Hi All, Well, I'm back from my big bike ride (California AIDS Ride 5 - San Francisco to LA, if anyone wonders). It turned out to be 576 miles, in 7 days. Whew! Imagine doing 3 centuries (100 mile rides) in a week, buffered by mere 65-85 mile rides in between. Well, I pedaled them all. My wife only missed 15 miles, mostly due to a really hot day and not enough food in the belly. She did great. We're a coupla proud folks. We all (2500 riders and around 300 volunteers) ended up raising $9.5 mil US for SF and LA local AIDS support organizations. Not too shabby. Oh, am I sore? Um, well, not as sore as I thought I might be. After a few days I guess I just got used to it somehow. Butt? Not too sore, we used lots of "butt balm" (no kidding) to prevent chafing. More than you wanted to know? We only got rained on one morning, the rest of the time the weather was either perfect for riding or a bit on the hot side. Hydrate or die was the motto. I think I drank more water and gatorade in that week than ever in my life. I'm sure of it. While I was gone a few things happened in the net world, some that I haven't seen any discussion on in this list: 1. AOL bought Mirabilis' ICQ. An evil beast buys a beloved little company and along with it goes my user information, and any "private" info I may have divulged to Mirabilis. Privacy issue. As a software user, how can you know that a software company that you've trusted, and maybe given "confidential" info to, won't be sold to one of the evil beasts? Guess you can't. This reminds me of the Firefly/Hotmail/Microsoft thing. Do "privacy statements" apply when a company gets bought out? Or are they just so much hooting into the wind? I can even see an evil empire creating a front with a nice little privacy statement, such as the one at bigfoot.com, only to lure data out of people, then change their policy via a buyout. I dunno, maybe that's taking it a little far? Maybe not. Comments? 2. Yahoo bought Viaweb. Very interesting. Now you can setup shop, complete with shipping, reporting, credit card verification, etc, through Yahoo. They're starting to get a bit big for their britches, IMO. Next evil empire? 3. Amazon started selling music. IMO, they did a rip-roaring job with their site. I think their sites are the smartest, most useful shopping sites I've been too, not that I spend a lot of time examining retail sites (George ?). I was particularly interested in seeing that they have a section called something like "In The Media", where you can go and click on "David Letterman Show" and get a list of albums by musicians who where on his show in the recent past. Same things for other TV shows, newspapers and magazines (Spin, Rolling Stone). I think this is some interesting cross-marketing. Then there's the usual really handy search tools, reviews, etc that we've come to know from the book seller once known as Amazon. What's next for them, I wonder? Groceries? 4. Justice Dept suing Intel. Yeah, yeah, ok, that's been covered on this list. 5. Lycos started launching its "Decision Guides", which use technology by Personalogic to help people through the decisions needed to buy specific products, such as Camcorders, bicycles (wheee!), and even colleges: http://www.decisionguide.lycos.com/ I'm starting to see this kind of "decision database" or "fuzzy logic" database show up in sites here and there (take a look at http://www.personalogic.com/ for more on where their tech is used). It think the delivery of the idea is a bit rough around the edges, but is on it's way to being used in many applications. 6. Jango and Excite got together and put up "Excite Shopping": http://jango.excite.com/ Where you can go and search for the lowest price on a product, if you already know what you want. Hook that and #5 together and things are startin' to look mighty different in retail world. I wonder if this idea will really rock, or if businesses will be hesitant to allow jango/excite to compile their prices into search results. Any speculation? Isn't XML supposed to make this kind of thing even easier? 7. Brent Eades returned to the WC and brought with him a lovely little Java Applet. Good to hear from you, Brent. 8. Barry's customers still can't understand the use of fixed width tables and that danged space on the right. 9. Javilk is back to pounding the keyboards with delightful chunks of experience. Glad you're feeling better, Javilk. 10. Hmm, it's almost time for dinner. Trying a new South African Vegetarian place tonight. Oh, um...uh... See ya, Jack ____________________________________________________________________ -------------------------------------------------------------------- Join The Web Consultants Association : Register on our web site Now Web Consultants Web Site : http://just4u.com/webconsultants If you lose the instructions All subscription/unsubscribing can be done directly from our website for all our lists. ---------------------------------------------------------------------
