October 1, 1999
Salon: Why Microsoft doesn't rule the Net. The platypus notion is a useful idea to keep in mind when thinking about how Microsoft works. Controlling the Net, and Net commerce with it, is only one of the objectives of a big and fairly unwieldy technology conglomerate.

CIO: Reaching Out for Help. In fact, with some call center costs ranging anywhere from $25 to $200 per incident, it can be one of the costlier drains on enterprise resources. So it is no surprise that new knowledge management and Web technologies are being harnessed to automate both internal help desk and customer product support with the goal of slashing those costs.

CIO WebBusiness: Plane and Simple Strategy. Joseph Levy, President and CEO of IDG Communications. The airline industry, for example, is one area where technology is abundant but not being used properly. I should know: I spend about one-third of my time traveling.

• Useit.Com: From June 19, 1999; Spotlight of a US Air mailing that gave customers new account numbers. Any time you get sub-standard customer service with the excuse being "because of the computer," you know that you are dealing with a company that still doesn't get it with respect to the coming Internet economy.

Computerworld: Comdex Miami: E-biz mistakes rampant. Many companies are also adding unnecessary features to their Web sites, while at the same time neglecting to include features that would support their business strategies, Bane said. For example, 88% of respondents either have or plan to add multimedia features such as audio and video.

Wired News: He Digs (Through) Gov't Muck. It was also the beginning of what has become nearly a full-time job for Young, who offers his scanners as a community service. News organizations and public interest groups regularly send him volumes of hardcopy documents to be turned into text files and placed on his site.

Harvard Business School Publishing: The Deconstructors and the Deconstructed: Corporate Leaders and Laggards in the Internet Economy. Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster, authors of Blown to Bits. Some companies have identified new opportunities and strategies and are prospering in this environment because they deconstructed their own business before others did it to them.

News.Com: Why AT&T doesn't care about Net content. But some analysts believe AT&T has very specific reasons for wanting to rid itself of Excite, including keeping regulators at bay while it continues to consolidate its cable properties.

CIO WebBusiness: No Free Lunch. Q&A with David Shenk. But at the same time, the Internet will look more and more like a giant cable TV network, especially for those people who won't take the time to find those serious gems. I hope the segment of society that is intellectual and serious stays so, that we don't lose them to pop culture.

CIO: Overload Redux. So it's settled then. In the future we will view information overload as an important problem because it can cause an inability to focus on what really matters. And we won't succumb to the tendency to view technology as our savior.

Forbes: Whither eBay? AuctionWatch has been looking to capitalize on the online auction market's fragmentation for some time. This phenomenon has been in evidence as more auction sites pop up and as more users employ more than one site at a time.

Red Herring: Convergence searches for meaning. ...nobody could quite put a finger on the exact nature of the converged electronic economy, other than the fact that it represents some kind of media/commerce hybrid that will make people consume lots more stuff.

USA Today: Workers unite online. Employees facing pension changes at companies such as AT&T and Electronic Data Systems also are turning to the Internet to gather information and rally co-workers. As unions say technology is transforming organizing methods, employers are adopting policies banning personal use of company equipment.

Web Review: The Politics of Annotation. Michael Swaine. Many web site owners are up in arms about Third Voice, envisioning competitors or disgruntled customers trashing them on their own site. They are worried about porn and spam, and most of all about loss of control.

CIO WebBusiness: Scared Straight. Carl Solomont, partner at the law firm of Bingham Dana LLP. Some day, law and technology may work together to make it harder for unidentified people to publish false, damaging messages. Until that happens, victims of such attacks can begin their legal defense with a solid threat and hope that that's all it takes.

October 2, 1999
InfoWorld: Online advertising: a $3 billion industry limping on its last legs. The moribund state of online advertising has been increasingly obvious for the past year. But I predict that during the coming holiday shopping season, conventional banner ads will be widely recognized as the annoying, bandwidth-consuming boondoggles they are.

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

InfoWorld: Organizational shift. And even among ardent technology buffs, there exists a realization that the Internet's most enduring lesson to date is that the technology itself plays second fiddle to humanity's instinctive desire to use it to associate with each other.

InfoWorld: Internet innovators map the future. Q&A with Leonard Kleinrock, John Patrick, Charley Kline and Esther Dyson. In interviews with InfoWorld editors, four leaders who helped the Internet become what it is today discuss key issues for the Internet moving forward.

InfoWorld: High prices, low inventory hamper Veritas Store. But this is most likely the way Veritas prefers it to be -- that is, the company doesn't want to upset the existing sales channels established by its value-added resellers and own sales representatives.

October 3, 1999
ABCNews.Com: Making the Box Go Away. In the future, according to Norman’s vision — set forth in the past dozen years in four books, numerous papers, work at Apple Computer and a new company called Unext — people will use computers constantly and access information from across the world. But the idea of the Internet and the personal computer will change radically.

Seattle Times: It's easy to become emotional over technology's behavioral impacts. ...Microsoft president Steve Ballmer revealed why he does not yet use a Windows CE personal digital assistant. It was a very small issue: He may be able to take notes while talking with someone, Ballmer said, but cannot maintain eye contact. He has to keep looking down to see if his writing is recording properly.

SJ Mercury: Electronic appliances we have -- we need embedded values, too. Dan Gillmor. And as networks and devices grow smarter concurrently, the potential grows far beyond their individual capabilities. This is the exciting part to contemplate, and we've barely begun to figure out where it's going.

NY Times: The Wired Bunch. However, they can also be the first to be dead wrong. He points to onetime Early Adopter favorites that wound up on the cutting edge's cutting-room floor, like the CB radio and quadrophonic sound. "The corpse of many a company has been led down the wrong canyon by Early Adopters,'' Saffo says.

SJ Mercury: Information Overload. Their challenge: to determine an equally indestructible form on or in which knowledge can be stored. To help find the answers, Long Now has recruited an expert with unorthodox ideas for transforming libraries into global information delivery networks -- and with the kind of for-profit offshoots that make venture capitalists salivate.

Microsoft Backstage: Site Server 3.0 + ADO 2.1 = A Winning Combination for Search. With Search 2.0, results are packaged in easy-to-navigate categories, and a human editor frequently scans queried terms and adds suggested links that map to common customer requests.

SJ Mercury: Tech talk permeates English language. High tech bombards English with new vocabulary and new uses of old words, as well as modifying the way we communicate, from sending an informal quip in an e-mail message to instantly publishing our views on the World Wide Web.

AskTog: The Pump. Nowadays, that has all changed, sort of. Doctors, following, as usual, the lead of dentists, have discovered "pain management," a complex web of techniques designed to keep the patients from getting on the doctor’s nerves by groaning so much. At the heart of pain management lies The Pump.

SJ Mercury: 'Family Circus' Web parody to go. An Internet site that parodies the Family Circus comic strip by allowing visitors to supply their own cartoon captions, some of them raunchy, will be taken down.

• Editor & Publisher: From September 20, 1999; Family Circus: They Just Don't Get It. Steve Outing.

October 4, 1999
Columbia Journalism Review: An Outbreak of Internet-Phobia. But the Internet is a brand-new medium, with fast-growing public access and instantaneous worldwide distribution. Authorities fear its power to put information into the wrong hands, or into the hands of those who are ill-prepared to handle it responsibly.

• Scientific American: From September 1999; When Publishing Could Mean Perishing

News.Com: Gemstar gets stronger with TV Guide buy. Gemstar, known for its VCR programming technology, is expanding into new markets with the acquisition of TV Guide. While TV Guide is best known for its print publications, it also operates a fast growing and popular service called TV Guide Interactive that holds significant strategic importance for Gemstar.

• Editor & Publisher: From April 23, 1999; Information Products on the Rise. When people think syndication, they often think cartoons and columns. But there's another category that has become an increasingly important part of the business: information products such as television and weather data.
• Forbes: From May 17, 1999; "The patent terrorist"

NY Times: Recording Industry Escalates Crackdown on Digital Piracy. What is more, the technology will probably embed in each song data that allow only one device to play it. Analysts say that fact is likely to make protection technologies so cumbersome that consumers will have a strong incentive to get around them.

Useit.Com: Ten Good Deeds in Web Design. Ten design elements that would increase the usability of virtually all websites if only they were employed more widely.

Information Week: Be Careful What You Ask For. ...GM has decided that it needs to broaden its focus from the customer to the entire household: in Noble's terms, "in the car, out and about, around the home, in the family room, in the den office, and in the study."

SF Chronicle: 'Tis the Season for E-Tailers. Of course, this could mean investing millions of dollars in new customer service technologies as well as in personnel costs. For some, this may run counter to the traditional notion of an e-commerce company as a lean operation with minimal overhead and limited labor requirements.

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

Internet Week: Have Yourself A Digital Little Christmas. As InternetWeek continues to chronicle e-retailers' efforts to prepare for the expected boom of Christmas '99, e-commerce managers are paying more attention to payment processing than ever before.

LA Times: Advertising Ban the Latest Salvo in Fight Over Internet Cable Access. Pacific Bell is crying foul these days over the fact that several area cable companies have refused the phone company's advertising for digital subscriber line service, or DSL--a high-speed Internet offering that competes with the cable modem services sold by Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable and others.

Industry Standard: Tools for Thinking. But it's the Net's role as a tool for inquiry that is most interestingly fluid right now. Systems for finding, managing and making sense of information are rapidly changing, and are providing signs of how they will alter our basic habits of thought.

Wired News: The E-Stamp of Disapproval. E-Stamp is selling an eponymous Internet postage product, a name critical to its branding and marketing success. That's why, like any responsible trademark owner, E-Stamp is trying to protect its name against the dreaded anonymity of generic use.

News.Com: Domain policy aims to keep fights out of court. Lohoti, like many others who have stakes in Net names, is closely watching the development of a universal policy to settle domain name disputes through a neutral arbitration panels...

Information Week: Wireless Comes Of Age. Clarence Wesley, GM of Xerox Mobile Solutions. However, the real work--and the biggest challenge--will be to identify new opportunities and create additional value via wireless-information capabilities.

Industry Standard: You Can Take It With You. In the past five years, the world has gotten wired. In the next five, there will be a global push to pull the wires and get people and businesses to log on over the airwaves.

LA Times: 'Super Search Engine' Would Simplify the Hunt for Information. The Mobile Data Access System is designed to make the less powerful tools of wireless communications work more efficiently in the increasingly congested world of global communications.

News.Com: Amazon goes anywhere with wireless pact. Using 3Com's new Palm VII handheld wireless computer, Amazon customers will be able to buy items from any of the company's five stores, as well as monitor auctions from the company's auction site.

October 5, 1999
Salon: Strike up the broadband. Scott Rosenberg. The Web is a logon-free zone; most Web sites know nothing about you other than what you choose to tell them (and you could tell them anything). But there is somebody in the online business who does know exactly who you are, where you live and what your credit card number is: your Internet service provider, or ISP.

Industry Standard: Shell Oil Spills Onto the Net. Kakkar says the Internet access offer allows Shell to bring its customers directly to the company's marketing message, and to give the company a way to communicate with its customers. "ISPs are becoming more of a commodity," he says. "Companies can use an ISP almost as a marketing tool. It's not just about Internet access..."

• Editor & Publisher: From August 9, 1999; Shell Oil Buys Banner Ads to Refute Articles

News.Com: RealNames to open source code. For the software giveaway, RealNames has set up a Web site for developers, where they can access the application programming interfaces that will let them plug into RealNames' keyword database.

• TechWeb: From August 9, 1999; Centraal Becomes RealNames And Real Rich

USA Today: Bowie turns to face the change. "It's impractical at the moment because so few people have the bandwidth and programs necessary to download an album," Bowie says. "But, mark my words, this is where the consumer industry is going. We are not going back to record companies and through shops."

Forbes: Online anywhere. Despite the slick treatment, the ad makes another point, one they may not have intended: Most people aren't ready to use their cell phones to access the Internet. The reason? Until recently the technology has been slow, unwieldy and expensive.

Builder.Com: Master Builder: Standards Support a Little Late. Dan Shafer. ...the variety of form factors that are emerging--including, for example, WebTV and the recently released Palm VII--are forcing a change in thinking about what it takes and how it feels to "surf" or search the Web.

WebWord.Com: An Inside View of Epinions. Q&A with with Epinions' Chief Technical Officer, Ramanathan Guha. The next step is to introduce other related real world entities such as groups --- everything from high school peer groups to organizations such as the Sierra Club. Ratings and value judgments by these groups deeply affect what information we consume.

Business Week: Commentary: Journalism's Online Credibility Gap. All these developments raise a tough question: Is there an irrevocable conflict between e-commerce and ethical journalism? As news outlets get closer to the companies they cover, it's possible that they'll lose the faith of their readers and viewers.

MSNBC: Workers like virtual environments. Whether a small business provides Internet access for its employees, and allows them to work in virtual teams, to telecommute or in other ways collaborate using online technologies, is starting to play a big role in the recruitment and retention of workers...

Wired News: Novell's New Schmooze Tool. In this era of increasingly sophisticated ad targeting and consumer profiling, the technology is designed for people to manage their own "trust relationships" and better control their private information.

Wired News: Newswire's Unintended Scoops. The hole, found late last week by Colorado-based software consultant Tim Van Tongeren, is found in PR Newswire's Web page addressing scheme. Van Tongeren said he was looking for a new release at the service's site Thursday and noticed that new releases were numbered in simple numerical sequence, by way of a number contained in the URL of each announcement.

NY Times: Microsoft and M.I.T. to Develop Technologies Together. But the agreement is unusual not because of the amount of money involved but because of the nature and scope of the types of projects that will be financed. The money will be used for a broad array of projects ranging from online learning to new models for academic publishing.

Business Week: Lionbridge: Translating the Language Gap into Growth. But in today's global e-commerce economy -- where growing numbers of Web surfers don't speak English -- getting it right in multiple languages has never been more critical to a company's bottom line.

Wired News: A Tollbooth for Digital Text. Hoping to develop the industry standard for securing text online, Adobe Systems said on Tuesday it would integrate its technology with InterTrust, a digital rights management company. They will work together to provide an offering for publishers that allows more security and complexity.

October 6, 1999
[clip]: The Extensible Enterprise. Q&A with David Pool, DataChannel. Internet Phase Two is going to be about enabling computers to communicate among themselves and allowing people to have more relevant data through the use of infrastructure and Internet systems that will allow the user to be the publisher – rather than the CNNs of the world.

Editor & Publisher: Free or Paid: Which Article Archives Bring in Most Revenue? Steve Outing. Given the modest numbers that paid Web article archives are generating for most newspapers, it may be a better solution to allow free access to archived articles on the Web — in order to drive Web traffic to new levels and benefit from overall growth of a publication's Web site.

TechWeb: Intel CEO Says The Web Wave Is Just Beginning. For example, Barrett said Intel previously sent nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) to its hardware OEM partners through the mail, but now makes them available via the Internet with digital signatures. Intel will handle 150,000 NDA transactions via the Web this year, he said. "Product savings were great for us, but probably greater for [hardware OEMs] because they could start designing and implementing [Intel-based systems] more rapidly..."

News.Com: Yahoo earnings soundly beat estimates. [Andrea Williams, E*Offering analyst] "We no longer see all ad-based revenue stocks do well if Yahoo does well. But if Yahoo doesn't do well, all Internet stocks get hurt. It seems Yahoo only affects stocks one way but not both ways."

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

Information Week: The Modern Call Center. That's why today's call center is being asked to do much more than simply field telephone inquiries. The modern call center is being integrated with other IT systems, letting agents cull information from a variety of databases, Web servers, and legacy systems.

Business 2.0: Jumpin' Jupiter! Rare is the IPO prospectus that doesn't use Jupiter statistics to prove that the new venture is on solid ground. No newspaper article on the Internet is finished unless it's topped off with a snappy quote from one of its analysts.

• Salon: From September 2, 1999; Jupiter shoots for the moon

• Industry Standard: From April 9, 1999; The Code Is the Law. Lawrence Lessig.

News.Com: Head of AT&T cable business resigns. Sources say Hindery--an outspoken, old-school executive--inevitably would have clashed with Web culture in which the cable industry finds itself increasingly enmeshed.

NY Times: AT&T Seeks to Deflect Internet Criticism. Now, AT&T is casting about for ways to put meat on the bones of its previously vague statements about offering open access, in the hope of staving off regulations that might set terms and conditions the company would rather avoid.

Business 2.0: Spool of Thought. Q&A with Jared Spool. Designers often design for missions, and often ignore goals, except for the most accessible sites such as eBay and Amazon.com, and this creates horrible usability problems. It's extremely common that designers don't know their users.

NY Times: Google Keeps Search Simple. Google is also working toward generating money through advertising, but does not plan to run banner advertisements. "It's going to be highly targeted text ads that are fast-loading and not a distraction," Brin said. "It will be relevant to searches."

RealNames: Internet Keywords. We are here to make it as easy as possible for you to add Internet Keyword functionality to your applications—any application that uses the Internet to connect people, whether on a PC, a mobile phone, a set-top box, PDA, fax machine, or any other Internet-connected device.

October 7, 1999
NY Times: Metabolife Posts Interview on Web. A diet-product company yesterday posted on the Internet a complete, unedited videotaped interview between an ABC News correspondent and the company's chief executive in an effort to publicize its concerns that ABC would broadcast an unfair report on the medical risks of its popular dietary supplement.

USA Today: Preemptive Net strike v. 20/20. Using the Internet as a tool to fight the news media might become increasingly common, says Bob Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. "It used to be the media 'prosecutors' had the last word," Lichter says. "Now the 'suspects' can get their side out as well. The Internet levels the playing field."

Forbes: How CBS builds an Internet empire on the cheap. CBS is building an Internet empire by giving away advertising inventory--a currency that's extremely cheap for the Tiffany Network because of excess promotional space.

Newsweek: Portal Prizes. People will pay anything for page views these days, and there's no clearer illustration than the announcement yesterday that CBS has backed a new Internet portal, www.iwon.com—a portal with a jackpot.

Fortune: Next Up for Cell Phones: Weaving a Wireless Web. And it won't be just a phone. It will in essence be a small, wireless mobile computer that can talk to the Internet, send and receive e-mail or video images, and use the Web to buy things. By 2004, Nokia predicts, cell phones will outpace PCs in Internet connections.

Wired News: Visor Closing In on Palm. One of the most popular Visor add-ons being shown at Internet World uses the emerging Bluetooth radio frequency standard for wireless transactions.

Information Week: Human Touch. But live chat and telephone communication aren't for all companies. "In a sense, it gets you back to a call-center environment," says Rob Garduno, product support manager for Excite@Home Inc. in Redwood City, Calif. That means having to handle call queues and answer requests almost instantly and around the clock-a complicated effort.

Wired News: Mac OS 9's Deal Detective. "They don't want people hanging around on auction hubs instead eBay," said Rothberg. "If these people can get [search, monitoring, and alert] services elsewhere, eBay's lost them." Rothberg predicted eBay might react defensively to Apple, but sees that as a short-sighted move.

• Apple Insider: From August 9, 1999; An Inside Look at Mac Internet Explorer 5.0. By the same process of using Internet Explorer to "Subscribe" to a website, users of version 5.0 can now select a "Track Auction" option from the browser's Favorites menu.

RCFoC: Internet-as-Utility. As impressive as it is that the loss of such a major data artery didn't cause a hard Internet failure, the Oct. 1 Edupage reports that some businesses found their service so degraded that "...they had no choice but to close down."

ZDNN: CMGI bigwig sees free Net access around the bend. "What the advertisers are looking for is proof," he said. "What they're looking for is results. In the next three to six months, a lot of this research (will be available) and you'll see a lot of big advertisers moving over because there's proof that it works."

Salon: Is technology unplugging our minds? But for others, it's a sign of the continuing demise of intelligent life on earth. Is this glut of information, technology, advertising -- omnipresent, at our fingertips, in real-time, all the time -- somehow frying our collective synapses?

• CIO WebBusiness: From October 1999; No Free Lunch. Q&A with David Shenk.
• FEED Magazine: From September 10, 1999; RE: Douglas Rushkoff and Andrew Shapiro

NY Times: Trapped in the Web Without an Exit. Some side trips are the result of mistakes by surfers, but many are the work of Webmasters who bend and twist HTML code into trapping people in one spot like overeager used-car salesmen. Sites that specialize in pornography are the most obvious practitioners of user manipulation.

NY Times: As Net Turns 30, the Sequel Is Still in Previews. It is one of several attempts to steer a future course for the connected world, a reinvention of the Net meant to feed new technologies to the public eventually. But opinion is divided on whether it is the bridge to the 21st century or an expensive dead end.

October 8, 1999
USA Today: Net poses challenge for funeral industry. In a showdown next month before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the nation's 14,000 funeral directors will battle to make casket discounters and other start-up purveyors of what the industry calls "death care services" subject to the same federal regulations that govern funeral homes.

Forbes: ChannelPoint's challenge. While the entire $700 billion domestic industry may not be tied to 20-year-old equipment, it does still rely primarily on the telephone and fax to transmit information between clients, brokers and carriers. Hollen and the 380 people he works with have their work cut out for them.

Newsweek: Searching for Alternatives. Spink, who studies how people search, says the average person rarely uses advanced tools that search engines offer. Neither do search engines make those tools particularly easy to use or learn."There's a lot of intense information seeking," she says, "but not very complex."

A List Apart: Whose Web is it Anyways? The same Big Business mentality that has crippled print publishing (remember when publishers cultivated talent?), and that long ago reduced television to a charred wasteland, now threatens to destroy the fundamental promise of the Web as a free marketplace of ideas, art, and commerce.

Web Review: Don't Trust InterTrust. Michael Swaine. Owners of private information have every right to control access to and use of that private information; but the InterTrust and SDMI technologies attempt to extend the kind of control appropriate for private information to published information, and in doing so they tread on the rights of us all.

Red Herring: Downtempo for digital downloads. [Jason Olim, chairman, president, and CEO of CDNow] "The future of digital music is not in the security [payment], it is not in the format [streaming vs. MP3], it is not in the technology or in the availability of artists," warned Mr. Olim. "It is in the acceptance and implementation of effective copyright law."

InfoWorld: Intelligent devices meet the Internet. In addition, these types of services could fundamentally change the way devices are manufactured. In today's market, more and more devices are being built to order to satisfy mass customization requirements. But in the future, manufacturers will be able to build one variation of their product and then enable more features by remotely downloading firmware for that device to a programmable chip embedded in that device.

AtNewYork: Start-up Soliloquy Crafts Virtual Customer Service Bot. A user, for example, would type in "I want a fast cheap laptop with lots of memory," and the chatterbot would respond, "There are eight laptops faster than 300 MHZ and costing under $2500 and with more than 32 MB of memory. Do you have a particular weight or battery life in mind?"

SJ Mercury: Ford Lincoln Mercury Web sites add rival information. Ford Motor Co., the world's No. 2 automaker, said on Friday its Lincoln Mercury division revamped its Internet sites to allow customers to compare the price and features of its vehicles alongside those of competing models.

MSNBC: Internet is called the key to settling diet-pill case. Every evening, he and about 30 other plaintiffs' lawyers around the country received updates of the day's proceedings, including a complete transcript, via electronic mail. The lawyers, in turn, fired back comments and advice. The result, he says, was akin to a giant national law firm, "a virtually unprecedented number of lawyers" at work on a single case.

Salon: Open-source journalism. Open-source pragmatists believe that better software arises from the scrutiny inherent in the collaborative process. Will better journalism ensue if more reporters and editors beta test their own work?

NY Times: Across the Country, Universities Generate a High-Tech Economic Boom. As universities and their communities, from Washington State to Georgia, strive for economic horsepower, a host of fresh questions are being raised about what a university's role should be, and what happens if the pursuit of money competes with the pursuit of knowledge.

PC World: Web Sites in Need. Flanders said companies need to design their sites with customers in mind, unlike sites that try too hard to look cool with dizzying animations and funky navigation. "The only people who want to see this are the people who designed it and the people who paid for it..."

ClickZ: In Praise Of Plain Web Sites. The smart sites drive you right to the point of business, making doing business as simple as can be, and once they've nailed the process, they LEAVE IT ALONE. In all the years that I've been using Amazon, I don't think they've changed the look one time, other than to add new products and services.

Web Review: The Lexus, the Olive Tree, and the Internet. When he vividly describes the destruction of the rain forests, a whole new view of the Internet emerges, as well as people and their relation to each other in a modern society. Instead of an undifferentiated mass of wealth-seekers, we now see people with values and a shared concern for a shared future.

CNN: Telecom '99: Mobile focus is on data. Most of the major telecom providers, software makers, hardware manufacturers and service providers seem to be planning to demonstrate new technologies that make accessing the Internet or corporate data faster and easier from mobile devices.

Information Week: Global E-Commerce. In the last year, several companies have introduced products and services aimed at helping companies globalize their E-business sites. Vendors such as Global Sight, Idiom Technologies, International Communications, Uniscape.com, and WorldPoint provide tools that help create multilingual versions of Web sites.

October 9, 1999
Fortune: Listen Up! Pay Attention! New Web Startups Want Ads That Grab You. Media buyers and marketers say intrusiveness is what's needed to turn the Web into a serious branding medium, like television. Users, though, swear they hate these ads. And yet the attention-grabbing nature of interstitials does convert lookers into buyers at a significantly higher rate than traditional ads.

InfoWorld: Auction network service to give Internet first mover a serious run for its money. FairMarket's network effects are killer. eBay is still denying this, but I think they'll eventually have to offer auction services to other sites, and network them, or die. FairMarket is a great example of how we're moving away from personal computing toward Web services.

Marketing Computers: Know who's behind surprising research. The frenetic e-commerce push of recent months, both in the vendor and user communities, spurs a heavy flow of market research reports designed to shape your thinking. So I offer what I call an editor's sniff test of viability, credibility and accuracy of market research.

• Useit.Com: From February 21, 1999; Details in Study Methodology Can Give Misleading Results

CBS MarketWatch: Meckler: I saw Net the first. As he grows his second company, Meckler is convinced his vision is still better than anyone's. "Virtually every large media company doesn't 'get' the Internet," he is convinced. "It's the fear of killing the cash cow, of protecting their existing businesses."

InfoWorld: From global to local. Despite these new technologies, some U.S. companies have not yet bothered to cater to non-U.S. consumers simply because the companies are just realizing that many of their site visitors are not American.

BBC News: The future is mobile. A United Nations report says there are nearly 400 million mobile phones in use globally - with another 250,000 new users being added every day. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) says a handful of countries both rich and poor - including Finland, Cambodia and Rwanda - already have more mobile phones than fixed line phones.

October 10, 1999
SJ Mercury: Some Web sites find third-party links something to get hyper about. Dan Gillmor. The activists are teaching an important lesson in the Internet Age. When you put up a public Web site, be prepared for the public -- including rivals and third-party intermediaries seeking to make some money off of your work -- to use your site in ways you never, ever anticipated.

SJ Mercury: What you're reading. It's not science. It's more like a digital parlor game. (You know. What you do at your computer when the boss isn't looking.) The lists are a hobbyist's measure of corporate and local culture. A source of material for petty regional and company competition.

Industry Standard: Spam Watchdog Floats New Service Ideas. But MAPS also offers two other ways to protect against spammers, and one of the proposals floated at a roundtable meeting on e-mail abuse here yesterday would combine all three into a new service called RBL+, for which subscribers would have to pay.

ZDTV: Brewster Kahle: Rescuing Web Pages. One way of describing his mission is to imagine a car repair manual. To find out what breaks most often, look for the oil-stained pages, the ones that are most worn. Similarly, Alexa, with the Internet Archive, analyzes Web patterns and traffic in order to figure out how to navigate the system better.

October 11, 1999
First Monday: Third Voice: Vox Populi Vox Dei? The future of the Internet does not lie in recovering its more egalitarian and participatory past. It has become a mass medium used mostly by relatively passive consumers, and as such major content providers will dominate it.

Mappa.Mundi Magazine: I see points and spaces of light. Esther Dyson. Cyberspace still needs better signposts, maps, directories, and reputation services. It’s like a giant city with billboards, but no street signs or well-defined neighborhoods. Most of the stores have windows but they are strangely devoid of people: I can’t see the other customers, and the salespeople usually talk about special offers, but they rarely listen.

Industry Standard: Customer Reviews: It's All a Matter of Opinion. There are other important reasons for adding consumer reviews to Web sites: They are low-cost, low-maintenance ways to attract and retain customers and they generate longer visits – helping consumers get more intimate with a brand and its advertisers.

News.Com: Levi's dresses Web site with TV ads. [Jim Nail of Forrester Research] "People are on the Web to research products and get information, so these kinds of ads are ineffective unless you offer some kind of utility," he said. "I don't know why ad agencies are so obsessed with making the Web into TV. What they should be doing is recognizing that the Web and TV play two different roles."

The Economist: Advertising that clicks. The combination of interactivity and precision makes the Internet ideally suited to the hard sell. As selling comes to overshadow brand-promotion, advertisers will build ties to websites on which they appear, reducing the need for middlemen, such as Internet media-buyers or creative web agencies.

Information Week: The Trouble With Online Ads. Not everyone believes ROI is important when it comes to online advertising. One media analyst says online advertising is akin to roadway billboard campaigns. "Do you stop cars and ask drivers, 'How does that billboard affect your next buying decision?' No, because it's not possible.

InfoWorld: GE touts automated customer support in bricks-to-clicks move. Analysts said it makes sense to use the Web as a way of making e-commerce a beneficial experience. "Most of the knowledge bases that Web customers will look at are the same ones that the customer support people are looking at -- so let users go right to source..."

News.Com: Microsoft turns over questions to Ask Jeeves. [Denise Rundle, director of Microsoft's online support] "The pilot program proved to us that Ask Jeeves's service is a great mechanism for understanding exactly what our customers need. Listening and acting on customer feedback is what makes it possible for Microsoft to answer more than 250,000 questions each day on its Online Support sites."

Wired News: Auction Conflict Escalates. EBay says AuctionWatch's claim is only partly true. Although eBay doesn't own the text and photographs of items that users post on its site, the company says it does have copyright on the bidding prices, feedback, and other transaction-related information.

The Economist: The world in your pocket. The convergence of mobile phones with the Internet has important implications for the Internet as well as for mobile phones. Many people will prefer to get on to the information superhighway via mobiles rather than personal computers, if only to do away with the palaver of logging on, let alone finding a desk and a telephone jack.

Industry Standard: Say It Ain't So, Mel. For CBS to get into the sweepstakes game thus displays a deep lack of imagination – and a lack of confidence in its own creative talents and competencies.

Forbes: WAP music. Diplomacy gets expensive. Once his web-based architecture had won the endorsement of Ericsson’s scientists, they introduced him to Motorola and Nokia. But the entrepreneur had to develop a neutral ground for the four companies to work together over seven months to develop the first version of WAP.

Mappa.Mundi Magazine: A Shared Reality. Death by a thousand clicks is the bane of any net user. The reason? We are attempting to shoe-horn the metaphor of maps–tools for navigating complex spaces–into existing metaphors, such as the infinite book that is the World Wide Web.

NY Times: Traditional Barriers Fall as British Papers Put News Online. [Peter Martin, senior editor at the Financial Times] In a matter of months, Martin tells a visitor, that relatively small unit will be gone, replaced by something much more innovative that, far more extensively than at any other British paper, will erase what he calls the ideological barrier between online news and the printed word.

• Industry Standard: From August 23, 1999; British Reporters Mull Financial News Site

SJ Mercury: Voice-activated sites offer Web access to new users. By substituting speech for computer programs, the companies hope to draw more people to their corners of the Web -- including the unwired majority without home computers.

LA Times: Fighting for the Net Users--Oh, and AT&T. But the group is primarily funded by business interests, including AT&T Corp., which is at the center of a heated debate over "open access" laws that would require cable operators who provide high-speed Internet access to make their networks available to competitors.

• Salon: From July 19, 1999; Hands off whose Net?

SJ Mercury: Wineries complain of federal threat to interstate sales. The fear is that curtailing wine sales could lead to restrictions on other highly regulated products such as cars or airline tickets, said Ben Isaacson of the Association for Interactive Media, which includes America Online and MCI WorldCom as members.

SF Chronicle: Power to the People. In fact, it's a painful paradox: High-tech manufacturers boast that they move at warp speed, yet the battery industry still lives, to a remarkable extent, on discoveries made decades ago.

October 12, 1999
USA Today: Despite buzz, Web design still 'sucks'. Not only are these companies squandering cash, they are also deflating the value of their brand, Nielsen says. "Enormous amounts of money are spent on TV advertising, and then people go to the Web site and the Web site is miserable."

Computerworld: Execs urge regulators to get on Net time. [Michael Armstrong, AT&T's chairman and CEO] In addition, Armstrong called for regulators to keep the Internet free of unnecessary regulations and move quickly to adopt global standards such as the third-generation wireless standard. "We need global standards, and we need them quickly..."

Editor & Publisher: IDG, CMP sign up for digital copyright permissions. The iCopyright program allows for instant reuse or reprint of content from registered publishers. It costs publishers nothing to register for the service; they pay only when a customer purchases editorial content for reuse. The material isn't encrypted. It's basically an honor system. "We are not the copyright police," Catalano said. "Our goal is to make it easy for people to do the right thing."

• Web Review: From October 8, 1999; Don't Trust InterTrust. Michael Swaine.

USA Today: Cisco chief pushes 'virtual close'. Q&A with Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers. It's the ability to close the financial books with a one-hour notice. By connecting an entire company via intranet, even one with operations in dozens of countries, what was once done quarterly can now be done anytime.

Computerworld: Intel chief details e-commerce strategy. A key to that transformation was not dumping e-commerce on IT's lap, Barrett said. Although the information technology team needs to be a key player in e-commerce, IT is oriented internally; trying to change that orientation would be a mistake.

ZDNN: Digital paper turns a new page. The two companies hope that by merging the technologies, they can create plastic sheets of "electronic paper" -- mimicking the weight and flexibility of real paper but capable of displaying text and graphics like a computer monitor.

PC World: What You'll Read Someday. Lucent Technologies and E Ink are collaborating on a futuristic product that the companies describe as electronic paper. It could become a new format for printing and distributing newspapers and books.

SJ Mercury: Technology: revolutionary the next 20-30 years. Whether leaps in technology lead to more good or more bad, predicting advances and where they might take society often results in projections that are far too conservative, philosophers and technologists agree.

Business Week: Being Seen on TV Doesn't Spark Net Sales. It may be great for building brands, but TV doesn't do much to generate Internet sales. In a survey of 135,000 online buyers at 200 retail sites at the time of purchase, BizRate.com found that referrals from other Web sites prompted more than half of all sales.

NY Times: Travel Agents Stung by New Wave of Commission Cuts. The airlines' success with electronic ticketing and Internet booking capability has periodically emboldened them to reduce commissions, but most travel agents have demonstrated surprisingly strong survival skills.

• SJ Mercury: From August 28, 1999; Travel agents' challenge to online ticketing insane

News.Com: Web sites target confused telecom customers. Online comparison shopping sites also offer some intangible advantages. "There's no pressure to buy immediately," Bryan Prohm, a wireless industry analyst at Dataquest, said of shopping online. "When the consumer walks into a retail store, the impetus of the clerk is to make the sale immediately because the odds are likely if the customer walks out, they won't be back."

Computerworld: Retailer pays Web hosting firm with a slice of sales. Meredith Whalen, program manager for Internet services and ASP programs at Framingham-based International Data Corp., said that the deal represents an increasingly popular trend of shared "risk-reward" pricing models between Internet service providers and their clients.

October 13, 1999
News.Com: Staples' Web promotion a victim of its own success. [Staples' spokeswoman Shannon Lapierre] "The [ coupon codes] were intended for a specific area or customer," Lapierre said. "In the broad range of the Internet, people had the opportunity to distribute the code. It's really caused us to go back and redress our processes." She added: "We're seeing the problems that come from moving brick-and-mortar companies to the Web."

• BBC News: From August 18, 1999; Web trader spills beenz

• Useit.Com: From March 21, 1999; URL as UI

ZDNN: Priceline sues Microsoft over Expedia. In its suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Connecticut, Priceline claims Expedia's Hotel Matcher -- which lets users name the price they're willing to pay for lodging -- is a knock-off of technology it created.

• Priceline Press Release: Priceline.com Sues Microsoft For Patent Infringement
• NY Times: From September 8, 1999; Microsoft to Start Net Hotel-Pricing Service
• USA Today: From September 30, 1999; Priceline: We'll avoid patent fights

• WebWord.Com: From March 16, 1999; Interaction Design: The Guru Speaks. Q&A with Alan Cooper.

Freedom Forum: Technology, censorship slayer. Jon Katz. But technology, as any teen-ager knows, is a wicked censorship slayer. Almost all information is now available almost everywhere. Memes, ideas, arguments, opinions — none can be universally corralled or suppressed. Heretics and hell-raisers have never thrived so much.

Newsweek: Higher Than Wire. But the wireless technology available today is unable to satisfy the mounting hunger for what is known in Geek as "bandwidth." The attempt to find a (buzzword alert) "solution" is a recurring theme at Telecom 99.

PC World: Mobile Marvels, Past and Future. [Dr. Martin Cooper, "Father of the Cell Phone"] "It's really parallel to what happened 25 years ago," Cooper says. "My idea was that it wasn't natural for people to stand around talking to a big box fixed to a wall. So why shouldn't you be able to use a data communications device that you can take anywhere you want to go?"

ClickZ: Hot Bots And Customer Service. Customers can engage in simple conversations about your products, ask questions about your site, and the chatterbot will respond with the information they need. The secret is that they work because their realm of knowledge is limited...

Wired News: Net Wiretapping: Yes or No? On a mailing list created by the IETF, participants are already dividing themselves into two categories: Members who argue that a principled, no-cooperation approach is wisest, and those who advocate a "pragmatic" approach.

InternetWeek: Hospital Web Operations Gear Up. Why would materials managers at hospitals want to buy medical supplies over the Web? Buying over the Internet makes it easy for purchasers to learn about new products, streamlines paperwork and can drastically reduce the cost of processing purchase orders.

October 14, 1999
Today's Links Story: Staples' $20 Coupon Travels the Web

NY Times: In Wired World, Much Is Free at Click of a Mouse. [Joe Kraus, co-founder Excite] "We are shifting from a retail economy to what I call an attention economy," Kraus said. "You are willing to give away services or even pay people to use services, if you can get a lot of people listening to your message."

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

RCFoC: Toy Story. In fact, I suggest that such a backed-up corporate Email box represents a vast business opportunity, rather than a pain in the derriere. A potential customer is a terrible thing to waste...

ClickZ: A Really Good Bar Code. [Seely Brown, chief scientist at Xerox PARC] Mr. Seely Brown realizes that there are values in technology other than money, and he came to New York to introduce the latest, a "social computing" system called FlowPort. "Every document I read I mark-up," he said. "These annotations translate as instructions to my assistant on what to do with the document."

MSNBC: Motive Communications is trying to move calls for help to the Web. Telephone support centers cost PC manufacturers from $15 to $20 per call. Ms. Rossiter says Compaq expects its Web-based help offerings to shave 20% off the cost of providing support for each PC.

Washington Post: .com Live with Tim Berners-Lee. Q&A with Tim Berners-Lee. : Interactivity was a word I used until people said that web browsers were interactive -- you can click. So I staretd calleding what I wanetd "intercreativity" . I want to be able to build stuff with someone else.

News.Com: Guru predicts $4 trillion Net market by 2020. [Michael Dertouzos, MIT] "By the end of the 21st century I think we will have increased our productivity by 300 percent. That is about as much as the industrial revolution did," he added. The information superhighway had truly shrunk the global village and "for the first time in the history of the world, we can put in contact people who want help and people who can give it..."

Online Journalism Review: EXTRA! Makes a Comeback. These newspapers are among the growing number that routinely break and update local news online. Collecting and posting a continuous stream of staff-bylined stories, they are shattering the one-deadline-a-day routine most papers have come to embrace for publishing local news.

• Editor & Publisher: From September 1, 1999; Washingtonpost.com's 'Afternoon' Web Edition. Steve Outing.

USA Today: Net health sites talk ethics. Leading Internet health companies said Wednesday they want to avert government regulation by developing their own standards for content, sponsorship and privacy.

LA Times: Overnight Parcel Deliveries Are in a Box. And ironically, one of the culprits is supposed to be helping boost business for the carriers: the Internet, which is generating millions of dollars in sales of goods that need to be shipped quickly. But many documents that used to be sent by overnight air are now simply transmitted electronically.

USA Today: MS, Penguin to publish eBooks. Microsoft Corp. on Thursday announced partnerships with book publishers in the United Kingdom, France and Italy to create and distribute thousands of popular titles on CD-ROM, and eventually online.

News.Com: Bertelsmann, Xerox to print books on demand. Instead of using a printing press to print books, where higher volumes lower production costs, electronic technology allows books to be printed using computers and digital printers at a constant cost per copy.

Editor & Publisher: LATimes.Com: Launches Redesign. The newspaper commissioned research for the project, polling 1,700 people about how they use the Web for news and information. Other factors were site traffic patterns and feedback from latimes.com users. The result is a split-screen format that the site says will provide simpler navigation through the more than 50,000 pages of information and news.

Salon: Surf and sniff. Digiscents is already talking to developers, primarily in the video game industry (which is always happy to add new gadgets to its games), about creating iSmell-enhanced products.

October 15, 1999
FEED Magazine: How Nielsen Portends The Death Of Mass Media. Clay Shirky. It is obvious that both the networks and their advertisers are soon going to have to adapt to a fragmented media market where nothing regularly reaches 20 million people, and the only way to get mass will be niche plus niche plus niche.

Industry Standard: Ticketmaster: Think Before You Link. In the hopes of sparking industrywide debate on the topic, Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch is set to post a statement on its Web site that argues against certain types of linking. The manifesto, which will appear Friday, reflects the opinion of Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch CEO Charles Conn on which types of links are acceptable and which are not.

• TicketMaster Online-CitySearch Press Release: Deep Linking Manifesto

Industry Standard: Web Ads: Not Just for Banners Anymore. [Sean Black, VP and interactive media director at Grey Direct Interactive] "Superstitials have far exceeded our expectations," Black says. About 8 percent of Web surfers who got the ad interacted with it. In contrast, banner ads have click-through rates of under 1 percent.

Interactive Week: Internet Patents: Debatable? Such process patents were legitimized following a July 1998 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals that upheld a patent granted to the Signature Financial Group; the patent describes the combination of technology and methodology Signature employed to update mutual fund share information.

Wired News: High Stakes in Priceline Suit. But legal experts say it will be a strong test of the strength of so-called business-method patents -- an increasingly popular type of patent among the Internet entrepreneur crowd. In essence, business model patents don't cover a particular gizmo or type of technology but, as the name implies, they cover a particular way of doing business.

MSNBC: A vision for the future. Tim Berners-Lee, from his new book Weaving the Web. For society to work efficiently on the Web, massive parallelism is also required. Everybody must be able to publish and to control who has access to their published work. There should not be a structure (like a highway system or mandatory Dewey decimal system) or limitation that precludes any kind of idea or solution purely because the Web won’t allow it to be explained.

Forbes: ChipShot.com aims for the hole. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company is the only sporting goods site that makes customized golf clubs, which cost roughly half that of rival brands. This build-to-order approach allows ChipShot.com shoppers to handpick drivers, irons, wedges and putters based on playing ability, gender, physique and budget.

Web Review: Notes on Annotation. Michael Swaine. The problem is, Third Voice goes to a lot of trouble to make the annotations look like a hack on the target machine. Many readers pointed out that a better model would maintain a clear separation between the site itself and the annotations made to it.

Metropolis Magazine: Against Type. Smart Design’s product, Thumbscript, is an inventive input system that transforms a nine-button, numerical keypad, like that of a mobile telephone or television remote control, into a simple interface for entering letters and words.

Upside: Philippe Kahn Dreams in Wireless. Say goodbye to your PC. In Kahn's brave new wireless world, we'll surf the Web, get stock quotes, news and chat via mini, wearable gadgets.

Forbes: Is eTour worth the trip? At least an ad network's dumb banner ads on a site's periphery can be easily ignored. Of course that's the problem eTour advertisers are trying to address. Unlike easily overlooked banner ads, eTour gets in a users face with entire web pages of content that may be good, bad or indifferent.

Web Review: Usability Checklist for Site Developers. Remember to strive for a quick-loading, well-designed, solidly written, easily maneuverable, thoroughly tested, pleasantly interactive, meaningful, and distinctive web site.

SJ Mercury: Furniture sellers believe in Internet. The chief reason consumers log onto his site is convenience. ``When a customer wants information, they want it quickly,'' he said. ``This is why they turn to the Internet.''

Editor & Publisher: New LATimes.com Takes Risks, and Frustrates. A little more frustrating is the way the split screen stays in place when you click on a story to read, cramming all of the text into one long, narrow, chunk too rarely broken up by boldface or a photo.

October 16, 1999
Internet World: Rethinking Convergence. A good convergence application of the Web should make the particular device disappear in the same way that the telephone fades away when we're using it so we can concentrate on the conversation.

Internet World: Listen to the Sound Of Content Being Sold. [Don Katz, chairman and founder of Audible.com] "Think FedEx," Katz says. "There's a world of difference between overnight delivery and that 33-cent stamp. People are willing to pay for what they want to hear during their own drive times."

Internet World: When Imitation Works. In business, imitation is usually considered the simplest form of theft, not the sincerest form of flattery. But on the Internet, where sites continually borrow graphics, content, and design ideas from each other, imitation may just be good for business--and consumers.

ZDTV: Douglas Rushkoff Looks at Cultural Coercion. This meant marketing and advertising-- both of which would shift the balance in the Net world. But what is Rushkoff doing now? Going to the other side to tell them what people want and need in their Net experiences, and how to make a profit from them.

CNN: Translation services key to global Internet. A Honolulu-based company that stepped in four years ago to meet the demand for Web-page translation now offers a Web-based "localization" service that translates and edits documents into 18 languages -- not just text, but also currencies, dates and even color and image conventions.

InfoWorld: Batten the hatches: Here comes the flood of holiday I-shoppers. Sure, many companies will make big bucks selling holiday presents online this year. But the biggest winners of the online holiday season are likely to be shippers, distributors, and fulfillment companies, as Web retailers, overloaded by holiday traffic, start looking desperately for logistical help.

October 17, 1999
Useit.Com: Prioritize: Good Content Bubbles to the Top. On today's Web, the most common mistake is to make everything too prominent: over-use of colors, animation, blinking, and graphics. Every element of the page screams "look at me" (while all the other design elements scream "no, look at me"). When everything is emphasized, nothing is emphasized.

SJ Mercury: Subversive software at your service. Dan Gillmor. Welcome to RUSure.com, one of the most interesting examples of a genre I call subversive software -- products that undermine the status quo and empower the individual. This isn't an entirely positive development. But it's inevitable, and on balance better than a rigid, top-down system.

Seattle Times: Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, is spilling the details of its creation. Review of Tim Berners-Lee new book Weaving the Web. Packed with personal observations and asides, the book for the first time details with illuminating insight the step-by-step evolution of one of technology's greatest accomplishments.

Internet World: Deconstructing Yahoo Store's Framework. Peter Merholz and Louis Rosenfeld. PM: The most successful garden stores, like Garden.com and Windowbox.com, dovetail content and commerce to provide an information-rich shopping environment. It seems that by using Yahoo, GardenSouth incurs an unfortunate division between its informative content on the main site and the products for sale on Yahoo's site.

October 18, 1999
Industry Standard: Help Yourself. To keep up with all those buyers, the Round Rock, Texas-based direct-to-consumer computer seller has transformed its tech-support system into a self-serve powerhouse. Now nearly 40 percent of all customer queries are answered on Dell's Web site.

Computerworld: How to Click Off the Customer. It's easy to forget that in between the sticky Web strands that catch customers are open spaces that people often pass right through. In Buckley's case, eBay relied too heavily on technology and fumbled on the human touch. In other cases, a business would be better off with more automation and a less-personal touch.

SF Chronicle: Patent Stampede. Patent disputes aren't new. But critics say the lightning pace of innovation, the increasing complexity of inventions and the financial stakes of patent ownership make it tougher for the patent office to perform its traditional role -- deciding who invented what first.

Information Week: Portals Make Business Sense. Analysts and other users agree. Portals can give employees, business partners, and customers a central access point to critical data, including Web sites, internal reports, news feeds--even enterprise applications such as enterprise resource planning and customer-relationship management software.

Salon: Stoking the Net's growth. Q&A with Ellen Hancock, CEO of Exodus Communications. When Exodus went public our peak rate was 5 megabytes a second. Last time we measured the customers had it at 4.2 gigabytes a second. And it's grown since then. I have never seen this before in terms of rapidity and constant nature of growth.

Web Informant: Preserving online archives. Years from now, researchers looking back at the dawn of the web era may have a small fraction of the web to use for their research. Why? Because many of today's publishers, including the computer trade press, do a poor job of archiving old content.

• Salon: From June 10, 1999; Can history survive Silicon Valley?

Industry Standard: City of Hits: e-topia. Review of William J. Mitchell's new book e-topia. Most disappointing of all, he spends relatively little time on the subject he so tantalizingly dangles before us at the outset: What is the future of the city in the age of the Net?

Forbes: Dot-com brand-building runs wild. At the start of the Internet revolution, many dot-coms wrongly believed they could build national name recognition with online ads. In reality, web surfers tend to ignore ads, which play to the same audience over and over and are too small to convey an effective pitch.

TechWeb: Hollywood Snubs Content-Protection Scheme. If movie makers get what they want, advocacy groups said, the feud could severely limit the way consumers use PCs and other machines for displaying, copying, or retransmitting copyrighted content over the Internet.

Industry Standard: Slammin' Sam. But when watching him in the RealPlayer box, I think: This is how it must have been for Ramon Navarro or Theda Bara, great silent-era stars trying to figure out what had changed when the talkies arrived.

October 19, 1999
Salon: Attack on the Net. Just the fact that the ad exists suggests that Internet auto sales are seriously cutting into dealership profit margins. But by their own choice of tactics, the ad's creators demonstrated exactly why car buyers are flocking online.

SJ Mercury: The man who really invented the Web. Q&A with Tim Berners-Lee. There's always the threat of fragmentation when companies diverge from using standards. That's omnipresent in a competitive environment. And there are economic threats such as the ``biasing'' of the Internet, where your ISP has commercial deals with certain Web sites. . . . It's like buying a radio that happens to work better on certain frequencies than on other ones.

Freedom Forum: Jane's open-source breakthrough: model for news media. Jon Katz. Jane's decided to correct mistakes and gather all possible information before, not after, the piece was published — the complete reverse of the way mainstream media have worked for decades, and a fundamental reason they've become so arrogant, disconnected and mistrusted.

ZDNN: Encyclopaedia Britannica goes free. The company previously charged $5 a month for an individual subscription to the online encyclopedia. The now-expanded free site will have paid advertisements and sponsorships from companies, including computer seller Gateway Inc. and flower seller 1-800Flowers.com Inc.

LA Times: Britannica Gives In and Gets Online. The decline of the 231-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica "illustrates how the most stable of industries, the most focused of business models and the strongest of brands can be blown to bits by new information technology," a pair of management consultants write in a new book, "Blown to Bits."

• Harvard Business School Publishing: From September 1999; How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy. Q&A with Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster, authors of Blown to Bits.

News.Com: Online stores are points of no returns. Many traditional retailers such as Toys "R" Us have struggled to gain traction against Internet competitors. Offering in-store returns is one way brick-and-mortar retailers can set their online sites apart, industry observers say.

Business Week: ConsumerReports.com: No Ads. No Links. Just Loyalty. Although she maintains that Consumer Reports is ''as excited about making money as anybody,'' she believes that any commercial relationship would undermine the organization's mission. It's the same reason why all of the products the magazine tests are purchased in stores by a clandestine army of 160 ''shoppers.''

• News.Com: From June 23, 1999; Consumer Reports' brand builds Net subscriptions

NY Times: Mobile Data Is Set to Take Off, but Glitches Remain. For all the problems, however, WAP should not be underestimated. If the recent history of the Internet has taught something, it is that new technology offering a higher level of interactivity and mobility will spread quickly despite initial technical complexity and limitations.

Wired News: Abra Cadaver: A Fight for Bodies. On the Web, they find something totally foreign to the traditional death care industry -- consumer information. Price comparisons abound, anathema to an industry that has thrived in a death-denying culture where people pay the asking price at the local funeral home and rush for the door.

October 20, 1999
Forbes: Requiem for a Bright Idea. Up to now the Web has been a massive repository of information, most of it served up free to help stir ad revenue and on-line product sales. Micropayments could let Web sites sell content by the word, line or page, or even the day, hour and minute--a recipe for a nickel, driving directions for a dollar.

News.Com: Palm cofounder shares design philosophy. One of the keys to successful product design, Hawkins stressed, is understanding the importance of a simple user experience. That simplicity can and should stop designers from overloading devices with too many unnecessary features.

• MIT Technology Review: From July/August 1999; That’s Not How My Brain Works... Q&A with Jeff Hawkins.

• USA Today: From September 9, 1999; Net firms reporting virtual revenue

ClickZ: Mining The Data Mountain. No, the real change-the-world aspect of e-commerce is perhaps its most untapped feature - the ability to measure customer behavior and deliver solutions tailored to that behavior.

[clip]: Digital Darwinism: Survival of the Fittest. Digital Darwinism's seven steps are fairly straightforward, and Schwartz recommends that companies follow them in order because they are set out in a logical progression.

Editor & Publisher: When It Comes To E-commerce, Think Different! Steve Outing. Enable everyone in your community, or in your online publication's audience, to become an online retailer. And I mean everyone, from the high school student, to the non-profit group, to the local school, to the little league coach, to your son or daughter.

Forbes: GE's Brain Drain. Many firms, from Walt Disney Co. to Comcast to Ziff-Davis to Forbes, struggle with the same issue as they invest in Web firms or open new on-line businesses: How do you keep old-liners happy while paying people on the Web what they expect?

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

Forbes: Is the Showroom Dead? What damage will the Internet do? If nothing else, on-line vending, coupled with made-to-order manufacturing, could eliminate the expense of financing of inventories. If buyers end up buying on the Web, why would we need all those million-dollar showrooms?

LA Times: Staking Claims in China's Uncertain Cyberspace. Many analysts see the ban not as a total exclusion of foreign firms but as a move by China's government to reappraise its policy and strengthen its regulatory powers over foreign investment in Internet businesses.

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

SJ Mercury: Encyclopedia's Web site jammed. ``We're a victim of our own success,'' said Jorge Cauz, senior vice president for sales and marketing of Britannica.com Inc. After the initial rush tied up the site, it functioned normally overnight but became clogged again early today as Americans woke up and sat down at their computers...

Wired News: My Agent Will Call Your Agent. If ideas for body-worn personal agents are ever translated into products, wearable computers will some day help you to find them and negotiate to-do list trades.

[clip]: Customers First. It's also key to follow these three imperatives: "empower customers, focus on parcels and deliver to the customer's doorstep." The report advises firms to provide customers with up-to-date information about order arrival and offer self-service solutions.

USA Today: FedEx faces Net challenges. FedEx sees its future in making deliveries of larger packages between businesses, not from businesses to consumers. "We're looking at a broader definition of e-commerce: how you manage the flow of goods into manufacturing," says Mike Glenn, FedEx executive vice president for market development.

USA Today: E-mail use may force Postal Service cuts. The market shift could cost the Postal Service $17 billion in revenue over the next decade; it might have to close some of its 38,000 post offices or reduce hours. Other possibilities: higher rates with premium charges for remote destinations.

October 21, 1999
Internet Week: Impersonal Touch Has Its Merits. It may sound implausible, but that's precisely what many e-businesses, and even some of their customers, want: minimal interaction except for the most complex, critical problems. Anything below this threshold can be managed online, proponents of Web-based customer service maintain.

Internet Week: Next Step: Remove All Human Intervention. Q&A with Dell VP Richard Owen. We are getting our technical support reps equally focused on populating the online databases with answers as they are in answering the phone calls. The future is getting information to customers through databases rather than through the phone.

CNN: Web inventor sees his baby as a 'play space'. Q&A with Tim Berners-Lee. The Web site should be a mirror of your organization. When you actually do things on the Web, it becomes your organization. Architecting this is a lot more than systems management. It asks fundamental questions about what the company is and what the company's ethos should be.

personalization.com: Web Marketer's Guide to Cluetrain. The solution is the same one successful salespeople have used for years — conversing with prospects. By engaging in a conversation we have the greatest likelihood of learning about each person's needs and how our products can help them.

Computerworld: Little by little. Little projects cost less. They get done faster. They succeed more often. If they fail (as some of Alaska Air's airport-automation efforts have) you can back out a lot more gracefully -- and you can afford a few failures, because the risk of each project is lower.

Wired News: Palm Developers Want Their Share. Tammy Rednich, a Palm VII product marketing manager, agreed that change is in the wind. Developers in the wireless era have to start thinking about alternative sources of revenue, like advertising, sponsorship, or selling services.

SF Chronicle: From the Creator Of a Universe. [Tim Berners-Lee] He also envisions a more collaborative communications medium that allows readers to see all sides of political agendas in forums where they can attach annotations and comments the way people now attach yellow sticky notes to paper documents.

Wired News: The Philosophy of the Handheld. Granted carte blanche by conference organizers to talk about whatever he liked, Hawkins dispensed with topics like the future of the handheld industry or the wireless Internet, choosing instead to impart some of his personal design philosophy.

Forbes: To CE of not to CE? That "clunkiness" factor is probably the biggest gripe about CE, regardless of the platform, as many believe it has too large a memory footprint with too many unnecessary features.

Wired News: Berners-Lee on His Baby, the Web. Q&A with Tim Berners-Lee. It's not just high-minded ideals, but fun -- being able to play, doing the creativity in the Web, rather than doing it offline and then somehow compiling it into a Web page -- that sort of thing.

News.Com: Portal numbers are flat--where is everyone going? David Card, an analyst at Jupiter Communications, said seasonal usage patterns could be a reason for the decline. But if there were a trend taking away market share from portals, Card said, it could be blamed on "affinity portals"--Web aggregation sites focusing on specific topics or markets.

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

Internet Week: Devil's In The Data. Not only are they transporting more online-purchased goods, they're becoming ever more critical links in those customers' supply chains. They're doing so by creating extranet links with their customers and gathering logistics data that those customers can use to improve the operation of their businesses.

BBC News: What does cyberspace look like? Because as far as he is concerned, cyberspace is a continuation of the real world - "virtual space is going into real space". Most people now have an understanding of what cyberspace is, he said, even if they couldn't say what it looked like.

SJ Mercury: Nike taking shoe orders online. Only two shoe models will be offered, the Air Turbulence and the Air Famished, selling for about $85. But customers can order specific colors and features to be delivered within two weeks, and Nike will pay the air freight charges for the time being...

October 22, 1999
Industry Standard: The World's Wide Web: Online Language Revival. While the giants of commerce and culture duke it out for Web hegemony, many smaller nations have embraced the Net as a vital source of rejuvenation for their native languages.

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

FEED Magazine: Kasparov Vs. The World. Clay Shirky. Microsoft made the same famously bad bet that sidelined Prodigy: By giving The World a forum for expressing itself, it assumed that The World's gratitude would prevent criticism of its host, should anything go wrong.

• Salon: From October 20, 1999; Microsoft chess: Call it a draw?

• Salon: From April 16, 1999; Must AOL pay "community leaders"?

Forbes: Electron Economy: The McKinsey of the 21st century? The six-month-old firm proposes to do nothing less than assemble and integrate every single logistical aspect of its e-commerce clients' operations, covering each step of the way between the buy button and the doorbell.

ZDNN: DSL takes Ebert to Internet heaven. Roger Ebert. My requirements when I request a URL are modest: I want to hit Enter and be looking at the new page instantly. When there is a pause, it should be because I am reading, not because I am waiting.

• Useit.Com: From March 1, 1997; The Need for Speed

October 23, 1999
InfoWorld: Video spam, anyone? Broadband may cause annoying side effects. Still, I have no illusions about broadband actually decreasing the amount of time I spend waiting while using the Web. Bottom line: Web pages will have video clips and interactive applications attached to them instead of mere graphics, but you'll still wait six or more seconds for them to appear.

Advertising Age: Marketers buoy brands with e-mail newsletters. The software marketer has tracked log-ons to its sites and watched as subscribers download trial versions of new software. It also has seen 32% of those trial users buy the complete version--with a little help from three e-mails sent out during the 30-day trial period, Ms. Brophy said.

October 24, 1999
NY Times: The High Road at a High Cost. While Britannica was charging up to $2,000 for a 32-volume edition of books, Microsoft was often giving away CD-Rom versions of its Encarta encyclopedia to buyers of new computers.

October 25, 1999
Salon: Local explosion. Q&A with Dan Finnigan, president of Knight Ridder New Media. When I was at the L.A. Times a team of us approached the two graduate students that created Yahoo -- Jerry Yang and David Filo -- because when I saw Yahoo, I instantly said, "This is the future of the newspaper industry, where we won't create all the content but we'll be aggregators of it."

NY Times: Internet Economy Grows on Plans, Not Products. A remarkable example of overvaluation is Blue Mountain Arts, the greeting-card Web site with a $1 billion valuation, 10 million users and virtually no revenue.

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

FEED Magazine: The Supermodel Egg Hoax. Clay Shirky. Falling for this kind of PR stunt is bad enough, but this is the same paper that spent much of the Year of Matt Drudge hectoring the rest of us on the superior accuracy of traditional news outlets.

New York New Media Association: From October 14, 1999; How The Internet Is Changing The Way We Get Our News & The Business Of News. Windows Media streamed video clips. Tom Brokaw, Steven Brill, James Cramer, Leah Gentry, Walter Isaacson and David Talbot.

Information Week: Fulfilling Expectations. On the verge of this year's stress test of the Internet economy, customer-savvy E-retailers are turning their attention to logistics--the ability to deliver the right goods, at the right time, to the right place, while keeping customers informed along the way.

Information Week: Lessons From A Cultural Revolution. Organization 2005 aims to do nothing less than change the Cincinnati company's culture from a conservative, slow-moving, bureaucratic behemoth to that of a modern, fast-moving, Internet-savvy organization.

Business Week: Ordinary Japanese Are Finally Asserting Themselves -- in Cyberspace. You have to wonder, given how this seemingly silent majority is using the Internet to rebel against everything from government malfeasance to shoddy customer service to the opinions of media elite.

Forbes: Branding Irony. Why use pulpy magazines and tired broadcasters? They're known to work, unlike ads on Web sites themselves. And since the Net is a medium with a low cost of entry, fortunes are squandered on building that American icon, the brand.

Time: The Net Loves Old Media. Web companies are widely dependent on the tube, as well as newspapers, magazines (thank you very much), radio and billboards, to imprint their brand names on as many brains as possible--particularly consumers who aren't online yet.

ZDNN: The great Net giveaway gimmick. While that approach may work temporarily in conjunction with Lynn's basic, advertising-based revenue model, it doesn't leave room for growth according to Jupiter's Gluck. "There's a certain type of person that enters sweepstakes. That applies to both the online and offline world."

• Industry Standard: From October 11, 1999; Say It Ain't So, Mel

• Useit.Com: The Use and Misuse of Focus Groups
• Usable Web: User Testing

Forbes: Solving an image problem. Alchemedia, a small, privately held company that originated in Israel and is now based in San Francisco, last week began shipping software that lets web site operators prevent Internet users from copying, saving or printing images.

NY Times: Product Reviews From Anyone With an Opinion. But a handful of companies are hoping to take the age-old effectiveness of word-of-mouth recommendations one step further, by creating independent Web sites that give common folks and bona fide experts a forum for their opinions and users a way to rate the pundits.

Forbes: Internet media's new buzzword: diversification. Tips and guidelines at Cnet typically lead to a store where users can make informed purchasing decisions. The company generated an average of 153,000 leads per day to its 120 merchant partners in the past quarter, leading to e-commerce revenues of more than $270 million.

October 26, 1999
Welcome to all readers of Dan Gillmor's column in the SJ Mercury News. Thanks for visiting, Lawrence (tomalak@tomalak.org).

SJ Mercury: As World Wide Web turns: new column online. Dan Gillmor. The ability to use the Web as a writing tool, not just a publishing platform, is a fairly big deal, I think. It changes my thinking about the very nature of creating content, not just because of the freedom it implies. The idea of writing on the Web, for the Web, is a dramatic shift from what has come before.

• SiliconValley.Com: eJournal: Dan Gillmor's News and Views

TechWeb: Office Of Future To Free Workers. The futurists, designers, and technology experts who think about how and where the office worker will be in 10 years agree on one thing: The old model of office space and office work belonged to the industrial age and will not survive.

• GartnerGroup: From October 14, 1999; Mastermind Keynote Panel: The Office of the Future. Windows Media and Real streamed video.

Forbes ASAP: The Great Convergence. Something immense is occurring around us. Everywhere you look, things are flowing together, creating new connections, new hybrids, new ways of seeing the world.

Interactive Week: Inter@ctive Week's 5th Anniversary. Ted Nelson, Jay Walker, Eric Brewer and Paul Gauthier, Michael Porter, Dave Barry and Inter@ctive Week editors take stock of the past and future of the Internet phenomenon.

ABCNews.Com: Shooters’ Future. Now more of the romance of photography is in danger of leaking away as far-reaching technological shifts - along with industry consolidation - transform the shooter’s profession.

The Philadelphia Inquirer: Clashes along a sales frontier. Retailers and vendors have long butted heads over how far suppliers can go to sell to shoppers without compromising the retailer. Manufacturers have always had the option of selling direct, whether it be through the mail, over the telephone, or out of a factory outlet store. But e-commerce is proving to be one of the most contentious battlefields yet.

New York Post: 'Zine sites linking to get more $. Some of the Internet's longest-suffering content producers, who have had to sit by and write about their peers growing rich, are on the verge of forming their own network. Normally outspoken commentators at a range of web properties have become tight-lipped over the last few weeks as the deal comes together.

• AtNewYork: From April 16, 1999; New Money for Content Raises the Stake for FEED

News.Com: Satellite firms eye Net content distribution. "The world is trying to force the Internet into a broadcast model. The existing [network] infrastructure can't do it well," said SkyCache chief executive Doug Humphrey. "You can't just brute force it anymore."

Upside: Brain-Dead Internet Marketing. How ridiculous. Internet companies are spending good money on paper, printing and postage just to tell me about a Web site. I've even had companies use snail mail to promote their e-mail services.

October 27, 1999
DaveNet: SalonHerringWiredFool.Com. And I didn't want it to be a theoretical discussion, I wanted to have a live site, on the air, changing every hour, perhaps even covering itself, in a way, if the various pubs decide to address the question on their sites as well as ours.

Editor & Publisher: Push service changes name, pours on money. "There's still that distinction between news origination, and news aggregation and distribution. We're just taking their work and aggregating it." Instead, the focus of the business, he says, is to get critical, updated news to people in the business community, based on their preferences, who would otherwise have no means — or no time — to gather it all themselves.

Business Week: The Cyber Wailing Wall Where Lockheed's Soul Is Exposed. The message board is run by Yahoo! and isn't connected to Lockheed Martin. But for those who want to take out their anger and frustration about Lockheed, it has become a virtual wailing wall. Before the Information Age, outsiders weren't privy to such inside venting and gossip.

• Jamie Zawinski: really bad attitude

NY Times: From a Giant Job to an Internet Fledgling. When he resigned as president and chief operating officer of the world's largest hotel company in April, the conventional wisdom was that after a summer vacation, Richard D. Nanula would land a similarly important job with a big company in the Northeast. So much for conventional wisdom.

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

News.Com: