Analysts agree: Death by Jargon meets expectations

Someone at Hoover's Online is thinking outside the box.

Leveraging the financial information service provider's brand equity, Hoover's has built a Death By Jargon online plug-and-play game that's a no-brainer for maximizing sticky eyeballs.

While taking on jargon may be considered going after the low-hanging fruit, this site doesn't try to reinvent the wheel. This customer relationship management tool is a pure b-to-c play.

But Death By Jargon doesn't have the crucial first-mover-advantage. Buzzkiller.net, another jargon-watch site, got up the learning curve a bit faster.

Visibility is low on whether there will be a real return on investment for Hoover's bottom-line performance from this site. But getting to laugh at the Jargon Offender of the Week is sure to actualize best-of-breed customer mindshare metrics.

This week's offender: Gartner Group research director Michael Maoz, who actually said: "We believe that by 2005, the three features common to leading businesses will be that they approach zero latency with information flow, they will have moved to real-time monitoring of business activities, and device independence will be a standard feature of information access."

We couldn't make this up. -- Katharine Mieszkowski [12:10 p.m. PDT, May 30, 2001]

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What does the technology industry have to hide?

An A-list of Silicon Valley CEOs and venture capitalists took to the warpath Tuesday against two obscure bills in the California legislature, AB 36 and SB 11. Led by the industry lobbying group, TechNet, the techies denounced what they're calling a threat to the California economy.

More than 200 tech industry honchos -- including Cisco CEO John Chambers, eBay CEO Meg Whitman and Intel CEO Craig Barrett -- lent their names to a letter to Robert Hertzberg, the speaker of the California State Assembly, voicing their opposition to the proposed legislation.

The bills, which are virtually identical, would allow plaintiffs in wrongful death, defective product or environmental hazard lawsuits to consider information turned up in a lawsuit's discovery phase to be public information. Groups like the Consumers Union and the California Newspaper Publishers Association have come out in favor of the legislation. There's no doubt that such newly public corporate information would contain a lot of juicy stories for journalists. But at a press conference Tuesday, Marimba founder and chair Kim Polese said that the legislation would force companies to settle lawsuits out of court to avoid corporate secrets from becoming public.

"Essentially it's blackmail that would force companies into settlements. That would be the outcome," she said. "Companies are already struggling with energy costs, power disruptions and an economic downturn. These bills, if passed, would provide companies with another reason to take their business out of state."

Venture capitalist John Doerr added: "I just want to remind us all of the effectiveness and success of high-tech firms is their ability to innovate by protecting intellectual property. If these bills are passed, they are going to cost California great companies and great jobs."

The bills do specify that "trade secrets" would be kept private, but the opponents of the legislation say that the definition of "trade secrets" doesn't include many documents that businesses usually guard closely, such as their business plans, competitive strategy documents, drafts of merger agreements, org charts and employee e-mails. -- Katharine Mieszkowski [1:05 p.m. PDT, May 29, 2001]

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$11,000 per spam?

Attention rogue Viagra purveyors, cellulite cream hawkers and home-based business scam promoters: Sending spam could get a lot more expensive, if Congress passes either of two anti-spam bills now pending.

At SpamCon 2001 in San Francisco, Jennifer Mandigo, a staff attorney in the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, explained that right now there is "no federal law that specifically addresses Internet fraud."

Nevertheless, the Federal Trade Commission has been able to bring 183 Net fraud cases against some 593 defendants since 1994 under other existing fraud laws.

But those cases have largely been limited to instances where consumers have lost money after falling for scams promoted on the Internet. The Commission hasn't been able to do much about the annoyance and inconvenience caused by the constant stream of spam filling inboxes everywhere.

Mandigo pointed out that it's tough to prove that there's "substantial injury" to consumers through the constant flow of spam: "It's hard when you're talking a few cents per computer," she said.

Now, two new bills pending in Congress -- HR 718 and S 630 -- would create new federal regulation demanding that e-mail marketers provide a legitimate return e-mail address and honor "opt-out" requests.

"They would both allow the FTC to treat violations of the bills as violations of a trade regulation rule," Mandigo said, adding that such violations can carry a fine of up to $11,000 each.

"We're looking at some pretty big penalties if we can collect even 100 [illegal] e-mails from someone," Mandigo said, adding that a judge would be unlikely to levy the full fine against a spammer on a per-message basis.

Still, spam haters shouldn't celebrate yet. Over the last few years, there have been numerous similar bills pending in Congress, with no results yet. And anti-spam activists like the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail are opposing the new bills, saying that neither goes far enough towards protecting consumers.

Meanwhile, the rest of us may want to seek other means of revenge. One way to get back at the spammers is by forwarding all that junk mail to UCE@FTC.GOV. That'll add the spam to the agency's database of offenders. It currently holds some 8.3 million pieces of unsolicited e-mail, and the FTC receives about 17,000 more each day. A drop in the bucket? Maybe, but it beats just hitting "delete." -- Katharine Mieszkowski [1:20 p.m. PDT, May 24, 2001]

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The last of the Bixen bid farewell

Say buh-bye to BIX. The 16-year-old text-only networking service -- the online community component of the late Byte Magazine -- will give up the ghost on June 1. Owner Delphi Internet Services, host to several online forums, is pulling the plug.

Most people on the Web won't notice or care, a point that BIX faithful acknowledge. But fans of the service say that BIX's friendly, intellectual banter will be missed. Along with the Well, one of the earliest online communities (which Salon now owns), BIX was an outpost "of (mostly) civilized, often passionate online discourse," says BIX regular Harry McCracken via e-mail. "It was the kind of place where you could discuss James Joyce with Hugh Kenner, as noted a Joycean scholar as they come -- and a BIX regular until today."

It was also the kind of place that technological progress left behind. No one at Delphi's Cambridge office answered calls for comment, but McCracken and others say that site never caught up with the times. After the original owner, McGraw-Hill, sold the service to Delphi, the service "never reacted to the Web revolution," says McCracken, who is also the executive editor of PC World. People could only access the text-only forums through the dial-up Telnet service, and Delphi stopped letting new members sign-up about five years ago. Given the circumstances, "BIX's demise was inevitable," says John Ralls, a long-time BIX member.

Still, Ralls and a handful of others are trying to save the BIX community. They've launched a successor service, Noise Level Zero, which uses free conferencing software and is based on Bix, and they've retained some of BIX's editorial staff. But the software remains in beta testing, and there's no way of knowing if all the Bixen -- as they call themselves -- will move over to the new service. So for now, the group is mostly reminiscing. "In its heyday, BIX was something," McCracken says. "Words, facts and ideas ruled, in a way that they did at no competitor." -- Damien Cave [12:50 p.m. PDT, May 24, 2001]

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S.F. dot-com seeks thrift shoppers, new name

Remember when "dot-com" wasn't an insult? Remember when companies everywhere were tacking that three-letter suffix at the end of their names, hoping to cash in on the craze?

Well, if you've forgotten those heady days of dot-com fever, you might want to visit the Dot-Com Boutique. It's not a dot-com, it has no Web site of its own and it's never tried to get venture capital funding. In fact, the Dot-Com Boutique isn't even a for-profit business. Selling used clothes and furniture out of a little storefront in San Francisco's tough Tenderloin district, the boutique is simply a fundraising arm for its owner The San Francisco Rescue Mission, a Christian church and nonprofit.

While artists, musicians and seemingly everyone else who didn't work for a tech company scorned the dot-com explosion, the Rescue Mission embraced it, changing the store's name from San Francisco Thrift to the Dot-Com Boutique.

"We wanted to get in on the boom," says Michelle Huang, the church's assistant public relations director. "We're close to SoMa" (San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood, once-filled with dot-coms, is actually a 20-minute walk away) "and we wanted to attract a younger crowd. We thought the dot-coms would be around for a while."

Even before the industry's massive shakeout, the name change largely failed to bring in new customers. Huang says only a handful of dot-commers bought used clothes or furniture from the store. And these days, Huang says, church officials are feeling a bit embarrassed about the name. "We're thinking of changing it," she says.

Maybe they ought to keep it. Unlike so many other dot-com hangers-on, the boutique seems to have ultimately benefited from its dot-com association. The boom never brought them cash, but the bust has brought something else -- a slew of donations. Kozmo.com, Pets.com and other defunct tech companies have donated old office furniture and computers to the store. -- Damien Cave [12:10 p.m. PDT, May 24, 2001]

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Supremes resuscitate Internet censorship law

The Child Online Protection Act (COPA), an Internet censorship bill signed into law in 1998, refuses to die.

First, a U.S. district court in 1999 issued a preliminary injunction against the law, which makes it illegal for commercial sites to distribute material that is "harmful to minors" on the Web without screening the age of site visitors. The American Civil Liberties Union led the challenge to the law (in which Salon.com, along with several other online publishers, was a plaintiff).

When the district court ruled that the law would violate adults' free speech rights, the government took the COPA to appeals court. In June 2000, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court's ruling, arguing that the law's reliance on "community standards" was fundamentally unworkable on the Internet.

Now the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review the law's constitutionality -- which means that a final COPA ruling is likely some time during the court's fall session this year.

Opponents of the law argue that -- like its predecessor, the Communications Decency Act -- it's unenforceable and overly broad, and other, less intrusive mechanisms exist to protect minors from seeing porn online. The law, critics say, would lump together edgy or risqué content with hardcore porn, forcing online publishers to "gate off" their Web sites to protect youngsters from four-letter words -- while plenty of pornographic content would remain available to all ages on non-commercial online services and sites.

The lower courts' decisions were strongly worded and argued. But given the current Supreme Court's bent, there's no telling which way it will rule. Until then, the Net's First Amendment crowd will be biting their nails. -- Scott Rosenberg [3:25 p.m. PDT, May 21, 2001]

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