Friday, May 19, 2000

"But a number of oil companies say the idea, while an obvious boon for drivers, doesn't adequately benefit the oil industry.

"Unlike airline seats or hotel rooms which represent a loss when they aren't used, gasoline doesn't disappear when its not bought," said one oil company spokesman.

"We don't have to bargain away gasoline. The benefit would be brand loyalty, but there are a lot of effective ways to build that.""

redux [02.25.00]
Priceline Name Your Own Price For Gasoline On The Internet, Then Get Your Price At A Local Gas Station
"Starting May 20th, Priceline WebHouse Club, a licensed affiliate of priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN), will launch a new service that makes it possible for drivers to simply ignore the price at the pump. Instead, they can go to priceline.com on the Internet and name their own price for up to 50 gallons of gas a month. "

""This is the perfect time for consumers to do something about the high cost of gas. It's the battle of the titans -- the global Internet vs. global gas prices. OPEC was a force to increase the cost of gas. Now, the Internet is the new counter-force to lower it.""

PC World My Agent Will Call Your Agent
""This world that we are moving into of agent-mediated commerce is going to fundamentally change interactions between buyers and sellers," says Jeff Kephart, manager of the Agents and Emergent Phenomena Group at [IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center]. "I don't think it's more than a couple of years off.""

When a pair of prominent Net companies flame out within days of each other, you can just smell the trend stories cooking in the media oven: Dot-Com Death Rattle! E-Extinction! Net Nada!

But just the slightest attention to these companies' sites and products offers a different view. The Net business may or may not be in trouble, but the failures of these companies don't offer much of a weather vane for this industry. Their problems stem not from general market conditions but from some very specific mistakes that more successful Web sites learned to avoid years ago."

Infoworld The best loyalty program for your Web site may be better customer service
"Honestly, how much distinguishes Amazon from its competitors? So why is Amazon a market leader? Certainly, coming to the game early counts for something. But that alone isn't the answer.

No, Amazon is Amazon because it provides things such as customer service just a little bit better than its competitors. Not always great, just a little bit better. And it's the little differences that pay off big-time with customers. "

News.com Dot-coms learn a lesson from Boo.com
"This first major dot-com collapse came the day after U.K. electronic auction company QXL and Germany's Ricardo agreed to a merger valued initially at $937 million.

These two events are consistent with Gartner's prediction last November that there would be dot-com failures and dot-com mergers in 2000. Gartner's hype cycle indicates that "e" hype would diminish by the first quarter, primarily due to deficient business strategies, poor implementations and the use of the wrong technology.

Unfortunately, Boo.com failed in all respects--most noticeably in its almost unusable, avatar-based system that demanded high-speed access. When coupled with poor business management and an uncontrolled cost base, the result was inevitable. "

Thursday, May 18, 2000

"Other than the heartbreak of watching UPI repeatedly rolled into the morgue, this latest (and, I hope, final) death is a horrifying lesson on how to ruin a news operation in the New Era."

"I know most reporters think they could run a news operation better than management, but in the case of UPI it's actually true. With the mid-1999 staff, a $20 Internet account and one sales rep -- and none of the waterhead managers who shuffled around the H Street headquarters without a single clue -- the wire could have kept and expanded its portal accounts, offered lowball prices to small publishers, and most importantly, offer an alternative to the Associated Press, which has become the Tass of America.

During the dot-com fervor of last year, a vaguely promising UPI...could have done an IPO and been flush with cash and talent. And a whole generation of otherwise-bland little content providers would have had the chance to work for a legendary news wire. It is often said that a month at UPI provided more education than years of silly journalism school.

No longer. The shabby remains of United Press are now in the hands of the Moonies, and nobody who claims to be a journalist will come anywhere near it."

redux [04.20.00]
Editor and Publisher Online Newspaper Sites Must Adjust To Life Without 'Editions'
"An online news site is more akin to a wire service than a printed publication, because it can (and should) publish news on around-the-clock basis. While the notion of "editions" still prevails at many news sites, the trend is more toward a constant publishing cycle, where news is published whenever it breaks.

Newspaper Web sites are in a period of transition, as more and more of them move into publishing news throughout the day instead of posting stories at specified times. While the idea of publishing Web "editions" is a comfortable one for a newspaper company, editions are really counter to the nature of the Internet publishing medium. Ideally, a news Web site will publish news without a set schedule."

The Round Table Group Young Adults Most Often Get Info From Net - Study
"Young adults say the Internet, not newspapers or television, is their number one source of information, a Round Table Group survey has found.

Fifty-nine percent of Internet users in the 18- to 24-year-old age group say that their household gets more "useful information" from the Net than from newspapers; 53 percent say they receive more information from the Internet than from TV.

Fully 84 percent say that their household is more likely to use the Internet to find useful information than to go to the public library. For specific questions, 68 percent are more inclined to consult the Internet than turn to a newspaper and 67 percent are more likely to go to the Net than rely on television."

Wednesday, May 17, 2000

Critics said the venture could be a cash cow in the future because it will help build brand loyalty and perhaps create a generation of future AOL customers.

AOL@School, being launched Wednesday, will have separate portals for elementary, middle and high school students that will help pupils reach the best educational Web sites, officials said.

Students will see no ads - other than the AOL logo - will not be able to purchase goods online and will be blocked from accessing pornography or other offensive material, officials said. Students will be able to send e-mail and instant messages to encourage group online activities or to establish pen pals in faraway schools."

redux [02.23.00]
Wired News AOL Ups German Access Ante
"AOL Europe announced Tuesday that it plans to give all German primary and secondary schools and 900,000 German schoolteachers free access to the Internet."

"It can never be too early to start communicating the necessary skills," [Chancellor Gerhard] Schroeder said."

Netfuture On Constructivism in Education
"..."student-centered, active, and experiential" is all too often taken to mean that we can just turn students over to their own devices and somehow they will learn everything that needs learning. In particular, the constructivist focus on the child is assumed to imply a de-emphasis of the teacher's role, as if the two stood in opposition.

But this is to miss the heart of the matter, which is that learning grows out of relationship. If you really understand that learning is not primarily a matter of content shoveled into a container, then you must also recognize that what the student learns most decisively is a set of human gestures, a strengthening of certain inner movements, a way of grasping (and being grasped by) the world.

In other words, education is not primarily a matter of learning subjects. What the student learns is the teacher. If you can recall a teacher who changed your life in a memorable way, what you remember will almost certainly not be a particular body of information he passed along; it will, rather, be the kind of person he was. You learned a way of standing in the world. The reason we need to approach ever new subjects is that we need to learn what it means to be a human being facing ever new aspects of the world."

Tuesday, May 16, 2000

"The near-universal disregard with which intellectual property is treated leaves anyone with even the slightest interest in their own rights thinking that the population of the Internet consists almost entirely of beady-eyed, slack-jawed warezd00dz. But moralizing never got anybody anywhere, save nailed to a tree. And since piracy is going to continue no matter what the courts or copyright-holders do, Metallica and the AP and anybody else with complaints about the state of intellectual property rights on the Web is going to have to do some hard thinking fast.

"First one with a business plan wins."

redux [02.05.00]
Reason Magazine Copy Catfight
"There is an inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of speech, a tension between your right to control a story you've written and my right to use it as raw material for my own work. Thanks to two trends, that tension is turning rapidly into a collision... On one hand, as information has grown more valuable, copyright and trademark law has become increasingly restrictive. At the same time, there has been, in the words of MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins, an "explosion of grassroots, participatory culture," a new high-tech folkway that not only draws on pop culture but appropriates from it more easily than ever before, and disseminates itself on a wider scale."

Feed Daily
"PUT YOURSELF in Microsoft's place. After battling the DOJ lawsuit and the ILOVEYOU virus, and beating down sixteen-year-olds for setting up Web sites with names like www.windowslover.com, the company's public image has deteriorated to the point that even a TV ad blitz featuring a sweater-clad Bill Gates can't overcome rising distrust. What would you do? Sic lawyers on a popular, grass-roots Web site? Probably not, but that's the latest gambit from Redmond. The conflict that is brewing between Microsoft and the "News for Nerds" site Slashdot is more than just another David-and-Goliath story -- the resolution could altogether delete the idea of on-line anonymity."

"Last week, administrators at AndoverNet, the owners of Slashdot, received a lawyerly letter from a J. K. Weston of Microsoft, demanding that Slashdot remove or censor some of the thousands of daily, anonymous posts to the site, posts that contained "unauthorized reproductions of Microsoft's copyrighted work." The letter invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DCMA) and stated that as an ISP, Slashdot was responsible for the content on their servers and potentially liable for damages, even if the text was placed there by shadowy Mister Nobodies."

Sunday, May 14, 2000

Groups that have traditionally had little influence here are finding their voices and taking action on the Internet. Farmers like the Kimuras escape the huge, bureaucratic distribution system that has been sucking up their profits. Working mothers are banding together to form business ventures. Small companies are using the Internet to expand business and decrease reliance on a primary corporate customer. These are all revolutionary developments by Japanese standards, and not limited to marginal players."

redux [04.23.00]
The New York Times When Villages Go Global: How a Byte of Knowledge Can Be Dangerous, Too
[requires 'free' registration]
"The prospects seemed bright when the Internet was recently introduced in a remote part of the mountainous Cotopoxi region in Ecuador. Under the guidance of aid workers, Quichua-speaking peasants planned to gather crop information and sell their crafts over the Web.

Soon, though, it was discovered that some of the men were using the computer to visit pornographic sites. "

"Dismayed, the women began to question how the men were treating them, and a debate ensued over the common practice of beating women. Although use of the Internet was later curtailed, its introduction unexpectedly generated discussion on a once taboo topic.

"The changes created by the Internet in rich industrialized nations are well known, affecting everything from how people date to how they work. But less is known about the impact on societies with limited contact with the rest of the world. As such experiments multiply, at least one outcome seems certain: the way people in these communities relate to each other and with the world is likely to be altered forever."

Netfuture I'm Glad The Internet 'Corrodes' My Culture
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.

Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).

It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."

The Freedom Forum Katz: geek and proud
""It's appealing to me," Katz added, "that people who have always been perceived as outcasts, marginalized, different, have all of a sudden become the only people who understand how the world works. And you can see it's freaking out the rest of the world."

"These kids have done something unprecedented in the world, which is they have created this rich, diverse and critically important universe almost by themselves — without help or support from any of these other institutions. What they've done is now becoming one of the most significant social institutions in the world, and everyone else is trying to figure out what's happened."

"This is the first time I can think of that a culture of kids understands so much more than any adults about something so important. Sometimes I think if you're not 15 or 16, you're already beginning to fall behind in this culture.""