The choice of winners by 220 judges didn’t display too much innovation — many of the awards went to the same winners as last year (PBS Online, Internet Movie Database, CNN, the Exploratorium, BabyCenter and Salon all won repeat awards). But the true test of creativity was the acceptance speeches, which were limited to five words — a shorter ceremony means more time to booze it up. Although many winners fell back upon self-promotion, and several seemed to have a difficult time counting (including Salon’s own David Talbot), the brief acceptance speeches did become, in their own way, a kind of miniature art form.

Herewith, for your edification, a complete transcript:

Ugly commercial sons of bitches. (jodi.org)
Books, music, video and Webbies. (Amazon.com)
Wow. Yes. SeniorNet and Webbies. (SeniorNet)
Monarch butterflies, bald eagles, children, nature, Internet. (Journey North)
Thank you. We deserve it. (PaperMag)
I’m the king of the World Wide Web. (Internet Movie Database)
It’s about power to the people. (Motley Fool)
Thanks, it’s a team effort. (Gamers Central)
Like an EKG with attitude (IntelliHealth)
Thank you very very much. (The Onion)
Thanks Mom and Dad. (BabyCenter)
SonicNet, SonicNet, SonicNet, SonicNet good. (SonicNet)
Who what where when Webby. (CNN Interactive)
Thanks. Contributions are tax-deductible. (California Voter Foundation)
I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Shlain. (Salon)
In the spirit of free speech, thank you. (Free Speech Internet Television)
No ads. No registration. Exploratorium. (Exploratorium)
Thanks, I really appreciate it. (Sportspages.com)
The best is yet to come. (Amazon.com)
Join the mile-high club online. (biztravel.com)
This one’s for Tinky Winky. (PBS Online)
Thanks a lot. This is nice. (Superbad.com)

— Janelle Brown

SALON | March 19, 1999

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Purple Moon and Barbie — together at last

Last month, the “girl game” industry was mourning the demise of Purple Moon, the ambitious software company founded by Brenda Laurel that sought to create positive games for girls. They didn’t need to mourn for long: On Thursday, Purple Moon was given a second life when Mattel purchased Purple Moon and promised to revive it within Mattel’s software-for-girls division.

That Mattel should be Purple Moon’s savior is richly ironic. Mattel is, of course, the womb of Barbie — the top-heavy one-dimensional nemesis of Purple Moon, whose own mascot Rockett had been designed as the anti-Barbie, a wholly human character that little girls could relate to. Mattel’s powerhouse position on the girl-game shelves has also been cited as a root of Purple Moon’s retail troubles.

Still, according to Chris Nolan, the spirited gossip queen of the San Jose Mercury News, Mattel had previously attempted to buy Purple Moon — but the price was too high. Although Mattel wouldn’t disclose the terms of the new agreement, it’s a fair assumption that Barbie’s new sibling was acquired at a discount.
— Janelle Brown

SALON | March 19, 1999

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New Gates book: Buzzword bonanza

If the excerpts in the new issue of Time are any indication, Bill Gates’ new book, “Business @ The Speed of Thought,” will be a buzzword bonanza. From its decade-bracketing opening sentence — “If the 1980s were about quality and the 1990s were about re-engineering, then the 2000s will be about velocity” — to its program-code-like diction (“Making data digital from the start can trigger a whole range of positive events”), Gates’ new tome promises to make his authorial debut, “The Road Ahead,” look like a bona fide Great Book.

Other publications have already noted the deep irony in Gates’ recommendation that companies “insist that communication flow through e-mail,” given the difficulties e-mail evidence has caused Microsoft during its antitrust trial. Gates’ assertion that “I read all the e-mail that employees send me” could cause him difficulty, too — given how frequently, in his deposition in the antitrust trial, he had asserted he couldn’t remember reading or sending particular e-mail messages.

The book excerpt also endorses tracking sales digitally, which, Gates explains in publicity for the new book, is something Microsoft routinely does. The trouble is, that contradicts Microsoft’s own witness in the antitrust trial, who told the court that the company tracks its operating system sales by hand, on paper.

Gates may be less interested in the fallout from such inconsistencies than in the chance to preach the gospel of the “digital nervous system” — a buzz-phrase from a massive Microsoft advertising campaign. Instead of having to buy full-page ads in Time to promote the phrase, his new book allows him to do so for free. No doubt it also helps that his publisher, Warner Books, is part of the Time Warner conglomerate. Perhaps the 1990s aren’t about “re-engineering” after all — but rather about “synergy.”
— Scott Rosenberg

SALON | March 18, 1999

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Steve Holtzman, R.I.P.

Digital art may be an extremely young field, but it already has a handful of serious chroniclers and theorists. Steve Holtzman, who died earlier this month, was in their front rank, thanks to his two well-received books — 1994′s “Digital Mantras” (from MIT Press) and 1997′s “Digital Mosaics: The Aesthetics of Cyberspace” (Simon and Schuster). Holtzman’s writing placed the new fields of digital expressions in historical context and related them to important trends and movements in the contemporary arts.

Holtzman, born in Great Neck, N.Y., received a Ph.D. in music and computer science from the University of Edinburgh. A composer and musician in both acoustic and electronic media, he initiated and directed the first Electronic Music Concert at the Edinburgh Festival.

In his business career, Holtzman participated in the founding of high-tech companies such as Liquid Audio and Perspecta. He also served as an executive for Radius, Farallon and Wyse.

Holtzman died of cancer at his home on March 4. He was 43 years old. He is survived by his wife, Trudy Edelson, and two sisters. His family has founded a scholarship fund in his name for aspiring students of digital expression. Contributions may be made to the Steven R. Holtzman Scholarship Fund, c/o Wells Fargo Bank, 2925 Woodside Road, Woodside, CA 94062.
— Scott Rosenberg

SALON | March 17, 1999

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This Web site wants your spam

Stop! Don’t trash that spam! Finally, someone has found a use — however useless it may be — for the endless stream of unsolicited junk that fills your in box every day. C-Spam wants your spam.

C-Spam is “an interactive art project created by a consortium of concerned artists for the purpose of educating the general public about the relationship between commerce and the Internet.” Translated, C-Spam is a sleek and silly little site that serves up a smoothly scrolling stream of other people’s spam, to the accompaniment of a soundtrack of classical composers.

The site also includes resources for those who would like to join the anti-spam cause, learn how to get off those pesky lists or simply send a can of Spam to a friend. And for the low, low price of $19.99, you can purchase 100 of the “best spam messages ever sent” packaged in a tasteful binder. Not only that, but you, too, can donate your spam to their cause, simply by sending it to spamseum@cspam.com. Think of it as “a gift to the American public” — a donation to the spam museum.
— Janelle Brown

SALON | March 12, 1999

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For sale: One wizard and 2 million pieces of gold
Anyone who has spent time playing the multiplayer role playing game Ultima Online can attest to just
how time-consuming building out your account can be — assembling the
castles, characters, clothing and other digital detritus needed to be a
powerful player can take years. Fortunately, thanks to the wonders of eBay
and virtual capitalism, you no longer have to spend excruciating hours
developing your own account: You can simply purchase another player’s
discarded account instead.

The “games” area of Ebay is now peppered with href="http://search.ebay.com/cgi-bin/texis/ebay/results.html?query=ultima+online&maxRecordsReturned=300&maxRecordsPerPage=50&SortProperty=MetaEndSort">auctions hawking used Ultima Online accounts — ranging from a modestly
valued account, offering a mere five characters, that is currently valued at
$20, to a href="http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=75868384">grandiose account that’s been bid up past $1,500 and
boasts eight characters, a castle, a smelting house, various weapons, 2
million pieces of gold and “the notorious horse dung.”

Louie Ciaramello, for example, opened the auction for his 2-year-old
Ultima Online account at $300 — the price, he says, of a DVD player he has
his eye on. Why would someone fork out that much cash for his account?
“Starting a new account is very time-consuming, it takes a while to build up
from nothing,” he writes via e-mail, though he too seems a bit surprised by
the phenomenon: “I can’t believe people are actually willing to pay $1,500 for a game. I guess it just shows how gaming can be an addiction just like drugs.”

David Swofford, a spokesman for Ultima creator Origin Systems, says the
phenomenon seems to have started just a few weeks ago and has caught on like
wildfire. “We’re pretty amazed, and certainly we think it’s a
reflection of the passion that people have for this game and the excitement
it generates,” he says. “It’s also a reflection of how Ultima Online
parallels the real world — people put value on virtual things and actions,
just like the real world. It’s a capitalist society, you’re free to see how
much you can get for things.”

Many Ultima players appear to be selling off their accounts because they
are weary of the game or simply don’t have time to play anymore. And the
emerging market for their accounts does seem to be a great opportunity for a
multitude of players: Although Origin Systems has sold 200,000 copies of the
game, only 125,000 accounts are active — which means that 75,000 players
have simply let their accounts expire rather than pay the $9.95 monthly fee.
If the auctions continue as a trend — and the bidders turn out to have
genuine offers — it will certainly be incentive for disgruntled players (of
which, judging from the href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/08/19feature.html">lawsuits and href="http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/8545.html">protests
of recent years, there are many) who are considering getting out of the game
for good.
— Janelle
Brown

SALON | March 11, 1999

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Intel eludes the antitrust maelstrom
Throughout its conflict with the Federal Trade Commission,
Intel has made one thing clear: This antitrust case would
be different from Microsoft’s. Now Intel has taken the ultimate
step to differentiate itself from that other legal quagmire: At the last
moment before its trial was set to open, it has reached a tentative
settlement with the government.

The details aren’t yet public, but the simple fact of Intel’s
willingness to compromise serves as a striking contrast to the trench
warfare that has marked Microsoft’s confrontation with the Justice
Department. After all these months of testimony and cross-examination, it’s
hard to remember that for a brief period last May, Microsoft, too, held out
the prospect of an early settlement with the government — and the Justice
Department’s suit was actually briefly delayed while lawyers bargained.
But the two sides couldn’t reach an agreement, and the rest is bitter history.

Now Intel can return its attention to its business, which has had its
own share of recent difficulties — the rollout of the new Pentium III was
marred by a privacy controversy over its serial numbers, and in January
Intel’s competitor, AMD, href="http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,32972,00.html">outsold it in
the desktop-computer chip market for the first time. Of course, those woes
also suggest that Intel’s chip monopoly might not be so fearsome and in
need of antitrust policing, after all.

href="mailto:scottr@salonmagazine.com"> — Scott Rosenberg

SALON | March 9, 1999

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Where are the Pathfinders of yesteryear?
In the course of its lifetime, Pathfinder, the Time Warner megasite, has undergone countless relaunches and management shake-ups — and with each one came a face lift or redesign. Can anyone remember what the site looked like back in October 1994, when it launched — or a year later, when Time Chairman Don Logan famously referred to it as a “black hole”?
Web history disappears unless someone takes the trouble to save it. In Pathfinder’s case, you can now relive Pathfinder’s golden oldies on a site called the Pathfinder Museum — established anonymously by a former employee to chronicle the ghosts of Pathfinders past.
“The Pathfinder Museum’s Permanent Collection,” its page reads, “is the world’s foremost collection of objects and artifacts relating to Pathfinder’s World Wide Web Site. It was established in 1998 with an anonymous donation of a 100MB Zip Drive containing rare Pathfinder screens (circa 1994-95).” The site is organized tongue-in-cheek along the lines of a real museum, and meticulously labeled throughout with curatorial annotations (“The Home Page below was used by Time-Warner to send information through the Internet”).
For now, it seems, the Pathfinder Museum is very much a work in progress. Though it teases visitors with features like the Content Partners Collection (“contains approximately 40,000 documents compiled by Pathfinder staff members in preparation for historically significant meetings with Pathfinder’s many content partners”), most of its pages remain empty vessels.
But someday, perhaps, scholars will write dissertations based on the museum’s artifacts. And if you believe in this undertaking, you can even donate your own Pathfinder pages and paraphernalia.
— Scott Rosenberg

A digital version of “Monica’s Story,” which was unleashed on an eager American public on Thursday, can currently be downloaded off barnesandnoble.com for a low $14.97 — the same price as the hardcover version, but faster than trotting down to your local bookstore. The only caveat: You have to own a Rocket eBook to read it, which will set you back $499.

The choice of “Monica’s Story” for the first simultaneous release of a bestselling title was no accident, of course: Says NuvoMedia’s director of marketing, Marcus Columbano, “Of course we pushed for this. Any opportunity for a book with this amount of awareness is something that no businessperson would be able to pass by.” Still, although barnesandnoble.com has announced that “Monica’s Story” is selling a record 2.25 copies a minute, it would not reveal just how many of those copies were in Rocket eBook format.

— Janelle Brown

SALON | March 5, 1999
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Amway joins the online multilevel marketing melee

Companies that have been successful in the offline world always seem to be the last ones to figure out how to make a go of it on the Net. Today’s announcement that Amway will soon be hitting the Web serves as further proof of that rule.

Amway is an enormous purveyor of home products — ranging from soap suds to computers — sold through a 3 million-strong sales force of “distributors.” According to an Associated Press story, beginning in September Amway will begin hawking those products on a site obliquely named Quixtar.com.

The catch is that Amway is best known as the world’s most successful multilevel marketing scheme (or MLM). Those “distributors” are generally homespun Americans who try to make money by getting their friends to sell Amway products, who then recruit their friends to sell products, and so on. (The new Quixtar.com site will tailor that model for the Web, encouraging Amway distributors to sell “memberships” to the e-commerce Web site.)

Of course, most veteran Net users already know what a multilevel marketing scheme is: MLM solicitation is perhaps the most popular variety of spam on the Net. Your in box is probably already stuffed with unsolicited e-mail informing you that you’ll make millions if you hop aboard some eager entrepreneur’s MLM.

These entrepreneurs have long known that the Net is perfect for get-rich-quick MLM schemes — oodles of potentially gullible “distributors,” just an e-mail away! (To be sure, the Net is also perfect for people to vent their critiques of MLM schemes like Amway.) The irony of Amway’s announcement is that it took the company this long to figure out that it belonged online. In fact, the wire reports say Amway’s sales for last year fell 18 percent — no wonder Amway is scrambling to catch up with its online imitators.
— Janelle Brown

SALON | March 4, 1999

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Can the Pentium III bring the Net to life?

Intel is currently bombarding TV viewers with a high-energy ad campaign for the new Pentium III processor, which seems to nest behind a tall, cobalt-blue door. “Through this door is the power to make the Internet come to life,” the ads promise. “Intel Inside” is now old hat; the chip giant’s new slogan is “Don’t just get on the Internet — get into it.” (Whatever that means.) The advent of the PIII means that “the Internet’s going to be a whole lot more fun.”

Bring on the fun! Just as long as people out there in TV land actually believe that a newer, faster processor will have a cosmic impact on their Net experience.

According to Intel’s Web site, “The Pentium III processor offers the performance for the next generation of the Internet.” Maybe so — but for the current Internet generation, most users’ computers have plenty of processor power to handle anything the Net can throw at them. The bottleneck remains where it’s always been: in the bandwidth we use to connect to the Net, and in the Internet’s distributed architecture, which means that data almost always makes it through — but often not fast enough for the kind of high quality audio and video you might conceivably need a PIII to handle.

To see what I mean, just visit Intel’s site and try to view its commercials over the Net itself. Whether you’re downloading 3-megabyte video files or trying to view the streaming RealMedia versions, the wait and the picture quality are almost entirely a function of how fast your Net access is.

A fast PIII chip might speed up a programmer’s work or spiff up an architect’s 3-D model. But it can’t do anything about those “Net congestion: buffering” messages that plague the lives of Net multimedia fans. For fun on the Net, your old Pentium should do just fine for a good while longer.
— Scott Rosenberg

SALON | March 3, 1999

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It’s Linux show time!

In Silicon Valley, massively hyped computer
technology conferences are about as unusual as greedy venture capitalists –
and just as boring. But every once in a while, an industry gathering takes
place just as a particular technology is taking off. All the pieces fall
into place — media and corporate attention, popular interest — and
suddenly, the excitement on the conference floor is palpable to the point of
outright giddiness.

At least that’s how attendees remember the First World Wide Web
conference, held in Geneva in May 1994, or the Internet Society’s INET ’95 in Honolulu. And who knows,
perhaps a few years down the line, people will look back at this week’s
LinuxWorld conference and say that was when it all came together, when the
world agreed that open-source software was destined to conquer the universe.

The time is ripe for such hyperbole. Linux-related
announcements have surged through the media so fast that observers can
now only stand by and shake their heads. Events as seemingly minor as the
purchase of “linux.com” by VA Research merit a New York Times mention. No
Linux or other open source trade show has ever benefited from as much
pre-conference blather as LinuxWorld.

So has free software come of age? It’s not quite a done deal. There’s
always the possibility that the influx of corporate representation — keynote
speeches by Corel’s CEO, press conferences from the likes of Silicon
Graphics, investment announcements by IBM and Intel — will suffocate the
grass-roots enthusiasm that has made Linux such a phenomenon. In which case
LinuxWorld could be remembered as the moment when open-source
software began to sell its soul.

We’ll keep you posted.
–
Andrew Leonard

SALON | March 2, 1999

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New legion in the Net music standard war

On Friday, the first meeting of the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) convened in Los Angeles, with nearly 200 representatives of the music and technology industries in attendance. The SDMI is a new coalition — backed by the powerful Recording Industry Association of America — that hopes to come up with a standard for music distribution on the Net. According to the SDMI’s press releases, both tech and music heavyweights will powwow over the creation of a specification that “will protect copyrighted music in all existing and emerging digital formats and through all delivery channels.”

The conflict, of course, is that there are a lot of companies with different standards, different hardware and different distribution systems — and each has a vested interest in seeing its own technology prevail as the de facto standard.

In the weeks preceding the SDMI meeting, the wires have been burning with press releases from the technology companies that hope to help define the standard. IBM, for example, recently announced the “Madison Project” — enabling consumers to download music by a cable modem using a special compression technology (Bonus: IBM signed on the Big Five labels). And just last Thursday, Sony announced its own music security system: “MagicGate” and “OpenMG,” copyright protection systems for music downloaded to PCs. LiquidAudio, one of the distribution systems currently available, announced that it would be working with Diamond Multimedia to put music on the href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/reviews/1998/12/09review.html">Rio MP3 player; and a2b — the AT&T-backed music platform — said it would be developing a new portable music player with Texas Instruments.

Meanwhile, the Fraunhofer Institute, which helped develop the MP3 standard, said it would work with Intertrust to push a new MP4 standard with an “artists rights system.” And although the freely available (and security-free) MP3 format has won a chilly reception from the RIAA, the background of new SDMI executive director Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione might suggest a thaw: He’s a pioneer of MPEG, the format from which MP3 has emerged.

Confused yet? Expect lots of bickering, confusion and even more announcements as the recording and technology industries each try to protect their profits and formats. The SDMI has promised both interoperability — meaning that the specification should work with any format — and a completion date of December 1999. Delivering on either promise could be tough.

— Janelle Brown

The transcripts of this year’s competition, held last month at Flinders University in South Australia, make for amusing and often fascinating reading. Some of the ploys are obvious — if a typo throws your conversational partner, you can bet it’s a program, right?

But the more you read, the more difficult it is to put your finger on exactly what it is that makes conversation feel human. Was that non sequitur a philosophical leap — or a line of dialogue pulled at random from a database? The most successful chatterbot in the competition, a program by Robby Garner, achieved only a 10 percent score on the Turing scale (50 percent would be indistinguishable from a human being). But some of the human “confederates” didn’t score all that well in the final results tally, either.
— Scott Rosenberg

SALON | Feb. 26, 1999

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Senate to nation: Get serious about Y2K

Don’t retire those millennium-bug worries yet. While a good percentage of pundits are downplaying fears of a massive technology disaster when computer clocks hit midnight on Dec. 31, 1999, a new draft report from a special U.S. Senate committee studying the problem uses some dire language: “This problem will affect us all individually and collectively in very profound ways … It will indeed impact individual businesses and the global economy. In some cases, lives could even be at stake.”

Those words come from an introductory letter to the committee’s findings, which were obtained by the San Jose Mercury News. The letter, from committee Chairman

Robert Bennett, R-Utah, and Vice Chairman Christopher Dodd,

D-Conn., goes on to say: “The committee has no data to suggest that the United States will experience nationwide social or economic collapse, but we believe that disruptions will occur that in some cases will be significant. The international situation will be more disturbing. Those who suggest that it will be nothing more than a ‘bump in the road’ are simply misinformed.”

According to the Mercury News, the report counsels moderation, suggests stockpiling small amounts of extra food and water and urges consumers to “keep copies of financial statements.” Hell, if the crisis gets bad enough, we can always burn our tax returns — and Senate reports — to stay warm.
— Scott Rosenberg

SALON | Feb. 25, 1999

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Pentium III serial numbers hacked

On Monday, c’t, a German technology magazine, revealed that it had found a way to read the serial number of Intel’s new Pentium III chip without the owner’s knowledge or consent.

Ever since privacy advocates raised an alarm about the new chips’ serial numbers, which can be read by Web sites, Intel has assured the public that Pentium III owners would be able to use a software tool to turn the feature off and on and protect their privacy.

But c’t's chip specialist, Andreas Stiller, found a way around Intel’s safeguard. Stiller loaded an Active X “Trojan horse” (a disguised, malicious

security breaking program) onto a remote PC over the Internet. He then circumvented Intel’s software tool by abusing a feature called Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) — a power-conservation standard created by Intel, Compaq and Microsoft.

“I switched the computer into ‘Deep Sleep’ mode, and rebooted the machine, then read the serial number before Intel’s software tool was started,” says Stiller.

The problem, it seems, is that the processor’s serial number is in the “on” position by default; it’s only Intel’s software that blocks the number. Seth Walker, a spokesman for Intel, responds: “Don’t think of it that way. The number is just there, it’s not ‘on.’”

In fairness to Intel, if someone manages to load a “Trojan horse” on your computer, then access to the chip’s serial number is probably the least of your worries. Still, the report won’t make Intel’s job any easier as it tries to dispel fears and reassure PC users that their personal information is safe from prying eyes.

What can users do to protect their privacy? Intel is not just providing the software tool but also advising computer manufacturers to switch the serial number off in the BIOS (the first software instructions a computer loads when it boots up). The proud owners of new Pentium III PCs can then enable the serial number function using a custom piece of software from the manufacturer. But not all manufacturers will disable the serial number in BIOS, and once enabled it will be very difficult to turn off. Finally, Intel’s Walker says, “We also advise users to choose carefully which Web sites they spend their time on.” When it comes to privacy, it sounds like Intel’s stance is “caveat surfer.”

The company has vowed that it will not be keeping a database of the serial numbers — although Intel vice president Mike Aymar admits that “we may be able to tell approximately when and therefore to whom the processor was sold.”

So why did Intel introduce the serial number in the first place? To help corporations track and manage their PC inventory, and to provide another level of security for online banking and e-commerce applications. Banks will be able to use the serial number, together with user names and passwords, to verify an individual’s identity.

Privacy groups such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center believe that the U.S. government had a hand in Intel’s decision.

“We have repeatedly asked Intel if the NSA or the FBI requested them to include the serial number,” says Dave Banisar, policy director for EPIC. “Their only response is that their largest customers have requested the serial number.”

Of course, Banisar points out, the U.S. government is one of Intel’s largest customers.
— Niall McKay

SALON | Feb. 24, 1999

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Nuremberg Files anti-abortion site back online — in Holland

It may be ironic that the Nuremberg Files, a Web site that packaged its anti-abortion militancy with banners of dripping blood, has been resurrected by “a liberal, smoking, cursing, bisexual, pro-abortion writer.” But free speech issues, shrugs the writer in question, Karin Spaink, make for “strange bedfellows.”

Earlier this month, the Nuremberg Files were taken down by the site’s service provider, after the site was fined $100 million for promoting violence against abortion doctors by listing their personal information and “crossing out” doctors who had been murdered. Now Spaink,

a Dutch writer, has decided to put the site back online in her own Web space, hosted by the controversial Dutch service provider xs4all. The revived Nuremberg Files are now prefaced with a lengthy introduction by Spaink, explaining why she decided to make the material available again.

“While I strongly hold that every woman should have an abortion if she needs one,” the site explains, “I do not think that other opinions about the subject should be outlawed or fined, no matter how harshly they are put.” Adds Spaink, “I’d like to have a new debate about this issue; it’s part and parcel of free speech. You have to realize that when you offer free speech, the stupid people and the nasty people and the bastards have the right to that speech too.”

Free speech online is an issue near to Spaink’s heart. Not only has she won a lawsuit again the Church of Scientology after they removed her personal Web site for “copyright violations,” but she is the president of the group Contrast, which provides “online asylum” for banned political Web sites, such as the leftist German newspaper radikal.

Because the site has been up for less than 24 hours, Spaink says she hasn’t received any reactions from the Net public at large, although she hopes that the context in which she has now placed the site will encourage useful debate. But lest anti-abortion activists try to use the new Nuremberg Files site to continue violence against the doctors listed therein, she warns, “You can never be sure that I haven’t tampered with the names and addresses, and if you use the names for sick purposes, be advised that you might end up killing one of your affiliates.”
— Janelle Brown

SALON | Feb. 23, 1999

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Girl game pioneer Purple Moon shuts down

On the front door of Purple Moon’s Web site last week, a cartoon girl named Miko exclaims, “Everyone has gone weird around here … rumors flying, boys behaving totally strange, band members freaking out … GET A GRIP, people!”

The screen was, perhaps, an unwitting commentary on the sudden demise of Purple Moon itself, the Paul Allen-backed company that proposed to lure girls to computers by offering them software with “a high cootie factor.” Brandishing sheaves of research on girlish behavior by interface design pioneer Brenda Laurel, Purple Moon has produced a handful of games and an online community in the last two years — all built around girls’ relationships and friendships. As Laurel put it in an interview in the book “From Barbie to Mortal Kombat,” the games focused on “emotional rehearsal for social navigation.”

Purple Moon announced Friday that it was shutting its doors and firing all its employees, citing market competition. Purple Moon’s signature character — an anxious teen named Rockett — couldn’t, it seems, hold a candle to her buxom blond rival, Barbie. Despite the media buzz around Purple Moon, Mattel’s popular line of “Barbie software” still firmly holds 63 percent of the “girl game” market, according to IDG.

It might be a case of good-for-you “girl-positive” earnestness falling flat on its face in front of frivolous, mainstream fun. It’s also a big blow to the girl games pioneers — idealistic independent entrepreneurs like Girl Games and Her Interactive, Purple Moon and Rhinestone Publishing — who have hoped to weave pro-woman principles into entertainment software and bring girls up to speed on the technological revolution to boot.

“The whole girl games movement came from an unstable alliance between people out to make money, and therefore subject to market pressure, and people out to do good for girls and technology,” says Justine Cassell, MIT Media Lab professor and editor of “From Barbie to Mortal Kombat.” “Certainly Purple Moon were the most successful of the nonstandard paradigms, the nontraditional startup; they were really pushing a different kind of game … But, who made the big inroads? It was Mattel, and they started out with 98 percent of the market.”

Many of the independent girl game publishers have banded together in the past both to build the category and to create a united front in their competition against the Mattels of the world. Sadly, it seems, even independent companies with Paul Allen’s cash behind them can’t compete in an increasingly consolidated gaming industry that measures success by millions in sales. Even one of the biggest producers of girl-positive games — the Learning Company — was recently bought out by Mattel.

But as Cassell looks at it, even Purple Moon’s demise isn’t a total failure for do-good girl gaming: “The biggies aren’t going to forget what Purple Moon learned, and I don’t think we can go back at this point. Parents are so aware in 1999 of the fact that what used to be called the games market is actually the boys’ games market. Neither girls nor their parents are going to put up with boys’ games in pink boxes. And that’s a success story.”

— Janelle Brown

Microsoft had to know, and it now has its answer: Though Slate is alive and kicking, the pig, plainly, is dead. Web users today may pay for specialized information and for adult material, but they’re not going to pay for general-interest punditry — not Slate’s particular Washington-heavy and policy-laden mix, at any rate, and not as long as so much is available free elsewhere on the Web. Henceforth Microsoft will continue to charge Slate users if they wish to access Slate’s archives, participate in Slate’s interactive area or use Slate’s e-mail services, but the magazine’s daily content will be available to all comers.

In a letter to subscribers, the magazine’s new publisher, Scott Moore, wrote, “Two key developments caused us to reevaluate our business model. First, the advertising market on the Web has continued to expand at a remarkable pace … Second, paid subscriptions for content (other than smut and investments) simply have not grown as expected. When Slate made the decision to go paid, neither of the two conditions described above were known.”

Actually, in spring 1998, virtually every industry observer agreed that A) Web advertising was headed for a boom, and B) subscriptions were unlikely to sell. Moore’s final passive locution can only leave one wondering: Exactly who was it at Slate who remained in the dark?

What’s clear is that Slate never got the subscription base it hoped for. It claims close to 30,000 subscribers now, which means its annual subscription revenue was under $600,000 — roughly a 10th of what analysts guess publishing the magazine probably costs. Meanwhile, as editor Michael Kinsley admits in a column explaining the new strategy, the closed-gate approach had literally throttled Slate’s traffic, making it impossible for the site to raise much money from advertising sales.

That Slate chose to make its announcement on arguably the biggest news day in eons, as the Senate took its roll call vote on impeachment, suggests the magazine hopes to prevent its about-face from making too many headlines. It also reminds us that the year during which Slate closed its doors was the year in which presidential and prosecutorial scandals finally put the Web on the map as a news-breaking medium — a process Slate’s business strategy prevented it from participating in. Now that Slate has rejoined the Web press, its success or failure will be judged by the same measures as any other site: How many loyal readers can it attract, how much noise can it make and how much ad space can it sell?
— Scott Rosenberg

SALON | Feb. 12, 1999

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“Felicity” points to the Web

The WB drama “Felicity” has been fooling around with Internet angles for some time now. But the lines between the TV show, the Web and reality became even more blurred Tuesday night.

Late in that night’s episode, Felicity interrupts her boyfriend, Noel, and a would-be stalker who are hovering over Noel’s iMac. One of the characters tells Felicity that they’re laughing at a great Web page, which he offhandedly identifies only as “the contemptuous sardonic …” (He’s interrupted before he can finish.)

The casual mention was a direct reference to a real-life Web site — the “Contemptuous Sardonic Felicity Watchers Society,” a site that’s “dedicated to improving lives (and vocabularies) through ‘Felicity.’” Besides a weekly “Felicity Sweater Count,” the tongue-in-cheek site posts a one-line summary of the latest episode’s “moral” and features excerpts of dialogue with big words. The site apparently knew in advance about its upcoming on-screen mention — a message encouraged visitors to watch the Feb. 9 episode.

This TV-to-Web nod is nothing new for the drama. In at least three episodes to date, the title character’s resident advisor (who’s also her boyfriend) has mentioned his Web site’s address at noelcrane.com. The URL points to an actual site — an elaborate (but now mostly stale) personal Web page complete with pop-up windows and Javascript-reliant pages. Recently updated to include a mock advertisement splash page, it invites probes into “creator” and RA Noel Crane’s design portfolio, risumi and residence hall calendar.

None of the content is framed outright as being related to the show — in fact, it sounds authentic, at least until you find mentions of the University of New York, the fictional setting of the drama. The show’s creators have even danced around the topic of ownership of the site, preferring fans to believe, on some level, that the site is actually that of the fictional character. Does suspension of disbelief work on the Web? Tune in next week.
— Andy Dehnart

SALON | Feb. 12, 1999

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Blurred lines in Times’ Amazon story

A front-page New York Times story Monday revealed to the world that Amazon.com, the pioneer online bookstore, was taking big payments from book publishers to promote new releases on its Web site in a variety of ways, including reviewing them and listing them as “”New and Notable” or “Destined for Greatness.”

The Times article said: “Some [publishers] are reluctant to discuss the blurring line between editorial and advertising. Others view the practice as an exciting opportunity that is no different from the terrestrial custom of selling display space in bookstore chains and supermarkets.”

In the wake of the report, Amazon Tuesday announced that it would offer refunds to any customers unhappy with the purchase of a book the site had recommended. Also, Amazon said it will henceforth identify paid placements on its site as such.

That’s certainly a smart and fast reaction, and it will help better orient Amazon’s customers in the virtual aisles. But something’s a little askew here: Amazon is, after all, primarily and essentially a bookstore. We hope to find a “line between editorial and advertising” in newspapers and magazines, but since when did we expect to find it at a store?

And in choosing to highlight Amazon’s practice so prominently, right below stories of the Clinton impeachment trial, the Times might have seen fit to mention its own complex interest in the rivalry between Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. Barnesandnoble.com happens to be the “exclusive bookseller” for the Times’ Web site (as it is for the site you are now reading). Surely this little fact deserved a brief mention in a major negative story about Barnesandnoble.com’s chief competitor.

Or could that line between editorial and business be blurred in other places besides Amazon?
— Scott Rosenberg

SALON | Feb. 10, 1999

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Tabloid sues Florida citrus growers over talking ham sandwich!

It sounds exactly like the kind of story that the trashy news-and-comedy site Tabloid.net might invent as a prank — a Web site suing the Florida Department of Citrus over a purloined, smart-alecky talking ham sandwich! But believe it or not, the story appears to be true. A lawsuit filed Monday by Tabloid.net claims that their leftover sandwich was used as the spokesmeal in a $12 million national TV ad campaign for orange juice.

Tabloid.net created their talking (and, incidentally, psychic) ham sandwich in August 1997 as a minor character in a bizarre fictional noir serial called Vodka City. Almost exactly a year later, they claim, a similar wisecracking ham sandwich — complete with olives for eyes — appeared in a Florida Orange Juice TV commercial, giving running commentary to a boy who opens a refrigerator.

But beyond the striking similarity of the characters, the editors of Tabloid.net believe they have proof of the rip-off: Their log files show that employees of the Richards Group, the Dallas advertising agency that created the orange juice commercial, visited Tabloid.net’s Web site several times between May and August of 1998.

As Tabloid.net editor Charles Hornberger explained their feelings in a statement: “We’re just a small publishing company trying to make a good magazine for the Web. We’re not in the business of making advertising campaigns for huge companies to rip off. Stealing a completely unique character from our original, illustrated fiction is a shameful way for an advertising agency to make its millions of dollars.” (The Richards Group did not return phone calls about the suit.)

So Tabloid.net is suing both the Richards Group and the Florida Department of Citrus, and has carefully documented its side of the dispute on its Web site. Tabloid.net’s demands? “Actual damages and the defendants’ profits from the wrongful use of copyrighted material belonging exclusively to Tabloid News Services.” Considering how much orange juice has likely been consumed in the five months since the juice commercial was released, those profits could pay for a lot of ham sandwiches.
— Janelle Brown

SALON | Feb. 9, 1999

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Gassie: Microsoft’s full of Be-S

Microsoft’s antitrust battle with the Justice Department has left the company strangely enamored of small upstart competitors like Linux and, now, Be — whose competition it can cite as proof that it holds no monopoly. Last Monday in the antitrust trial, Microsoft senior vice president James Allchin cited Be as an example of another operating system that, like Windows 98, features a “fully integrated” browser.

Trouble is, Jean-Louis Gassie, Be’s founder, says that’s nonsense. He wrote last week in Be’s newsletter: “Our browser is an application, just like a word processor, and it is removed just as easily. I recall us jokingly referring to it in one of our press releases as ‘DOJ-approved.’”

According to Gassie, if you remove Be’s Netpositive browser, “All you lose is the ability to read HTML documents locally or on the Web. One might object that other applications, such as a mail client, are affected. If you remove NetPositive, clicking on a URL no longer takes you ‘there.’ Right. If you remove the printer, the word processor no longer prints. This doesn’t mean the printer or the driver is ‘integrated’ in the OS in the sense that removing Explorer would cripple Windows 98.”

As for the notion that Be is a credible threat to Microsoft, Gassie calls that a “DOJ bedtime story”: “We would feel validated, as we say in California, if we didn’t have to wonder why a minuscule company like ours is held in such high regard by the giant.”