Dave Winer: Dot-Coms

NY Times: "Nearly all its rivals have vanished or are just limping along, conserving their last drops of cash. And Amazon, with its head start and foresight to raise $2.1 billion, is one of the few dot-coms left that will ever find out whether that that crucial second phase can work."

Eazel: The Honeymoon's Over [Slashdot]

TheGlobe.com faces Nasdaq delisting. CNET Feb 14 2001 11:12PM ET

News.Com: Amazon debuts Honor System. Dubbed the Amazon Honor System, the new payment method will allow Web sites to solicit small donations from visitors or charge for content on a pay-per-view basis. The system will tie into Amazon's one-click payment feature and Amazon's customer database... (Shouldn't we ask first if they've taken out a patent on this?)

Glenn Fleishman: Yaahoooooo--argh! Genuine People Personalities. A couple days ago, they completed the branding switchover, so that it's now Yahoo! Groups. This kind of thing happens all the time in the dot com world. But with Yahoo's typical response to feedback, they've already made some large blunders.

VeriSign Blows Away Forecasts. The company topped earnings estimates by 10 cents per share and pointed to a diversified business as the reason.

It doesn't take long to find the gotcha in the redesign at News.Com. There's a big huge ad in the middle of almost every story. News.Com, like every other dotcom, is radically altering its formula, wanting to be one of the survivors. If this proves economic (that is if people continue to read the stories wrapped around the flashing TV-size ads) then you can truly see the cost of being an eyeball. Judge for yourself if the editorial that surrounds the ads is worth the distraction. I've found lately, even before the redesign, that I'm visiting News.Com less. Fast-flowing news, once the exclusive domain of News.Com, is now commonplace. So the quality of the reporting and analysis becomes the issue and the distraction cost of the ads.

Can The Doghouse Help Save Webvan?. Fledgling online grocery story bets diversity is the answer to financial stability as it joins forces with PETsMART.com to launch a pet store on Webvan's site.

A Dot-Bomb Postmortem. Many died, but what's the fate of dot-coms that survive the current shakeout?

Vignette to Cut Jobs in the Face of A Cooling Economy. The software maker cuts jobs in preparation for the cooling economy.

Business 2.0: The Invisible Internet. Clay Shirky. Internet World is more than a trade show; it's the industry's collective unconscious, its zeitgeist check, if you will. And the fall 2000 event said something loud and clear: The days of the Internet as its own business sector are winding down.

Internet.Com: Customers Last To Know of PSN.net Closure. EXCLUSIVE: With its Web site closed down and a no one answering the phones, the defunct national ISP is keeping its customers in the dark and without service.

Salon: Finishing last in the dotcom race. "Actually, there have been better times than now to raise VC money for dot-com start-ups -- during the crusades, for instance, or during those torrid years when dinosaurs walked the earth."

Industry Braces for Yahoo!, DoubleClick. The two giants in ad-supported content and ad delivery Wednesday and Thursday will give earnings -- and an idea of how the industry will fare in coming months.

Amazon's Elusive Billion-Dollar Quarter. Amazon.com had a solid fourth quarter. Was it solid enough?

Internet News: The Dot-com Bubble-Burst and Disintermediation. "Amazon.com itself doesn't really cut out the middleman: it is the middleman. It stands between the author and the reader, the musician and the listener. It's just another super-store, just one with a lower cost of overheads."

NY Times: More People Went Online to Talk and Send Greetings Than Shop. They found that noncommercial activities -- getting information about the holidays, seeking tips and ideas for celebrating and using e-mail and e- greetings to make contact with family and friends -- drowned out the buy, buy, buy drumbeat of online companies.

Legal Battle Escalates Between Top Free ISPs. The federal courts awarded NetZero a temporary restraining order against Juno Monday over its ad banner technology. Juno says the technology is theirs and NetZero is the one infringing on its technology.

Marc Andreessen: "It's a classic bubble thing. The bubble only bursts when there's no more people left to convert into being true believers, which is what happened in March."

Wired: Dot-Coms Punt in Super Bowl. Dot-coms that went on a spending spree to advertise during last year's big game didn't necessarily do themselves any favors -- many no longer exist. Bet on the dot-com presence not dominating Super Bowl XXXV. By Jeffrey Terraciano.

DaveNet: What if technologists had integrity?

Inside.Com: Layoffs Expected Monday At The Industry Standard, As Deteriorating Market Conditions Force Strategic Retreat. Internet economy magazine's ambitious parent company had bulked up to 400 employees amid explosive ad page growth; only latest boom-time business book to trim staff.

Fast Company: The New Lure of Internet Marketing. The new marketing tools of choice are affiliate programs, and pay-for-performance deals such as revenue sharing and bounty systems. Welcome to the Kickback Economy: Merchants and media sites are forming alliances that refer customers back and forth -- and are sharing in the spoils.

Advogato: Getting Over Bad Habits. "So, you've been through Dilbert hell. But now you've made it, right? You've got more character and more experience. You escaped with your will intact, and no battle scars. Hah, right. You've got plenty of ingrained bad habits from your years in hell, and you'd better start figuring out what they are and cutting them out of your life."

Technology: China Planning Own Internet. 12:44 ET - AP

Paul Andrews: Was 'free' such a good idea?

Marketing Computers: Conflicts of Interest. Michael Schrage. However, the imperatives of venture capitalists are not the imperatives of brand builders and marketers. A dispassionate analysis of dot-com turbulence and Net-hysteria can only conclude that conflicts of interest have played a starring role in raising the market up and crashing the market down.

Inktomi Hurt By Spending Slowdown. The Internet infrastructure company is down nearly 25% today after issuing a sales and profit warning.

DaveNet: Desktop Websites.

AtNewYork: 210 Dot-coms Closed in 2000, E-commerce Hardest Hit. "In a year when $87 billion was spent on M&A transactions in the dot-com industry, some 210 Internet companies were forced to shutter operations in 2000, including 20 in New York."

Yahoo! Bows to Reality. New policies are instated as Big Purple faces bottom-line and public-relations challenges.

Hey I guess we won't be seeing any more "We're the Dot in Dot-Com" television ads. Something to be thankful for.

Dot-Com Begs for Bucks. Pyra.com can't get the necessary cash to upgrade its free weblog service from Internet investors burned by Wall Street, so the company asks users to send them a few dollars to buy new hardware. By Leander Kahney.

Khosla talks money, tech, and modesty. Vinod Khosla gets introspective about his role mentoring companies to the top. He prefers to think of himself as a coach, despising the take-the-money-and-run approach of many of his fellow VCs. Relationships with companies are nearly as important to him as his relationship with his family, we found.

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Doubleclick tries to regain credibility. Doubleclick entered 2000 with plans for new products, new revenue, and new customers. Instead, the Internet advertising company focused on crisis management. A ruckus started when a privacy advocacy group accused Doubleclick of planning to give out anonymous data to an offline direct-mail house.

Mary Jo Foley: Web services, few actually deliver. "Are the industry leaders onto a hot trend? Or are the emperors parading around without clothes?"

Free Links, Only $50 Apiece. Some online news sites have begun charging others to link to their articles. The Albuquerque Journal, for instance, charges $50 for the right. But legal experts say no U.S. law or court decision allows a website to successfully demand payment. Declan McCullagh reports from Washington.

It's all Netscape's fault. Tactics. In the three quarters prior to its 1995 IPO, Netscape generated just $43 million in revenue. Yet from its IPO to its pre-takeover peak four months later, the stock appreciated from $28 to $98, a 250 percent gain. Netscape turned the technology-investing world on its ear.

Evhead: Pricing Matters. I've been thinking a lot about pricing lately, and the statement above is inline with my intuition (and experience) on the ever-tricky issue. It also brought up a lot of thoughts I've been having about pricing and assumptions that are often made about what does and doesn't work on the web...

Content Magazine: Dumb and Dumber Ideas. Evan Schwartz. So, we have crawled through the Web's wreckage in search of turkeys--by which we mean e-commerce predictions that missed their mark by an embarrassing margin. We have identified four of the most misleading and ruinous predictions of the past several years.

Post Holiday Dot-Com Blowout Clearance Sale!. The holiday season is over. Is it time to go shopping for bargains?

The Red Eye: Droplets and Zaplets. Executable client applications, like those from Zaplet and Droplets, that can be dragged and dropped from a Web browser could be part of the X Internet revolution.

Realnetworks hasn't mastered revenue streaming. The economic slowdown and the dot-com bust bring Realnetworks to its knees. Can the company weather the storm until broadband hits?

NY Times: Will Bricks-and-Mortar Merchants Grow Complacent. It meant they had at least a little more time to construct their own Internet strategies. But now that the consumer e-commerce landscape looks like it has been struck by a neutron bomb, industry analysts say bricks-and-mortar merchants are breathing a bit too easily.

Technology: E-Business - IPO market goes to the dogs. 10:48 ET - cnet

The Sock Puppet Tells His Story. Despite the recent demise of Pets.com, its spokesperson appears to be here to stay. This is one sock that won't get lost in the laundry. By Farhad Manjoo.

Useit.Com: The Web in 2001: Paying Customers. Offering free services on websites is not a sustainable business model, nor is advertising, which doesn't work on the Web. Most Internet companies are now pursuing an enterprise strategy to make money, but they'll soon begin turning to individual customers for revenue as well.

O'Reilly Network: The Case Against Micropayments. Clay Shirky. The very micro-ness of micropayments makes them confusing. At the very least, users will be persistently puzzled over the conflicting messages of "This is worth so much you have to decide whether to buy it or not" and "This is worth so little that it has virtually no cost to you."

NY Times editorial: The Dot-Com Bubble Bursts. "The current sense of despair in the dot-com universe may be as overdone as last year's euphoria. The Internet, after all, really is a transforming technology that has revolutionized the way we communicate."

Fortune: It Can Go Down To Zero. I said that everyone in the press had expected a crash; of course, we knew Net stocks could and should go down 70 percent or 80 percent. "But not 96 percent," he finished my sentence. I opened my mouth to deliver the next line, but he beat me to it. "It can go down to zero," he said.

SF Chronicle: "Salon relies on advertising for 87 percent of its revenue. Half of its advertisers are dot-com companies, and that is a shrinking market, O'Donnell said."

An Extreme Year for New Stocks. The Year 2000 was a time of crazy contrasts for companies that tried their luck on the public market. Companies raised more money than ever before in initial stock offerings. But most are now trading well below their starting price. By Joanna Glasner.

Washington Post: "The Internet is proving to be a difficult place to make a profit."