Wednesday, January 26, 2000

1/26/00 2:43:19 PM

• An interactive "ego-net" of the industry. Dave Farber's Interesting People list carried a note from Valdis Krebs <valdis at orgnet dot com> describing a fascinating and insight-generating Java applet just released. In the words of the author:

  The current issue of the "Industry Standard - the magazine of the internet economy" (Jan. 24, 2000) has an interesting article on the key players in the internet industry -- "The Web's Gatekeepers." In the print version (page 204) they show the partial ego-networks of the 4 "gatekeepers": AOL-TW, AT&T, Microsoft, Yahoo. The ego-networks reveal some of the strategic alliances these 4 companies have formed.

  I combined the 4 ego nets and added other recent alliance data to create an Internet industry network of some 50+ players. The network is displayed in an interactive Java applet.

1/26/00 11:26:55 AM

• How big is the Web today? Today the Censorware Project released a dynamic essay on the size of the Web -- a page that gives a daily estimate -- in order to put into context the task of "filtering the web." (As you might expect, this task is impossible on its face.) Here are today's figures.

  So, as of today (these figures are dynamically generated on a
  daily basis), the web has roughly:
  
        1,570,000,000 pages;
   29,400,000,000,000 bytes of text;
          353,000,000 images; and
    5,880,000,000,000 bytes of image data.
  
  In just the last 24 hours, the web has added:
  
            3,180,000 new pages;
       59,700,000,000 new bytes of text;
              716,000 new images; and
       11,900,000,000 new bytes of image data.
  
  And of course, any web page can be changed or removed or any time.
  Changes may be minor, major, or total. According to Alexa, which
  is striving valiantly to create archive snapshots of major
  portions of the web, the average lifespan of a webpage is about 44
  days, which means that in the last 24 hours, about:
  
           35,600,000 pages changed; and
            8,020,000 images changed.
  	

Tuesday, January 25, 2000

1/25/00 8:57:52 PM

• etoy wins the war.

  [Note added 2000-01-26, 8:39 am:] Much more media coverage this morning: CNet, CNet Investor, NY Times.

  The avant-garde Internet art group etoy declared final victory today in its battle against Net merchant eToys. The toy retailer had filed suit against the art group apparently because their domain names were similar. What an ill-advised and self-destructive move. Today eToys agreed to pay up to $40,000 in legal fees to etoy and to drop the suit "without prejudice."

  I've placed the etoy victory press release on the TBTF archive. It's a wonder of stylized bombast. An excerpt:

  on monday, january 24, 2000, the TOYWAR.crisis-control-board, 1345 special TOYWAR.agents and media warriors triggered another firestorm : within a few hours many hundred EMAIL-TOY-BOMBS exploded in the brains of customers, e-shoppers, brokers and nervous business men all over the world.

  no one got hurt - but the message is placed and the eToys share value sunk below its initial price of $20: value on tuesday / 11.12 AM: $19.0625 per share unit.

  one of the targets of the violence-free toy-bombing was the eToys HQ in santa monica .. eToys felt that it is now time to drop this lawsuit and to accept all the demands the etoy.CORPORATION submitted.

Monday, January 24, 2000

1/24/00 5:27:06 PM

• FTC names 40 to a privacy/security committee. The US Federal Trade Commission is grappling with questions of consumer privacy in the online medium. The agency has selected the members of that will light its path through the thicket of issues of free trade, interstate commerce, and the right to be left alone. The body is called the Advisory Committee on Online Access and Security. Among the committee members are staffers from EIPC, the EFF, and the CDT, as well as freelance security specialist Richard Smith. They get to spend a couple of months of unpaid labor tussling with heavyweights from Walt Disney, Time Warner, Microsoft, DoubleClick, and Engage Technologies.

Sunday, January 23, 2000

1/23/00 10:49:32 PM

• Registrars now accepting long domain names. Now that all the "good" domain names are gone, we're seeing more jammed-together phrases in front the .com, .net, or .org suffix. Anyone who registered through NSI or Register.com until recently ran up against a limit of 26 characters total. Why so constricted? The RFC defining domain names (search for "length") allows 63 characters before the suffix. Search Engine Watch reported on what was apparently the first registry to allow full-length names. Now a Hawaiian outfit has set up business under what it claims is the longest word in English -- intended as a magnet fir those wishing to register long domain names. Still they only managed to get to 49 characters total. (What is the longest word in English? This treatise proves that there is no answer to the question this side of 1,913 characters.)