December 1, 1999
Editor & Publisher: A Judge's View of What's Right and Wrong. Steve Outing. In today's column, I'll assess how a sampling of online news sites are doing — what they're doing right and where they're still in need of work. Here are some of the things I noticed on my recent EPpy-induced surfing trip to a variety of news sites...

ClickZ: Time Out Of Mind. Big media have never understood the basics of the Internet information transaction. Perhaps they never will. Time Warner and News Corp. represent two good examples of this aggressive, insistent Cluelessness. They think brand equals trust, and trust means you buy. So they demand your money before they give value.

Internet World: A Better Tap for Importing Beer. Armed with a Web application developed while most companies were still debating whether they needed a Web site, Heineken USA has cut in half the number of weeks it takes to ship beer from the brewery in Holland to American distributors.

Internet World: On the Web, Advertising Often Leads. It's not just that a site's primary real estate--the top of the page--is uniformly given to a banner ad. Sites have also taken to building sponsored microsites and content areas, in which the content is often supplied by the sponsor, and to creating content sections based on whether advertisers exist to support it.

Freedom Forum: 'Consumer protection' is latest excuse to regulate the Net. Jon Katz. In the last few years, even the most mule-headed and reactionary corporations have figured out that they'd better learn to do business on the Net, if they're going to do business at all. So one way or another, the wild, unregulated frontier atmosphere that has characterized the Internet's first decades is coming to an end.

PC Magazine: It's the Warehouse, Stupid. Web customer-service people are equipped to chat online with shoppers or to chat via phone while they surf alongside shoppers. It's an important point: Web-based shopping hasn't saved Lands' End any money on customer service and order entry. All those people are still there working at telephones and computers.

News.Com: Barnesandnoble.com tests 24-hour delivery service. Without alerting buyers, the online bookseller has been delivering books using messengers on bicycles, on foot, by subway, and in delivery vans to bring near instant-gratification to its customers who order books online in Manhattan.

Fast Company: Digital Competition - Laurie A. Tucker. On one side of the screen, a customer was on the phone with a call-center rep, asking a question about a certain page on FedEx's Web site. On the other side, the rep was apologizing profusely and explaining that she couldn't see the page. When the video was presented to the board, "there was an audible gasp in the room..."

CIO WebBusiness: First Line of Defense. To cope with the electronic blitz, Meskill tapped nearly 100 people to read and answer customers' messages. Not long after, PacBell Internet Services (and later, all of SBC Internet Services) implemented its automated e-mail system. Since then, SBC as a whole has viewed Web-based technologies with a more generous eye.

Industry Standard: Check It Out. Now comes the Net, which in theory could overturn this whole arrangement by offering content for free, without the need to buy a book or other object. But in fact we'll look back on this moment as a time when the Net was trying out countless schemes, to see which would solve its payment problem.

ZDNN: eBay sanctions first outside search service. The exact terms of eBay’s deal with Auction Rover were not disclosed by either company. But the deal basically allows Auction Rover to search and list eBay auctions as long as the results are separated from other auction listings, and as long as Auction Rover doesn’t "spider" eBay’s site...

SJ Mercury: Mall lifts ban on advertisement of Web sites. After creating a stir by telling its retailers that promotion of e-commerce won't be allowed this holiday season, the Saint Louis Galleria mall has decided to lift the ban. The upscale mall recently sent the store owners a second letter, essentially saying to disregard the first.

Computerworld: Motorola demos 64K wireless network. The company said its 64K bit/sec. technology will be available to service providers in the U.S. in the first quarter of next year. According to a Motorola official at the conference, delivering the solution is the first step in a strategy that will lead eventually to third-generation (3G) packet data services at 384K bit/sec. or more.

December 2, 1999
News.Com: Extreme sports sites take advertising road less traveled. Quokka.com, another outside-the-mainstream sports site, doesn't allow banner advertisements either. Instead, the three-year-old San Francisco company allows sales pitches throughout its Web site in storytelling form.

Industry Standard: Partner Protection. Because so many sites are rushing to gather content these days, there's a danger that "people [might] let their business plan get in front of their legal documentation," says Gerald L. Jenkins, a partner and Internet legal expert with Goldberg, Kohn, a law firm in Chicago.

NY Times: It's Often Hard to Find Help Behind the Cybercounter. Part of the problem may have to do with online culture. "The whole industry was built on the concept that we can get rid of people -- it would be a huge savings," said Lixuan An, vice president of LivePerson.

RCFoC: Of Bricks & Mortar & Bits & Bytes.... The Dec. 1 Wall Street Journal describes how barnesandnoble.com is testing a currently unadvertised service in New York where they provide same-day delivery of books purchased online! They're leveraging their bricks and mortar assets, plus bike messengers and vans, to delight their online customers.

Mappa.Mundi Magazine: Mining in Textual Mountains. Hearst describes information retrieval as a way to pull out the documents you are interested in and push away the others. In contrast, text data mining is a way to examine a collection of documents and discover information not contained in any individual document in the collection.

News.Com: Amazon wins first round in Barnesandnoble.com suit. "The evidence indicates that Barnesandnoble.com can modify its 'Express Lane' feature with relative ease to avoid infringement. For instance, infringement can be avoided by simply requiring users to take additional action to confirm orders placed by Express Lane," judge Marsha J. Pechman stated in her ruling...

Salon: Singing the MP3 blues. Despite attempts to cultivate an image as a grassroots community dedicated to helping struggling independents, the average online music distributor's business model is enough to make any red-blooded record executive blush.

USA Today: 15,000-song catalog free on the Net. [Steven Devick, CEO Platinum Entertainment] In the future, Devick believes, most music will be available for free over the World Wide Web, and advertisers will pay the music companies and the musicians. ''We think the music model will be a lot more like TV than it has been in the past. TV is free, supported by advertising..."

Mappa.Mundi Magazine: I See Dancing Beans. Jeffrey Zeldman. There are now more sites on the Web than there are stars in the heavens. POV Magazine selected 100 sites - "The POV 100 Top Sites" - and threw a party to honor the winners. My site was Number 76.

December 3, 1999
Today's Links Story: Industry Standard: Navigation or Advertisement?

AtNewYork: Buying the Place With Beads: The Customer Loyalty Illusion. Jason Chervokas. The land grab theory of Net marketing, particularly as practiced by the e-commerce players, but also as practiced by the big Net media players goes something like this -- pay through the nose to drive traffic through your sites today and you will establish a pattern of consumer behavior that will give your business a dominant position forever.

Salon: See spot run. Scott Rosenberg. The dot-com TV frenzy isn't a sign of things to come; it's a mere transitory spasm of folly -- albeit a spectacular one. To understand how this vast failure of imagination came to pass, we need to look at the nature of today's overheated venture capital market -- and the pathologically impatient mind-set it has promoted among the Internet start-up companies it spawns.

USA Today: Web order leads to sour grapes. [Harry and David, a fruit and food gifts retailer] Since my inquiry, the company has started e-mailing customers who order an unavailable item online, Tait says. Soon the system will warn you before you can enter a credit card number. Another flaw: Orders entered online take longer to get into the system than telephone orders. Why? When you click "buy," the order is printed and then hand entered into the main order system.

Wired News: Newspapers Ding the Web. [Larry Abrams, realtor in New York] "The ad rep said, 'Because your ad is directing people to a Web site, you have to pay the national rate [what the paper charges for national corporate ads] -- $21 a line,' Abrams said. "I said, 'What, are you out of your mind?' That increases our cost from hundreds of dollars to $6,000 per insertion!"

TechWeb: Nike Model Shows Web's Limitations. The Nike system is limited, Allen said, because it's difficult to build a system that not only interconnects previously disconnected pieces of the supply chain, but also is easy and fast enough for the consumer to use.

ClickZ: Where Are All The Testimonials? To be fair, the Net has taken the concept of testimonials and evolved it in a few interesting ways. Deja.com, Epinions.com and Productopia.com are all places you can go to find 'peer-reviews' of sites, products and services. But that's not quite the same thing.

Time Digital: Inside the Geekosystem. They're pioneers of an academic discipline so new that, like many Silicon Valley start-ups, it hasn't quite decided what to call itself. (Webology, perhaps? E-cology?) Their premise: the Internet is growing wild like a jungle, so humans should treat it like a jungle -- with curiosity, courtesy and respect for its laws.

• NY Times: From April 11, 1999; Searching for the Essence of the World Wide Web

NY Times: Software Code Has Power of Law on the Internet, Author Says. Review of Lawrence Lessig's new book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. "At some point we will see that cyberspace does not guarantee its own freedom, but instead carries an extraordinary potential for control. And then we will ask: How should we respond?"

Industry Standard: Victims of Their Own Success. AOL, of course, is not a town. It's a business. And if companies are willing to pay millions for prime real estate on the service, guess who has to be relocated? The community leaders who don't pay rent.

SJ Mercury: Employers use Web to recruit. Recruiting by the Internet is now a maturing industry. According to Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass., there are more than 2.5 million resumes floating around cyberspace and nearly 30,000 job-posting Web sites, ranging from the largest, Monster.com, to sites solely for mortician openings. Big companies, such as Irving-based GTE Corp., get 20,000 to 30,000 e-mail resumes a year.

December 4, 1999
InfoWorld: To tax or not to tax? It's an old battle that traditional mail-order catalog companies have been fighting for years, and in the new digital economy it's one that carries just as much concern for companies doing most or all of their business online.

InfoWorld: What's so special about e-commerce that it should be exempt from taxation? Michael Vizard, editor in chief at InfoWorld. If you look at transactions on the Web today, you'll find that we're already on our way. Most sites voluntarily comply with existing tax codes. All we really need is a system that makes sure everyone complies.

Industry Standard: What's the Deal: The True Cost of Marketing. Netcos and their investors expect seamless acceleration of revenue and profit past marketing expense. The same vision has seduced many startups and investors in the past, but history shows it's easier said than done. In the Net biz so far, only AOL, Yahoo and eBay have pulled it off over a long haul.

December 5, 1999
Salon: Prime time online. Q&A with Jim Moloshok, President Warner Bros. Online. With Entertaindom, we're not trying to be everything to everybody, not trying to be stock quotes, sports scores and whatever else comes along, we're just focusing on what we know best, entertaining the mainstream.

Advertising Age: CyberCritique of MCI WorldCom. Customer service on the Web has amazing potential. When done right, service via the Web can be invaluable and provide all sorts of warm, squishy customer relations. When done wrong, such as MCI Worldcom, it can frustrate consumers to no end.

• Industry Standard: From July 2, 1999; Telco Sites Leave Customers on Hold

Nando Times: Internet raises stakes for sneak previews. The major studios are trying to move heaven and earth to protect the confidentiality of these previews but admit that, ultimately, there's little they can do about the proliferation of Internet sites and other media that report the results of these works in progress months in advance of release.

Industry Standard: Net Retailers Face A Taxing Question. Uncertainty about the law, lax enforcement and a retail environment in which a 5 percent to 8 percent sales tax could make or break a sale have caused Internet retailers to adopt a variety of policies on collecting sales tax for the 46 states that impose taxes.

December 6, 1999
Information Week: Real-Time Reality. Companies are being pressed to generate ideas and make decisions faster, and to manage logistics and order fulfillment more efficiently. To do so, they have to move beyond the standard means of communication. Gone are the days companies could rely on batch processing, electronic data interchange, E-mail or-heaven forbid-the telephone.

• Net Company: From Fall 1999; Time for Zero Time

LinkShare Press Release: LinkShare Wins U.S. Patent for Technology that Drievs Affiliate Programs on the Web. LinkShare Corporation announced today that the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office granted U.S. Patent No. 5,991,740, covering LinkShare's innovative technology for tracking and managing e-commerce relationships on the Internet.

SJ Mercury: AT&T must define cable terms. [Andrew Schwartzman, head of the Media Access Project] The problem, Schwartzman said, is the degree of control AT&T wants to retain over rivals' customers. Because AT&T refuses to let competitors install equipment at the cable network's central terminal, or ``head end,'' it will be in a position to favor some customers and Web sites over others...

CIO WebBusiness: Investing in the Web. Q&A with Guy Kawasaki, chairman and CEO garage.com. Pretend it's the 1960s; it's like asking, "Are some businesses better suited to using information systems or is it just the lure of information systems that edges out good business sense?" The Internet is going to permeate every pore of successful businesses. It's not a dichotomy: Internet or good business. It's a prerequisite: Internet is good business.

USA Today: CDnow gains in question: It counts coupons as sales. The online seller of music and big giver of coupons reported Thanksgiving sales up 200 percent from the year-ago period. But that figure might be in question because CDnow breaks accounting norms by adding to its revenue the value of coupons redeemed by customers.

Computerworld: SEC tackles dot-com revenue practices. Under the new guidelines, companies can only book revenues if they have satisfied a number of requirements: they must have an agreement to deliver products or services; they must have actually delivered the products or services; they have set a price for the products or services; and they can collect on that set price.

Web Informant: Shopping on the web, two days seems like an eternity. They look at stores like OfficeMax or Staples who move into an area and steal sales from the local office supply stores even though most of these giant chains typically have much worse service than the small stores they replace. The difference on the web, however, is that dozens of big stores can open up in the same space almost overnight.

USA Today: Sorting shipping problems online. It happens on thousands of Web sites every day, in the form of shipping and handling charges. Such costs can vary widely from site to site -- and customers often don't see the costs until the end, after they've given a name, billing and shipping addresses, a phone number and an e-mail address.

Newsweek: The Internet Brain Drain. This year venture capitalists have thrown $6 billion at new Internet companies, more than in 1996 and 1997 combined. To protect that investment, they like to have managers with "golden resumes" leading their fledgling firms.

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

Industry Standard: One-Stop Shopping For Airline Tickets. Rather than simply trying to put a consumer-friendly veneer on a standard reservation system, ITA gathers data from the same places the computerized reservation system gets it, then organizes it more intuitively.

Forbes: Do computers make you stupid? John C. Dvorak. And sin of sins, for some unknown computer-related reason, students are using a conversational voice, heaven forbid. We can't have that, can we?

• Chronicle of Higher Education: From November 26, 1999; Technology Transforms Writing and the Teaching of Writing

NY Times: Enforcer for the Electronic Marketplace. Currently, InterTrust earns revenue only from licensing fees. But in the future, the company expects that its main revenue will come from a fee ranging from 0.6 percent to 2 percent for each transaction using InterTrust technology.

December 7, 1999
Today's Links Story: E-Christmas at Yahoo and Amazon

Business Week: Silknet: Customer-Service Software with Staying Power? Using Silknet's software, companies can make their sites more self-service oriented -- easier for customers to find what they need on their own. Silknet's technology also enables companies to offer online chat with customer-service reps -- and to respond to e-mailed questions faster.

SJ Mercury: Sales taxes on the Internet need a software solution. But rather than getting bogged down on the question of whether or not to tax Internet sales, the commission should instead be spending its time crafting the outlines of a tax system that would be easy for consumers to use, and even easier for e-commerce merchants to implement.

DDJ TechNetCast: Philippe Kahn on the Wireless Internet. Real streamed Video. Sure, the Internet reaches the cubicles and homes of white collar workers all over the world. But it's real potential won't be realized until it moves away from the desktop and extends to millions of mobile devices through wireless communications.

ChannelSeven: Affiliate Marketers Score at the Patent Office. It's no longer "patent pending" for LinkShare and BeFree. Both companies, leaders in the affiliate marketing space, received patents yesterday for technologies associated with customer tracking.

ZDNN: Streaming industry should 'move to Canada'. [Mark Cuban, Yahoo's Broadcast Services] Cuban advocated the move as a way to avoid the fees imposed by the Copyright Act. Cuban said Canada's friendly attitude towards the Internet industry, including a promise not to impose Internet taxes, has made moving servers something Yahoo! is "examining very closely."

SJ Mercury: Ford seeks Court order to reopen Houston Web site. The case has drawn the attention of dealers, automakers and others throughout the industry because of the rapid changes brought on by Internet car shopping. About 30 states have laws restricting automakers from owning dealerships. The Ford site, one of five it operates around the United States, had been up and running for about 18 months.

USA Today: When computers fail. From soap makers to stock exchanges, non-Y2K glitches are cutting a wide swath of mischief in corporate offices, schools and government agencies from Washington, D.C., to Washington state. The glitches are creating delays, outages, garbled data and general snafus, proving Murphy's Law that anything that can go wrong probably will.

Internet Week: Streaming Media Goes Corporate. Companies just learning to use the technology to improve communication among employees and with partners and clients also are grappling with managing the load video, audio and graphics add to their networks.

December 8, 1999
Business 2.0: Brain Waves. Vinton G. Cerf, Peter Cochrane, Tim Berners-Lee, Douglas Rushkoff and others. The World Wide Web may be in its infancy, or just entering adolescence. It's hard to be certain. As we mapped the path of its evolution, we asked 10 influential people to riff on their visions of the Web — what form will it take?

Editor & Publisher: Keep It Simple In the Age of Overload. Steve Outing. Review of Jakob Nielsen and David Shenk's new books. The Internet is the ultimate tool of information overload — providing hapless consumers with an ever- and faster-growing data stream and millions of "channels" of news and information. It's too much for we mere mortals to absorb, and the purveyors of Web sites must therefore act in accordance.

Business 2.0: Digital Desert. If you are in the business of offering goods to the customer, you had better figure out who is going to move those goods for you, and from where. You might find the answer in a surprising place. Like Leland Stanford, you might find your fortune in the bone-dry hills of Nevada.

TechWeb: Wireless Consortium Meets With WC3. However, analysts said WAP Forum technology does not enable total access to wireless information, which could hamstring its marketability. WAP Forum technology requires special servers and software, which puts the network operator in the position of providing and controlling the content available, rather than offering total access to the Internet...

Business 2.0: Amazon.com's Bubble Bath. "We're not going to direct competitors and sprinkling Zs all over the place - the users can do that if they want to," says Bruce Gilliat, Alexa's co-founder and chief operating officer. "We got counsel from intellectual property attorneys because we wanted to make sure [it was OK]. zBubbles is a separate download that you opt for."

USA Today: Some Web sites try to crash. For the past few months, online companies have converged on IBM's National Testing Center here to "stress-test" their systems. They heap huge amounts of traffic onto their Web sites and wait for them to buckle. It's not an exercise in self-flagellation; rather, the companies are trying desperately to avoid the network outages that plague many Web sites.

Business Week: Dot.Coms Ditch the Flying Gerbils. Internet companies are now realizing what traditional enterprises have known for years: Obnoxious ads may be remembered, but they don't always lead to sales. ''The shock-value ads get people's interest, but they alienate them in their gut,'' says Jaleh Bisharat, Amazon's vice-president of marketing.

Business Week: A New Recipe for VirtualGourmet.com. Peter Morville of Argus Associates and Josh Feldman of frogdesign. This week, Business Week e.biz kicks off a new feature in which we will periodically look at common, basic -- and often easy-to-fix -- Web design challenges for real readers with real site problems.

Business 2.0: Stop the Presses! Traditions that took a century to evolve are quickly being rendered obsolete. Readers, advertisers, employees are all being lured away by the Web. Slow to recognize the threat to their core constituencies, publishers were late to adapt, though adept at playing catch-up. Still, viable revenue models have yet to emerge for all but a handful of online publications.

The Digital Edge: 15 Minutes of Online Fame. Early in 1996, prior to CNN's serious online news immersion and before MSNBC.com's launch, Nando's leaders could've developed a major promotion blitz, Calloway said during his November 4 dinner presentation. The chance existed to build a brand out of thin air, as had Yahoo!.

USA Today: Extra, extra: Download all about it. However, the Internet and strong economic times are killing the imported newspaper business at Out of Town and other newsstands around the country. Rather than make the trek to the central city for day-old newspapers, readers can scan the latest edition from their desktop computers.

Business 2.0: Whither the Banner. This month, we asked a couple of marketing diehards on either side of the banner aisle - i-traffic founder Scott Heiferman, proud instigator of the popular bulletin board bannerssuck.com; and Michael Lubell, Internet marketing director for WinStar Interactive - to defend their turf.

Washington Post: Online Firms Pay Surfers to Click Away. Skeptics, though, counter that the pay-to-surf business resembles off-line pyramid marketing. And they wonder how successful it will be for advertisers since it is inherently difficult to make sure people really pay attention to the ads, which flow into a window the users must keep open on their computer screens.

December 9, 1999
Online Journalism Review: From Doing Good to Doing Well; When Journalists Go E-Commerce. E-commerce entrepreneurs, sitting on warehouses bursting with everything from vitamins and blue jeans to trashy novels and pesto spreads, are hiring journalists in droves these days, hoping to lure the credit card-carrying masses to their sites with splashy, magazine-style content.

MSNBC: A wanna-be Webpreneur. Lisa Napoli. "We had that meeting on the Web site today," he said, monologuing away. My ears always perk up when someone mentions the Web, particularly now that everyone’s got the fever. (I remember just a few years ago, when people struggled to recite the "w-w-w" in a Web address, and when the people who got into the business weren’t opportunistic, but passionate. They got rich by accident, not design.)

Salon: Dot-com dogs. What in more rational times would be considered mediocre IPOs are plentiful. Dozens of companies have filed documents with regulators that tell prospective investors that they have never made a profit and, moreover, expect no profits in the foreseeable future.

News.Com: Costco goes shopping online. [Richard Galanti, Costco CFO] Part of employees' duties at Costco's online operations include checking out what Internet retailers have in the way of prices and inventory. Some of this is done to make sure Costco is getting the best prices from vendors, Galanti said.

ClickZ: Brand Building Now A Small Company Reality. The key problem is that affiliate programs promote the affiliate owner, not necessarily the "affiliatee." It's like having a store and displaying "Please leave our store" signs whenever a customer wants to buy anything: I spend time on your site, I want to buy something, you ask me to go to Amazon.

• Useit.Com: From August 18, 1999; Spotlight of a business-process invention disclosure. Establish a reverse affiliates program where an e-commerce site links to some of the better specialized sites to use their content and recommendations as an enhancement and objective third-party advice for customers.

Harvard Business School Publishing: Rembrandts In the Attic: Unlocking the Hidden Value of Patents. Q&A with Kevin Rivette and David Kline, authors of Rembrandts in the Attic. We find it odd that those who have no problem accepting the Net as a nonphysical yet economically viable business medium should get stuck in industrial-age conceptions of what should and should not be patentable.

NY Times: Legal Squabbles in Path of Internet. The issue is significant because companies often use similar software to do business online. "Any new entrant into commercial space on the celestial jukebox has to worry about its business plan being cut off at the knees by a patent infringement lawsuit," Dr. Goldstein said. "This issue could effectively bring e-commerce to a halt."

Webmonkey Radio: Information Design with Drue Miller, vivid Studios. MP3 and Quicktime audio files. What kind of people make good information designers? Should you have a site map? What link colors should you use?

PC World: Full-Featured Eudora Now Free. Starting Thursday, Qualcomm will let you download a beta edition of a full-featured version of its Eudora e-mail client free of charge. The only difference from the $50 retail version of Eudora Pro is a large ad in the lower left-hand corner of the application window.

Interactive Week: AOL Unplugs CompuServe Forums. Rather than eliminate forums entirely, CompuServe is instituting a new Web-based program that some forum managers said is the equivalent of raising the white flag in the online community business. Starting in April 2000, CompuServe will supply software enabling forum managers to publish their communities in a venue accessible by any Web user.

December 10, 1999
FEED Magazine: Why Everything Is All That. Steven Johnson. Plenty of decentralized systems in the real world spontaneously generate structure as they increase in size: Cities organize into neighborhoods or satellites; the neural connections of our brains develop extraordinarily specialized regions without any master planner drawing up the blueprints. Has the web followed a comparable path of development over the past few years?

A List Apart: E-commerce sites are designed to fail. The only way to find out about each laser printer on the H-P site is to choose from a list that tells you virtually nothing but model number. Electing a model leads you to some details about that model. It's like being in a store and seeing lots of closed cartons which you open, one after another, hoping to find what you want inside. Who, outside the Soviet Union, has ever shopped for anything this way?

AtNewYork: Giving it Away Online: The Six Degrees of Free. Tom Watson. Then too, look around at the marketing on and about the Web this Christmas season, all of it aimed at those prosperous enough to possess an Internet connection and a credit card. Never has the principle of "give it away now, take advantage it later" been more prominent.

Web Review: Point of Presents. Michael Swaine. One of the hot or at least warm gimmicks in e-commerce in these chilly (in some latitudes) days of the 1999 Christmas shopping season is the online gift registry. Once again, evidence that e-commerce is still mostly about acquiring quote customers unquote rather than about selling anything to anybody.

Business Week: Using the Net for Brainstorming. Today, increasing numbers of companies are using the Internet to stimulate and manage innovation--and to put the brightest new ideas into the hands of the people who can turn them into products the most quickly.

PC World: The Many Paths to Mobile Net Access. Vendors struggle to come up with compelling applications for Internet-enabled phones. But since even the latest models have tiny displays, you can all but forget about extended Web surfing. But the designers and developers keep trying. They showcased many of the latest products and services here this week at a conference on The Future of Pervasive Computing, hosted by Technologic Partners.

Newsbytes: AOL Shopping Site Launches Product Simulations. The LiveProducts technology from Israel-based e-SIM enables ShopAtAOL customers to take control of simulations that recreate the looks and sounds of the products they want to buy. Alternatively, they can sit back and watch animated "walk-throughs" showing off product features.

Business Week: Needed: The Human Touch. Some of them are depending on fresh technology to help them answer e-mail faster, update Web sites more often, and make the essentially self-service Web work better. But those sites may be left behind by bolder outfits, like Lands' End. They're relying on the personal touch to make themselves stand out.

PC Week: Compaq readies new e-mail support system. The multiyear outsourcing deal, signed last month, is worth an estimated $6 million, according to Brigade officials. The free service will augment the customer service area of Compaq's Web site, which includes searchable FAQs, downloadable manuals and phone listings but little in the way of interactive help online.

Upside: Net Patent Fights May Surprise. The most contentious debates in today’s patent stampede, however, center on the new practice of granting patent rights not just to devices and other tangible inventions, but also to fundamental Internet business models and methods of doing business.

Christian Science Monitor: Media didn't give Comet Systems a chance to explain. It turns out the story is more complicated than first presented by AP, and that Comet is not the 'privacy destroyer' that it was painted to be in the media -- but that it did show poor judgement in communicating with its users, and that's part of what caused the problem.

NY Times: EBay Says Law Discourages Auction Monitoring. EBay, which is the leading Web auction service, says that under current law, aggressive monitoring of the transactions on its site could leave it open to lawsuits. So it makes no effort to sift through a vast majority of the tens of thousands of new auctions each day to weed out inappropriate items.

NY Times: Copyright Decision Threatens Freedom to Link. In a ruling that could undermine the freedom to create links on the Web, a federal judge in Utah has temporarily barred two critics of the Mormon Church from posting on their Web site the Internet addresses of other sites featuring pirated copies of a Mormon text.

Business Week: Copyright on the Net: Who 'Owns' a Price? One of the great weaknesses of the Net is that it provides too much information. That paradox is creating a legal controversy that will leave an indelible imprint on our ability to use the Web productively and companies' ability to use the Web profitably.

December 11, 1999
NY Times: Looking at the Transcontinental Railroad as the Internet of 1869. Today's networks are extensions of that telegraphic signal, not of the tracks beneath it. They involve telecommunications companies and television cable companies, wireless telephones and computer networks, electronic transfers of cash and stock and commodities -- the exploding world of the Internet.

• Byte: From September 13, 1999; The Victorian Internet

NY Times: Surging Number of Patents Engulfs Internet Commerce. "This is the end of the wild, wild West on the Web," said Stephen Messer, LinkShare's founder and chief executive. "There are laws that protect the pioneers from pirates who steal all of their good ideas. Everything you love to do on the Internet will have some sort of patent on it."

News.Com: E-tailers confront customer service challenges. Amazon's Capelli declined to give statistics on the number of calls Amazon's service center receives or the average hold time customers experience, but said the company doubled its number of customer service representatives in preparation for holiday shoppers. The e-commerce leader also has attempted to make its site easy to use so customers can help themselves purchase items...

December 12, 1999
Useit.Com: Voodoo Usability. Focus groups and surveys study users' opinions and not their actual behavior and are therefore misleading for the design of interactive systems like websites. Automated usability measures are just as misleading.

• devhead: devhead: From February 18, 1999; Survey Your Users. Jakob Nielsen.
• TechWeb: From March 29, 1999; New Tool Simulates Web Surfers

SJ Mercury: Some timely guidelines for Web design. Dan Gillmor. I don't assume that my ideas of what works on the Web are the absolute best. Different people use the medium differently. But I feel comfortable in saying that the Net too often provides an abysmal experience, not a helpful one.

Web Informant: Measuring web performance. Finding the most troublesome spots takes part detective, part engineer, and part just plain persistence. So a number of companies are doing something about at least measuring and reporting on these bottlenecks, in the hope of fixing or at least avoiding them.

SJ Mercury: Colleges attack market in notes. The dispute is only the latest example of how technology has rattled some ivy-clad traditions of higher education. While online registration and fee payment generally are praised for making college life easier, Web-based instruction and library access have radically changed parts of the familiar college experience over the past decade.

SJ Mercury: Vintage battle. Because Wine.com bypasses these traditional channels, it must painfully negotiate licensing agreements to distribute a wine. Thus, Wine.com's selection is limited to 2,000 bottles, many of which come from abroad. That pales in comparison with the ``20,000-plus'' promised by WineShopper.com, which has cut deals to work through established channels.

December 13, 1999
Welcome to readers of WebReference.com! Thanks for visiting, Lawrence.

NY Times: Pricing Errors on the Web Can Be Costly. When traditional retailers mistakenly label an item the wrong price -- for instance, marking a $99 item $9.90 -- they might have to apologize to a customer and give a quick lesson in decimals to a clerk. On the Internet, they have to be prepared either to lose face or to part with a lot of money.

Information Week: Rule No. 1: Don't Annoy Your Customers. Seasoned E-retailers know their approach to order fulfillment and delivery is critical for making their business a success. But reliable delivery is just the beginning: Online champs keep customers in the loop from the virtual shopping basket to a package's arrival at their door.

Information Week: The Leaders Of E-Business. They are aggressive in linking customers, suppliers, business partners, and employees via the Internet, using Web sites to handle sales transactions and provide customer service; intranets and enterprise data portals to link employees and give them more access to data; and extranets to improve information flow to and from business partners.

Forbes: Santa Flaws. PeopleSupport aims to expand the center from 300 reps to 1,500 in a year. Naysayers, however, see the human touch as merely a quick fix. "It treats the symptom rather than the disease," says Web consultant Jakob Nielsen, "and the disease is that the Web is still too damn hard to use."

Internet Week: Early Flaws Don't Doom Online Customer Service. Meantime, customers will grow more comfortable with the online medium for inquiries, just as they have for transactions. How many of today's hard-core online shoppers swore a year or two ago that they'd never send a credit card number over the Web?

Interactive Week: Amazon.com Adopts Bubbly Shopping Companion. [Brewster Kahle, founder and CEO of Alexa Internet] "Our challenge is to do a really good job, as you surf, to put shopping information at your fingertips," he said of the utility, which Alexa plans to release in the first quarter of 2000. "We're trying to shift control away from the merchants and give shoppers a forum for talking about products. These are talking bubbles - the Web speaking to you and other shoppers in a shoppers' forum..."

InfoWorld: Content adaptation protocol in the works. The ICAP forum will tackle issues centered around forming a protocol that will allow enterprise companies, content providers, and internet service providers to conduct Web services, including targeted online advertising, content filtering, and data compression on Internet access devices.

Washington Post: Online Sales Heating Up Tax Debate. States, which receive about half their revenue from sales taxes, attempted to force mail order companies to collect the levies. But courts consistently have ruled that businesses cannot be required to do so in states where they have no substantial "physical presence..."

Business Week: This Lawsuit Is Cranking Up the Volume over MP3. But at the same time, there are powerful reasons to shield sites like Napster from liability. If Web sites are forced to police their users, then the cost of offering information on the Net will dramatically increase. That, in turn, could decrease the usefulness and financial viability of many types of search services.

SF Chronicle: Online News Syndicates Provide Missing Links. [Douglas R. Stern, CEO of United Media] Stern said traditional syndicators like United Media are built around a finite client base of print publications, with exclusive contracts for columns and cartoons. But Stern said the explosion of Internet sites has created a demand for news that previously wouldn't fit into print, which has busted open the door for writers and artists who haven't been able to break through in print.

InfoWorld: Wireless standards support slipping. However, companies supporting WAP are also supporting alternative technologies that are promising a single HTML development environment, rather than backing WML and HTML, eliminating the need for additional infrastructure, such as a WAP gateway...

PC World: Welcome to the WAP World. WAP appears to have unlimited potential, with the WAP Forum already working on end-to-end security, smart card interfaces, connection-oriented transport protocols, persistent storage, billing interfaces, and push technology.

USA Today: Judges weigh site's financial disclosure plan. The federal judicial system will decide as early as this week whether to allow its judges' personal finances to be published on the Internet. The online news service that wants to publish the information says that if the judges refuse, it will see them in court.

Business Week: Why Patents Are a Rising Currency in the Net Economy. Emboldened by a decision by a federal appeals court endorsing business-method patents last year, entrepreneurs and companies are rushing to secure protections for their own methods -- from new ways of selling things over the Internet to the systems underpinning esoteric financial products.

December 14, 1999
ZDNN: E-tailers learn a lesson -- the hard way. Looking to drum up new business, increasing numbers of e-tailers are mailing out promotions and coupons to Internet users. But unlike promotions in the so-called world of brick-and-mortar retailers, online discounts are not necessarily limited to one per customer. And savvy consumers are catching on.

ClickZ: The Great Madison Avenue Ripoff. What's worse is how much we're paying for this nonsense. Some radio stations are increasing their rates four-fold for 60-second spots, and getting it, the San Francisco Examiner reports. Agencies are now supposed to have two rate books, one for regular companies and a second, higher one for "dot coms."

MSNBC: Lycos searches for a sticky solution. [Mark Stoever, Lycos director of product management for vertical content] "We came from being a search engine, so we have lots of dominant searchers," said Stoever. "A lot of people think of Lycos as a search engine and not a place to get the info. Yahoo has gotten there quicker. Destination content is where it’s at."

• PC Magazine: From May 24, 1999; The All-Things Approach. John C. Dvorak.

Freedom Forum: Why the panic over online information? But any move to post those same facts on the Internet, or a Web page, panics otherwise sane and sober people — such as judges and members of Congress. When confronted with that possibility, they inevitably begin to jabber excitedly about terrorists, murderers and the unimaginable horrors that electronic access might provoke.

• Columbia Journalism Review: From September/October 1999; An Outbreak of Internet-Phobia

• Usable Web: Linking

News.Com: Online holiday shopping come and gone? Gomez's Leonard applauded sites for letting customers know about their shipping deadlines, saying that it was an improvement from past practices. The worst thing a site could do is to promise prompt delivery for Christmas and then not do so...

Editor & Publisher: Copyright in the Digital Age. Q&A with Rex Heinke, attorney who represents both The Washington Post and the LA Times. Q: But couldn't encrypting copyright material impinge on fair use? A: Sure. Then the question becomes: Does Congress think as a matter of public policy there should be exceptions to encryption? For example, the obvious way to deal with that problem is that access codes should be sold to public libraries at a discounted cost

ClickZ: Support Your Local Fan Site. Companies in other industries are quick to shut down unauthorized web sites, just ask anyone with a penchant for Star Trek. But the game companies have learned that the guy who's so excited about a game as to create a web site may have energy and credibility that's worth harnessing.

• NY Times: From April 12, 1999; Potential Profits Seen in Fan-Oriented Web Sites

USA Today: Internet tax panel likely to deadlock. While the policy debate is murky, the political rhetoric is clear. Most of the Republican presidential candidates, except Texas Gov. George W. Bush, have opposed Internet sales taxes. Bush supports extending the current three-year moratorium on new Internet taxes.

December 15, 1999
Industry Standard: What's in an "S"? Ask eToys. "It's the first case of someone being told to stop doing what they're doing because someone else has decided to make money doing it," says Douglas Rushkoff, media critic and author of the books "Media Virus" and "Coercion." "In other words, it's the first case of the Internet equivalent of people being forced from their homes to make room for a highway."

Atlantic Unbound: The Unacknowledged Legislators of the Digital World. To Lessig's way of thinking, the code is being rewritten -- by business and government. Corporate interests want to make cyberspace safe for e-commerce; nations want to ensure that their sovereignty isn't flouted there. Unfortunately, the underlying software of the Internet was not written with either capitalism or nationalism in mind.

Fast Company: Collision Course. But within the next few years, the Web is expected to make its greatest impact yet. That's because one of the most powerful and most important industries on the planet -- the design, assembly, and sale of automobiles -- is finally ready to get with the digital program.

Red Herring: Ford's Internet efforts encounter roadblocks. The biggest hurdle in Ford's Web strategy may be the same one facing brick-and-mortar companies: channel conflict. Many Ford dealers are opposed to Ford's online initiatives, fearing that competition from manufacturers on the Web will endanger their sales.

NY Times: I Write Copy for a Web Start-Up. A few weeks ago, I abandoned the sinking ship of newspaper journalism and hopped aboard a pirate vessel, the Internet. Instead of writing news for a venerable newspaper, I'm now providing content for a Silicon Alley start-up founded by two 20-somethings.

• Online Journalism Review: From December 7, 1999; From Doing Good to Doing Well

SF Chronicle: Retailers Step Up Drive for Net Taxes. At issue for both the e-Fairness Coalition and booksellers is a 1992 Supreme Court decision, Quill vs. North Dakota, that requires merchants to collect sales tax only in states where they have a physical presence, or ``nexus.'' The Quill decision applies to sales via catalogs and television shopping channels as well as Web sites.

USA Today: AOL seeks access to party conventions. Except for those given to major networks, most credentials are issued by the four "press galleries" -- representatives of newspapers, radio and TV, magazines and photographers -- that issue credentials to reporters who cover Congress. Those galleries have been hesitant to credential AOL until it demonstrates that it is a news-gathering operation, not just an Internet service.

• Online Journalism Review: From July 23, 1999; The Mythical Press Box

Online Journalism Review: The New Crime Boss. For now, though, APBnews has been far busier with the journalism than the business. There, too, the company has had some interesting ideas, chief among them that the fastest way to credibility (and the long-term goal of being a "liquid" news service oozing content across all mediums), is by hiring established reporters and insisting on straight-ahead AP style.

USA Today: Judges' data won't be released online. The judges said that to put the financial data on the Web would rob judges of the ability to know who was looking at information about their investments and other holdings. The panel said this could expose judges to security risks -- for example, from people they had convicted or ruled against.

NY Times: It's Not the Product That's Different, It's the Process. And once pure information is cut loose from the expensive physical means of delivering it, whether a printing plant and a fleet of trucks or a dedicated network of mainframe computers, the value of all those old arrangements comes into question.

December 16, 1999
ClickZ: How To Get Internet Savvy. Internet savvy comes from free unfettered, unfiltered, burn-risking use of the Internet. If your company is monitoring e-mail, filtering out chatrooms, and reminding employees every day that you own the resource (as well as their time) your people aren't learning. Learning comes from reaching, trying and making mistakes.

Internet World: Please Deposit $1 For The Next 1,000 Frames. DRM is still a long way from the mainstream, however. Consumers are accustomed to gaining unlimited, relatively unencumbered access when they purchase a piece of content in the form of a book, a CD, or a videotape. Are they ready to buy content that self-destructs like something out of "Mission: Impossible"?

• Atlantic Monthly: From September 10, 1998; Life, Liberty and the Pursuity of Copyright?
• The Economist: From July 17, 1999; Digital rights and wrongs

Internet World: When Your Site Is Ridiculed. [Scott Moore, publisher of Slate] Moore's reaction to falling victim to the Web's prankish, irreverent culture is instructive: He chose not to assume the role of victim when it wasn't necessary. As more and more intellectual property is held up for ridicule online, it's important that Web publishers keep level heads.

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

Red Herring: The top five mistakes of e-commerce design. Jakob Nielsen. Clueless business models also hurt e-commerce. Some companies still insist on overcharging Web users to protect their legacy channels. Grow up and join the Internet economy, please.

Computerworld: Oracle pushes customers toward its site. "Ninety-eight percent of Oracle's revenues have been individually negotiated," said Larry Ellison, Oracle's CEO. "That's how we've done business historically. It's been a manual process, not an e-business process. We can't continue to do this. We must push more business through the Web store."

Computerworld: Service needs drive tech decisions at Lands' End. "One of the great fallacies of the Internet is [that] you'll save on customer service costs because customers would serve themselves," said Bill Bass, vice president of electronic commerce at the $1.4 billion retailer. Lands' End has discovered that simply isn't the case, but it isn't worrying about it.

NY Times: Web Is No Place for Last-Minute Shoppers. Eight days passed. No CD's. I logged on to Buy.com's online order tracking service, typed my order number and learned, well, not much. My order was "processing." Whatever that meant, I suspected it was not good. Had my credit card been rejected? Were the items unavailable?

News.Com: The push toward better customer service. Most have tried to build loyalty by building their brands and outspending their competitors. But a company's viability will ultimately be determined not only by its ability to attract and retain customers, but by its ability to do so cost-effectively.

InfoWorld: Internet Domain Registrars increases length of Internet domain names. The company positioned the 67-character option -- an alternative the standard 26-character limit - as a way to add possibly millions of new domain name combinations.

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

December 17, 1999
SJ Mercury: Interactive TV to limit Web access. That's because the service, which is expected in mid-2000, won't bring the far reaches of the World Wide Web to consumers' TV sets. At least not without an extra fee. Instead, AT&T plans to create virtual arenas where customers can shop electronically, read headlines and sports scores, check the weather and send e-mail.

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

The Economist: Who needs NTT? With so many new telecoms firms, NTT is going to have to rethink its age-old strategy of loading all its sunk costs on every new service it offers. The arrival of fresh competitors could also lead it to accelerate the introduction of optical fibre to the home—it is currently due only in 2010. Long before then, Japanese surfers will have found other ways of gaining broadband access to the Internet

NY Post: Waterford's Web Image Shattered by Schoolboy. Waterford had registered the name two years ago, but forgot to renew. James' father Richard -- who runs his own e-commerce site -- said he knew they didn't own the trademark and would have to give it back eventually. He said he had trouble finding someone who cared. "People kept saying, 'We're not interested in the Internet.' "said the elder Stell.

• Wired News: From December 16, 1999; A Crystal Clear Web Lesson

• USC Marshall School of Business: Internet Advertising: Is Anybody Watching? Funded by France Telecom.

AtNewYork: The Internet As A Wedge for Reform. Tom Watson. The Internet isn't a miraculous technology, but it is a revolution in sharing information. If the technology is interesting, the potential social consequences are fascinating. And yet we nibble around the edges.

NY Times: Electronic Sales Are Up, as Are Customer Gripes. Online stores face all the pitfalls of any Internet service -- sites that can be slow and hard to use and crash at the moment people want to use them most. And they are subject to all the flaws of any mail-order company -- shipments that may have the wrong items or damaged goods, or arrive late, or are inexplicably lost forever.

Industry Standard: Eruption Over E-Voting in Arizona. Regardless of whether a lawsuit is filed, Arizona's planned primary demonstrates that online voting has moved rapidly from a controversial theory to a real business. According to one estimate, there are more than half a million public elections in the U.S. each year. That creates a potential multimillion-dollar market for companies providing voting services.

Web Review: Funny Money. Michael Swaine. Neither atoms nor Flooz is a real medium of exchange, but surely it's just a matter of time. It seems to me that the first one of these certificate deals that allows users to sell or exchange them with one another will have created a bona fide alternative currency, with interesting, unforeseeable consequences.

NY Times: Former Playboy Model Wins Right to Use Keywords. [David H. Bernstein, Debevoise & Plimpton] "My view is that you don't analyze meta tags any differently than you do the use of a visible mark on the page," he said. "If it's fair use to have a prominent headline that says someone is a Playmate of the Year, then it's equally fair to use that term in a meta tag."

December 18, 1999
InfoWorld: Please Santa, grant me these special holiday wishes, and improve Web commerce too. But I've been doing a fair amount of online shopping. In my adventures online, it seems like every new site I go to is a new adventure in frustration and inconsistency. There are a few things I'd like to see on each and every single Internet-commerce site.

News.Com: Top Web sites compromise consumer privacy. [Marc Rotenberg, executive director EPIC] Rotenberg cited extensive customer profiling and intrusive marketing techniques, such as the use of "cookies," among the factors causing higher risk. Cookies track user browsing and shopping habits online.

• Electronic Privacy Information Center: Surfer Beware III: Privacy Policies without Privacy Protection

NY Times: ISP Blocked After eToys Protest. Although the case is at one level a routine domain-name dispute, it has become something of a Web cause celebre among those who resent the growing influence of commercial interests on the Internet because they fear it will limit artistic expression.

Wired News: The Amazon of All Boycotts. Barnesandnoble, Amazon claimed, was infringing on Amazon's patented 1-click purchasing process. A judge agreed. Now Stallman fears Amazon will squelch Web commerce with a serious of follow-on suits, and he's proposing a counterattack: an Amazon boycott.

SF Chronicle: Ask Jeeves Sued Over Patents. Two scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are suing Ask Jeeves, a company that lets Web surfers use everyday English to conduct Web searches, for patent infringement. Emeryville's Ask Jeeves, which operates the popular Ask.com site, violates two U.S. patents issued in 1994 and 1995, according to artificial intelligence researchers Patrick Winston and Boris Katz.

PC Magazine: Shop by Color. The convenience of buying clothing and furniture over the Web can quickly turn into a big hassle for shoppers--and merchants--when on-screen colors don't match real-life colors. Accurately depicting colors on the Web is no easy job, especially because every graphics card and monitor has its own ideas about color.

December 19, 1999
Web Informant: The Shipping News, or when you absolutely, positively have to know. With only a few more days left before Christmas, shoppers are acutely aware of how long it takes to get their goods delivered. And nothing exposes the soft underbelly of eCommerce more than how a storefront manages the entire shipping process.

Cal Law: Goo Goos Go Gaga Over Online Handle. The flap over the Goo Goo Dolls began after the band's record label, Warner Bros., asserted ownership of a Web site, www.googoodolls.com, which purports to be the group's "official" home on the Internet. Perturbed by the company's move, the band responded by setting up its own official site in cyberspace, www.googoodolls.org.

• News.Com: From September 15, 1999; Sony seeks musician domain names for life

SJ Mercury: Hacker threat almost spoiled holidays for DVD makers. Even as it downplays the problem, Macrovision R&D is at work on a new encryption system to foil the dreaded DeCSS. Seventy-five percent of all DVDs pressed are encoded with Macrovision copy protection. This translates into 100 million discs worldwide.

• ZDNN: From November 16, 1999; DVD encryption break is a good thing

December 20, 1999
NY Times: The Next Waves of Electronic Commerce. This transformation will happen because, very basically but profoundly, the Internet permits ease and breadth of communication, provides newfound mobility and allows complex transactions to take place among numerous parties in far-flung regions.

Forbes: The death of e-commerce. John C. Dvorak. Meanwhile, nobody is talking about the true Achilles' heel of e-commerce: the delivery mechanisms called Federal Express, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service, for example. They have already hit the limit and are becoming a bigger and bigger problem.

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

Useit.Com: Spotlight of Bob Frankston's analysis of WAP. Bob Frankston (co-inventor of the spreadsheet) has a great analysis of why WAP is mis-guided. Instead, he is a proponent of IP everywhere.

NY Times: Wireless Industry Looks Beyond Phone. In fact, discuss the future of wireless technology with leading communications executives and the words "phone" and "telephone" may not be used at all. That is because they see the future of wireless technology as having little to do with talking and everything to do with putting the Internet into pockets and purses around the world.

Salon: Hold the phone. Q&A with Robert Tercek, President of Packet Video Networks. When video becomes mobile, it's going to be a lot more active, highly under the control of users and purposeful. It's going to be the opposite of the sitting-in-the-living-room experience. If you're going to program for people with the mobile mindset, you've got to think interactive.

Boston Globe: Gadget deserves a hand. Simson Garfinkel. The pdQ phone certainly does deliver on the promise of integrating the Palm Pilot and a Qualcomm CDMA phone. On the outside, the pdQ looks like a somewhat oversized cellular phone, complete with a stubby antenna and a standard keypad on its outside. But flip the keypad open, and the phone reveals the familiar screen of a 3Com Palm Pilot.

NY Times: Electronic Retailing to a Truly Mass Market Is Expected. [Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future] The Web's ability to concentrate geographically dispersed markets, he said, is one clue to the type of products Internet retailing will support. "We'll have products for audiences that have been so widely distributed in the past that there wouldn't be a store for them...

CNN: Jason Catlett: Privacy's most public face. Whether on network or cable television, in national magazines or local newspapers, on commercial or public radio, or certainly on the Internet, if there's a story about your privacy being violated online – particularly by Web businesses – you can be sure that Catlett is sounding off in all of his vitriolic, sound-biting glory.

• Wired News: From November 2, 1999; The Internet's 'Living Treasure'

Industry Standard: The Net, Version 2000. Lawrence Lessig. This was the year of the rift, when a certain alliance began to die. This alliance was between two dominant communities on the Internet: on one hand, the ordinary and early adopters of the Net; on the other, the people who wanted to sell things online.

NY Times: As Data About Readers Grows, Newspapers Ask: Now What? Every day, around midafternoon, Jennifer Musser, an editor of philly.com, finds out more about her audience than any print editor has ever known. On Dec. 5, for instance, she knew that the Web site's most-visited article was The Philadelphia Inquirer's account of a 76ers' basketball game, with 4,097 hits, and that the average visitor stayed three and a half minutes

• Online Journalism Review: From November 10, 1999; Caught in Traffic

December 21, 1999
NY Times: The virtual science of high-tech forecasting. But the headlong rush of the Internet, and the fortunes to be made or lost because of it, has created a particularly sharp craving for a numerical accounting of what will happen next. So who can blame Forrester and Jupiter for recognizing that uncertainty is just another demand in search of a product?

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

Salon: Amazon to world: We control how many times you must click! Scott Rosenberg. If you want to buy stuff anywhere on the Web besides Amazon, Jeff Bezos insists that you must click at least twice! And that insistence, as manifested in a patent-infringement lawsuit, is now sparking a grass-roots boycott of the company by free-software devotees.

Wired News: Major Toy Site, Um, Er, Sucks. Most companies that buy up potential slam-site URLs take them out of commission. Call up schwabsucks.com, for instance, and you get an error message, not the latest stock quotes. EToyssucks.com, by contrast, drives a little extra pre-Xmas traffic to eToys.com...

Computerworld: WAP is the wave of the Web's future. Don Tapscott. Some pundits argue that the recent Microsoft-Ericsson alliance is intended to create a proprietary standard that will undermine WAP. Hesitant companies may use this alleged uncertainty as a reason to delay generating WAP content. That's the wrong decision. WAP will prevail.

• InfoWorld: From December 13, 1999; Wireless standards support slipping. However, companies supporting WAP are also supporting alternative technologies that are promising a single HTML development environment, rather than backing WML and HTML, eliminating the need for additional infrastructure, such as a WAP gateway...

News.Com: Palm devices with color screen coming soon. But the release also presents a new set of thorny issues for the company, which has so far predicated its marketing and development strategy on a so-called Zen of Palm principle, which mandates keeping devices as simple as possible, even at the expense of cooler features.

• ZDNN: From March 16, 1999; Catching up with the creators of the Palm

TechWeb: Phone.com To Acquire AtMotion. The goal of Phone.com (formerly known as Unwired Planet) is to create a unified phone/PDA platform capable of handling WAP, short message service, and enhanced circuit voice capabilities such as unified messaging and voice recognition.

Time Digital: Checking the Interweather. Check the weather - the weather in cyberspace, that is. Like the earth's atmosphere, the Internet is a vast, complex system, one that has its own patterns and disturbances, and those disturbances can affect your own access to the Web.

• Mappa.Mundi Magazine: From December 1, 1999; MIDS Maps the Internet World

December 22, 1999
NY Times: In Season of Giving, Europe Offers Special Challenges for Online Retailers. Across Europe, too, retailers are hoping that this will be a breakthrough period for electronic commerce. But merchants in Europe have already found that varied laws, languages and customs are posing challenges that their American counterparts have largely not had to face.

SF Chronicle: E-Tailers Creating Last-Minute Frenzy. Like entry into a secret club, consumers originally had to be directly solicited by the retailer to even learn of these deals. But Web sites quickly sprang up that gave away the passwords, an event the retailers have decided they welcome. ``If posting the password either attracts a new customer or encourages a returning customer to shop again, we're happy,'' said Amazon spokesman Bill Curry

• ZDNN: From December 14, 1999; E-tailers learn a lesson -- the hard way

WebWord.Com: Thinking Beyond Web Usability. Interview with Donald Norman. Usability is always secondary. It's never the most important thing about an experience. I will accept poor usability if I get what I need, if the total experience is great. I will reject perfect usability if I am not rewarded with a useful, engaging experience.

ClickZ: End The Patent Wars. That, in a nutshell, is the problem with offering patent protection to business processes like reverse auctions or one-click ordering. The patent in this case doesn't just protect the way you did something; it protects all ways of doing that thing. Rather than supporting innovation, business process patents stop it in its tracks.

MIT Technology Review: Dr. Email Will See You Now. EchoMail, says Shiva, is a combination of pattern recognition techniques that, by decoding, routing and in many cases answering e-mail, lends his customers the “sensory and cognitive ability” needed to win customers online and keep their loyalty.

• PC World: From February 5, 1999; E-Mail Isn't the Best Route to an E-Merchant

InfoWorld: WAP-enabled phones to get voice interface. "It [makes PDAs] obsolete ..." Grant said. "People have to go out and purchase a PDA. They already have a cell phone." According to Grant, it will be apparent by the first quarter of 2000 that voice-based wireless technology will become dominant in the mobile phone industry.

Internet Week: Beenz.com And Mondex Team On Smart Card. Beenz.com and Mondex International Ltd., a division of MasterCard International Inc., said yesterday that they are jointly developing a smart card capable of carrying both Mondex's own digital cash and beenz.

NY Times: AOL Extends Its Borders by Buying Mapquest.com. [Jordan Rohan of Wit Capital] He added, "Many of AOL's users are not aware that free Web-based content exists outside of AOL. This enables AOL to get inside the walls. Other companies have to pay a lot to get inside those walls."

MIT Technology Review: Gifts that Keep Giving: Patents. This Christmas, universities added patents to their wish list. In the latest trend in corporate philanthropy, large companies are giving away millions in unused intellectual property, and walking away with a tax write-off—and plenty of good will.

December 23, 1999
FEED Magazine: The Internet's Foolish Lawsuits. Clay Shirky. These big companies would do anything to find a way to use what they have -- resources -- to make up for what they lack -- drive -- and they may have found an answer to their prayers in lawsuits. Lawsuits offer a return to the days of the fight between the big and the small, a fight the big players love.

Wired News: Leonardo da Cyber Controversy. The suit, filed by French company Transasia Corporation, demands that Association Leonardo halt the use of the word "Leonardo" in its Web sites, projects, or services, according to Leonardo editor Roger Malina. "I feel outraged," said Malina. "I think its obviously part of this Internet fever right now."

ClickZ: Users Do The Branding. You might list a plethora of printers, for example, but apart from the brand names attached to them, the differences between them might be minimal. What would make you choose one printer over another? If you don't have a brand preference, the opinions of other users may sway your choice. This is why concepts like uTOK will be the next bright lights on the Internet scene.

Industry Standard: Agence France Presse's Stymied Net Strategy. But unlike those private-sector competitors, the quasi-governmental AFP is run by a board made up of eight representatives from media companies, three government officials and two staff members. The agency is subject to arcane bylaws, which prevent it from raising public capital.

Washington Post: It's Clicking in Europe, Slowly. European tastes and preferences mount a serious challenge to those who wish to sell online here. The Web shopping site for Lands' End in Germany, for example, isn't allowed to mention its unconditional refund policy. That's because German retailers, which normally don't allow returns after 14 days, sued and won a court ruling blocking mention of it.

• Forbes: From March 29, 1999; Europe: The next frontier

NY Times: Web Sites Bloom in China, and Are Weeded. It is a delicate balancing act for China's leaders and for the commercial Web sites. They must preserve the sense of freewheeling openness that makes the Internet so popular while maintaining the control over information and dissent that the Communist government requires.

• Business Week: From November 18, 1999; A Chinese Wall around the Net? Why Beijing Gave In

NY Times: On the Net, Curiosity Has a Price: Registration. No matter where you go on the Internet these days, it seems you won't get very far without first registering, signing in or becoming a "member," all of which require that you provide your name, your e-mail address and other personal information.

USA Today: Tech support lacks the human touch. "If the company can give you support online without devoting a person to that support, then you go away happy, and it costs them less money," says Shane Rau, a senior editor at PC World magazine, which does an annual examination of the state of tech support. "The trend is more online tech support, downloading files, chat rooms, e-mail and posting questions."

• PC World: From November 15, 1999; Dell Revamps Web Site

December 24, 1999
SJ Mercury: Web retailers brace for post-holiday returns. Online merchants say one of the main ways they prepared for after-Christmas returns was to do everything possible before Christmas to make sure their customers were happy with the items they ordered. ``We provide oodles of information about our products up front, all intended to help make the right purchase in the first place,'' says Bill Curry, spokesman for the online retail giant Amazon.com...

LA Times: Buying Insurance Via the Net Waits. Even those who start an insurance purchase on the Internet, though, typically must send in a paper form with their signature to complete the transaction. The only exception so far is ECoverage, a San Francisco-based online insurance services company launched earlier this year.

ClickZ: The Brutal Truth About Online Support - Part Two. Unfortunately, a high rate of customer satisfaction is not usually one of the numbers they are chasing. Venture capitalists tend not to look at customer satisfaction numbers with the same scrutiny they apply to revenue, margins, and customer acquisition costs.

• AtNewYork: From December 3, 1999; Buying the Place With Beads: The Customer Loyalty Illusion. Jason Chervokas.

USA Today: 'Buffy' fan sites fight off 'demon' Fox. The legal tactics are part of an "ongoing policing" that also includes sites run by fans of such Fox shows as The Simpsons and King of the Hill, Fox says. Three years ago, when The X-Files sites were targeted, fans responded with thousands of angry e-mail messages.

• Industry Standard: From January 13, 1999; WB's Acme Explodes Onto the Web

Industry Standard: RealNetworks Sues Streambox.com. In October, Streambox.com, a Seattle-based software company, issued a giddy press release announcing that its programmers had "cracked" the source code of RealNetworks' RealPlayer, allowing users to copy and distribute previously restricted audio and video. Soon, it may be facing RealNetworks in court.

LA Times: Toysrus.com CEO Blames Snafu on Several Factors. Analysts suggested the company should have warned of its problems before a Tuesday night e-mail, but Barbour said Toysrus.com believed it could still deliver. "Being a parent myself and having shopped on the Internet . . . I felt we should put it out there and pro-act," Barbour said...

Web Review: Visual Language - Global Communication for the 21st Century. Review of Robert Horn's book Visual Language. Written in the "visual language" it describes, the book reads like a very dense graphic novel—it's full of ideas for your next design project ... and many beyond. While not written specifically for the web design audience, much of the information will be of value to developers of web sites that use graphical elements to enhance text.

December 25, 1999
Merry Christmas from Tomalak's Realm!

NY Times: The Internet Wears Out Its Welcome. Still, the historians say, there does seem to be one truly distinctive feature about the present. "I don't think there has ever been anything like the Internet and cyberspace craze in terms of media hype," said Robert C. Post, a technology historian and a former curator at the Smithsonian Institution.

NY Times: A Governor Leads the Charge Against Taxing the Internet. [Virginia Governor James Gilmore] "Government is entitled to the revenue it needs to provide services, but it is not entitled to reach into new areas to get revenues it doesn't need," he said. "Government is not entitled to a taxation windfall just because a new industry has emerged."

December 26, 1999
Useit.Com: Predictions for the Web in Year 2000. Micropayments will start with value-added content; mobile access; advice and sales become unbundled and physical experience environments may launch.

BBC News: People wielding power: Tim Berners-Lee. Streamed RealAudio. BBC Radio 4's World At One programme features a week-long series of interviews with those exerting power in modern Britain.

Builder.Com: AOL's Browser Strategy: Crazy Like a Fox. Dan Shafer. It seems to me--and I said this to the assembled faithful in New Orleans--that we can now see the browser landscape pretty clearly. AOLScrape will be quite content, thank you very much, to foist off the Netscape browser with its proprietary whistles on the tens of millions of captive users it has...

InfoWorld: Why we owe our thanks to the Y2K problem and how we can learn not to fail going forward. But we will soon see a time when the pressures of being to market first collide with the reality of what can be coded. The result will be some spectacular, high-profile explosions. The world's year-2000 problems should also have acquainted us with our friend, Mr. Contingency Plan.

InfoWorld: Brace yourself for the Wireless Century. Just like distinguishing between electronic-businesses and brick-and-mortar companies will become obsolete, wireless communications will eventually become the de facto standard in communications, thus eliminating the need for columns that chronicle the emergence of the technology -- and thus eliminating the need for me in this capacity.

December 27, 1999
SJ Mercury: Taking the Internet out of `the dark ages'. ``We're still in the dark ages, we really are,'' said Tannenbaum, senior technical staff member for IBM Corp.'s corporate Ease-of-Use group in Austin. ``Wireless will be the key. We're going to see computing shrink and disappear into other devices, letting us get at the Internet through things we can't even imagine yet.''

Microsoft Backstage: A Brief History of Microsoft on the Web. As we prepare to enter the year 2000, it makes sense to reflect on all that has happened since 1994 - the year that microsoft.com launched its public Internet Web domain with a home page. This isn't meant to be an exhaustive account of the early days of Microsoft on the Web, just a short compilation of history and reminisces by some of the "old timers" who helped build the foundation for microsoft.com.

NY Times: Web Merchants Discover Extended Warranties. WarrantyNow and RevBox are among the first companies to offer warranties online, and though their businesses differ in significant ways, the basic approach is the same. Both companies provide Web retailers with the technology to sell extended warranties and to offer consumers a secure site where they can keep track of the warranties and get help with service.

LA Times: Expectations Are High for a Future That's Wireless. The shift so far has been a slow one, limited largely by the cost and capability of U.S. wireless systems. In the coming years, however, cutting the cord will likely become easier and cheaper, and the service offerings will approach the reliability and functionality of wired phones and computers.

NY Times: Toronto TV Station Adopts Web-Page Format. Not everyone agrees that television will be able to match the Web. Edward Tufte, author of three books on information design and professor emeritus at Yale University, says that dividing the screen is helpful, but multiple fields of information on a TV screen cannot compete with the interactive features of the Web.

• Useit.Com: From February 15, 1997; TV Meets the Web

• Online Journalism Review: From October 27, 1998; Inside the Online Newsroom: MSNBC.com

Red Herring: Unsung heroes of the Internet. Because it's one thing to talk grandly about DSL and how its high-speed connectivity will foster more online transactions. But without people like Mr. Maley to hook up the wires, the connection never happens.

News.Com: Real wins temporary injunction in software lawsuit. A U.S. District Court judge has granted a temporary injunction against Streambox in a lawsuit filed against the software maker by RealNetworks last week.

Wired News: E-Books Turn Over a New Leaf. "Digital rights management is incredibly complicated politically and cuts to the core of everybody's business model," said David Ornstein, chief technical officer at NuvoMedia. "The minute you talk about building standards for digital rights management, you must talk about what things the standard allows."

December 28, 1999
NY Times: Time of Turmoil at Willy Loman & Co.. For six months, he searched for a sales position that would be "immune" from the Internet. Finally, in May, he landed one, with Parker Interior Plantscape, a company in Scotch Plains, N.J., that designs floral landscapes for office buildings and hotels.

InfoWorld: Holidays offer lessons to e-tailers. But Cohen believes e-tailers are also getting a bad wrap on customer service, especially when compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. E-tailers provide better customer service, not worse, by being able to answer more detailed technical questions than a seasonal worker at a traditional retail outlet can...

News.Com: Study: Web success to be measured in new ways. Forecasts like Schmitt's go to the heart of doubts about soaring stock valuations for ".com" companies, which have risen on expectations of great things to come. Although analysts, executives and investors have developed creative ways of ferreting value out of raw traffic numbers, the coming year could spark growing demand for more detailed and harder evidence of success.

• AtNewYork: From August 20, 1999; New Media, New Metrics: A Proposal for Industry Measurements. Jason Chervokas.
• Salon: From February 5, 1999; Reach for the hits. Scott Rosenberg.

TechWeb: Talk City CEO Chats About Online Communities. Q&A with Peter Friedman, president and CEO of Talk City. Community is the most distinguishing part of the Internet. It allows people to engage [in chats], and it's fundamental to the human condition. It's market research where a product manager with a credit card can construct a survey and run it.

CIO: Inventing the Enterprise. What is it that inspires, or allows, someone to invent something as bedrock as packet-switching, as seminal as the Internet protocol? Necessity—that is, personal necessity. Unix, TCP/IP and Ethernet all started life as internal solutions to departmental problems, with no thought of the marketplace beyond.

News.Com: Coalition sues to bar distribution of DVD cracking tool. The lawsuit names individuals who registered Web sites from California, New York, Australia, Denmark and other areas, as well as dozens of "John Does," charging that they are facilitating the illegal copying of DVDs by posting the DeCSS program on their sites or "knowingly" linking to it.

ZDNN: Is iWon destined to be a loser? But analysts call the cash giveaway a cheap shot at entering the portal market. Despite the traffic figures, they remain skeptical that iWon will ever make more money than it has to spend to lasso customers. "If you run a heavy TV campaign saying you're giving away money, the curious will click," Allen said. "It's a huge traffic driver, but that doesn't mean the company has a long-term future."

Business Week: Google Can End Your Search for a Great Search Site. No banner ads, no "extra services" offered, no tiny type that's hard to read. Compare that to the information overload that assaults you when you go to most portal pages to do a search. Eventually, you'll see banner ads on the search results page, Brin says. But he promises that the home page will always retain its clean and crisp style.

CIO: Don't Stop Thinkin' About Tomorrow. Today, organizations like the United States Postal Service and brick-and-mortar retailers use scenario planning to understand the effects of external factors on their businesses, whether they be technology driven (e-mail and e-commerce), political (deregulation) or economic (sudden downturns).

SJ Mercury: Net dims popular economic gauges. As consumer and business activity shift to the largely unmeasured Internet, current economic gauges such as the purchasing managers' survey could become less reliable. That would hamper decisions based on those data such as whether bonds are a good buy or whether the Federal Reserve will raise or lower interest rates.

BBC News: Greenwich could mark web time. The idea of Get is to provide a common standard for all electronic commerce around the world. But it would also maintain the status of the Greenwich Observatory as the home of time for the next millennium.

• Wired News: From December 2, 1998; Time for a Change?

USA Today: Clinton to crack down on Net drug sales. But they are hampered when the patient lives in one state, the pharmacist in another and the operator in a third, said Dr. Jane Henney, FDA commissioner. ''Many of the traditional safeguards that have been in place for many years are breaking down,'' she said.

December 29, 1999
Wired News: EToys Relents, Won't Press Suit. After being pilloried in news groups and deluged by angry email, eToys said on Wednesday it would not press its lawsuit against the Swiss art site etoy. "People are telling us they want the art of etoy and the e-commerce of eToys to co-exist," said eToys spokesman Jonathan Cutler. "We've agreed. We're not pressing the lawsuit."

SJ Mercury: Copying of DVD movies targeted. The lawsuit, brought in Santa Clara County Superior Court, also seeks to stop Web sites from merely offering a link to other sites that carry the allegedly illegal software. If successful, the suit could chill free speech on the Internet by making it a crime to allow people to click through to a site where they can obtain illegal material.

InfoWorld: Y2K call-center crisis. "If someone gets to the point where they need to send an e-mail to a customer service rep, the Web site has failed," says Greg Gianforte, CEO of Right Now. "We've realized that the 80-20 rule applies: Twenty percent of the information will answer 80 percent of the questions. That is what a Web-based customer-support system does well."

USA Today: ABC to dot-coms: Pay up before play. Show me the money. That's ABC's signal for dot-com advertisers looking to suit up for Super Bowl XXXIV. ABC is making dot-com advertisers pay in advance for time in the advertising showcase. ABC is using an arsenal of defenses against the threat of deadbeats, including letters of credit and escrow accounts.

• SF Chronicle: From December 10, 1999; Firms Leery of Getting Paid With Paper

Editor & Publisher: News Publisher Strategies For the 2000s. Steve Outing. I asked an assortment of industry visionaries to gaze into their crystal balls and make long-term Internet strategy recommendations that news companies should employ.

ZDNN: The Net is not good enough. Everything (including the site you're looking at right now, of course) could be so much better. And when I think about the work that's going to be involved in making it better, I sometimes wonder if we're all up to the challenge, given the many distractions -- everything from IPO envy to plain old bad press -- that slow us down.

• Useit.Com: From August 9, 1998; The Web Usage Paradox: Why Do People Use Something This Bad?

Industry Standard: Blair: U.K. Will Own Net Time. "We've made a good start," says Gareth Donovan, project development director for GET. "By making the information free and the tools free for everyone, we hope people will adopt the scheme because it's free, it works, and it's easily available."

December 30, 1999
ClickZ: E-tailer Testing Season. In many cases,