These are the original, unedited versions of columns that appeared in Online Magazine. Reva's (W)rap: You Can't Go Home Again © July 1998, Reva Basch Forget push. This year's buzzword is "portals." Search sites are repurposing themselves as portals in hopes of becoming your home on the Web. Single- mission domains such as Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and Infoseek have expanded to offer personalized news and information channels, shopping and travel services, online conferencing and chat rooms, and free Web-site hosting and email accounts -- incentives designed to encourage you to stick around and to keep coming back for more. America Online has been a portal to the Net almost since its inception; new media ventures like C|Net's Snap! and some yet-to- be-unveiled partnerships involving old media companies like Time Warner, Disney, CBS, and even General Electric, are betting that you'll bypass all those other gateways and enter through their own. By offering the virtual equivalent of free HBO, in-room coffee and a heated pool, these sites are vying, like motel chains on the interstate, to become your default destination -- the spot you head for every time you fire up your browser, the place you return to whenever you click on "Home". Microsoft and Netscape already own a significant share of the lazy-person's home-page market, since their browsers are configured to take you where they want to go today -- to home.microsoft.com or home.netscape.com, respectively. The other portal-players have to compete for your attention; the colossi of the browser business simply coded it in. But both Netscape and Microsoft have acknowledged the escalating competition: Netscape's newish Netcenter offers what it euphoniously describes as community, commerce, computing and content. Microsoft's Start.com, the online service formerly known as MSN, is slated for a rollout later this year, Justice Department willing. This frenzy of apparent hospitality has nothing to do with home, hearth, and fresh-brewed coffee (except perhaps of the Java™ variety). It's all about advertising, market share, return on investment, and nouveau promo-metrics such as "eyeballs" and "clickshare." But the "home" metaphor is a savvy, fortuitous, and compelling one. Everybody needs a home -- a starting point, a familiar abode, someplace to return to. "Cyberspace" itself implies a need for, and a sense of, place. Howard Rheingold's 1993 book, The Virtual Community, was subtitled Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Back in 1991, I published an essay in Artpaper called "Living on the Net," and an article in the May issue of this very journal entitled "The Best Places to Live Online." The phrase "home page" is universally understood and woven deeply into the fabric of the Web. "Home" provides context, a reference point, a measure of how far we've traveled. We online searchers talk about our "home systems," too -- the database service that initiated each of us into the mysteries of Boolean logic and first revealed unto us the subtleties of proximity operators, field searching, internal truncation, and other arcana of our professional calling. We tend to cling to our home system, grant it unquestioned preferential status, and explore other alternatives only when our first love fails to deliver. I grew up with Dialog, a 4-digit user number, and an inordinate fondness for the Combine command. Maybe Dow Jones' dot-dot commands or Lexis- Nexis' Procrustean file-naming conventions were like mother's milk to you. Perhaps it's that early imprinting, or simply the natural human tendency to personalize and project expectations onto familiar institutions, that makes Dialog's recent pricing changes so deeply unsettling. Our default settings have been messed with; someone's reconfigured our assumptions. Suddenly "home" is no longer the place where, as Robert Frost said, "when you have to go there, they have to take you in." They'll keep the light on for you, all right -- as long as you keep paying the rent. Meanwhile, the innovative Web engine Northern Light makes a bid for the corporate desktop, DR-LINK and other natural language text retrieval systems point the way to a post-Boolean search environment, and attractive and affordable aggregations of high- quality resources, of which Dow Jones Interactive is only the most visible example, continue to develop throughout the digital realm. Early homesteaders circled the wagons to avoid attack as they crossed the plains. Online settlers in search of reliable information at a fair price may have to use similar tactics in order to survive. But our vehicles may turn out to be moving vans. ------------------------ Reva Basch has always wanted to use the word "repurpose" and thanks you for your indulgence. She is author of Secrets of the Super Searchers, Secrets of the Super Net Searchers, and the recently published Researching Online For Dummies. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reva's (W)rap: People are Talking © September 1998, Reva Basch Two years ago, you couldn't pry my 11-year-old friend Zack away from his Nintendo. By last summer, he'd graduated to Mortal Kombat on a PC. This year, it's chat. Zack and his real-world pals hang out after school in a private AOL chat room. From what I can gather, they goof around, gossip, tease, put up parodies of each other's Web sites, and engage in whatever else passes for social interaction among adolescent males. AOL, Zack's enabler, has rebuilt its business model around the success -- some would say notoriety -- of its hugely popular chat rooms. In June, the company paid $287 million for Mirabilis, an Israeli firm best known as the developer of ICQ, a real-time chat service that claims to have 12 million members worldwide. Net-wide chat, known as IRC or Internet Relay Chat, used to be the province of computer geeks and gamers. No more. Conversation -- whether chat, conferencing, listservs, one-on-one email, even Internet telephony -- is proving to be the Net's killer app, and the driving force behind many late adopters' desire to get online. My tiny rural community stretches for 10 miles along a sparsely populated coastline, with no village store, post office or other central meeting place. But we do have a listserv. When the fire chief logs in, among rumor and speculation, to explain what the commotion was down on the highway this morning, it's like that scene in Annie Hall where Marshall McLuhan pops up to explain his theories. Locals who had never felt the need for a computer before are buying one just to get in on the action. Listservs are old news to many online professionals (raise your hand if you remember PACS-L), humming away in the background of our already information- overloaded lives. But, like ham radio operators pressed into emergency service during wartime and natural disasters, they occasionally become vital links in the communication chain. During the recent Dialog pricing upheaval, official sources were silent or evasive on the subject everyone wanted to know about -- the effect on our bottom lines. Listserv members took up the slack, providing eyewitness reports, analysis, and opinion. Lots of opinion. It was disintermediation at its finest -- raw data, not always accurate, but delivered quickly, in detail, and without self-serving spin. If you weren't reading the lists, you might not have known there was a story, let alone a controversy, in progress. List-less Dialog customers may not have suspected a thing -- until their July-dated invoices arrived. Information providers now realize that ignoring user listservs is like disregarding the world's largest focus group. As the Dialog pricing story continued to unfold, several major online information providers contacted me, all of them asking the same questions: Which lists should we be monitoring? How do we join? How can we use this technology to stay on top of the competition and, if necessary, do our own damage control before things get out of hand? I wouldn't be surprised if BUSLIB-L and others have seen an upsurge in subscribership recently. I encourage vendors to sign up and participate actively -- not as lurkers, carrying insights and intelligence away to their management, but as active, visible members of the listserv community. I warn them, however: Marketing hype and vague reassurances won't cut it. The Net demands, and delivers, the truth. Be prepared to hear your customers' unalloyed, and not always politely-expressed, frustration. Be ready to share their pain. Linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky has criticized mainstream media for "manufacturing consent," portraying an oversimplified and biased version of reality, thus reinforcing public complacency while providing no platform for dissent. "Manufactured consent" is impossible online; the medium is incapable of consensus. It rejects authority like the human body deploys antibodies against infection. The Net has produced no digital-era Walter Cronkite, no universally-respected dispenser of wisdom. Everyone is a reporter, a critic, and a commentator. Computers didn't capture the popular imagination until they moved from computation to communication -- from crunching numbers to connecting people. Now that the great global conversation has gotten underway, participation is mandatory. That's where the drama is unfolding; that's where the truth will out. If you don't schmooze, you lose. Ask Zack. -------------- Reva Basch can type faster than she can talk, but still prefers email to chat. She is author of Secrets of the Super Searchers, Secrets of the Super Net Searchers, and Researching Online For Dummies. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Reva's (W)rap: In Your Dreams © November 1998, Reva Basch 1998 was the year I surrendered to the Borg. My most recent book publisher dragged me -- a WordPerfect loyalist since version 4.2 for DOS -- kicking and kvetching, into the feature-bloated world of Word. Then, like a sign from the universe, my trusty old PowerBook went flaky – a long, gruesome tech-support story, and not the poor beast's fault. My new Windows (sigh) laptop came bundled with PowerPoint and Excel, two Microsoft apps I'd previously resisted. But Microsoft didn't stop at my desktop. It appears – alert the Justice Department! – to have invaded my subconscious as well. Since we're all such close and trusted friends here, I'll share with you a couple of excerpts from my dream journal: Episode 1: One day I notice that a new neighbor has moved in, right on the rocks below my ocean-front house. For some reason he doesn't have a home himself; he's just camped there. The surf doesn't wash him away or seem to bother him at all. This doesn't strike me as odd. I invite him over for coffee. He turns out to be Bill Gates. He hangs out with us a lot, and ends up moving in. Episode 2: I'm walking on the beach, and I notice that the waves are behaving strangely. Instead of rounding up and cresting, rolling in and ebbing when they hit the shore, these waves form into squared-off channels, like a right-angled rain gutter or a downspout cut in half down the middle. The length of the channels as they form and come ashore is perpendicular to the coastline; as each wave comes in, the water-channels hold their shape and burrow deeper into the sand. You don't have to be a psychoanalyst to interpret the one about Bill G. moving into my house. In effect, he had. As for those oddly-shaped waves, my first take was: Dang, Janet Reno is right; the man has the power to reshape the seas. Upon reflection, though, I realized: Channels. Of course. Sometimes the subconscious is more literal than you expect. Mr. Bill, through Windows 98 and its Internet-desktop integration, seeks to channel the ocean of online content. What a mundane theme for a dream. Channels are 1998's version of subject catalogs. Whether it's search engines like Infoseek and Excite with their consumer-oriented Autos-to-Travel classifications, Yahoo's more scholarly Arts & Humanities-to-Society & Culture approach, the Argus Clearinghouse and other venerable, pre-venture- capital Net guides -- it all harks back, through Dialog OneSearch categories and Lexis-Nexis group files, to Dewey and LC. Bill Gates is just one more guy – like Diderot and his 18th century Encyclopedia – trying to encompass the realm of human knowledge. It took him a while to Get It about the Internet, but when he did, he claimed the right of eminent domain. Or – let's not leap to conclusions, here -- perhaps, like Melvyl Dewey and Roger Summit, Bill doesn't want to own the data, merely organize it and make it more accessible, using his proprietary tools. Update '97, Dialog's 25th anniversary extravaganza, featured an elaborate Star Wars parody in which the 21st century information industry was dominated by an evil empire called MicroSquash. Maybe it wasn't such a whimsical construct after all. And maybe – like my forced conversion to Word earlier this year -- it's not as dire and dystopian a prospect as we might once have thought. Meanwhile, back in my dreams, the tide is turning. The blue-green Pacific is taking on a cold, steely-gray hue, as California's Information Access Company bows before the Midwestern Gale, and Dialog recedes from earthquake country and flows toward the hurricane zone of Silicon Triangle, NC. These western waters still teem with life, but some of the big fish are migrating eastward. From a business perspective, I can't blame them for seeking out more economically salubrious climes while they can. Winter's coming. It's getting choppy out there on the information high seas, and it looks like a storm might be brewing. You folks on the east coast – keep an eye out. Let me know if a nerdy-looking guy with a bad haircut shows up in your dreams. And if the Atlantic ocean starts acting kind of... funny, have your people call my people, okay? Our subconscious minds should probably compare notes. ------------------- Reva Basch may need to go back into therapy. She is author of Secrets of the Super Searchers, Secrets of the Super Net Searchers, and Researching Online For Dummies. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reva's Wrap: Back to the Future © January 1999, Reva Basch Every year around this time, I think about paring down, weeding out, starting the new year lean, mean, and unencumbered by extraneous baggage – such as subscriptions to periodicals that no longer speak to my needs. It was in that spirit that I found myself sitting on the floor of my office, leafing through Volume 1 of WIRED magazine. You remember WIRED, the cutting-edge, hipper-than-thou guide to the digital revolution. The premiere issue (simply dated 1993) carried an article called "Libraries Without Walls for Books Without Pages." No, it's not about the Web. In fact, although the Web was already making waves elsewhere in the world (I first heard about it – like the Kennedy assassinations, I'll never forget – on a train from the Karolinska Institute back to central Stockholm in May of '93), it didn't register on WIRED's trend-o-meter until late the following year. Up to that point, WIRED was all about bulletin board systems, text-based MUDs, CD-ROM games, hackers and phone phreaks, massive supercomputing applications, the developing infobahn – as if the loathesome phrase "information superhighway" was somehow cooler in German – and the seductive powers of email. Finally, though, on the cover of Volume 2, Number 10: "Everything you wanted to know about MOSAIC." Inside, the headline read "The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun." WIRED got it late, but it got it right. The immediate payoffs of an exercise in retrospection lie not in the formal monuments – the feature stories that grapple with gradually-evolving ideas – but in the middens, the discards of an earlier digital civilization, the silicon and plastic potshards that future archaeologists will analyze as artifacts of our (approximate) era. I'm talking about the ads. In 1993, AT&T was touting its hot new fax system. (When was the last time you saw an advertisement for a free-standing fax machine?) Apple was targeting the voyeur in all of us with that "What's on your PowerBook?" campaign. PeachPit Press was pushing The Windows 3.1 Bible. NEC extolled the virtues of its speedy 3X CD-ROM drives and Seagate celebrated its massive 200 MB disks. On the e-commerce front, an outfit called Send-A-Book was pre-announcing its impending "on-line" presence. Surely Amazon.com was not even a gleam in Jeff Bezos' eye. It's easy to pick on a device-driven publication. WIRED, with its self- conscious cool, its technolust and hardware fetishism, is almost too obvious a target. The cognitive whiplash from a 5-year-old issue of WIRED isn't as jolting as from a 1950s-era Popular Science with its personal jet-packs and self-cleaning houses. But give WIRED another 30 years. It's a fundamental rule of the universe: Quaint happens. WIRED – the name itself whispers creeping obsolescence. With the world tending toward the wireless, the embedded, and the ubiquitous, WIRED, to invoke its own sneering dichotomy, is tired. I can't resist pointing out that the name ONLINE, by comparison, is wearing very well. I'll bet Jeff Pemberton doesn't have a leisure suit hanging in the back of his closet. About Louis Rossetto, the founding publisher of WIRED, I wouldn't be too sure. The irony du jour is that if you're wired you don't need WIRED. Everybody's got the scoop. Our bulletins from the digital millennium arrive in real time, online. WIRED's bleeding-edge relevance has been neutralized by the technology it was born to report. What's WIRED hyping today? The issue on my coffee table reports: "Most notebooks and handhelds come with installed modems, but you aren't guaranteed a convenient place to connect in a hotel room or airport terminal…. PocketMail is a service that lets you efficiently send and receive email using only a phone's handset. You … place the handset against a little speaker and microphone…" The old acoustic coupler, the Mickey-Mouse ears of our 300-bps searching days, is back – reincarnated as the Road Warrior's newest weapon. This may be the start of a retro trend, or a backlash against mindless technophilia. Dow Jones Interactive, which seldom falters in its progressive path, pulled back from the brink of Web-only service upon realizing that information professionals still need some features that only a Windows-based package currently can deliver. Good for them. But what other reassessments might the final year of the 20th century hold in store? Typewriters as dedicated envelope-printers? Rotary dial phones as a stress-reduction device? I guess I will renew that WIRED subscription after all; I'll need an early warning if leisure suits come back. ---------------------- Reva Basch promises to wipe that smirk off her face before it freezes that way. She is a writer and consultant to the online industry, and the author of Researching Online For Dummies and Secrets of the Super Net Searchers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reva's (W)rap: Honoring Our Ancestors © March 1999, Reva Basch Doug Engelbart isn't exactly a household name. Without his efforts, though, we might still be searching on dumb terminals and sending our clients cut- and-pasted printouts of the results. The easy familiarity with which we interact with our computers as extensions of ourselves – in fact, the very concept of personal computing – might never have been conceived, let alone realized, without Engelbart's ministrations. Several tech pioneers could legitimately claim the title "Father of the Personal Computer"; Doug Engelbart is father to them all. On December 9th, 1968, Engelbart, then a 40-something project team leader at Stanford Research Institute, presented a live demo incorporating several radical new technologies: the computer mouse (a rectangular device roughly the size and shape of a schoolroom pencil sharpener), a graphical user interface with a now-standard black-on-white text display, multiple windows, real-time interactivity using an on-screen "bug" or cursor, remote access, and hyperlinking. Even the logistics of the demo itself, with a home team in Palo Alto communicating with Doug's "away" team in San Francisco, foreshadowed modern videoconferencing. As his SRI colleagues gradually filtered out into the private sector, to Xerox PARC, and eventually to Sun Microsystems and Apple, many of these innovations found their way into commercial computer applications. Yet Doug Engelbart, never a self-promoter, remained almost unknown outside the Silicon beltway – until just a few months ago. On December 9th, 1998, thirty years to the day after Doug's original demo, Stanford University staged a day-long symposium called Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution to honor Doug, his team, and their accomplishments. (You can read about or listen to the proceedings, or order videotapes, at http://unrev.stanford.edu.) Chaired by Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future, with a lineup of speakers including former Apple Fellow and Xerox PARC founder Alan Kay, natural-language and human-computer-interaction pioneer Terry Winograd, Ted Nelson of Xanadu fame, virtual-reality guru Jaron Lanier, online community evangelist Howard Rheingold, and Marc Andreessen of Mosaic and later Netscape, the event felt like a latter-day techno-Woodstock with schmoozing instead of music, PowerPoint instead of patchouli oil, ties instead of tie-dye. Actually, there was some tie-dye; hippie-to-high-tech is a smoother continuum than you might imagine. One of the presenters, Stewart Brand, who went on to create the quintessentially counter-cultural Whole Earth Catalog as well as the ever-obstreperous WELL, had handled the A-V linkup at the Palo Alto end of Engelbart's '68 demo. The Woodstock analogy runs even deeper. In the 1960s, computers were primarily associated with scientific calculation and the promise of office automation, number-crunching and facilitating rote tasks. Doug Engelbart was one of the first to see their potential for communication – and community – as well as computation. With his encouragement, SRI became the second node on the ARPAnet, the forerunner of today's Internet (as Doug himself pointed out at the symposium, that's about as early, by definition, as one can be on a network). All of Engelbart's innovations were aimed at furthering human system development as well as the evolution of the machine. 1968, the year of Doug's demo, was also the year of Prague Spring and the student-led general strike in France, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Tet offensive and rising opposition to the war in Vietnam. It was a time of profound change on every level – political, social, and personal. Despite his clean-cut appearance, this Stanford engineer was perfectly in tune with the revolutionary zeitgeist. Doug's vision was never about product cycles, exit strategies, or stock-option millionaires; it was about transforming mankind. I suppose that's why Stanford decided to call it an unfinished revolution. Surely the Web, the greatest interactive medium in history, has drawn heavily from Engelbart's insights and inventions. The next wave of Web search tools, including Alexa, IBM's Clever, and Stanford's own Google!, factors in the social component of the Web, using collaborative, consensus-based, and peer- influenced decision-making processes that emulate our information-seeking behaviors in everyday life. The social Web is evolving to include more than virtual communities, and we humans are co-evolving with it. To those of us who've felt from our first exposure to it that the Net was something "more than human," an extension of our individual intellect, consciousness, and will, it all seems to be moving in the direction that Doug Engelbart envisioned so clearly 30-some years ago. May he live to savor the fruits of his revolution. ---------------- Reva Basch cops to her old hippie credentials, but she never inhaled. She is author of Researching Online For Dummies and editor of the forthcoming Super Searchers book series. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reva's (W)rap: We Are Everywhere © May 1999, Reva Basch Small isn't just beautiful – it's mandatory. The macho-nerd vanguard has declared desktop computers obsolete. "I don't even own one anymore," one member of the Palm Pilot brigade told me not long ago. "Why should I? I'm hardly ever in my office. It's all on my laptop now." "Boys and their toys" was my first reaction, arguing about whose is smaller – although this particular knowledge-warrior happened to be a woman. But the digital downscaling isn't really about size, it's about freedom. Think about it. Battery life and radio waves are the currency of cool . The workaholic geek at the airport who draws fellow travelers' envious stares today isn't just working on his laptop, but checking his email with a wireless connection. WIRED magazine's Kevin Kelly envisions a near-future in which computers will be ubiquitous. Don't confuse "ubiquity" with "convergence," although their buzzword quotient is roughly equivalent. Ubiquity means more than WebTV in every living room. I'd bet that the number of people who compute with the TV on, multitasking between the two appliances, is and will continue to be several times larger than the installed base of WebTVs for several years to come. I'd also bet that the Net novices toward whom WebTV marketing is aimed are purchasing iMacs instead. As the head of a wireless industry trade association said recently "The only combination device the American public has bought in great numbers is the clock-radio." – and, I might add, the Swiss Army knife. Ubiquitous computing is about getting small. It's about divergence rather than convergence. Ultimately, it's about nanosystems, tiny technologies – embedded, interlinked, and so unobtrusive that we take them for granted, like the plumbing and the wiring in our walls. Example: Sun, IBM, Motorola and a dozen or so other major international companies are working together to develop standards for interconnecting Java- based smart devices. Sun is running full page newspaper ads touting its Java- based Jini technology. The one in my local paper showed a portable CD player, a wristwatch, a computer printer and a washing machine arrayed in a circle around the statement: "Maybe all your toaster needed was someone to talk to." Example: Frigidaire and ICL have has introduced an interactive refrigerator that keeps a running inventory of its contents and continuously monitors its own internal workings. Not only can it call a repair person if something goes wrong, it will order groceries, over the Net, when it sees that you're running low. So much for those "Got milk?" ads. Example: Windows 2000, or whatever they finally call it (I understand the reluctance to name a product "00," even for consistency's sake), will include a smart card interface to download applications and access secure data from anywhere in the world, including the back of an airline seat, the console of your minivan, or the base of mom's telephone. Example: Tiger Electronics has introduced an electronic yo-yo, the E-Yo, which provides, er, users with a digital display showing average speed, distance traveled, and total time in use. Tiger is the same company that manufactures the Furby. Furbies, in case you've been hiding in a cave for the last six months, are furry animaloid toys that speak their own language, exhibit adaptive behavior (i.e. learning), and communicate with each other. That last example is the one I find truly scary. I'm beginning to see where Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, is coming from: The network is the computer. Give your shoulders a break; leave that fully-laden laptop case at home – on your desk, where it belongs. Let the network do the heavy lifting and, in between, warehouse the gigabytes for you.What's important is access to the Net when you need it and, through the Net, to the information. My backache may go away, but I'm left with a couple of tiny nagging concerns. Privacy, for one: Is your refrigerator telling the e-commerce interests about your other buying habits while it's out on that milk run? Got cookies? You betcha. Will Microsoft monitor its smart card terminals for erratic or unsavory itineraries? Do you want them to know where you go today? The data- mining potential, once we're all linked and uploaded, is – let me select a value-neutral adjective – awesome. I don't even want to think about how small system glitches might multiply, rolling up into big ol' catastrophic failures when everything is interlinked. Just as well we won't be living with ubiquitous computing until sometime after Y2K. Come to think of it, I could go two or three millennia, easily, without a toaster that talks back. ------------- Reva Basch can't maintain a conversation, period, in the morning, let alone with an appliance. She is author of Researching Online For Dummies and executive editor of the new Super Searchers book series. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Reva's (W)rap: My Internet Hype-PO © July 1999, Reva Basch I've finally figured out my problem with Web search engines. It's not the black box effect, the inability to pop the lid and examine their internal workings. It's not the certain knowledge that, no matter how carefully I craft my query, I'm doomed to failure on the "comprehensiveness" front. It's not the lack of standardization or any of our other oft-aired gripes. It is, I've concluded, the noise. Most of the major sites have marginalized the search function itself to the point of nonexistence. It's swamped by banner ads and breaking news headlines, overcome by offers of free email, chat, home page hosting and message boards, sidelined by prominent pointers to sports, shopping, travel, entertainment, and the rest of the Net's top hits. You can barely find that pathetic little search form amid the roar of the pixels vying for your attention. Several months ago, the San Francisco Chronicle added a decibel rating to its restaurant reviews. Diners can select a happenin' scene, or a quieter venue where conversation is possible. I find myself gravitating toward some low- key, out-of-the-way search sites, like – at this writing – ProFusion, Highway 61 and Google. I tell myself it's intellectual curiosity, but I'm also looking for calm amid the dot-coms, places where they don't yell at me when I'm trying to concentrate. It's hard to maintain credibility as a serious research tool while shining the lurid red light of commerce directly in your users' eyes. It's like asking us to do surgery in a three-ring circus, play Chopin sonatas during a Pearl Jam concert, or study for finals while our dorm-mates are partying down. Imagine searching Dow Jones Interactive with ads popping up like prairie dogs, all custom-targeted to the subject of your search. Or shouldering your way past the free offers and "popular" categories on Lexis-Nexis to find the libraries and files you need. Or wondering whether those weird results in InSite Pro are the result of pay-for-placement, or some nefarious indexer spamming the controlled vocabulary field. The old-line online companies weren't conceived with exit strategies and IPOs foremost in their founders' minds. Despite the vicissitudes of competition, most of them remain clear on the concept: they're in the information retrieval business. Silicon Valley no longer looks askance at employees who job-hop every few months, or at companies that change business models whenever the market says "jump." Last year's search engine is yesterday's portal, today's virtual community, and tomorrow's e-commerce bonanza. In fact, e-commerce appears to be behind much of the acquisition activity today: The eBay auction site recently acquired Butterfield & Butterfield, the third largest real-world auction house after Sotheby's and Christie's. Amazon.com bought Alexa, Brewster Kahle's collaborative filtering tool. Dialog, now officially classed as an Internet stock, has split into three entities, its Web solutions and e- commerce divisions carrying equal weight with its information services group. I have no position in the Internet economy. Ask me for a hot stock tip and I'll tell you to add a few peppercorns and a bay leaf to that chicken carcass bubbling away on the stove. I suspect a lot of committed players are holding their breaths, making their deals, and hoping the house of cards doesn't collapse before they collect their winnings and run. Several investment analysts have pointed out the parallel with tulipmania, when Holland went wild over the colorful flowers, trading in bulb futures at vastly inflated prices that bore no relation to the product's inherent value. Fortunes changed hands on the strength of wild speculation and hype. Sound familiar? A rumored startup called eTulip is a fragrant commentary on today's overheated market. (A fun fact for readers who remember the early days of the graphical browser: One of the hottest tulip varieties was a variegated pattern that owed its lovely coloring to a common botanical virus called… Mosaic.) Was I the only one who used to feel a discreet frisson of excitement when NPR announced that the preceding program was underwritten by Lexis-Nexis? A real- world mention! On National Public Radio! We existed! We were relevant! Earlier this year, a job-search site paid $1.6 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot. My local rock station runs Yahoo! commercials in annoyingly regular rotation. Northern Light sponsored a car in the Indianapolis 500. What's the message for consumers here? Do search engines run better with Pennzoil? Of course not. None of these stunts has anything to do with the product they're ostensibly pushing. It's all about brand identification – attracting eyeballs, building sticky sites, and "monetizing," heaven help us, the consumer. With rare exceptions, the development effort at search sites today is not aimed at building better ways to search the Net. If it were, the ads would say "Now! With nested parens and extra-strength proximity connectors!" They'd be selling improved results – the intellectual equivalent of whiter whites and brighter brights – instead of free email and chat. You don't need a product, just a URL, to play the search engine game. Maybe I'll change my name to eReva.com and issue an IPO. ------------- Reva Basch has enough M&A experience to last a lifetime, but will entertain buyout offers. She is author of Researching Online For Dummies and executive editor of the new Super Searchers book series. --------------------------------------------------------------- Reva's (W)rap: The Bionic Searcher © September 1999, Reva Basch Whenever I travel to some non-English-speaking land, I wish for the same thing: a plug-in language chip to render me instantly fluent in the local tongue. A simple slot behind my right ear would work; I could reach up, casually, as if I were adjusting an earring, to switch from Italian to French or from one Germanic dialect to another. I'd carry the spares in a neat little velour-lined case like one of those electrical-outlet adaptor kits, and slip it into my carry-on before I go. Peripherals as accessories; maybe that's the appeal. Wild as it seems, I might eventually get my wish, or some approximation thereof. The Wearable Computing group at MIT's Media Lab (http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/projects/wearables/) contends that the term "personal computer" is a misnomer; a truly personal device is one you wear on, or in, your body. Other research institutions agree. In fact, Carnegie Mellon University's (www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/vuman/www/home.html), Speech Translator Smart Module comes darn close in functionality to my fantasy language chip. The University of Rochester's Center for Future Health (www.rochester.edu/pr/releases/med/future.htm) is developing smart socks, antibiotic-dispensing bandages, wrist-based bio-monitoring and feedback devices and – my favorite app so far – "memory glasses," a pair of regular eyeglasses combined with a video camera and pattern-recognition software that matches the person you're looking at against an image database of people you know or have met. The device would whisper in your ear, or text would appear on a heads-up display: "That's Shirley from Payroll. Ask her about her daughter's wedding." An individual very close to me needs one of these devices, though he claims to have addressed the problem with an invention of his own: A button that says "Please don't assume I remember your name." A growing body of evidence suggests, however, that wearables are for wimps. Neurobiologists have implanted hair-thin electrodes in rat brains that convert neural activity into an electronic signal that in turn controls a mechanical device. The rats first learn to get a drink by pressing a lever connected to a robotic arm. Once that behavior is ingrained, all a rodent has to do is think about a drink and voilΰ, the arm actuates to slake its thirst. Comparable experiments are underway with human subjects controlling cursor movement by leveraging and channeling the electrical impulses in their brains. Careful; we don't want to make this computer thing look too easy. Perhaps even implants are passι: Leeches were cutting-edge (so to speak) technology for medical practitioners well into the 19th century. They're back, this time as the "bio" in experimental biocomputers that combine invertebrate neurons with silicon semiconductors to create a computing model much more sophisticated than the simple binary on-off signals on which contemporary digital systems are based. Today, biocomputers can solve simple mathematical operations; i.e., they can add. Down the road, who knows? They might be capable of online research – a much better match than Boolean for the non- linear, associative branching of data on the Web. As a card-carrying member of Save the Leeches, perhaps you're repelled by the thought of these noble creatures yolked like galley slaves in servitude to mankind. Have no fear: The latest lab reports indicate that leeches are actually, well, kind of gross. Enter molecular computing, in which a single synthetic molecule acts as a binary switch, and an array of such molecules forms a complex neural network that mimics the human brain in its complexity, and 100 billion Pentium IIIs in its computational speed. A couple of columns ago, I wrote about the trend toward downsizing and ubiquitous computing embodied in networked appliances, smart cards, and toys. Now we're looking at the possibility of intelligent paint mixed with molecules that climate-control your house, and manufactured corpuscles that surf your bloodstream, monitoring your body chemistry and adusting your meds. Computing devices are moving from portable to wearable, to implanted, to innate. Always looking for patterns and themes, I detect an echo here of another progression, this one familiar to information professionals: From data to information to knowledge to wisdom. I'm betting it won't be long before the two converge, perhaps in programmable, self-searchable molecular databases that you swallow or inject. Get your translation skills along with your tetanus shots, and a booster every few years to keep your vocabulary current. Au revoir – I'll see you on the Champs Elysses. ------------------- Reva Basch is not unaware of the dystopian downside. She is author of Researching Online For Dummies and executive editor of the new Super Searchers book series. ------------------------------------------------------------- Reva's (W)rap: Any Support in a Storm © November 1999, Reva Basch Here's one for you oxymoron collectors: Internet customer support. The standard scenario is a recursive nightmare: First, the email bot that urges you to read the FAQ you've already determined does not address your Q; next, the bombardment with pages of irrelevant technical boilerplate; finally, the auto-responder equivalent of "All of our operators are busy. Please continue to hold." Three weeks later, when you've bumped up in the queue sufficiently to rate attention from a real person, you find yourself back at the start: "Have you read our FAQ?" Bulletin: Customer support is not an entry level position. Neither is customer support design. It's not just the Net. One indication of widespread dissatisfaction with problem resolution in general is the rise of businesses like Complaint.com, whose sole raison d'κtre is to write complaint letters on behalf of tongue- or keyboard-tied consumers. I read in a travel magazine about a Portuguese practice loosely translated as the Book of Grievances. Hotels and restaurants are required to maintain a book in which customers can record instances of perceived abuse. If an establishment receives three legitimate complaints in a given period of time, it drops a rank in its tourism rating, and must charge less for its services. Airlines are exempt, unfortunately. But imagine that principle applied to content providers and search engines. Give it a few months and they'd be paying us money. Maybe I'm just wallowing in nostalgia or showing my age again, but I remember when the voice at the other end of the toll-free support line was not only live, but familiar -- and well-informed. You didn't even have to pick up the phone; typing "SOS" in the midst of a Telebase search summoned a human being with a Master's in Library Science – for a while, my brother's college roommate Seth; how's that for the personal touch? -- to the keyboard on the other end. At least one major search service kept a database of customer support calls keyed to user ID. The CS staff was knowledgeable, polite, and eminently professional, although I always imagined them covering the receiver and whispering to their colleagues "Jeez, it's MX70WP again. That's the third time this week." In the course of problem-solving, they logged recurring trouble-spots and patterns of confusion, and fed valuable data about system features and functionality back to the product design side. Taking an even more direct approach, the dearly departed NewsNet earned the admiration of subscribers and non-subscribers alike for implementing searcher Anne Mintz's suggestion of an online FIXIT command: Hey, this is broken; look! The world's a bigger and colder place now. Outsourcing – the "O" word – has come to customer support. Companies with names like LivePerson and PeopleSupport have leveraged consumer backlash against the maddening impersonality of autoresponder pseudo-support by providing packaged, Web- based solutions for real-time, real-person help. Their turnkey systems cover everything from back-end software to trained (ostensibly) personnel. You click a "live help" button and a chat window pops up: "Hi, I'm Raoul. How can I help you?" Poor Raoul was spread pretty thin; I ran into him at four vastly different e-commerce sites served by his O-word employer. At least Raoul provides a human touch. Several ventures are attempting to replicate his responsiveness, such as it is, by creating their own Outsourcer's Apprentices -- virtual customer support reps that combine natural language query-processing with a searchable database of known responses, overlaid with a client-customized personality. Despite its Eliza- like limitations ("How long have you felt this way about our products?"), the avatar approach scores points with me for rejecting the stall-'em-til-they- give-up philosophy and actually attempting to answer your question. The ideal solution is live and knowledgeable online customer service, a click away, with no delay. Nordstorm, the epitome of customer service excellence in the retail world, has set up a separate online division. Want to bet they'll do it right? Dialog has attached a "Call Me Now" button to its web site. You supply some basic data, and your request is routed to the appropriate department within Dialog; they call you back immediately, or at the time you've specified. The bad news is that the feature is limited at present to customer administration issues, not search assistance, although European customers can use it to help set up Alerts. Let's work on that searching angle, though; then all we'd need is a chat function, and we'd be back to the SOS scenario, updated for the Web. I wonder what Seth is up to these days? ------------------------ Reva Basch is the author of Researching Online For Dummies and executive editor of the Super Searcher book series. Your call is important to her. ------------------------------------------------------------ Reva's (W)rap: Talkin' 'bout a Resolution © January 2000, Reva Basch Ever since I graduated from college and became an official grownup with a life of my own, I've managed said life with the aid of a Sierra Club engagement calendar, my low-tech, trailing-edge personal assistant. Every fall I pluck my fresh, neatly-boxed companion-to-be from the stacks of calendars in the bookstore, anticipating the event-full year ahead. The transition from my worn, inked-up datebook to the pristine new one is a familiar and comforting ritual: First I transfer the birthdays and anniversaries, then the standing first-quarter obligations (estimated quarterlies, property taxes) and well-in-advance commitments that I'd crowded onto the tiny 12-months-at-a-glance calendar in the back of this year's book. Next come the supplementary listings – addresses, what-to-save-first-in-case- of-an-earthquake notes, and the rolling perpetual project list. Finally, before packing Old Man datebook off to the archives and slipping Baby New Book into place, I look back through the year, savoring or shuddering at the inky echoes of business trips and weekend getaways, deadlines and dinner parties, movie dates, houseguests, phonecalls and chores. Friends think it odd that I, the poster child for obsessive detail disorder (let me write it down so I can cross it off the list), never joined the uber- organized Filofax/Franklin/Day-Timer/Day Runner pack. I don't do "systems"; I prefer the organic approach. My scrawled and cryptic notations, free-form circles, arrows and asterisks, punctuated by occasional Post-Its ™, attest – I tell myself -- to my wild, creative, left-brained side. That ink smears, sticky notes and clipped-on addenda often obscure the lovely wilderness photographs – I barely glance at them as I turn the page on Sunday nights to confront the following week's packed agenda -- is a low-level but constant reproach. Nor do I lust, much, for a Palm Pilot or any of its digital siblings. My friend Bob serves as a cautionary example. As we schmooze, he clicks away on his PDA – inspired by Star Trek, he calls it his tricorder -- entering all mentions of upcoming celebrations and get-togethers, art exhibits, community meetings, books and videos to check out. Bob is a walking database interface. His tricorder beeps as he walks in my door, reminding him that it's time to Be Here Now. Would that it were so. But were I to win one of those cool e-devices in, say, an Online World business-card drawing, I wouldn't donate it to charity. I actually bought a last-generation PDA, cheap, from a pal who had her eye on a Palm. Since it runs Windows CE, I could, theoretically, transfer my calendar, task lists and contacts from Microsoft Outlook – assuming I'd entered all that stuff in Outlook in the first place. Outlook is an awesomely well-integrated product, another step in Mr. Bill's quest for global domination. But I can't say I've maxed out its potential: My Outlook calendar is empty, and my task list is sketchy and outdated. The Sierra Club datebook still rules my life. Since I moved to the country, both my social life and the logistics of business travel have complexified immensely. I'm intrigued by those shared online calendars that Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape Netcenter and other web sites offer as part of their personalized portals. Now, everyone can see how busy I am, and plan around my ridiculously crowded schedule. Sites like When.com, Jump, Appoint.net, Dataferret, PlanetAll, and Schedule Online (all URLs the obvious ones) have bet their business plans on web mutations of Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange, with calendaring, scheduling, and contact management functions built in. There's something appealing about being able to access your schedule from anywhere. The newest PDAs – and cell phones, too -- are web-enabled, so synchronizing between local and web-based calendars would be a simple matter of upgrading my hardware. That, and overcoming a 30-year ingrained habit. I made just one new year's resolution for Y2K: To simplify my life, making more time for play, for reading in the window seat, for activities I don't have to schedule or write down (2:30 PM: Nap). More technology -- wireless, seamless, frictionless though it may be – does not appear to serve this end. Nor does putting my life "out there" to be accessed remotely, or surrendering my personal historical record to today's software standards or the financial vicissitudes of a particular e-business venture. No, a 2000 Sierra Club engagement calendar will see me into this new millennium, just as its forebears have throughout each of the last three decades. Maybe this year, though, I'll have time to look at the photos. ----------------- Reva Basch is booked through March. She is author of Researching Online For Dummies, and executive editor of the Super Searchers book series. -------------------------------------------------------------- Reva's (W)rap: They Know What You Did Last Summer © March 2000, Reva Basch "We can no longer depend on privacy through obscurity." I said that in an interview with Steve Steinberg of Wired magazine in May 1996. My point was that search engines, despite their copiously documented shortcomings, can be very efficient at picking up offhand comments that might come back to haunt us later. "What are the chances?" is an overly cavalier attitude; chances are good that your casual comment in a newsgroup or other online venue may be used as competitive intelligence – against you, or in a manner you hadn't intended. Jim Rutt, a long-time WELL participant and a colorful, often provocative poster, "mass-scribbled," deleting most of the WELL postings he'd made during the past ten years, after being named head of Network Solutions, the net domain administration agency. Exposing your private persona to WELL members is one thing; leaving that persona exposed after you assume a visible, sensitive, and highly political job is quite another. I'm not violating Jim's privacy here, by the way: The Washington Post reported on his mass-scribble last October, with Jim's full cooperation. Seasoned Net-denizens know not to say anything online – in email, on a private list, or in a public forum – that they wouldn't like to see on the front page of The New York Times. In the workplace especially, online privacy is non-existent. In 1999, 45% of employers admitted monitoring workers' email messages, computer files or phone calls. Given the facts, we can make an informed decision about how publicly we live online. But personal discretion only goes so far. Another, more complex, facet of the privacy conundrum involves what we reveal inadvertently, or more widely than we realize. Amazon.com lost face last summer after rolling out its "Purchase Circles," which allowed you to see what books people in your zip code, college, or company were ordering. Amazon's misstep reads like a youthful indiscretion compared with the datamining potential once financial services and healthcare providers, say, decide to share customer profiles online. And -- despite efforts by the FTC and industry privacy watchdogs like TRUSTe -- the trend toward mergers and convergence at the top of the information food chain makes that scenario more plausible every day. In a widely-quoted statement last year, Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, said "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." Everyone who lives on the Net leaves a trail, intentionally or not. Web sites log visitors, and patterns can be tracked. According to a study late last year by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, 87 of the "top" (however that's measured) 100 Web sites collect user information using cookies. Sure, you can set your browser to reject cookies, but try navigating the web that way. Or fight software with software: Online anonymizers and "privacy enhancers" have existed since the early days of the Net. One recent entrant, Zero Knowledge Systems (www.freedom.net), offers users five separate anonymous, untraceable identities in an effort to thwart the gathering of personal information either overtly or by monitoring one's travels through the web. Another, Junkbusters, will toss your cookies for you. Does the word "infomediary" strike a gong? One of the alternative labels that information professionals periodically try on for size (it was even a journal name at one point) now applies to a gatekeeper whom you entrust with your personal profile and who, in turn, acts as your agent in shopping for goods and services online. Check Lumeria's SuperProfile (www.lumeria.com) or PrivaSeek's Persona (www.privaseek.com) to see how such services work. Would you trust an untested infomediary, though, whose revenue stream derives from the vendors who pay them for qualified leads? Established financial services firms like Citigroup and First USA hope to exploit consumer uncertainty by setting up infomediary services of their own. The privacy dilemma is ironic in view of the Net's openness and inherent voyeuristic bent. Examples range from Ask Jeeves' benign peek into what people are searching for now (those search topics are buffered, the equivalent of the talk shows' several-second delay for bleeping dirty words), to the creepiness of the original JennyCam and its even nastier variations. We could have predicted all this, I suppose, when that coffee pot in Cambridge went online back in 1991. Science fiction writer David Brin projects a continuously-monitored universe in which ubiquitous webcams beam images of our personal realities to bosses, law enforcement, and the Net at large. The result, Brin predicts, will be "a dramatic increase in professionalism and in legitimate arrests, and … an incredible renaissance in sarcasm on our city streets." Meanwhile, the web offers myriad windows into human behavior and performance art, including overt exhibitionists and instant micro-celebrities like Mahir, the "I kiss you!!!!" guy. That quote at the top of the column? I couldn't have told you, offhand, when I said it and to whom. But a Google search picked it up in .91 seconds. As a researcher, I'm gratified, and not at all surprised. As a "private" citizen, I'm reminded once more that the medium in which I've chosen to live is transparent, infinitely interconnected, and rapidly rendering obscurity obsolete. ---------------- Reva Basch maintains plausible deniability. She is co-author, with Mary Ellen Bates, of the 2nd edition of Researching Online For Dummies, and executive editor of the Super Searchers book series. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Reva's (W)rap: Going, going… © May 2000, Reva Basch Remember the "ticking meter"? Remember DialUnits? How about per-search fees and hit charges? The Internet is finally confronting the perpetual bκte noire of the traditional online world – pricing. How do you assign value to a particular transaction, or a given piece of information? The Net has come up with some creative scenarios. Although the advertiser-supported model may work for a passive medium like TV -- and for entertainment-based, TV-like web sites – many dot.coms are abandoning the banners in favor of fee-based models. They now realize that people will pay for content that's meaningful to them – we could have told them that billions of dollars ago -- whether it's stock trading, cybersex, Beanie Babies or business intelligence. The key to staying afloat on the Net is to involve users in an interaction -- better yet, an ongoing series of interactions – from which they derive perceived value. On the Net, pricing is highly, and often directly, competitive. At auction sites like eBay, bidders compete against each other. At reverse-auction sites such as Priceline, would-be buyers set their own fees and compete against the law of supply and demand. Shopping bots rove the Net in search of the best listed prices. A venture called Mercata attempts to leverage the sheer numbers of the net into a warehouse club-type super-discount volume-buying operation. As their ads put it "We supply the volume. You get the discount." Demand, in this case, drives prices down, not up. Mercata's PowerBuy™ offers even deeper discounts; as more customers queue up to take advantage of a real-time sale on a particular item -- the window of opportunity is typically one to four days -- its price continues to drop. Such innovative solutions ride on three conditions: -- Volume – a critical mass of participating consumers -- Volatility – a non-fixed-price economy in which consumers are willing – nay, eager -- to participate -- Visibility – publicly-posted prices in which the mechanism of the market is clear With the arguable exception of the first, these conditions don't apply to conventional online pricing. Supply-and-demand doesn't track in the electronic information realm, where the product is infinitely replicable, doesn't run out, and is never in short supply. (What am I bid for two dozen MEDLINE cites, mint-condition, never used? No, I don't think so.) On the other hand, the complicated pricing algorithms and unpredictable, often inflated, bottom lines we information professionals have tolerated for so long won't fly in the expanded, web-based knowledge-worker marketplace. Our big three content aggregators now accept credit cards for on-demand searches. Lexis-Nexis lets you buy a day's or a week's worth of searching for $24 to $129, depending on the time period and the sources you select. The Dow Jones/Factiva individual subscription model – $69 a year, plus clearly defined document charges averaging $2.95 apiece -- is among the most successful on the Net. The upstart Northern Light, recognizing that "value" is often subjective, offers a money-back guarantee on individual documents. (Suppose the item wasn't totally worthless for your purposes, just not as useful as you hoped it would be. Would you pay half-price?) It's a buyer's market out there. Although our traditional information vendors don't partake in the breathless rush of the online auction scene, they've introduced a range of flexible, comprehensible, and even affordable pricing alternatives that would have been inconceivable in the relatively limited, far less competitive, pre-web marketplace. Fortunately for all of us, the Net has matured beyond "it's all free for the taking"; given the right combination of sources, pricing, convenience, and ease of use, business and professional users are willing to pay commodity prices for the information they need. The online industry finally has a chance to capture the attention of that once-elusive end-user market. Now's the time to sell content. Now's the time to come down heavily on the virtues of aggregation, and on the depth, variety, and quality of information sources a single search statement can deliver. E-commerce studies show that people will pay a premium for a personalized, customized online experience. Traditional vendors are ahead of the game, whether they realize it or not. Targeted current awareness services could be the next killer app. Which of our big three will be the first to market itself outrageously, the way the dot.coms do – perhaps not via a commercial during the Super Bowl or a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving parade, but by creating a "gotta have it" buzz, becoming the Palm (the "Pilot" part apparently is passι) of online information? The system's complexity and steep learning curve could be part of its hip, noir, edgy mystique. It might work; new media companies have built market- and mind-share on the basis of far less. Imagine what a business with an actual product could do. -------- Reva Basch wonders if tagged format records are more valuable if the tags are intact. She is author, with Mary Ellen Bates, of Researching Online For Dummies, 2nd edition, and executive editor of the Super Searcher book series. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Reva's (W)rap: E-Books? E-ventually © July 2000, Reva Basch Thank you, Stephen King. I've never been a big fan of his writing, but I admire the man's ability to accomplish what dozens of hardware and software producers, plus faceless legions of hard-working public relations functionaries and amateur enthusiasts like yours truly had tried and failed to do – boost electronic books into the realm of public awareness. King's "Riding the Bullet" sold 500,000 copies in its first two days of electronic release, continued selling respectably for the next several weeks, and earned the author a cool $450,000 or so in royalties. For his publisher, Simon & Schuster, there's no doubt that content is King. I wonder, though, about the real significance of the "Riding the Bullet" phenomenon. Bargains are irresistible, and you can't get much cheaper than free: The King novella was distributed at no charge for up to two weeks after publication. Even after the freebie window closed, the "cover" price was a nominal $2.50. You can't discount the mob psychology factor, either: Folks love to be part of a happening thing – crowds, demonstrations, virtual giveaways -- to be able to say years later, as if they'd attended some kind of digital Woodstock, "I was there." How many of those copies of "Riding the Bullet" have actually been read? I wrote a cover story about e-books for the July '91 Online. Remember the Sony Data Diskman, later rebranded the Bookman? Didn't find one in your Christmas stocking that year? The Chanukah mensch apparently lost mine, too. But that was the pre-Palm era; the mass love affair with personal digital devices was still a few years in the future. Now, people who'd sworn that they'd never adapt to reading books on a screen are not only wedded to their tiny cyber-assistants; they're becoming fluent in Graffiti – reshaping a behavior as fundamental as their handwriting in order to interact with their PDAs. The e-book industry appears to be getting its act together. The two leading e-book readers, Rocket eBook and SoftBook, are now jointly owned by Gemstar, which dominates the onscreen electronic TV program guide and VCR programming market. VCR programming? If they're smart, they'll leave user interface issues to others – perhaps to Thomson Multimedia, owner of the RCA brand, with whom Gemstar has partnered to codevelop new SoftBook and Rocket eBook models and market them through major consumer electronics retailers. Are you willing to carry around a specialized digital device just to read a book, when dozens of titles -- including King's latest best-seller and a few others you might actually want to read -- are available for the Palm? The ergonomics are nowhere near optimal but maybe users will adjust, the same way they learned to articulate their Vs in Graffiti. In the meantime, the size of the screen determines the design, or at least the dimensions, of a workable e-book reader. Many people, myself included, do carry reading material everywhere they go, along with their organizer of choice. The largest of the e-book readers is no heavier than a hardbound bestseller – and holds a sabbatical's worth of material. And if the Thomson-Gemstar joint venture works out as planned, next-generation readers may include PDA features such as calendars, address books, puzzles and games, as well as online information services, email, and instant messaging. Ten years ago, e-book content was pretty much limited to self-published sci- fi, libertarian manifestos and works in the public domain. The developers of Rocket eBook and SoftBook bring to the table distribution and copyright agreements with several major U.S. book and periodical publishers – including S&S, Random House, Harper Collins, St. Martin's, McGraw-Hill, MacMillan, Doubleday, Ballantine, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Money, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post -- as well as the draft of a standard file format specification for e-books. Gemstar intends to expand the publishing alliance to include textbooks, reference works, catalogs and manuals. At the same time, a robust self-e-publishing infrastructure is amassing across the Web. MightyWords.com specializes in eMatter -- works longer than a magazine article, shorter than a book. Fatbrain, a MightyWords affiliate, extends that definition to include e-books, book chapters, and shorter pieces. eBookNet.com is a clearinghouse for e-book industry news, commentary, and discussion, with pointers to new and classic releases. The Association of American Publishers predicts that in five years, 28 million people will be using electronic devices to read books. They don't say what kind, or how regularly. But I'm a lot more confident that it's really going to happen than I was in 1991. ------------- Reva Basch does not think the book is dead or dying. That's another column. She is co-author, with Mary Ellen Bates, of the 2nd edition of Researching Online For Dummies, and executive editor of the Super Searchers book series, all of which are printed on dead trees. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Reva's (W)rap: The Last Mile © September 2000, Reva Basch Telecommunications industry experts use the phrase "the last mile" to refer to the distance between the local telephone office and your house. Wiring that last mile can be difficult and expensive. For the phone companies, it's the most problematic stage in delivering high-quality voice and high-speed data communication services. On the Net, the last mile is about delivery also -- delivering whatever goods and services can't be delivered instantaneously, in digital form, or traditionally couldn't be delivered that way. It's about bridging that crucial gap between online impulse and real-world gratification. We can already print postage stamps through e-stamp or Stamps.com. We can print our own tickets to certain events; Cirque du Soleil did it for its last show. A Stamps.com subsidiary called EncrypTix, backed by Microsoft co- founder Paul Allen, plans to let us print our own gift certificates, travelers' checks and "other financial vouchers" – though presumably not, at this point, $20 bills. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com has said that he chose an online bookstore as his e- commerce model because books are among the easiest commodities to warehouse, inventory and ship. Books can be digitized easily, too, and downloaded within minutes of purchase. The resurgence of interest in electronic books that I described in my last column (Online, July 2000) may be due in part to the scarcity of other product categories capable of leaping, digitally, across that last mile and into eager consumers' hands. In other words, consumers seeking instant gratification may be drawn to e-books because there's not much else to acquire. Except music: The Napster phenomenon, too, is fueled in part by the novelty-and-coolness factor. But suppose you're willing to wait, say, an hour? If your laid-back self happens to live in a major metropolitan area, your buying options expand to include a range of other commodities that don't lend themselves to digitization. Ventures like Webvan and Kozmo.com have re-tuned the old- fashioned truck-based local delivery service for almost-immediate response in certain densely populated markets. Kozmo, though bleeding red ink at the moment, promises to deliver everything from lunch to lingerie to living room furniture -- just about anything you might order online -- within an hour after you place the order. Kozmo claims that it delivers a thousand Krispy Kreme doughnuts in New York City on any given day. Amazon.com has invested $60 million in Kozmo; I don't have to tell you why. Disappointed in your online purchase? Mail Boxes Etc. has set up Return.com, a site that makes it easier to send stuff back. That's one way to bridge the last mile. Here's another: The nanobox, a three- dimensional copy machine that uses nanotechnology fabrication methods to create fully functional products. Business Week described the process as follows: If you want a new cell phone, you'll purchase a recipe on the Net. It will tell you to insert a sheet of plastic and squirt electrically conductive molecules into the "toner" cartridge. The nanobox will pass the plastic back and forth, laying down patterns of molecules, then electrically direct them to assemble themselves into circuits and an antenna. Next, using different "toners," the nanobox will add a keypad, speaker, and microphone, and finally build up a housing. It sounds to me like perhaps more trouble than it's worth. But imagine how such 3D "printing" processes might affect our traditional manufacturing, distribution, and warehousing sectors. If it still seems like science fiction to you, think about how unreal the current generation of cheap desktop color printers would have seemed back in the days of the earliest dot matrix printers. And consider that desktop prototyping devices already exist. They use materials that are just one step up from paper machι, and the devices they build don't actually work, but they're capable of creating some amazingly complex and accurate models. Does that Dot.com Guy – the fellow who's trying to subsist for a year solely on goods and services purchased off the Net – know about this? Parts is parts, goes the adage. And atoms is atoms, theoretically capable of becoming whatever one assembles them into. You thought custom-configuring your new computer on the manufacturer's web site was cool; you ain't seen nothin' yet. Purchase a product, any product, online and your desktop nanobox delivers the goods. Gotta have that hot new mountain bike? Wonder how that bathing suit really fits? Nanotech assembly gives a new meaning to the Star Trek injunction: "Make it so." ---------------- Reva Basch wouldn't sell her UPS and FedEx stock quite yet. She is author, with Mary Ellen Bates, of Researching Online For Dummies, 2nd edition, and executive editor of the Super Searchers book series. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Reva's (W)rap: It's a (W)rap © November 2000, Reva Basch Mothers of the world, I salute you. Mothers of toddlers, mothers of twins, mothers of twin toddlers – the mind reels – I applaud you from the depths of my frazzled being. We have a pair of new kittens. Our blended feline family now numbers five. I am officially a crazy cat person. The babies are, of course, the most exquisite (www.jereva.com/kittens/kittens.htm) creatures in the universe. They're also a study in the evolution of awareness, the dominance of instinct, the limitations of the juvenile attention span. Look -- a fly! Look out – the lamp! What's that under the sofa? How do you get up there? I walk around with a pocketful of small, toylike objects that I fling about at random to divert their energies to marginally less-destructive explorations. Living with kittens is a practicum in distraction. Living with the Internet is, too. We're drawn to bright promises, intriguingly-packaged content, the new, the enhanced, the different. We're attracted to movement and change. Our focus is torqued this way and that. New resources, technologies, and tools appear and disappear in our environment, mysteriously, as if some unseen Cat Mother has dangled them in front of us, then jerked them away. Today's fascinating development fades by tomorrow and is forgotten by next week. R.I.P. push. Farewell, portalmania. Hasta la vista, all you eager startups with more bucks to burn on PR than brains to hire a decent market research consultant. Goodbye to dozens of good ideas and stupid ones alike. I discovered another one of those Internet timelines recently. This one (www.dejavu.org/forsta.htm) goes back a mere eight years, to the dawn of the web era. It tracks such milestones as the emergence of key technologies like Java, RealAudio, ICQ and XML, and noteworthy domain debuts like those of Webcrawler, the White House, Amazon.com and Alta Vista. Like all such timelines, it's a useful reminder of how far we've come in a relatively short period. And, like all timelines, what it leaves out is as telling as what it has chosen to include. Timelines demand the long view. Picture your quintessential 50-something baby boomer, squinting to read a newspaper story, then holding it at arm's length (or whipping out the Dean Edells) to bring it into focus. Multiply that action by hundreds of items a year. My role, in the decade that I've been writing for Online magazine, has been a balancing act between cynicism and hope. I've looked at thousands of articles and press releases touting "revolutionary" breakthroughs in the electronic information industry, and tried to assess their value and significance in the long term. Some have clearly been vaporware or clueless efforts to cash in on the Internet economy. Others have been intriguing, worth following for a while. A relative few appear in boldface in my mind, significant enough to have eventually earned a place on the online industry timeline. In particular, I've enjoyed tracing the changes in language as the Web has entered and transformed our lives. "Web" itself now seems a shade passι; "Internet," the primordial term, is climbing the charts again. Only naοve site designers still indicate "click here." Both "here" and "click" are implicit; we link as intuitively as we read. The medium itself, whether we call it "Web" or "Net," will continue to fade into the background as wireless applications take over, and as content regains the throne. Give it a year; as with TV, we'll be talking about programs, not platforms. I'm still interested in the evolving Net. But it's time for me to hold the whole scene at arm's length for a while. Semi-tasking is for kittens. Their enthusiasm is unbounded; their concentration, albeit measured in nanoseconds, is absolute. In cat years, though, I figure I'm about 218. Like a cranky old tabby, I've developed a bad attitude about the next new shiny thing, whatever it may be. Call it Internet backlash if you will. Novelty is more irritating than exciting to me right now. So I'm lightening my load, offloading – for a while, at least -- the obligation to make sense out of constant change. That includes this column. If you have something you think I really need to know, email me: reva@well.com. Meanwhile, I'll be sitting in my own sunny window, contemplating the view from there. -------------------------- Reva Basch intends to spend the first year of the real new millennium pondering the astounding resonance, give or take a letter, between backlash and Basch-lack. She is co-author of Researching Online For Dummies, 2nd edition, and executive editor of the Super Searcher book series.