November 1, 1999
InfoWorld: Weblogs mix creative expression with practical information. Weblogs provide a series of annotated links to items such as news stories, and often include personal rants. They are maintained by one person, most commonly someone who is involved in Web design or some other tech-related field.

Industry Standard: Brand Inequity. Advertisers agree that it's difficult to pull off a branding strategy on the Web. Many of the techniques that are most successful in offline ads are complete bombs when duplicated online. The Net may be an interactive medium, but it defies all brand logic.

NY Times: CD Software Is Said to Monitor Users' Listening Habits. Even if the company's use of the data is benign, these experts said, the practice is unacceptable because of the secrecy: RealNetworks, one of the largest distributors of audio software on the Internet, does not inform consumers that they are being identified and monitored by the company.

• Project Cool: From August 28, 1999; A Real Invader. This is a rant about Real Audio and Real Networks the company and the sleazy, slimy way it thinks it has a right to invade my desktop, my menu bar, and the functionality of my browser.

CIO WebBusiness: On the Internet Edge. Q&A with Xerox PARC's Mark Stefik. The Internet Edge is a collective edge, reflecting how people are adjusting as the world becomes more connected through the Internet. As with other connection technologies, the edge manifests itself as tension between local and global values.

• Web.Builder New Orleans '97: The Internet Edge. Excerpt from the introduction to Mark Stefik's book, The Internet Edge.

Business Week: CNET's $100 Million Marketing Bet: Scant Payoff Yet. So, what has CNET gotten for its money? Not enough, when you consider that its cost of acquiring new customers nearly doubled in the third quarter, to around twice what each visitor will generate in annual revenue.

Industry Standard: Join The Club. But for the affiliate, the one providing the link to the retailer, the concept may be less than it was cracked up to be. While some of the bigger online brands are thrilled with their affiliate programs, too many affiliate groups are nothing more than a series of links to myriad vendors – without much selling going on.

Boston Globe: Site has all the research that fits. The point is to ''develop a way to disseminate research results in a way that allows anyone access any time, any place,'' says Varmus, who dislikes the ''gatekeeper'' role that major journals now play. The goal, he says, is fast, ''barrier-free'' access to medical research.

CIO: Teamwork Made Simple. Once, software tools for programming teams meant a code repository and a bug-tracking database. But as companies find themselves hiring distributed project teams and juggling multiple simultaneous projects, they are turning to tools that provide the communication and resource-allocation features that traditional programming utilities lack.

Industry Standard: Giving Up Their Ties. Most difficult is the people problem. In the Internet Economy, it's hard enough for traditional companies to hold on to talent when the temptations of stock options, flexible work environments and fast tracks to the top are so great. The big, established consulting firms are no exception.

CIO WebBusiness: Hired Guns. For maximum efficiency, clients say, it makes perfect sense to bring in savvy, veteran guides to integrate technologies, point out organizational problems, identify business opportunities and threats, and set priorities.

Internet World: A Whodunit Site Credits Hard to Come By. But the home-page site credit has been disappearing over the past couple of years, falling victim to the Web's increasing strategic importance, as well as the burgeoning complexity of the design process.

InfoWorld: Push coming to WAP-enabled mobile phones. Push technology on mobile phones is expected to be used for real-time alerts, accessing purchasing price information, airline schedule and meeting changes, among other things...

November 2, 1999
Mappa.Mundi Magazine: I see business as usual. Scott Adams. Today we say "I drove to work" and don't need to add "in a car" because it is assumed. Cyberspace, multimedia, the Internet and a host of other words will leave the language in twenty years as they also become assumed as the normal way of doing things.

Web Techniques: You Asked for It! The customer service solutions emerging to fill this niche have their roots in several disciplines in computer science. They're enjoying a resurgence in applications including knowledge management, user-interface design, case-based reasoning, and good old-fashioned FAQ lists.

Forbes: Computer, Heal Thyself. Kmart Corp. began moving its workers off old mainframes and onto PCs three years ago. But the switch had a dark side--calls to the company's help desk exploded. Only 40 tech-support people must field calls from a base of 7,500 users...

Web Techniques: You Rang, Erlang, and the Poisson Problem. "The difference is that most know security is a hard technical problem and few consider CS (customer service) as such. Both CS and security include a technical and social element, and companies need to think more systemically, or holistically, about CS."

SJ Mercury: Chinese database is a gift to humanity. Dan Gillmor. Digital Heritage Publishing Ltd., a Hong Kong-based company, has turned the enormous collection into an equally enormous database, adding the kinds of tools that will enhance scholarship: searching, annotation, hyperlinking and much more.

Web Techniques: Masters of Our Shifting Paradigm. [Tim Berners-Lee] He adds: "The essence of working together in a Weblike way is that we function in groups." Don't think of mass markets. Think of groups that get work done -- groups of two, ten, or twenty. Think about how quickly such groups might form and dissolve when the task at hand is accomplished.

First Monday: FM Interviews: Howard Rheingold. Access to the raw tools for many to many communication is not sufficient. You need to know how to use them. We would all be better off if the flamers, lamers, and spammers who destroyed so much of Usenet and many other virtual communities would sit in front of their keyboards.

Wired News: The Internet's 'Living Treasure'. A 45-year-old veteran programmer, Smith retired a couple of months ago from Phar Lap, the software company he helped build and still owns but no longer runs. He started looking at Internet security issues as a hobby about three years ago, uncovering bugs and security holes in email clients and browsers.

• Forbes: From September 27, 1999; Go head and sue! It's a sad fact, but whenever someone is cited as an expert in one publication, he is almost sure to be quoted in another--and another and another.

InfoWorld: Mobile technologies like Bluetooth to push e-commerce. The large number of mobile phone users, combined with emerging technologies, including wireless application protocol and Bluetooth, means that at least 40 percent of consumer e-commerce transactions outside of North America will take place from mobile devices by 2004...

Forbes: 24/7 Media gets patent for online ad technology. At the same time, the patent gives 24/7 Media a weapon against DoubleClick, which threatened its competitors with lawsuits when it won a similar patent for its DART targeting and ad delivery technology in September.

NY Times: Online Retailers Emptying Their Wallets on Advertising. Convinced that this holiday season will be make-or-break, e-retailers are burning through resources as they race one another to bring their names to consumers through TV advertising.

Editor & Publisher: Digital Design Will Impact Newspapers. The prototypes included plenty of visuals, "portal" approaches with chunks of information and many points of entry on the front page, and cross-promotion and even new tools to enable for quick transition to reading online.

Seattle Times: Shoe fetish? Nordstrom has your fit. Less successful, in our view, was the "sole's desire" quiz which aims to show customers shoes that may match their mood, based on their answers to five bizarre questions. (Here's one: "I relate most strongly to feeling: masculine; feminine; none of the above." Hmmm.)

November 3, 1999
Wired News: Toward a Click-and-Pay Standard. The era of almost-everything-free-on-the-Internet may be evolving into the age of the micropayment with new software from IBM and Compaq, who are pushing for new Net standards to hurry things along.

• IETF: Micro Payments Birds of a Feather. In this BOF we'll review some recent micropayment markup standardization spec from the W3C, and discuss whether the IETF should attempt to contribute standards in this area...

Salon: Getting smart, the stupid Web way. On Oct. 25, on a Monday morning at midtown Manhattan's Hammerstein Ballroom, such just-do-it bromides bracketed the scene at AltaVista Network's live relaunch. Think out-of-control smoke-up-your-ass hoopla.

Industry Standard: FT Runs Afoul of Hong Kong Paper. The FT recently launched an advertising campaign announcing free access to its archive online, which included articles from the Post. But the Post charges a fee for the same articles on its own Web site, and FT's end run has raised the Post's hackles.

Editor & Publisher: Newspaper Stories Online in 30 Minutes or Less. Steve Outing. The trend is now crystal clear. Major newspapers are headed toward the day when reporters' work will be published instantly on the Web, in order to compete with TV news and wire services.

Red Herring: Mobile computing finds its voice. Cell phones are becoming commonplace. Internet access, at least the wire-line kind, is widespread. Portable devices capable of accessing the Internet via voice recognition technology appear to be the next step.

ZDNN: Report calls for national 'e-archive'. Policy-makers should create a new system of "electronic depositories" to preserve digital information for posterity, America’s top research council says in a new report. The National Research Council’s recommendation is contained in a survey of the challenges surrounding intellectual property rights in an online age.

Business Week: Salon and Slate: A Tale of Two Webzines. But both sites' biggest challenge is to give readers reasons to log onto them regularly as a primary news source. That'll be tough with so many established media giants stomping about the Internet with their own news and information services.

• Columbia Journalism Review: From January/February 1999; Slate vs. Salon

NY Times: Rewriting the Résumé Rules of the Road. Computer databases that screen jobseekers are the culprit. With millions of applications sent by e-mail and the Web, employers lack the time even to glance at many. Instead, they sort through job-search Web sites like CareerMosaic or through their own virtual piles by asking computers to search for phrases...

November 4, 1999
ClickZ: Thinking Through Your Links. No organization is an island. Success may have once belonged only to those organizations that could make the most improvements and create the most value within the four walls of their own enterprise.

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

NY Times: Lawsuit Says AOL Shuts Out the Blind. In a test of the idea that virtual spaces must by law be readily accessible to people with disabilities, a major organization representing the blind filed suit against America Online Inc. on Thursday, saying that its online service is almost impossible for blind people to use.

InfoWorld: Microsoft, R.R. Donnelley plan eBook title effort. Microsoft and R.R. Donnelley & Sons on Thursday announced a joint effort to provide large numbers of eBook titles to users of Microsoft Reader software.

Wired News: Med Sites Prescribe Ethics Credo. At a press conference in New York on Thursday, leaders of the partnership, called Health Internet Ethics, or Hi-Ethics, announced plans to create a set of industry standards focusing on site content, advertising and privacy issues.

XML.Com: The W3C, P3P and the Intermind Patent. The analysis confirmed that it would be possible to implement P3P without infringing the patent—great news for implementors and users of the new standard—but the episode raises important issues about protection of the freedom to implement open standards.

TechWeb: Scientists Say E-commerce Will Be Portable. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, researchers are working on a scenario that uses software agents and handheld devices with a wireless Internet connection to automate shopping.

News.Com: Qualcomm readies new wireless Internet strategy. Analysts describe HDR as a "stepping stone" technology between today's slower wireless data capabilities and the blazing speeds expected with future wireless technologies known as 3G.

MIT Technology Review: Interfaces: The Century’s Top 10. The best systems convey information so elegantly that we hardly think about the power they give us—boundaries dissolve and we become one with our technologies. The editors of TR picked 10 of the most ingenious and important.

ABCNews.Com: Digital Dilemma. The best defense against online copyright infringement is not new legislation, according a new report released today by the National Research Council. Instead, new business models, technological innovation and public education offer the best solutions to protecting intellectual property in the information age.

PC World: Earn (Virtual) Money for Surfing. Still, their idea has gained momentum this year as the Internet has entered a new phase in which direct promotions, sweepstakes, and giveways have become accepted as a way for new companies to stand out in a crowd on the Web.

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

November 5, 1999
ClickZ: The Myth Of Manufactured Stickiness. I am, indeed, going to talk about stickiness. But I'm not going to perpetuate the myth of created or synthetic stickiness -- that sticky, gooey artificial content on general interest sites that promises to attract visitors and keep them coming back, but seldom does.

ZDNN: Customer support: Forget about it. Intuit, for instance, has built its business on engaging the customer, to gain feedback and build new features. But now, calling in is out. Try to get a question answered about Quicken 2000 and you have basically two options: message boards or a few hours of live chat with some tech experts each week.

CNNfn: Future Bright For Digital Cash - Report. In its report, "The Dash to Digital Cash," the Aberdeen Group says the drive to support micropayments - typically sub-$10 transactions without the disproportionate processing fees of an ordinary credit card - is expected to gain significant momentum over the next two years or three years.

• Aberdeen Group: The Dash to Digital Cash. Brief of the report, PDF of Table of Contents and Report Abstract is available on the site.

Forbes: For your information. Priceline's Walker sees the information exchange as the perfect union of the Internet's capabilities to search, find and communicate. "Every day, people are faced with professional and personal challenges that they know someone, somewhere, has already dealt with..."

Forbes: Killer ads. It refuses to accept ads based on Shockwave technology, according to Anil Singh, Yahoo!'s chief sales and marketing officer (see the next page for a description of these technologies). "We would love to use these kinds of rich-media features if the technology were widely deployable. But the fact is, it's not..."

• Red Herring: From July 14, 1999; Comet Systems' cursor points to more Web advertising. [Dean Margolis, CEO of Comet Systems] He expects that the user base will continue to grow. "People just love it when their cursor turns into Tweety Bird..."

Wired News: Smelling Success for Wireless. Billed as Wireless IT 99, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association conference held here this week centered around the imminent emergence of wireless as a medium for shoveling data, not just voice, over the airwaves.

NY Times: In Internet Time, a Year Is Much Too Long, Judge Finds. Internet time, the concept that everything and everyone involved with the Internet moves faster than the rest of the world, got some legal backing last week. A federal judge ruled in an employment case that in the Internet industry, a one-year hiatus from the work force is "several generations, if not an eternity."

November 6, 1999
InfoWorld: E-publishing challenges the gatekeeper model. Last month, a slew of announcements partnering these leaders with technology enablers, such as Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, Reciprocal, and Fatbrain.com, confirmed that Web-based books-on-demand and Internet self-publishing are key to online publishing.

InfoWorld: Fatbrain's CEO heralds the future of publishing in the Internet Age. Q&A with Fatbrain CEO Chris MacAskill. I would maintain that there is no economic model, and there hasn't been for more than a century, for anything longer than a magazine article or shorter than a book, especially speeches, conference proceedings, research reports, white papers, or even short stories.

November 7, 1999
Useit.Com: Graceful Degradation of Scalable Internet Services. Specialized Internet applications will return to provide richer UIs than are possible in browsers, but browsers will remain and new, smaller devices will arise, so content and features must work across three levels of sophistication (specialized applications, traditional web pages and narrowly focused small devices).

Seattle Times: Would-be Web giants go a little patent-happy. But recent court decisions have loosened the restrictions on patenting software, leading some observers to predict that companies will flood the patent office with applictions to protect their software. By obtaining a patent, companies can lock out competitors or seek licensing fees for others to use a patented feature.

Multi-University Research Laboratory Seminars: Five Forces in the Network Economy. Hal Varian. Technology changes. Economic laws do not." Understanding these laws and their relevance to information goods is critical when fashioning today's successful competitive strategies."

MSDN Online: The Power of the Usability Lab. The value of the usability lab goes beyond the important usability data you obtain. I always think about moments sitting in the lab, watching someone try to use something I designed, and completely failing—sometimes in the most horrific and bizarre ways imaginable.

November 8, 1999
Cal Law: On the Net, In the Dark. With the World Wide Web providing a relatively unfettered global bulletin board, some of the information found online is giving rise to a mounting number of lawsuits. Much of the litigation stems from a handful of popular Web sites that allow investors, employees and others to post anonymous comments about companies...

Industry Standard: Architecting Innovation. Lawrence Lessig. The network is to be kept simple, incapable of discrimination. What is allowed in the Internet is what users demand. The innovations that are permitted are those that users find useful. No central or strategic actor gets to decide how the network will evolve. The network is constituted to disable that sort of control.

InfoWorld: Online collaboration revolutionizes design process. Collaborative design and manufacturing tools, formerly the sole domain of industrial giants such as Ford and Boeing, will soon be available to smaller companies thanks to a new generation of emerging Web-based design tools and services.

• Executive Edge: From June-July 1999; Hatching the Helibus. Gartner Group.

ClickZ: ExcessVoice.com. Well, I have a feeling that excess voice is going to start depressing responses to just about any online marketing effort. The online environment is getting noisier and noisier. Heaven help us when 'broadband' finally gets to us. That will mean more noise, more rich media, more flashing and sound.

PC Week: When listening to customers is the wrong thing to do. Digital did everything its customers told it to do, technologically advancing its incredibly prosperous minicomputers. In the process, the company missed the future by not taking steps to ensure its viability in the post-minicomputer era.

SF Chronicle: HP Unveils Web-Centric Vision of Future. HP Labs last week unveiled ``CoolTown,'' its Web-centric concept of a future world, where Muni riders, using a wireless device, could tap into a bus' Web site to find out how late it was running. And where a smart alarm clock would access your electronic calendar and know what time to wake you in the morning.

Industry Standard: Meet Me in Britannia. It wasn't the technology that was compelling. Players could find faster and more fantastic graphics in packaged, out-of-the-box games. People who liked to play games online were excited by the social experience of it.

Salon: GM's e-mobile magnate. Q&A with Mark Hogan, group VP of e-GM. To be straightforward about it, it changes everything we do -- it changes our manufacturing model, because rather than having long pipelines of work-in-process inventory, and long pipelines of finished-good inventory at the dealerships, we're going to shorten both.

Web Informant: Using email to effectively communicate with your customers. The best eCommerce is all about managing communication with your customers. The stamps.com and ITN sites understand this and have put the effort into prompt and helpful email support.

NY Times: Online Companies Squander Public´s Trust. These disclosures are what provide readers, listeners and viewers of traditional media the context to judge what they read, hear or see. But it is not incumbent upon today's commercial Internet, either by tradition or law, to provide such context.

InfoWorld: Neuromedia offers Web sites virtual customer service reps. "It's certainly a natural evolution. People are getting used to asking questions on the Net," said Rex Baldazo, an analyst in the site operations strategies group at Jupiter Communications, in San Francisco. "It's a lot cheaper to run a Web site to answer customers' questions than it is to run a call center."

Forbes: The return of push. The fallout from the PointCast debacle poisoned the water for other push startups, sending nearly two dozen of them to an early grave. But two companies, BackWeb Technologies and Marimba, were strong enough to survive and are leading a ferocious comeback for the once-shunned technology.

Information Week: But The Computer Said ... Had the airline enforced so stringent a set of rules that its employees have no discretion to use their own common sense? Or was this vignette just another example of people viewing the technology we develop as a silver bullet, relieving them of all need to interpret the data they see before them on the screen?

November 9, 1999
Wired News: TRUSTe Declines Real Probe. TRUSTe's stated mission is to regulate the use of personal data submitted to Web sites by accepting input from consumers. TRUSTe declined to investigate RealNetworks because RealJukebox is music-listening software that works via the Internet, but only indirectly through a Web site visit.

Lighthouse: Virtual Community: an idea out of control. Actually, Blue Mountain's success to date exemplifies the failure of the "community" model. Users talking about the Web rarely discuss the "experience", the "environment", the "community" of a Web site. Instead, they enthuse about the tasks they can perform...

• Useit.Com: From August 15, 1997; Community is Dead; Long Live Mega-Collaboration

ZDNN: Net heavyweights launch Net think tank. [Esther Dyson] "The hype comes from companies trying to promote their causes. (There are) people with a vested interest in raising the importance of the Internet saying it's going to be 10 gazillion dollars, so people will buy their market research..."

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

Upside: Online Car Chase. But dealers have an even stronger trump card to play: "It's illegal to replace dealers in many states," says Mike Morrisey, spokesman for NADA. State franchise laws are a crazy quilt, and manufacturers are barred from setting prices in 35 states, according to Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey.

MSDN Online: One Man's Security is Another Man's Prison. Robert Hess. On the one side, it is important to continue to increase both the functionality available to bona fide applications and the ease at which they interact with users. At the same time, it is important to appropriately safeguard these systems and prevent inappropriate access, while not impacting users with burdensome security barriers.

• Ask Tog: From November 1999; On Walls and Mouse Holes: Security and privacy

November 10, 1999
FEED Magazine: Tomorrow's Desktop. Steven Johnson. We know that the web has lived up to its potential as an e-commerce platform and as a communications vehicle, not to mention an endless supplier of public offerings. But has the web lived up to its potential as an interface generator?

Salon: The consumer's always wrong. Remember the advice your mother/teacher/best friend gave you in, oh, about third grade? "Don't get mad, get even"? A lot of people now have a way to get even with companies they believe gave them a bad deal -- and they see getting even as a public service.

USA Today: Specialists fill cyberspace void. A step beyond the strategy of traditional newspaper and television syndicates such as United Media and King Features, companies such as iSyndicate, Screaming Media and Wavo are building a new way for smaller Web sites to add niche-oriented content to their offerings.

Editor & Publisher: Web Sales Catching Syndicates' Attention. Steve Outing. Syndication in the era of the mass-market Internet is an industry poised to grow rapidly, as a new and seemingly lucrative Internet market for syndicated content takes shape. The smart players are beginning to line up, but not everyone has yet recognized or acted upon the looming opportunities.

Computerworld: U.S. patent law puts the Web economy at risk. The fact is that the congressionally controlled U.S. Patent Office, with the support of the U.S. federal courts, has said that software processes can, in fact, be patented. Now that this misguided policy has been established, due diligence demands that companies apply for patents whenever they think they might get one.

Upside: Burn, Baby, Burn? As much as Web developers objected to Unisys' after-the-fact attempts to capitalize on GIF popularity, most viewed the entire patent office's 19th century approach to software policy as the true culprit.

• Atlantic Unbound: From November 3, 1999; Hey Ho, GIFs Must Go!

InfoWorld: End-to-end e-publishing service announced. The jointly branded service, Xerox/Reciprocal's e-Publishing Clearing Service (ePCS), lets publishers produce, distribute, and transact digital documents with copyright protection over the Web.

• Xerox Press Release: Xerox and Reciprocal Join Forces to Revolutionize Digital Publishing

Salon: "Fair use" vs. foul play. It is understandable that the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post should be concerned when someone copies their work and gives it away on his Web site. But the very same newspapers also will have an interest in making sure that the copyright laws are not used as a club against their own investigative reporting.

Forbes: Pixelworks' perfect vision. The company, started by Alley and six others, has developed an image processor, that helps flat-panel displays perform better than their cathode ray tube (CRT) counterparts.

Editor & Publisher: Chicago Tribune to end AOL edition. "We're starting to focus on our own core products," said Rashmi Turner, director of communications for Tribune Interactive. Developing a special edition for AOL users was largely a duplication of the work performed on the Tribune's own Web site.

New Scientist: Well connected. Hillier's contention is not just that how spaces are connected determines how much they will be used, but that this relationship is mathematically predictable. "If you design something in a particular way it will influence people's movement, and you can predict when people will be in the same space..."

November 11, 1999
ClickZ: Orchestrating The Brand. In the past, brand control typically covered use of the logo, graphic style, picture quality, typography and the brand message. These elements are still important - but the list has dramatically expanded. Visit a bank online and see what you feel about the bank after waiting two minutes for its homepage to download. Or try searching and searching on its website for what you want and never finding it.

• Industry Standard: From February 12, 1999; The Net's Brand-New Brand

• Online Journalism Review: Writing for Clicks

Forbes: The check is in the E-mail. E-mail updates were the ugly cousin of newspapers and magazines, the print media that Internet news services hoped one day to render obsolete. Fast forward to today, and E-mail is suddenly the hottest app on the Internet. Berst's E-mail now reaches more than two million subscribers, outstripping the circulation of top U.S. newspaper The Wall Street Journal...

Electronic Buyers' News: New 6.3-in. display from Toshiba boasts print-quality image. The thin-film-transistor LCD achieves XGA resolution, or the equivalent of 1,024 x 768 pixels. Supported by a 0.126-mm dot pitch, the panels reaches a density of 202 pixels per inch, which Toshiba claims is equal to an image resolution more commonly found in high-quality color print matter like magazines.

EE Times: Philips to use tiling technique for large, flat displays. Tiling, said Steve Sedaker, vice president of sales and marketing at Rainbow, "is a breakthrough and enabling display technology that combines several smaller-size displays to produce a single, large flat display without any visible seams.

ZDNN: IBM readies eye-popping LCD. Wednesday it announced QX20, a new high-resolution 20.8-inch flat display, whose LCD panel can achieve resolutions of up to 2,048 by 1,536, or 123 pixels per inch. The display is a breakthrough in technology, offering a much higher density of pixels per inch than typical flat panel displays, which offer about 88 pixels per inch...

Editor & Publisher: Dot-com Style Drives Editors Crazy. Since the Internet has become a ubiquitous part of the culture, editors and copy desks have struggled with the sometimes bizarre language of the dot-com world. What do we do with that pesky exclamation mark in the name of one of the Web's leading companies?

• Editor & Publisher: Associated Press E-Style Rules

Wired News: It's the Sizzle, Not the Steak. Welcome to Spin City in Silicon Valley, the geographic ribbon from San Jose to San Francisco, where there are so many newly minted, well-funded dot coms raising a cacophony of competitive shouts that they'll pay nearly any price to rise above the noise.

November 12, 1999
TechWeb: Tomorrow's Internet Is Today's Challenge. [John Patrick, IBM] "One misconception now is that Next Generation Internet is about bandwidth. It isn't," he said. "Bandwidth is, frankly, presumed. It will be there. The question is: What do you do with it?" That's a complex issue with many answers. Video is perhaps the predominant one.

AtNewYork: What Is a User Worth to Web Content Companies? Jason Chervokas. So is Amazon a successful company? The answer is we don't know anymore. In the Internet age, we no longer have adequate benchmarks for gauging the nature of success.

USA Today: Nabisco plays branding game on Net. NabiscoWorld is an attempt to crack the code. The site, www.nabiscoworld.com, consists of 14 games. Each is sponsored by a Nabisco product, from the Oreo slam-dunk contest to the SnackWell's Golf Club. The more time a player spends at a game, the longer the player is exposed to a brand.

• Web Informant: From May 26, 1998; There is no demand for messages. Doc Searls.
• News.Com: From June 30, 1999; Yahoo in marketing trial with Procter & Gamble

SF Gate: Going Once, Going Twice, Gone. eBay's move also assaults a critical part of the Internet's evolving business culture. If eBay's gambit succeeds, the Internet could be on its way to becoming a much less useful place. Finding what you're looking for on the web will get harder and harder just when it should be getting easier and easier.

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

Webmonkey Radio: The Usability Process. MP3 audio file. [Mike Kuniavsky, Wired Digital's interface designer] But to create a successful site — one that reaches its intended audience and gets it to read, click, or buy what you're hawking — the time to start chumming the waters for user feedback is in the concept phase, before development even begins.

NY Times: Is Cyberspace a 'Public Accommodation'? The question is an important one for the Internet industry, because if the answer is yes, then AOL -- and possibly other Internet service providers and Web sites -- would be subject to the strict rules of the ADA, which applies to places of public accommodation.

PC Week: Wireless specs are on collision course. Its main problem: It uses the 2.4GHz radio frequency, the same used by wireless LANs based on the 802.11 standard. When a Bluetooth connection collides with a wireless LAN connection, either or both connections can jam, resulting in a transmission error.

Internet Week: Metricom Assists The Mobile User. Metricom's new Ricochet 128-Kbps service will be in 12 major metropolitan areas by next summer and in 40 by the summer of 2001, the company said. The new service will feature wireless modems that can access Metricom's spread-spectrum and packet-switching network at 128 Kbps.

Wired News: A Top-Drawer Education Online. Next year, business students in Brazil will be able to get a Stanford-caliber education in Sao Paolo, not Palo Alto. Stanford is one of several top universities that have enlisted commercial Web sites to supplement their catalogs with point-and-click courses and to market their distance learning programs to larger audiences.

• Industry Standard: From October 22, 1999; Ivy Online

Industry Standard: Planet Web: Someone to Watch Over Me. There was a time when, if you were an evil communist government, or even a power-crazed villain with a fondness for Persian cats, the only way you could get close-up satellite pictures of U.S. nuclear bases was to do some good old-fashioned spying. Nowadays, you can just buy the photos off the Web.

November 13, 1999
Freedom Forum: 'Insider' tells the truth about what's become of journalism. Jon Katz. But in a world where most if not all of journalism has now been scarfed up by profit-obsessed companies, the Internet is a godsend and potential salvation for the press, especially as American citizens and journalists learn how to use it wisely.

MSNBC: E-commerce ethics 101. In cyberspace, when you make an error, it gets broadcast around the world quickly—first, because it’s available to a wide audience online, and second because, as likely happened in this case, everyone e-mails their friends to tell them about the great offer they found.

Advertising Age: CyberCritique of Hewlett-Packard. Internet users recall e-mailing friends and co-workers all the cool articles they read on HotWired. Now they send notes about the great ads. Once again, HotWired shows new hues of its true colors.

November 14, 1999
Salon: The accidental entertainer. Q&A with Rob Burgess, CEO of Macromedia. We're always looking two or three years out, speculating about what kinds of connections people will have, and building tools in anticipation of that. There'll be much more video, much better audio, and you won't have to be so concerned about the initial download time.

Forbes: Thresh plays the portal game. "There's a plethora of gaming web sites out there, but no one has put it all together yet," said Fong. "Right now, you'll have to go to plenty of different sites to read reviews about a new game. We're offering gamers a single site with links to all the best content."

NY Times: Letters to Santa Are No Longer Necessary. Retailers have also embraced the idea because it helps reduce one of their biggest headaches: returns. Internet retailers who continue to struggle with fulfillment issues exult at the prospect of shipping a package with a virtual guarantee that it will not be dropped back on their doorstep a week later.

NY Times: Setback for a Web Site in Copyright Case. In a case that pits the push by newspapers for online revenues against the free-for-all nature of cyberspace debate, a federal judge here says she intends to rebuff the assertion of a conservative Web forum that it has a right to post articles from two newspapers to foster discussion.

November 15, 1999
Forbes: Piracy Panic. John C. Dvorak. Piracy in this case is a direct response to customer demand that isn't being met. When was the last time you were threatened with prosecution by a company for trying to get the product it was promoting? The studios, instead of protecting their interests, are destroying them by creating thousands of two-bit competitors.

Interactive Week: Are Revenue Values Accurate? This week, the task force will begin looking into two of approximately 20 hot spots pinpointed by the Securities and Exchange Commission: how Net companies record revenue from sales of tickets; and the bartering of ads, whereby companies show investors revenue from ads for which they never receive any cash.

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

• Salon: From October 27, 1999; Sony's $900 picture frame

LA Times: EBay's Bot Block Is a Threat to Web Growth and Hurts Consumers. EBay's stance is defiantly anti-consumer. And there's no shortage of irony in the situation: The Web's most effective networking company wants to capture the auction market in a way that's antithetical to how Web networks grow.

Internet World: Carnival Time for Ads. Rich-media advertising can backfire if consumers find the ads interfere with their Web experiences. That's because the pop-up windows, sounds, and long download times can be as disruptive as they are engaging.

PC World: Dell Revamps Web Site. Advanced computer users have always liked Dell's Web-based technical support services, he says. But the site could be difficult for new users to navigate. Now Dell.com gathers more customer information up front, so it can tailor information to the visitor.

Information Week: The Knowledge Merchants. That's why many companies depend on research and analysis firms to help them spot new products, figure new strategies, and sort real trends from false leads. These days, that imperative comes from the top.

PC Week: WML opens Web to handhelds. As more handheld devices become Internet-enabled, delivering Web content to the various proprietary interfaces is becoming a critical bottleneck. But an emerging technology, Wireless Markup Language, is catching on that lets developers create content once that can run on any device.

Internet World: Hello, Half a Billion of Us Want the Net via Phone. In addition, the experience level and tolerance for complexity of the average mobile phone user is far less than a PC user. In fact, some studies show that for every key press that is required for a particular function, the use of that feature is reduced by 50 percent.

• Useit.Com: From October 31, 1999; Graceful Degradation of Scalable Internet Services

Editor & Publisher: Latest Line on Online Syndication. [Joel Maske, iSyndicate President and CEO] "Anything on a Web site is syndicatable," added Maske. He noted, by way of example, that a site mentioning a book can include a link to Amazon.com, with the site receiving a percentage of revenue if its visitors use the link to buy the book. "That's syndication..."

November 16, 1999
Business Week: Insurers Step Gingerly into Cyberspace. Check out insurance sites on the Net. Most still send users back to agents who won't seal a deal without a telephone call or a personal visit. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. has started to quote rates online, but will only close deals through its own agents.

ZDNN: Cyber merchants to swap money for eyeballs. The Snap campaign is the latest - and among the most generous - in a string of high-profile marketing efforts designed to draw holiday shoppers to specific Web sites. A number of retailers, for instance, already feature programs offering free shipping to online buyers.

Fortune: How Gartner Got Snagged By the Net. And while Gartner analysts wrote about the Net's business potential as early as 1993, the company itself hasn't adapted to the changes wrought by the Net. Most of its researchers remain focused on traditional infotech areas like data storage and the relative merits of Unix vs. WindowsNT.

ZDNN: DVD encryption break is a good thing. Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security. The fatal flaw is that the entertainment industry is lazy, and are attempting to find a technological solution to what is a legal problem. It is illegal to steal copyrights and trademarks, whether it is a DVD movie, a magazine image, a Ralph Lauren shirt or a Louis Vitton handbag.

• Fortune: From April 26, 1999; Copyright Protection Is for Dinosaurs. Stewart Alsop.

Computerworld: FedEx creates online shopping marketplace. [Mike Bernstein, an analyst with Gartner Group] "This seems like a questionable strategy to me," Bernstein said. "This is not a major new phase in FedEx's life. I look at it from a consumer perspective. If I'm going to buy a shirt, why would I go to FedEx?"

Fortune: Dot-Com Time Bomb on Madison Avenue. Says Aaron Cohen, head of broadcasting for Horizon Media: "Spending on virtually all media has gone berserk." Berserk is right. If you're one of those naysayers who's been waiting all these years for the Internet bubble to burst, take heart. Madison Avenue's dot-com bubble is definitely going to burst, and soon.

Business Week: E Ink's Message: We're Creating a New Medium. They claim their electronic ink will be the basic ingredient for a new type of media that would combine the superior look of ink with the dynamic capability of an electronic display. The concept has tantalized technologists for decades. But chemistry and electronics weren't well enough integrated to produce a prototype -- until recently.

PC Magazine: Serious Disconnection. John C. Dvorak. Back to my rant about online phone directories. Today's first target: AnyWho. The biggest problem I've had with it is its incredible failure to stay up to date. When you call information, they have all the names and addresses in some sort of database, don't they? Why can't they put this exact same database online?

Computerworld: Study: Most travel Web sites suffer basic usability problems. Julian Rawson, principle at Quidnunc, said many site developers mistakenly take existing reservation systems and build the customer experience around its capabilities or use the company's existing nontransactional Web sites and add on e-commerce capabilities.

Business Week: Finally, Japan's Netizens May Be Able to Afford the Net. Like many Japanese, Yasushi Nakajima has one eye glued to the clock as he races through cyberspace on his home PC. If he doesn't, there's a hefty telephone bill to reckon with.

Web Review: Are E-Wallets More Trouble Than They're Worth? Indeed, analysts believe electronic wallets won't truly take off until they offer something beyond simple form-fillers. Add-on technologies such as digital coupon management, receipt of sale generation, micropayment mechanisms and even price-comparison "shopping bots" are important to create need for digital wallets.

November 17, 1999
Editor & Publisher: Selling Your Content to Business: How to Keep Your Integrity. Steve Outing. Internet syndication is clearly a trend that news publishers should watch closely, because it represents a potentially large future revenue stream. But it's also a new line of business that presents some ethical challenges.

Fortune: If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Say It Anonymously. What an irony! You have to go outside the organization to talk honestly about the firm--and even then the talk is shrouded in anonymity. Is that healthy? Absolutely not. If organizations aren't careful, they're going to discover their credibility disintermediated by the Vault.coms and anonymous messages flowing on their own internal networks

• Salon: From April 20, 1999; Caveat Poster
• Business Week: From October 27, 1999; The Cyber Wailing Wall Where Lockheed's Soul Is Exposed.

News.Com: Amazon floats new service from Alexa buy. Kahle said Amazon is using Alexa to further its goal online, which is to help users find anything they want via the Internet. "That initiative is what we're a part of," Kahle said. "It's not about pumping more sales down their books channel."

• Red Herring: From September 8, 1999; How Amazon.com kept a top idea guy. Mr. Kahle and Amazon.com remain mum about the specific ways in which Alexa will change the way Amazon.com does business. Mr. Kahle says both companies will make an announcement later this fall.

NY Times: Three Big Airlines Join Others on Priceline. Although Priceline has insisted from the start that its ticket program would help airlines get rid of unsold seats, most major airlines resisted cooperating with the company, supposedly because they were unwilling to turn over control of their inventory to a third party.

News.Com: Science journals form common ground on Web. The agreement allies some of the biggest rivals in the highly lucrative arena of scientific publishing, including Oxford University Press, Macmillan Magazines and Elsevier Science. They said the agreement would link 3 million articles at first and more later.

• Boston Globe: From November 1, 1999; Site has all the research that fits

Industry Standard: Marketing Trade Show Gets Personal. [Harley Manning, Forrester] The underlying sentiment of Manning's talk matched that of the entire show: Personalization can increase sales and customer loyalty. However, in order to personalize, you need information – and in order to get information, you've got to give visitors something of value.

Wired News: All's Fair in Banner Ad War. NetZero doesn't charge for Internet access, but instead makes its money by delivering advertisements to a separate screen above a user's Internet browser. Because NetZero controls what ads go to the screen, it can basically put any banner it wants on top of any site.

November 18, 1999
ClickZ: My Very Own Brand. The days when a brand speaks with one voice to many consumers simultaneously are over. All trends indicate that the future direction of brands will be toward multi-dimensional brands communicating multi-dimensional messages to a multi-dimensional audience.

Boston Globe: Who'll rule cyberspace? Simson Garfinkel. There are other, more subtle ways corporations are regulating the future of our information space. Consider America Online, which tens of millions of Americans use to access the Internet. America Online is a world with particular rules. These rules aren't handed down by God or Congress. Instead, they are created by AOL's programmers.

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

Forbes: News mega site could topple Time Warner. For years, Newsweek offered its content exclusively on proprietary networks, first on CompuServe and then on America Online. Paralyzed by its once-lucrative deal, Newsweek.com long resisted going online, even as competitors such as Time Warner's Time built a large--if unprofitable--presence on the Internet.

Editor & Publisher: Washington Post Co. Forges Alliance with NBC. [Howard Kurtz, Washington Post media reporter] Both sides say they will maintain editorial independence, but the thicket of joint ventures and cross-promotion raises questions about potential conflicts of interest. It means, for example, that the Post Co. is in business with a network that is owned by General Electric and partners with Microsoft, both major companies covered by the Post and Newsweek.

NY Times: Delivering the Goods: No Simple Solution. To allow access to all delivery services, the yet-to-be-named devices will be wired to the Internet. When the box owners make an online purchase, special software will create and transmit a code for each order. A delivery driver can punch in the code on a keypad to unlock the box and make the delivery.

ChannelSeven: Affiliate Deals Give a Whole New Meaning to Grass Roots Marketing. In today's market where $20 million offline campaigns are more common than presidential candidate promises, affiliate marketing is the unglamorous choice. But it is deadly effective.

Wired News: Wired News Turns a Mature 3. Yup, exactly three years ago, on 18 November 1996, Wired News popped onto the Web. White text on a black background, you might recall -- sorry about the retinal damage, by the way. We were young.

• Salon: From January 6, 1997; New news in old bottles. Scott Rosenberg.

ZDNN: SEC asks to stop accounting tricks. Specifically, the SEC has found dot-com companies juicing up their numbers by including in their revenue figures the total revenues for product sales even when they merely are distributing products on behalf of other companies.

NY Times: Beyond the Palm Pilot: New Brands and Features for P.D.A.'s. But the peaceful era of the P.D.A. may be ending, a victim of the gadget's success. There are so many new features being added -- tons of RAM, wireless communications capabilities and interchangeable expansion modules, for example -- that today's P.D.A. may be unrecognizable in a few years.

Computerworld: United Airlines outsources all e-mail operations to USA.NET. The airline may be at the leading edge of a wave of large companies that decide to give someone else the headaches of e-mail management. Last summer, BusinessWeek reported the results of a survey that showed that two-thirds of the BusinessWeek Global 1,000 were considering outsourcing their messaging systems.

Internet Week: Holidays Bring Downtime.com. [Dermot McCormack, CTO of Flooz.com] "If you go to most Web companies and ask the IT guy, 'When was the last time you met with the vice president of marketing?' they'd say, 'Now, which one is he again?' " In addition to poor communication, too many Web companies are blowing their budgets on television and radio ads but skimping on their data centers...

NY Times: Niche Sites Offer Chance to Create or Personalize Gifts. Online niche shops allow you to buy monthly deliveries of caviar for your friends, for example. There is at least one shop where you can order aerial photographs of your grandparents' favorite national park.

November 19, 1999
A List Apart: Where Have All the Designers Gone? Jeffrey Zeldman. On the surface, Web designers would seem to have the coolest job in the world. But surfaces can lie. Web designers have been increasingly frustrated by a Technology Gap, an Expectation Gap, and the ancient gap between Art and Commerce.

FEED Magazine: The Yahoo Companion, The Internet's Future. Clay Shirky. As the purpose of software moves from being a product to being a channel for communication, it may now be the media and content companies that produce the most innovative software, not traditional software companies.

Net Company: Chat Room - New Headspace. Q&A with Jeffrey Rayport, Harvard Business School. The traditional value chain in business starts with a product or an idea for a product. Markets on the Web represent a 180-degree turn. They start in the psyches and hearts of consumers.

AtNewYork: Making Silicon Alley Part of New York Culture. Tom Watson. We are using what is clearly a transitory version of this medium. And yet the current method and pace of investment rarely favors true innovation; the current climate usually favors clever ways to extract more users and revenue from what we already know.

MacWeek: Does Sherlock 2 play fair? According to MacWEEK's own tests and reports from members of the Sherlock-Talk mailing list who have worked with Apple's Internet search technology since it shipped with Mac OS 9 in October, Sherlock 2 will override ad banners in third-party plug-ins outside Apple's built-in set.

• CBS MarketWatch: From May 11, 1999; Apple sets stage for e-commerce

American Prospect: But Is It Journalism? James Fallows. Instead, the distinctive value of Net publications proves to be their ever-fresh nature, through more frequent updates than any print publication can manage. Every serious Net site must have new material at least once a day, to get people in the habit of visiting.

• Business Week: From October 11, 1999; Journalism's Online Credibility Gap

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

Wired News: The Slow-Mo Broadband Brawl. Opponents say cable companies can theoretically set prices as high as the market will bear. But that's not their greatest fear. They say cable companies are looking to set up exclusive partnerships that view customers as "eyeballs."

InfoWorld: Intel, L&H to launch 'agentless' call centers. Intel, in conjunction with speech-technology vendor Lernout & Hauspie, will launch "agentless" customer-service call-center services for electronic-commerce vendors late next year.

Computerworld: 3M hopes virtual showrooms ease channel conflict. Rather than competing with resellers, the Minneapolis-based maker of Post-it notes and thousands of other products, is working with them to create virtual, co-branded showrooms. There, 3M can control how its products are portrayed and gather valuable data about users of its products.

Online Journalism Review: Desperately Seeking Good E-Freelancers. But keeping e-mailing barbarians away from the gates of Big Publishing has a flip side. So-called professional print freelancers, finding an easier entreé in cyberspace, send in surprisingly mediocre stories and ideas to online editors, some of which seem to indicate a lack of respect for the medium or the publication.

Columbia Journalism Review: Some Pitfalls in Portals. And finally, it's troubling that none of the newspaper portals feels that quality journalism is at the center of its strategy - not because they don't believe in it, but because journalism doesn't really help you sell things.

Upside: The Web Grows Up. The question is how to get them to buy without an ad. Jerry Michalski, president of the consulting firm Sociate, made a very interesting comment recently. He believes that editorial and advertising will merge, and as commerce sites add content, we're already starting to see that.

Net Company: Digital Decisions. Part conference room, part laboratory, part theater, the Decisionarium is an oil company's dream. Equipped with 3-D goggles, geoscientists, engineers, and business managers surround themselves in state-of-the-art computer images, evaluating prospective reservoirs and drilling strategies like never before.

• ABCNews.Com: From September 10, 1999; Texaco’s 3-D Pod Improving Oil Exploration

November 20, 1999
InfoWorld: Levi Strauss & Co. site doesn't pan out, but the rush isn't over yet. But, here's the funny thing. At less than one year old, Levi Strauss & Co.'s I-commerce attempt can be seen as a spectacular failure -- yet amid the ashes are a few gold nuggets. Levi Strauss & Co. could still strike it rich, if it is willing to hunker down and prepare for the next big I-commerce wave: custom-built products for markets of one.

Project Cool: Sweepstakes Rule. Forget crafting a unique product or a service that stands apart -- heck, there's probably nothing unique left to be done in this area anyway. But there's nothing quite like throwing a few dollar bills in the air then standing back to watch the fun.

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

NY Times: Is This the End of the Story for Books? Instead of reading being a linear experience as the reader's eye moves across the printed page, reading may become "circular," with the reader following text from link to link on a computer screen with the click of a mouse. E-books may also become simply an alternate form of reading. "Many forms of reading exist in any complex society," Grafton said. "I read my American Express bill different from the way I read the text I'm teaching."

InfoWorld: Crushing spam avalanche may be too powerful for anyone to be able to stop. Somehow, that doesn't make me feel better. Whenever this policy was implemented, AOL is not justified in forcing customers to renew preferences. Opt-outs are bad enough -- annual opt-outs are simply abusive. Their only purpose can be to wear customers down until they just accept the torrent of ads.

November 21, 1999
NY Times: Self-Indulgence in the Internet Industry. Denise Caruso. And after having spent much of the last year doing research and interviewing Internet companies about disclosure and credibility practices, I wonder how much change any industry-based organization can effect without real, outside pressure from either consumers or the law.

Salon: Tuned in to TV. Q&A with Wink CEO Maggie Wilderotter. The beauty about Wink is that we don't have to drive you anywhere to interact -- you simply do it on top of the shows you're already watching. It's geared around why consumers watch TV in the first place: to watch video.

NY Times: Point and Click: Interactive TV Is Poised for a Prime-Time Run. Leak is tantalized by visions of interactive television surpassing the personal computer. "I think it's bigger than the Internet," he said in an interview at WebTV's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. "All the elements are there for it to happen."

Seattle Times: Microsoft takes aim at interactive TV - continental style. The gamble in Europe, moreover, has far-reaching implications for Microsoft in this country. If it doesn't win the battle for customers in places such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany, it may very well find itself at a significant disadvantage when interactive television takes off in the United States.

NY Times: New Tools Make It Easier to Find the Lowest Price. [Michelle Rubin, director of affiliate marketing CDNow] "I think they will become more sophisticated in the future, to give consumers a fuller picture of what's important at a store beyond prices. But right now it's a very freewheeling, competitive environment out there, and it's just hard to stop stuff like this."

NY Times: Internet Company Offers Customized Cursors. "We were pleased with the results," said Gretchen Briscoe, a spokeswoman for one advertiser, Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati. "The cursor drove awareness and people remembered the brand, but we've got no plans going forward to use it." Let's hope P&G rethinks its reticence. Who wouldn't relish the chance to see a Comet Cursor shaped like a can of Comet cleanser?

• Lycos Press Release: From March 1, 1999; Millward Brown Interactive Study Shows Comet Cursor Significantly Impacts Online Advertising

November 22, 1999
Internet Week: You're In Good Hands Online. The argument that insurance products can't be bought and sold online flies in the face of an Internet truism: The availability of information online goes a long way toward demystifying complicated things, putting more knowledge and power into the hands of the customer.

Forbes: How big an opening for OpenTV? The problem is that instead of going to the Internet, users find themselves in a digital dead-end, with no access to the wealth of information available on the Internet.

MSNBC: The Nielsen of the Internet faces growing questions. Internet companies, advertisers and Wall Street investors are all desperate for accurate counts of how many visitors Web sites receive. Web companies brag about their numbers in prospectuses. Advertisers use them to determine how many "eyeballs" their ads will reach. Investors want third-party data to justify their investments.

• Salon: From February 5, 1999; Reach for the hits. Scott Rosenberg.

• Industry Standard: From August 9, 1999; Human Answerbot

USA Today: Nike site lets you be a shoemaker. Nike.com Monday launched a personalized service allowing shoppers using the Oregon-based company's Web site to pick the colors they want on their running shoes or cross trainers. Then they can have a name or nickname, up to eight letters, stitched on the shoe.

Freedom Forum: Online news fills international void left by print, broadcast. As their print and broadcast brethren continue to give short shrift to international news, online news sites are expanding both their international coverage and their global outlooks about news reporting, a group of online journalists said yesterday.

Business Week: A Chinese Wall around the Net? Why Beijing Gave In. Companies that want to reach Chinese Net surfers "don't need to be in China," he said. Since Internet companies can locate their servers anywhere, businesses could keep have their computers far beyond the reach of Wu's army.

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

Wired News: Sherlock: Get a Clue. But the release of QuickTime 4 took Mac users into unfamiliar territory. The multimedia software featured controls that borrowed heavily from the buttons and knobs found on stereos and VCRs.

November 23, 1999
Forbes: RealNetworks' real dilemma. [Howard Katz, COO of Tunes.com] "One day, you're a partner of RealNetworks; the next, you're fighting over the same market. Microsoft, America Online and Yahoo! have done the same thing over the years when they see an opportunity. Welcome to the Internet."

• News.Com: From November 17, 1999; Warner Bros. sees Real as rival after Webcast dispute

Builder.Com: A Web Statistics Primer. As in physics and economics, much that happens on the Web is outside your control and beyond reach of your observation. Your server logs provide a server-side sample of selected activity related to your Web site, but the sample is not the universe.

• Web Techniques: From July 1999; How Shall I Measure Thee? Let Me Count the Ways

Editor & Publisher: Europeans Struggle With Print-Wen Integration. Report from the Interactive Publishing conference. [Nick Denton of Moreover.com] By leveraging their physical proximity to an industry hotspot, Denton suggests, more papers could follow the lead of the San Jose Mercury News' Silicon Valley coverage, which has earned its Web site readers worldwide.

ClickZ: An Opportunity In Drudge's Fall. The fact is that Internet journalism can be the most credible, not the least credible, of all media. Any claim can be referenced, and that reference can be checked in a few seconds - if we all cooperate in the effort. You don't have to believe what you read. You can check it out and decide for yourself.

Seattle Times: Renton start-up sees cash in copies. Starting next month, iCopyright.com will go live with the first of its signed publications, with additional online access in the coming months. For computer users, the first sign that iCopyright.com has taken over reprints and permissions will be the company logo, which will appear in the footer of Web pages, alongside the copyright notice.

Industry Standard: Virtual Income: Buying Flooz With Beenz. Beenz wants to be seen as a universal Web currency that transcends its roots as a loyalty program, akin to such classic marketing programs as Green Stamps. Flooz, meanwhile, wants to be seen as a payment option similar to Visa and MasterCard.

Computerworld: Nike offers mass customization online. "NIKEiD brings us back to our roots when we designed and sold shoes one-by-one out of the trunk of my old Plymouth," according to a prepared statement from Phil Knight, Nike chairman and CEO. "We have now come full circle."

November 24, 1999
Editor & Publisher: Giving Away Content: An Affiliate Strategy. Steve Outing. This affiliate strategy is apples to affiliate retailer program oranges, but it's similar in the approach of getting potentially thousands and thousands of independent Web sites working on their behalf. It's a great way to drive traffic to a news Web site.

ClickZ: Interactive Media Is Different. To beat a spectacularly-dead horse, take banner ads. These little beauties were cooked up by someone at HotWired who needed a way to pay for their little web experiments. Do they work? I think we're finding out that the answer is "sorta." Why are they still around?

Internet Week: Beauty Site Gets Personal. Reflect.com represents a challenge to the traditional brand-marketing strategies of players like P&G. "We see ourselves as a service rather than a brand," says Swinand. "The brand does not exist until you create your own brand of beauty products online."

ZDNN: Mall declares war on online tenants. The Saint Louis Galleria informed its 170 retail tenants in a letter last week of a new policy prohibiting any in-store "signs, insignias, decals or other advertising or display devices which promote and encourage the purchase of merchandise via e-commerce."

• Saint Louis Galleria: Welcome to the Saint Louis Galleria

Computerworld: 'Tis the season for banner ads. "These are people who are already online and in a shopping mode. This is not something you can generalize,"James said. "There is overriding evidence that banner ads are not as effective as TV ads."

MSNBC: Banner ads deliver more punch and purchases than thought. Of the 1,500 Internet users interviewed for the Andersen Consulting study to be released Wednesday, 25% of the Internet users said they went shopping on a Web site after seeing a banner ad, compared with 14% of the users who said they clicked onto a site after seeing a television or magazine advertisement.

Andersen Consulting: Banner Advertising More Effective than TV or Radio in Luring Web Shoppers

Industry Standard: Online Games Goose Portal Stocks. If you want to understand the essential difference between America Online and its Web-based, would-be competitors, just look at this week's online gaming deals. AOL not only gets to feature popular games from Electronic Arts – which will attract new users and add to advertising revenue – but it also gets $81 million from Electronic Arts.

InfoWorld: Collaborative design is next wave of e-business trends. With the transaction-driven foundation of enterprise resource planning and supply-chain management applications in place, discrete manufacturers are eyeing streamlined, collaborative product development as the key to responding quickly to customer demands.

Salon: Cyberslacking epidemic. The advent of e-mail and the Internet has brought out of the woodwork a whole army of efficiency experts and dismal consultants, all seemingly stepping right out of the pages of Dilbert, fingers wagging away at the employee who dares to sneak off with 10 minutes of the company's precious time.

Time Digital: A Search Engine That Knows What You Mean. The key technology behind Oingo's meaning-based search (which is still in beta-testing) is a massive lexicon that keeps track of the meanings and associations of any given word. It's now up to 250,000 terms and growing.

Upside: Open Directory Project: Pyramid Power. [AOL's Open Directory Project] The project relies on ordinary Internet users to do the bulk of the debugging work. Users who find dead links or gaping holes can submit on-the-spot revisions. They can even edit specific sub-sections of the directory, provided they earn the respect of their editing peers.

November 25, 1999
ClickZ: Information Poor Vs. Information Junkies. Sadly, there are other ripple effects of the Internet that are caused by its heavy focus on customization. Imagine a person who prefers light entertainment like the Wheel of Fortune TV show. The Net monitors his/her preference and ensures that future content belongs to the same category.

• FEED Magazine: From September 10, 1999; RE: Douglas Rushkoff and Andrew Shapiro. [Andrew Shaprio] My Yahoo! and My AOL often unintentionally shut out dissenting views and voices, or news and information which we haven't preselected in advance. The consequence is the potential for a narrowing of one's horizons, a potential to have a lack of shared information within a community.

LA Times: Beating the Drums for 'Convergence'. But the show, which will premiere Monday at 5 p.m. on MTV, has one more unique element: It is designed to be played simultaneously by up to 25,000 online participants whose computers will be automatically synchronized with the broadcast episode.

November 26, 1999
ClickZ: Final Two Of Six For Christmas, Not. "But Nick," you cry, "You must admit that dot-com companies have had a huge success in advertising offline." Sure they have. But that was when doing so was the exception. People talked about it. It was a novelty. But when you get hundreds of unknown names all competing for my attention at the same time, forget it. I've had enough.

SJ Mercury: Bonanza of freebies, discounts await online shoppers. For their part, online merchants, desperate to stand out among the thousands of companies vying to sell things over the Internet this holiday season, are trying just about anything to drive traffic to their Web sites and convince shoppers to actually buy something.

AtNewYork: Governing Reality: Make It Ebay.gov. Tom Watson. To date, the industry has been content to let a few of its more active executives join "self regulation" panels and blue ribbon task forces to study these issues. Meanwhile, Congress is getting itchy -- and when it does, its members, Republican or Democrat will pursue willy-nilly regulation.

TechWeb: Web Millionaire Stays In School For New Ideas. Q&A with John Riedl, chief scientist of Net Perceptions. Let's take a recommendation of a movie from a site. You have heard of the movie and you are very skeptical you would like it. Wouldn't it be cool to have a button you could hit that says: Explain this. It would give you an argument why people liked it and it would be like opening up a black box and exposing it to people.

Computerworld: Why Online Browsers Don't Become Buyers. More than 350 customer service representatives also are available around the clock at the firm's three phone service centers. Bass wouldn't say how much Lands' End has invested in customer service for its Web operations. But as more customers move online, the company expects savings to come from reduced printing and postage costs as it mails out fewer catalogs.

Sacramento Bee: Measuring Internet usage still an imprecise art. Just like the so-called Nielsen families, whose TV viewing habits are monitored, Web panelists agree to have their Internet activity monitored with special software in their computers. Based on what the panelists do and view online, the audience measurement companies extrapolate what is happening among all Web users.

USA Today: Marketing execs go dot-com. The reasons: even more money and unprecedented opportunity. Marketing executives can jump into top management jobs at the Web start-ups, with big packages of lucrative stock options. Moreover, they have the chance to do something that few have ever had the opportunity to do in the offline world: create a brand from scratch.

November 27, 1999
InfoWorld: What if I-commerce were restricted on weekends and around the holidays? Anticipating reptilian death throes, I've been asking around about laws that might someday restrict Internet business hours, which until now have been 24 hours per day, 7 days per week (24x7).

SJ Mercury: Web co-inventor backs licensing. [Robert Cailliau, CERN] ``We've had micropayments in the French Minitel system for 15 years and it is shown to work extremely well,'' he added. As for the Web of the future, he said: ``The obvious things are more speed, more high-quality information, getting micropayments to really work and getting the regulation going internationally as well.

Project Cool: Mall Rats Rejoice. The web isn't going away -- and no mall developer is going to be able to unplug the country. The management of this mall is out there showing the world that it is out of touch with shoppers, out of touch with its own tenants, and so insecure that it thinks it can't compete with its shadow.

Useit.Com: Spotlight of Panasonic's clueless merchandising of their S-VHS recorders. Classic example of clueless merchandising on the Web: What is the difference between the Panasonic S9670 and S7680 S-VHS recorders? Why is the second model twice as expensive?

Wired News: Closing the Windows on MS. The harbinger of change is already here. PC manufacturers themselves see the computer and its multi-purpose operating system funneling toward a single-purpose future. Especially in the consumer marketplace, that role will be to connect users to the Internet and the information that works through it.

InfoWorld: Ford and Priceline: Don't make consumers bid for new cars online. You're going to have an inexorable undertow that pulls the price to the minimum the seller can afford, and consumers will get savvy to that number and bid it. So, why not just set that price to begin with?

November 28, 1999
Useit.Com: Usability as Barrier to Entry. Increased user impatience will make new websites fail unless they are twice as usable as existing sites. Revolutionary Internet services must explain why users should care in no more than two lines.

Washington Post: EBay Taming the Wild Web. [Rob Chesnut, associate general counsel for eBay] Chesnut is the eBay prosecutor, judge, jury and, when need be, its executioner. Some days, he gives the boot to as many as a dozen people. The rest of the time, he's writing the laws for this burgeoning online community.

NY Times: Nightmares Before Christmas for Online Retailers. Most alarming, perhaps, is the fact that in the age of "fully-integrated, end-to-end software solutions," some sites are still typing in customer orders by hand. "You'd be surprised at how many sites are rekeying data," said Cavallari. "At least half of all commerce sites are duct-taped and glued in a similar manner."

NY Times: Internet Labels Lose Meaning in Rush for Popular Addresses. It used to be that you could tell a lot about a Web site just by looking at the letters after the "dot" in its address. But as competition for prime Internet addresses intensifies, the most popular dot suffixes for domain names -- .com, .net and .org -- are losing the meanings they once had.

ZDNN: The Net goes guerilla. "Two years ago, Yahoo! could advertise on TV and it would stand out. Now you watch a half-hour show and you'll see five or six (Internet) ads," said Michele Slack, an analyst at Jupiter Communications in New York. "These companies... are looking to guerilla marketing to break through the clutter."

NY Times: Cisco to Offer More Details on Wireless Technology. Cisco's briefing will offer the first detailed plans after an announcement last month by the company, Motorola and 10 other equipment makers and service providers that said they would create an industry-standard format for sending Internet data over a long-existing, little-used set of microwave frequencies.

November 29, 1999
Salon: The music man. Q&A with Nicholas Butterworth, president and CEO of MTVi. In the TV industry you spend millions of dollars and countless hours trying to understand your audience so that you program to them. Let the audience program to itself, and you're going to do even better. Letting people participate in a meaningful way is something that makes things enjoyable and interesting.

ClickZ: How To Be Human 101. A moment to be human, one-on-one. But each time I asked a question, the reply was wooden and flat. I was puzzled - until I realized that the real, live operator was simply dragging and dropping pre-written replies. Yes, a real live person was trying hard to impersonate a computer.

SJ Mercury: `Cybersmear' lawsuits raise privacy concern. In yet another phenomenon of the Internet age, corporate executives have been loosing their lawyers on the nation's courthouses to hunt down the anonymous authors of disparaging -- or economically damaging -- content getting posted these days on the Web.

• Cal Law: From November 8, 1998; On the Net, In the Dark

Editor & Publisher: New NY Times Desk To Update News Throughout Day. "By midmorning, the newspaper starts to become static on the Web site," explained Gray, who reports to Times Managing Editor Bill Keller. He said his job will be to update some stories from each morning's paper with explanatory journalism and analytical takes on events.

• Online Journalism Review: From October 14, 1999; EXTRA! Makes a Comeback

SJ Mercury: The Post-PC Era. But behind the closed doors of Silicon Valley research laboratories like PARC, IBM's Almaden Research Center and SRI International, scientists are exploring the next wave of technology development, generally referred to as the post-PC era, where context -- not computation -- will take precedence.

Internet Week: The Internet Is No Longer The Road Less Traveled. This is what Internet-based businesses have been working toward since all of this began. Likewise, because the Internet is entering the mainstream, the process of dealing with customers, suppliers and other business partners should become easier.

USA Today: Cursor software tracks customers. Richard Smith, a Cambridge, Mass., computer consultant who first discovered the tracking mechanism last week, says cursor developer Comet Systems Inc. needs to disclose more about what it does online. "A piece of software get installed on your computer and you go to this site and they know it. It’s weird."

Wired News: Heat Fries Y2K Film Web Host. Then the real enforcers stepped in -- online free-speech advocates. They bombarded Wieger's inbox with brutal flame mail after the story of his FBI encounter went public. "I've received hundreds and hundreds of emails, and they all say something like, 'You should have stood up for yourself, you spineless bastard..."

Wired News: Elite Brand Eschews Net. Montblanc North America marketing exec Eric Werner defended the action. By banning Internet sales, he said, the company is essentially trying to protect its image as a luxury brand. "Luxury by its very nature is not ubiquitous," Werner said. "And that's why by its very nature it doesn't make sense for it to be on the Internet."

Industry Standard: Meanwhile, Back at the Mall. But take a trip to the gargantuan Mall of America, the country's bricks-and-mortar retailing mecca, and you will be hard-pressed to find e-anything – even at Macy's, Nordstrom or Sears, three of the four anchor tenants at this 4.2-million-square-foot mall in Bloomington, Minn...

November 30, 1999
SJ Mercury: AOL's arrogance is answered by canceled account. Dan Gillmor. Now look at the penultimate sentence in AOL's message. As the company guessed, many readers of this message were getting more furious the more they read. So AOL said, effectively, don't bother replying -- we won't accept your mail.

• Boston Globe: From November 18, 1999; Who'll rule cyberspace? Simson Garfinkel.

Computerworld: Emery Worldwide adds technology to boost online customer support. Customers who click on the FAQs button at Emery's Web site will be engaged in a short interactive session. The expert search engine then gathers information from the user in order to deliver a tailored answer that is more relevant than the usual question-and-answer help functions.

Forbes: Webhelp.com answers questions with a personal touch. Indeed, Webhelp's popularity could also become its Achilles heel. In an age when automation is leading to greater efficiencies, the company say's it's adding 50 people per day to meet the perceived demand. In contrast, a successful portal such as Yahoo! gets by with only 150 editors to catalog some 3 million Web sites.

News.Com: New standards could help micropayment companies. Under the proposal, a common language would be developed for encoding micropayment information and an applications programming interface that will allow the browser to communicate with e-wallets.

• W3C: Micropayments Overview

Salon: Toy story. The story of David and Goliath comes to mind, as it often does, in looking at a domain-name fight between a big guy and a little guy. In this case, the big guy is eToys, an online toy-selling star. The little guy is a group of German pranksters who work under the name "etoy."

Computerworld: Rule Britannica! Encyclopedia's site is a winner. Don Tapscott. But today's information consumer needs context, not just content. In particular, students need to know how to authenticate, filter and synthesize the enormous volume of information flowing over them. For example, individuals and advocacy groups of all persuasions are building Web sites that pump out what really is propaganda cloaked as objective analysis.

Computerworld: North Carolina to require licenses for online auctioneers. By year's end, the North Carolina Auctioneer Licensing Board in Raleigh will distribute pamphlets to auction sites and the public, making them aware of a long-standing state law that requires auctioneers to be licensed or face misdemeanor charges and a $2,000 fine.