Rough Drafts

While the Internet economy booms, the Linux and open-source software movements are thriving on a “gift economy” that values intellectual contributions over market share, Salon writer Andrew Leonard observes. Of course, Wall Street loves the gift economy too, pushing Red Hat and VA Linux shares into

Red Herring has a nice piece on the “unsung heroes of the Internet” — the ordinary working folks who make e-business happen through their decidedly un-virtual jobs. Profiled in the story are a DSL installer, a Webvan warehouse worker, a call center employee, and a manager at an Exodus data facility.

Toy company says its sorry for late shipments with $100 gift certificates: Toys R Us Pays for Missed Gifts

E-commerce sales during the holiday shopping season will add up to the predicted $4 billion, the Mercury News reports. And, despite pre-Christmas reports of retailers’ inabilities to deliver presents on time, most online merchants performed respectably, according to early reports. Net sales soar pas

Dire predictions about holiday e-commerce notwithstanding, the top online retail sites seem to be performing pretty well this holiday season, according to Keynote Systems, which measures Web page availability and download times at major e-commerce sites. Holiday Shopping Web Sites Continue to Perfor

The U.S. Postal Service is in fact working on an “e-post office box,” as I suggested last month. This article has few details about the proposed service (the explanation of how it will work is a little confused and the article doesn’t say when it will be available) but it does indicate the service w

Online merchants may be throwing away 25% of their business this holiday season, an Andersen report suggests. In the study, Andersen employees made 480 orders on 100 different e-commerce sites this month — and only 350 of those were completed. Web site crashes, buggy forms, and other problems famili

Online sales are pretty much on track, merchants report in a new IDC study: Most Web merchants to meet sales forecasts (12/20/1999)

In a survey of the top 100 e-commerce sites, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) discovered that many of these sites aren’t adequately safeguarding the privacy of their customers. 18 of the 100 surveyed sites had no privacy policy at all, and many of the posted policies were confusing o

In the biggest domain sale yet, eCompanies bought the URL “business.com” for $7.5 million. Are they insane? Can an address really be worth that much? In a word: Yes. But let’s see what eCompanies can make of it. THE REGISTER: Big bucks URL is the business(.com)

It’s a bit more than a week old, but if you missed this Thanksgiving week story on Amazon’s beleagered customer service staff, you’re missing part of the total Amazon picture: Not every member of the Net economy is a dot com millionaire. Washingtonpost.com: At Amazon.com, Service Workers Without a S

Maybe there’s no such thing as a free PC any more? EMachines Will Purchase Free-PC; Pioneer Will Lose Its Independence