Recent press coverage of Moreover LA Times on Moreover's deal to power news search on AltaVista, and Jim Fallows' column on the next big themes in the internet industry.#
L'Osteria del Forno Run by three women from Bologna, a genuine eatery a world apart from the synthetic Italiana of the rest of North Beach.#
FuckedCompany.com - govWorks I've always been a bit sceptical of the FuckedCompany bitch boards, but am assured by a former govWorks insider that most of the sober-sounding postings are indeed accurate.#
media / Meet Market by Michael Wolff Billionaires dinner at the TED tech-media conference may be false advertising. Murdoch talks to Wolff "about who might still be a billionaire at Brockman's dinner (Murdoch was dubious about several claimants)."#
Evite: Eurotrash Pre-register for the next of San Francisco's Eurotrash events.#
FuckedCompany.com - iSyndicate A personal agenda here. I was an early investor in iSyndicate, the internet syndication company, and then pulled out. No love lost. But even I winced when reading through the posts on FuckedCompany.com. Most are slanderous, but this one has the ring of perceptive insider analysis. "While were at it... how about the top five business mistakes made by iSyndicate?"#
FuckedCompany.com on Iconocast's pro-internet campaign Pud skewers Michael Tchong's attempt to boost confidence in the internet. "The reason these companies are failing is not because of "lack of confidence in our marketplace." It’s because many of these companies give shit away for free and burn millions of dollars per month."#
Matchmaker, Matchmaker Justin Fox meets Julie, one of the other First Tuesday founders. "I had lunch with Julie Meyer last week. That's always an interesting experience. It involves her asking questions along the lines of, "Do you know Olaf Huskerduson at antsinmyporridge.com?" I almost invariably answer, "No.""#
TheStreet.com: Finding the New Tech Gorillas in Our Midst Geoffrey Moore, the man responsible for all that industry talk of chasms, got enveloped in the internet bubble. His spin: he got out in good time. "Things didn't work out badly for Moore. An early adviser to Internet Capital Group (ICGE:Nasdaq - news), he says he made a killing selling its shares before they fell from around $200 in January 2000 to $2.22 Friday."#
WSJ.com - Microsoft Charts New Course, But Is It the Right Approach? Kara Swisher extrapolates from the Hailstorm announcement to speculate on a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo! "Here's one possible scenario: Microsoft buys a chunk of Yahoo!, the beleaguered Web portal, and transfers its important consumer online services to it. It would be an independent entity, not a market-impossible spinoff, that would engender more consumer trust than a Microsoft-controlled company would."#
Brill's Content: Overdoing IT A dissection of the spread of the IT meme, in which internet discussion boards played a crucial part. IT was a nebulous new invention that garnered a mass of press coverage earlier this year. "Word traveled at Internet speed. A day after the Mark story, a pair of ardent speculators started theITquestion.com, packed it with articles and a bulletin board, and claimed, within 24 hours, 125,000 visitors."#
European Net CEOs have a tough life Robert Norton, founder of UK's Clickmango, was one of the first dotcom entrepreneurs to go under. He did so early, and elegantly. Here he muses with Brent Hoberman, one of the Euro CEOs who is hanging on.#
Brill takes Inside track Variety thinks it unlikely Anderson - Inside's storied founder - will stay on if Primedia takes over Inside. An elegant exit for Anderson, who had a perfect copybook before his internet adventure with Inside.#
Gossips: Will Dish for Cash Popbitch joins the ranks of Drudge Report and Ain't it Cool News: a gossip board for the music industry.#
Friday, March 30
VARBusiness News: Scient Mum On HP Buyout Industry analysts who spoke with VARBusiness last week said the two companies have been in "intense" negotiations of late to make a deal that would place Scient and all its assets under the wing of the hardware vendor's IT services unit. #
DSLreports.com Another industry-specific gossip and news site, this time for the broadband internet sector.#
Scient gets the Jaco treatment in Iconocast Jaco hears Scient CEO Bob Howe suffered from a hissy fit last Thursday when he discovered insiders had leaked inside information. Jaco hears he then proceeded to shut down Scient's e-mail system to try to track the sender's origin.#
Gossips: Will Dish for Cash Internet is less a medium for information as a medium for insight and commentary. Also known as gossip.#
Will Microsoft Make A Play For Excite@Home? One source used a recent content distribution deal between MSNBC.com and Excite@Home as evidence of an impending move. In this business, a content distribution deal is as basic of a deal as they come.#
Powerful Media reportedly selling out While Powerful Media, publisher of Inside.com, is under negotiations to be purchased by Primedia and Brill Media Ventures, the Inside.com staff has decamped to a nearby bar to drink their blues away, according to one source.#
Louise Kehoe: Start-up shut-down Who cares about the demise of the dotcoms? The world will not miss a dozen companies selling dog food over the internet. Nor will most of us extend great sympathy to the generation of business school graduates who seemed to believe that their birthright included a multibillion-dollar public stock offering.#
Inktomi gives Web sites control--for a price Inktomi comes clean. Inspired by the relative success of GoTo.com, search engines are toying with paid inclusion. Sites that pay get indexed more often or displayed more prominently. A nice touch: Inktomi makes a distinction between paid inclusion and paid placement, and offers free priority to high-quality non-profit sites.#
Wednesday, March 7
Merchants of Cool Jason Kottke - Moreover's designer - has an attack of scruple. I'm quite flattered that he classes Moreover's marketing efforts along with Viacom.#
Suits swarming around Critical Path Chris Nolan digs into an earlier case involving Critical Path's Thatcher. "In May 1999, Thatcher's former employer, Geoworks Corp., sued Thatcher for the "recovery of 'short swing' profits" from Geoworks stock and detailed how Geoworks executives believe Thatcher manipulated the stock of a company he knew he was leaving."#
Strange Connections | Little Blue Folders Lifted from www.kottke.org. This item, about the marketing mist around information retrieval, sounds like it's all about Autonomy. But I think Jason is having a dig at Moreover too.#
