a new frontier. We're talking now about the Internet becoming a complete, empowering, universal way of networking, not just in your cubicle, but anywhere, anytime.

• NewMedia Magazine: From September 1999; Philippe Kahn - Dilbert Breaks Out. Q&A with Philippe Kahn.

Industry Standard: The World's Wide Web: The Globe Standard. And if faith is all you need, there's no reason why some highly undesirable currencies – like the unpredictable lira, and the farcical ruble – can't one day be replaced by a common currency from MasterCard.

Time Digital: Whither Chiat's Virtual Office? But the strong-willed former CEO of advertising giant Chiat/Day (which has since merged with TBWA), is bringing back the virtual office as part of his latest gig as the interim CEO of New York-based Screaming Media.

SF Chronicle: Tibco Provides Net's Guts So Others Get Glory. Tibco makes what it calls ``event-driven, publish and subscribe'' software. It's a mouthful, but basically the software connects disparate computer systems, so that information can be seamlessly transported from point A to point B.

Industry Standard: Forget Walter Cronkite, Try Max Headroom. As much as the broadcast companies are driven by the opportunity to break new ground, they could also be fueling nagging suspicions that spikes in Web usage are coming at the expense of TV viewership.

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

Industry Standard: Technology Spotlight: The Financial Impact of Site Outages. "We found the most damaging category of losses to be future revenues." As eBay knows too well, negative press and bad word-of-mouth cost plenty.

September 28, 1999
Business Week: The Internet Age. In fact, efficiency may be the watchword of the Net. It provides the means to break down bureaucracies; challenge corporate, governmental, and intellectual orthodoxies; and foster a stronger sense of community. Such developments have sparked more than one revolution. There's no reason to expect anything less this time.

NewMedia Magazine: Personalization that works. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. The simplest way to deepen your customers' relationships with you is to link their transactions over time in what we call a learning relationship, so that no customer ever has to "start over."

NewMedia Magazine: The New Majority. To the New Majority -- the millions of people who will venture online in the next few years -- the computer is a necessary evil. They never wanted one in the first place.

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

PC World: Does Your Web Site Give Too Much Away? But he says that doesn't mean this information should always be withheld. "They have great strategic value on the site," he says. "The idea is to weigh the benefits versus the potential liabilities."

USA Today: USPS's plans go beyond delivering mail. The unfolding e-revolution is so drastic that it's stirring the debate about whether the Postal Service, a government agency, should be allowed to compete with private businesses in ventures that have nothing to do with delivering the mail.

Computerworld: Will Third Voice turn your Web site into a voodoo doll? Don Tapscott. Soon, all sorts of groups could be damning or praising you. Such is the unprecedented power of the Web. Third Voice is just the beginning. Every business, no matter how small, will acquire a reputation accessible to anyone in the world on the Web.

Computerworld: Desktop deja vu. Just as those renegade desktops started trickling into centralized IT operations in the 1980s, mobile devices of all stripes are flowing into companies today. They're coming in faster than desktops ever did, and their owners are more likely to be business execs -- not your power techies.

Boston Globe: Sharpening a tool. ''It's really important to him that people think the Web works as well as the stock market,'' said Dan Connolly, a W3C technical staffer since 1994. Once, Connolly remembers, Berners-Lee threatened to boycott a conferences organized by a Canadian data provider after finding its Web site wanting.

NewMedia Magazine: 5 Myths That Could Kill E-Commerce. There are many myths when it comes to e-commerce. The current beliefs about sites needing to have whiz-bang technology, an overwhelming product selection, a one-site-sells-everything model, a focus solely on sale of products, and completely automated transactions are going to have to fall by the wayside.

WebWord.Com: A Deep Understanding of the Customer Experience. Q&A with Mark Hurst of Creative Good. Once they arrive on the site, customers don't want complex technology, egocentric graphic design, or any other slick nonsense. What customers *do* want is a good experience.

Wired News: A Tale of Too-Big Cities. The Hudson Institute's Center for the Digital Future commissioned a forthcoming study from the two researchers. "High tech is growing fastest at the fringes and often in fairly rural areas," he said.

NewMedia Magazine: Keeping A Site Up and Running. There are many options for Web maintenance, but good Web management -- whether it's handled internally or outsourced -- is the key to customer satisfaction.

NewMedia Magazine: The Leader of the Pack. Q&A with Roger McNamee. couple of years ago, we started to explore the question of whether you could do leveraged buyouts in technology-related businesses. We looked at it because there were all these industries being disrupted by the Net. The media business was a prime example.

Salon: The Web's newest talking head. It has the flat look of a program that a major network might have aired 30 years ago -- and to top it off, on a typical computer screen it appears in a 2-by-2-inch window. That makes it 1/75th the size of the image on a 25-inch television screen.

SF Chronicle: Free-Lance Writers Win Electronic Victory. The union sued six publishers, including the New York Times, Newsday Inc. and Time Inc., on grounds that free-lance work purchased for print publications could not be reproduced without permission in electronic databases or on CD-ROMs without infringing on the writers' copyrights.

SF Chronicle: Fogdog Nabs Nike in One Fell Swoosh. But under the terms of the deal, Fogdog is the only ``pure play'' Internet company with the rights to sell Nike's complete product line on the Web. The exclusive agreement is for six months, after which time the two companies will reassess the relationship.

ZDNN: eBay cracks down on search sites. eBay, the world's largest online auction service, will no longer allow third-party search engines to tap into its database of nearly three-million auction items and serve up the results with direct links to the items for sale.

• News.Com: From September 3, 1999; eBay cuts off outside search service

September 29, 1999
ClickZ: The Network Vision. Indeed, the most brochure-like corporate site isn't anything like a brochure, potentially speaking. Whereas printed pieces or one-way communications (advertising) exist as isolated entities unto themselves, the potential of the web allows us to do things that we never would have dreamed of ten years ago and that many of us still have trouble dreaming of now.

Online Journalism Review: From the Drawing Board to Slate...and Beyond. If one theme has recurred time and again in Slate's short history, it's that the online magazine really is a slate that can be wiped blank, or at least tinkered with extensively.

CBS MarketWatch: Amazon breaks down its virtual doors. The online retailer said it will begin allowing anyone to sell merchandise through its Web site via its so-called ZShops program. Beginning Thursday, Amazon will sell more than 500,000 items, including vacation-travel packages.

InfoWorld: Amazon.com aspires to be Net's shopping mall. ...the company also announced an All Products Search capability, which is in essence a search engine that looks only for e-commerce sites on the Web. The results come back with Amazon.com products first, then zShop products, then other sites unaffiliated with Amazon.com.

• Salon: From August 5, 1999; Why won't Amazon help you compare prices?
• News.Com: From July 23, 1999; Junglee founder departing Amazon

TechWeb: Web Ads Won't Pay, Say Experts. [Charles Schwab co-CEO David Pottruck] "I think most online advertising tends to commoditize you to be equal to the other commodity sellers who advertise online. We have no desire to be another button on somebody's website or a banner that clicks on annoyingly that no one really notices."

Business Week: Can Google's Prodigies Make a Search Tool Pay? But at a time when other popular search sites such as Yahoo!, Excite, and Lycos have all morphed into diversified entertainment portals, is there really a future for a pure, advertising-supported search tool?

• Interactive Week: From May 10, 1999; Google On Searching: Do It Fast

TechWeb: Online Shoppers Frustrated By Confusing Sites. In a consumer research study conducted on a dozen of the largest online retailers, Hurst said 39 percent of customer buying attempts online and 56 percent of product searches failed. Even companies that are entirely online fail to make an easy shopping experience...

• Good Reports: Holiday E-Commerce '99

• devhead: From December 22, 1998; Redesign: When and How. Jakob Nielsen.

News.Com: Razorfish sees wireless beating Web. Kanarick said growth will be driven by the spread of digital wireless phones and by the fact that an increasing number of mobile digital devices will eventually become networked.

Online Journalism Review: Live, from the Fishbowl! Whatever comes of the Chris Nolan affair, the online reaction to the San Jose Mercury News columnist's ethical flap has exposed the Bay Area's media heavyweights as being precious and frequently silly hand-wringers, too far removed from the rest of society to recognize their own greed.

Online Journalism Review: Role Models Can Guide Lost Journalists. It's possible to have a private life, be a productive member of society and make some money without being in a conflict of interest.

NY Times: Senate Campaign Data Trapped in the Microfilm Era. But the Senate remains a glaring exception, to the degree that it is unlikely that data on some major contributions will reach the public before Election Day. Next year, elections will be held for 33 Senate seats.

TechWeb: Motorola Shares Intellectual Property Store. All Motorola designers and their customers, through the Motorola Business Groups, will have access to the repository. The repository consists of distributed "vaults" of reusable hardware and software intellectual property that can be integrated plug-and-play fashion into system-on-a-chip designs.

September 30, 1999
Salon: A worm in the Apple? And this crack in Apple's interface foundation is spreading: Upcoming Apple applications -- including the video editor Final Cut Pro and Sherlock 2, the next iteration of the Mac OS "Find" function -- are saddled with similar, and arguably damaged, interfaces.

• Ask Tog: From May, 1999; Apple Quicktime Player 4.0 a Real Dud
• Interface Hall of Shame: From May 25, 1999; QuickTime 4.0 Player

Computerworld: Web boosts self-service human resources. Self-service human resources "lets HR people do the work you hired them to do," Messerschmidt added. Otherwise, "you're using college-educated HR professionals to push paper around. We call it administrivia."

ClickZ: Can Truth Kill Brands? These major brands are not ready for open dialogue. Why? Because they do not have a strategy in place for the freedom of opinion that the web enables. This will lead the way into a new role for brands -- a role where the brand also starts to show weaknesses.

• Useit.Com: From September 5, 1999; Reputation Managers are Happening

Business Week: To the Victors Belong the Web Ads. The good news: Yes, companies can thrive on advertising alone. The bad news: The number of those that can do this seems to be shrinking, as marketers spend more and more with just a handful of big sites.

Fortune: AOL: The Future King of Advertising? With newcomers going onto the Internet every day and current users spending more time online, Wolzien predicts that AOL will generate more ad revenues than either the ABC or CBS broadcast networks (excluding revenues from their TV stations) by 2003.

• Upside: From May 5, 1999; Pittman's Marketing Mantra

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

Wired News: Goodbye Wallet; Hello Chip. [Visa International CEO Malcolm Williamson] At the Jupiter Financial Services Forum -- a conference on emerging technologies -- Williamson talked about how credit card companies are using advances in chip technology to store vast amounts of data in tiny, portable devices.

Time: Question of the Internet Age: To Regulate or Not to Regulate? TIME convened a meeting of its Board of Economists in San Francisco this month to assess the impact of the Internet on more traditional arenas like the Fed's monetary policy, the domestic economy, and the breadth of America's socioeconomic divides.

News.Com: Priceline.com to defend patents against Microsoft? "Lawsuits are a great way to make lawyers rich, but they don't make customers happier, and they don't make shareholders happier," Walker said. Priceline.com's business, which also lets consumers name their price for mortgages and new cars, doesn't depend on the success of defending its patents...

• Salon: From August 27, 1999; Jay Walker's patent mania

Business Week: From NASA, a Web Search Tool for the Blind But NASA soon realized that Iliad had more than one audience. Just so happens its text-based e-mail interface is ideally suited for Internet users who are either blind or visually impaired.