Links to some articles on the Web I found interesting.

Economist.com Imagine that the site is very successful, say among the top few hundred on the web. If so, it may be able to generate 10m page views a month. At $3.75 per thousand views, that means revenue of $37,500 a month. Take out hardware, software and bandwidth costs, and enough might be left to support two employees or so.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 3/1/2001 01:30:52 AM

She Reads Customers' Minds She Reads Customers' Minds
posted by Doug Beeferman at 1/16/2001 12:47:47 PM

The Real Thing: Democracy as a Contact Sport "Why are you using a public institution to promote a junk food product?"
posted by Doug Beeferman at 12/18/2000 07:15:05 PM

Forbes.com: After the Crash "The market became filled with people who had no understanding of the Internet," he says over tea at his Tokyo offices. "They had no passion for the Internet, they just had a passion for making money. It was a boom without belief. With the market correction, those who are passionate just about making money are leaving. Now it is a better situation in which to make investments. Prices are more realistic."
posted by Doug Beeferman at 12/18/2000 07:10:51 PM

Salon.com Technology | Hunting the secret cyber-stash To some, geocaching will seem like no more than a bunch of gadget nuts hunting for each other's junk, but that doesn't do justice to the poetry of the process. Geocaching is like sending a love letter to the world, a secret place, vista, a favorite hike or a secret cave that the stasher shares with those who "get it." The coordinates on the GPS receiver are merely markers of someone else's memories, offered up anonymously to the strangers who care to follow.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 12/11/2000 04:41:10 PM

Drug firm tries to control findings He called their attempt "data dredging," in which researchers go back over their data and slice the numbers to come up with a positive outcome.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 11/1/2000 07:45:12 PM

Decoding the Candidate The Bushism is challenging the malapropism as an eponym for lexical near-misses
posted by Doug Beeferman at 11/1/2000 09:37:52 AM

Boston Globe Online / Nation | World / Economic view: US, Canada as one ''The corporations and the think tanks and the so-called `working groups' float these notions to see how much we scream in horror,'' she said. ''After a while, the screaming fades. And the trial balloons become official policy.''
posted by Doug Beeferman at 10/23/2000 11:06:15 AM

Ann Pasternak Slater - A Bergen-Belsen Correspondence Frustrated that the architecture didn’t look olde worlde enough, the Yale authorities once poured acid on some of the buildings to speed up their decay.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 10/12/2000 10:29:07 PM

Knowledge@Wharton - In hearing the proposal for this type of deal, says Cachon, "most people’s reactions would be, ‘Well, you’re doing this only to exploit me. If you’re going to be better off, then I’m going to be worse off’. But the research shows that if you implement these revenue-sharing contracts, both parties can be better off than before." Surprisingly, that is true even though, when revenue sharing is implemented correctly, the supplier should sell each unit below its production cost.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 10/12/2000 11:30:13 AM

Salon.com Mothers Who Think | Buffett takes a swipe at rich kids "I don't believe in accentuating that by passing along the chips that would enable them to command the resources of society without contributing to society. I believe in leaving them enough so they can do anything -- but not enough so they can do nothing."
posted by Doug Beeferman at 9/28/2000 12:31:45 AM

Go.com, Disney's Dumbest Brand by Rob Walker But Go.com as a proposition for consumers remains roughly equivalent to a Procter & Gamble retail store: Sure, you could go to such a place (if it existed) to buy Tide, but why would you?
posted by Doug Beeferman at 9/22/2000 09:14:57 AM

New York Press - New York's Premier Alternative Newspaper. Arts, Eats, Music, Food, Movies and Opinion Insularity combined with self-satisfaction to produce the worst of both worlds: arrogant stupidity.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 9/12/2000 03:38:55 PM

Salon.com People | Love's labors flossed "Yes, but there's nothing humorous about floss rings," Dix declares. "They had to go out of their way -- not give the dentists time to read the instructions -- to make floss rings funny."
posted by Doug Beeferman at 9/9/2000 10:00:32 AM

But I *like* going to Toys R Us, and real kids like to even more.

Fortune: 9.18.2000 The Last e-Store on the Block No one--certainly no parent--disputes that Lenk has a great market niche. eToys means "you never have to go to Toys "R" Us again," says Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist with respected Sequoia Capital, an early investor. "That is one of the most compelling investment premises I've ever heard." The merits of the idea were brought home to Lenk during Christmas 1996, while shopping for his niece and nephew. "I couldn't find half of what the kids wanted," says Lenk, 38, a bachelor. "I was running around like a madman." So he raised nearly $1 million from family and friends to build a business that solved the problem.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 9/8/2000 05:09:04 PM

Fortune: 9.18.2000 The Dot-Com Factories, Part 4 The luster attached to the hotter Internet incubators, perhaps because of the crowded space, is already fading. "Our opinion is that incubators are the equivalent of veal-fattening pens, where they shove entrepreneurs into cubes with a computer and a T3 line and say, 'Make me money,' " says George Zachary, a partner with the VC firm Mohr Davidow Partners in Menlo Park, Calif.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 9/5/2000 01:35:02 PM

New Scientist: Voice from the grave First he noticed that people who are truly suicidal use a narrower range of frequencies when pronouncing their vowels than people who are just depressed. The voices of suicidal people also become higher pitched. "We find there's a noticeable difference between suicidal and normal, and normal and depressed people," he says.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 8/16/2000 03:03:52 PM

Salon.com Health | See no AIDS, hear no AIDS So here is the latest step Swazi leaders are taking against the worst threat the country has ever faced. Banning miniskirts and blaming schoolgirls. If it weren't so cruelly inept, it would be funny.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 8/15/2000 02:51:15 PM

Some Early Net Entrepreneurs Look for Ways Out Internet veterans who are considering a hiatus or a new career say the hours have been brutal. But they also say the relentlessness of their jobs was easier to accept when the focus was on exploring the creative possibilities of technology, not constructing a blueprint for a public company.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 8/14/2000 09:19:41 PM

Some Early Net Entrepreneurs Look for Ways Out "It's tough to contribute good, new ideas and keep stuff going if everybody's sitting at home eating Fritos, comatose from four years of working this hard," Harmel said.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 8/14/2000 09:19:02 PM

Miracle Engine's Tank is Empty "For hundreds of years, there have been people who claim a source of 'free energy.' Amin is only one them. History shows many break the law, but never the laws of nature."
posted by Doug Beeferman at 8/7/2000 07:43:40 PM

Joel on Software Things You Should Never Do, Part I There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It's harder to read code than to write it.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 8/7/2000 04:07:59 AM

Salon.com Technology | A poster child for Internet idiocy DotComGuy has managed to achieve the unthinkable: He has taken the thrill out of the peep show.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 8/1/2000 09:58:41 PM

Intellectualcapital 7/27/00: Tremain: The New Emperor's Clothes EMP's mistakes reveal not only the difficulties created by great wealth but also the seductive illusions of celebrity architecture.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 8/1/2000 02:58:57 PM

CNET.com - News - Entertainment & Media - Web users have case of short-term memory "It doesn't give any sense of time because almost everything on the Web is about events and articles in the last five years," he said.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 7/17/2000 02:48:46 PM

Salon.com Technology | Britain's first software billionaire He's actually buried not far from William Blake. They could have a pretty interesting discussion if they woke up for five minutes.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 7/10/2000 04:11:44 PM

Intellectualcapital 7/6/00: Lightman: The Laws of Exponential Improvement As Silicon Valley writer Michael Malone has pointed out with respect to one of these laws, they are not actually laws, but instead are propositions that act more like promises from enterprises to keep improving at an exponential rate, though part of what makes these laws so wonderful is that they can be graphed over long periods of time as straight lines on a logarithmic scale.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 7/10/2000 02:30:11 PM

Intellectualcapital 7/6/00: Bishop: Different Worlds "When I look down at what is the political powder keg … I think, this is it," says Richard Florida of the divide between old and new. "It's simmering beneath the surface in California; it's simmering beneath the surface in Seattle. My guess is it's simmering beneath the surface in Texas. And I don't think either political party has sorted this boy out."
posted by Doug Beeferman at 7/6/2000 02:07:04 PM

Salon.com tech | Free to be P-to-P It's A is for advertiser. B is for business, obviously. C is for consumer. D is for developer -- or maybe dummies. E is for employee. F is for Fortune 500. G is for garage start-up ... M is for monetized eyeballs ... Z is for zero-sum game.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 7/6/2000 12:09:24 PM

The Year 2020, Explained That era you thought had only just revved up is in fact just ending -- with a burst of information "goodies" that is typical of scientific era-endings. "You always get the most presents at the end of the year," Saffo said. "Everything kind of piles up at Christmas, even though it takes all year to get there."
posted by Doug Beeferman at 7/5/2000 01:20:14 PM

Forbes (7-3-00) Dead Ringers Ali helped his brother out by standing in for him at an interview with MicroStrategy on the East Coast, so that Hadi could interview the same day at Microsoft out West. "I know his curriculum vitae cold," Ali says. Apparently so. Hadi got both jobs and wound up signing on at Microsoft.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 7/4/2000 03:29:17 PM

Spears' concert lacks luster, but the kids love her Carefully leading a group of polished dancers and musicians, she seemed like nothing so much as the world's luckiest karaoke singer.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 7/2/2000 05:24:16 PM

Isn't "publishing" exactly the same as "sharing research"? Biotech: The Internet, With Soul Right now up to 80 percent of research is wasted, because graduate students and postdocs repeat past experiments as part of their training, and scientists refuse to share their research until it's published, which can be up to two years after the results are compiled.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 7/2/2000 09:38:46 AM

I've always liked this guy: FT.com | News and Analysis | World Article Another concern, Mr Andreessen acknowledges, is that the company's employees, who now number 270, should not leap to the conclusion that the company is already successful, based on its ability to raise money. "We are not cash flow positive, we are not profitable, we are not capable of sustaining operations without funding," Mr Andreessen stresses. "Funding is not the equivalent of revenues. We have not yet proven that we can be successful."
posted by Doug Beeferman at 6/30/2000 10:44:27 AM

Salon.com tech | The science of invention It was Altshuller's stroke of brilliance to view the problems of engineering and innovation in terms of technical contradictions, the concept around which TRIZ pivots. "An invention is the removal of technical contradictions," Altshuller writes, and a moment's reflection proves him correct.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 6/29/2000 02:08:02 PM

Salon.com news | Adiós, Elián Now that your telenovela is over, perhaps your normal childhood can begin again.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 6/29/2000 11:32:08 AM

Against the Grain: Dirty Data Delivers Dead-End Data Mining That brings us back to the original problem with data mining. It merely shows us where customers have been. Marketing devotees have high hopes that such patterns bring predictability about where customers—individuals—are going. But as we’ve already learned, the current cluttered online environment makes those decisions extraordinarily difficult. There are so many distractions, so many brightly colored candy cane trails to divert the naïve online Hansels and Gretels. With so many options, consumers are likely to change their thinking, often on a whim spurred by a better Gingerbread House offer or recommendation from an off-line friend.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 6/28/2000 11:07:07 AM

CNET.com - News - E-Business - End of the beginning Between 1904 and 1908, more than 240 companies competed in the automotive business. Now there are about 40 worldwide.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 6/23/2000 08:51:51 AM

It's an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World/Ads Invade Any Space Possible "There's an ADVERTISEMENT on my BANANA!"
posted by Doug Beeferman at 6/23/2000 12:26:16 AM

Salon.com business | Send in the clowns CEOs are adopting furry mascots, hopping around on pogo sticks, even creating "mirth committees" to monitor fluctuations in their organization's "happy quotient."
posted by Doug Beeferman at 6/21/2000 11:37:11 AM

It's Geek to Me/Computer usage caters to English-speakers Globally, the problem is much more acute. Worldwide, it's estimated that 80% of the data stored in computers is in English.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 6/14/2000 06:15:44 PM

FORTUNE.com: 6/14/2000 - Valley Talk: The Dumbest Dot-Com There is some delicious irony to the thought that these more or less ordinary Net surfers should be the beneficiaries of a scheme in which some of Silicon Valley's hotshot financiers so thoroughly outsmarted themselves
posted by Doug Beeferman at 6/14/2000 03:22:30 PM

Go Courtney!: Salon.com tech | Courtney Love does the math Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 6/14/2000 08:00:10 AM

CNET.com - News - Entertainment & Media - Loudcloud rains on Thundercloud's parade "It's too bad, because we like it," he said. "But in the end, it's just a name. I think the perception of the significance is a little different on the East Coast than it is on the West Coast."
posted by Doug Beeferman at 6/13/2000 09:35:41 PM

New Scientist: Half fish, half robot Kevin Warwick, a cyberneticist at Reading University, believes that it may even one day be possible to have your brain transferred to a robot when your body dies. It would be extremely difficult, "but mapping the entire brain to a robot can't be ruled out", he says. More realistic, he says, is connecting electronic devices such as mobile phones directly into our brains.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 6/8/2000 01:51:55 PM

cover story / Parenting: Is Aol Worse Than TV? by RALPH GARDNER JR. (06/12/00) It's ironic in a way. A generation that prided itself on turning parenting into an art form and choreographing every aspect of its children's happiness -- starting with mothers' groups, continuing through play dates and the right schools -- seems to have been blindsided by this latest twist. Never before, to my knowledge, has the world faced a technology where the average third-grader is more proficient than the average CEO, not that that's saying a lot. One dad told me with a mixture of alarm and pride about the way his 10-year-old daughter managed to jimmy the parental controls he'd placed on the family computer.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 6/6/2000 03:05:20 PM

TheStandard.com: Just Managing: Public Enemy These new ways of doing business are troubling to all companies, said Bhide. "The most socially injurious aspect is that with the silver and gold rush, at least you could say that it didn't affect you because you chose not to speculate on it. But this current mania is dragging everyone down."
posted by Doug Beeferman at 6/6/2000 03:03:13 PM

May/Jun 00: The End of Moore's Law? The puzzle—huge expenditures with little apparent benefit—became known as the “productivity paradox.” Not only were these new technical wonders not useful, some researchers argued, they might actually be harmful.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 6/6/2000 03:01:49 PM

Schizophrenia Genes Discovered "What we don't know at the moment is whether we are looking for five or six genes, or 50 or 60," Porteous said.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 5/31/2000 01:27:23 PM

OJR Matt Welch: My Time in the DEN of Iniquity DEN, regardless of its founder's appetites (which included serially lying about his age), tried to spend and bluff its way to a huge audience from the top down, hiring a huge staff at exaggerated salaries while inventing strategy on the fly. Yet since going live a year ago, it has never even cracked PC Data's top 1,500 list of most-trafficked sites, unlike, say, The Hamster Dance.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 5/29/2000 09:56:05 PM

Salon.com ent | Oops, she's doing it again! But what about No Doubt's Gwen Stefani and Mariah Carey, someone else might say, both of whom, respectively, are no strangers to slamming sounds or desperate ballads? Again, the differences are key: For Stefani, even in all her "Just a Girl" glory, works into her ska and new wave-y hard sounds, echoes them, plays along with her songs instead of getting beaten up by them. She's a tough girl, and she's got the style -- the flamingo-pink hair, the braces-as-a fashion-statement moxie --and one-of-the-boys energy in her performances to prove it. And Mariah? Mariah's just a girl with a crush, over and over again, a girl who wants to be pretty and keeps trying harder and harder to be ever more so, who promises to give it up but still always remains, in all her Sony-studded armor, a version of a virgin.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 5/23/2000 02:04:29 PM

Technology So if you've been worrying that you'd have to reinvent your business or yourself, stop worrying. Life is still good.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 5/22/2000 09:12:51 PM

Harsh! CNN.com - Entertainment - Review: Crime does not play in 'Small Time Crooks' - May 22, 2000 Movie fans will be glad to know that the junk shop of Woody Allen's mind has been further emptied of clutter with "Small Time Crooks," another half-baked picture from a major filmmaker who's gotten incredibly lazy in his old age.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 5/22/2000 09:09:53 PM

CNET.com - News - Entertainment & Media - Lycos acquired in first foreign portal deal Terra Networks said today it would buy Lycos in an all-stock deal valued at $12.5 billion, marking the first time a U.S. portal has been acquired by a foreign company.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 5/16/2000 07:09:29 PM

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Half the internet is going nowhere "About 30% of the 1.4 billion unique documents on the web are rubbish or computer generated and stuff that people are not interested in," said Joe Frost, marketing director at Inktomi.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 5/15/2000 01:48:22 PM

CNET News.com - A return to demand-driven capitalism One way to gauge this is to look at the marginal start-up (or perhaps a large group of them) and try to understand the primary incentive for the creation of the business. On average, today's start-ups are far too often "supply-driven" as opposed to "demand-driven." In other words, the ideas for the start-up are born purely in the mind of the entrepreneur; they do not attack, identify or leverage a real problem or opportunity in the marketplace. Although this is almost impossible to definitively measure, such a signal would be a strong indicator of risk in relation to a match between start-up demand and supply.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 5/15/2000 09:03:15 AM

CNET.com - News - Entertainment & Media - Study: Four distinct regions on the Web Within the "strongly connected" core, the knot of the bow tie, Web surfers can travel smoothly between sites through hyperlinks. One side of the bow contains "origination" pages that allow Web surfers to reach the central knot. The other side of the bow consists of "termination" pages that can be accessed from the connected core but are not linked back to it.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 5/11/2000 09:29:00 AM

CNET.com - News - Personal Technology - Cheap rates speed up cell phone growth Despite the push by cell phone manufacturers and mobile software makers to arm cell phones with everything from Internet access to voice recognition, the most popular and fastest selling phones are the cheapest and simplest.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 5/9/2000 05:33:12 PM

Yahoo takes a wider view (5/07/2000) I leave it to the smart people to come up with ideas. The most creativity doesn't happen at the executive level. Our role is putting parts together, spotting trends and directing traffic, in general managing creativity.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 5/9/2000 08:35:10 AM

Salon Technology | Fumble.com So, why did this horde of mostly fledgling and unprofitable dot-coms do it? Novitsky's theory: "I think it's an ego thing ... It was really a sign of excess."
posted by Doug Beeferman at 5/3/2000 06:16:20 PM

Boston Globe Online / Nation | World / Words that haunt It took him days to realize it, but this 19-year-old had become yet another character in a murky tale about the perils of privacy and the wispy line dividing prudence from paranoia in the post-Columbine era.
posted by Doug Beeferman at 5/3/2000 08:40:52 AM

Tech firms boost S.F. economy, but loss of diversity feared (5/01/2000) Tech firms boost S.F. economy, but loss of diversity feared
posted by Doug Beeferman at 5/2/2000 08:04:21 PM

CNET.com - News - E-Business - Newspaper prints codes that link readers to the Web Newspaper prints codes that link readers to the Web
posted by Doug Beeferman at 5/2/2000 11:14:47 AM

Hobbes' Internet Timeline - the definitive Internet history Hobbes' Internet Timeline v5.0
posted by Doug Beeferman at 4/29/2000 11:36:48 AM

CNN.com - Scientists rewind aging clock in cells of cloned cows, study says - April 27, 2000 Scientists rewind aging clock in cells of cloned cows, study says
posted by Doug Beeferman at 4/27/2000 04:56:30 PM

digitalMASS at Boston.com The Divine M: Media Lab, MasterCard, and M-commerce
posted by Doug Beeferman at 4/27/2000 04:54:16 PM

digitalMASS at Boston.com Researchers worrying as teens grow up online
posted by Doug Beeferman at 4/21/2000 08:01:39 PM

Brown students create massive Tetris game on building
posted by Doug Beeferman at 4/21/2000 07:34:27 PM