August 2000

Wanted Joseph Bosco, for the crime of ogling at girls in Sweden and not even writing to me about it. Better do so quickly before someone searches for your name and finds it on my site!

A guy called Baumgartner at the RPI set up a site that lets people auction their votes. Users of Gnutella (and Napster) are free-riding. People are faking videos real-time. Author’s reviews are forged. Life in the 21st century doesn’t look promising ;-)

Amazon.com moved retailers to the web, and disintermediated retail inventory. SimonSays.com is a publisher (Simon & Schuster) on the Web. Stephen King’s an author on the Web. You can buy his book from him directly, and online. He’s releasing The Plant in installments. Each installment will be about a dollar. That’s pretty cheap for an online book, but then, he only has server storage and tracking costs and all that. He says he’ll stop writing the next part if people don’t pay enough. Payment rate is over 75% so far. This is an experiment to watch.

The Economist has an article on The failure of new media – about how the Internet’s a disappointment. In fact they have lots of articles on the Internet.

Don’t know what a web log is? It’s a site where people talk – usually about the Web. Some are discussions. Some are moderated. Some are narratives – like mine. Scripting news is my favourite, and SlashDot’s another popular one. Blogger’s the most popular, I hear.

AstaLaVista is an ‘underground search engine’. I’d been there before, and since its survived this long, it must be good.

An update on the Internet cable scenario.

inc.com has lots of good articles on anything to do with business – business plans, customer service, e-commerce, law, strategy, etc. Especially their guides.

I-DNS looks like a great concept. You can register a domain name in any language. Localized Internet is taking off like mad.

The IT Act will be implemented in September. We’re just done with our business proposal. If we rush in now, we may be just in time to get a first mover advantage. But we’re losing the lead each day. Read about itsvalidated.com.

These days I need to search a lot for images. images.altavista.com and gallery.yahoo.com have proven very handy. To me, it seems Altavista’s the eternal innovator, and gives away its lead to Yahoo. They came up with the image service first (and its still better). But their babelfish language translator is still one of its kind.

Why do we drive on the left? The medieval nobility wielded their sword on the right (mostly), and rode on the left, so as to chop off oncoming horsemen. Peasants walked on the right to avoid the swords. While the New Scientist’s last word reveals why Napolean drove on the right, it’s not clear why Americans do. Kevin Lowey has a different opinion, though.

Direct Hit (from AskJeeves) is a search engine. Copernic is a software that searches multiple sites. Flyswat is a way of interfacing a messaging board with your browser. I’ve heard they’re all cool.

What’s more of a rage than profitable dot-coms? Bankrupt dot-coms, as listed by dotcomfailures, startupfailures, and fuckedcompany. Scepticism’s gone far enough to make this web economy bullshit generator a great hit.

While hunting for some stuff on public relations on the Internet, I found 10 ways public relations specialists can use the Internet. Actually, the links are useful to anyone doing any news research. What’s Next Online, 12th July has a good writeup on how to research online. I did find some good Internet PR related links too on About.com, Connecting Online and Impulse Research.

Internet Telephony in India is legal. Some stories: 1 | 2 | 3

There’s a whole series of articles on Umashankar Dikshit – a Silicon Valley pujari. Not a bad idea – epujari.com (which incidentally is on sale.) Following the articles on Rediff and USA Today, there’s this really funny piece. Now I’ve heard everything. The San Francisco Chronicle reported some weeks ago that a Hindu priest in Silicon Valley called Umashankar Dixit is in great demand to perform Lakshmi poojas when e-commerce startups are launched by Indians, as an increasing number are. Mr. Dixit says modestly that he is considered a ’lucky hand’ because his God is Ganesha, the remover of obstacles. He – Mr. Dixit that is, not Ganesha – has been compensated in cash and stock options by several startups and says he has already done very well from the IPOs of successful companies like Exodus Communications. Rediff’s US edition and USA Today have since come up with their own breathless takes on Mr. Dixit, reporting among other things that he spends an hour every morning, presumably just after sandhyavandanam, on the Internet monitoring the financial markets. ...

While we’re on metrics, here are some search engine metrics from useit.com, Media Metrix, Nielsen’s NetRatings and StatMarket. Yahoo’s right on top, followed by MSN.

With network-tools, you can find out where a particular computer is, who’s it registered with, and how information travels there.

The latest browser stats say that 69% of the world uses, Internet Explorer, while only 27% use Netscape. BrowserWatch says 57%-26%. Netscape 6 might do something about it, given that Microsoft’s split.