Articles by Dana Blankenhorn

Some 100 spams have hit my client inbox over the last two weeks, a much faster pace than previously. Chances are, your servers have been flooded as well While most of my spam is of the usual variety (get rich, get thin, free lunch, or looky looky) I have noticed some disturbing trends which could make it impossible for even a well-made law to slow ...

Internet stocks have been "cracking," as they say on Wall Street, all this week. That means CMGI, Yahoo, and even America Online are falling in price. For most of them, this comes despite strong earnings reports On Wednesday, however, one of the Internet bellwethers came out with a weak earnings report. Amazon.Com lost $61.7 million for the quarter...

While the brouhaha continues in Houston, Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto is quietly facing the same challenges. Like Compaq, H-P sells PCs through distribution channels, as well as servers and legacy systems (mini-computers). What would it do about this new e-commerce thing? According to analysts, quite a lot. Zona Research of Mountain View, Californi...

How would you like to see one company controlling the bulk of the Internet access market and the customers within that market? How would you like to see one company deciding where people will start their online sessions, how fast they'll be able to see your site, and whether they'll see it at all? You wouldn't? Then you should be very, very concern...

When Congress passed the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act last October, sites that dealt with kids probably thought the battle over this issue was finished, except perhaps for the shouting. Word up, bro'. The shouting has started On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission released its first draft of the rules that will enforce the new law. It...

One of the biggest holes in the Internet business model involves moderators Back in the 1980s, CompuServe had a sound model for paying the people who ran its forums and built its communities. They were given a portion of the online time their forums generated. As the forums grew moderators sub-contracted the work to volunteers, forum members who we...

While growth in most of the PC market is slowing, there's an exception to the rule. Apple is back Apple announced its earnings this week, and they were pretty good. (Compared to the results at Compaq, they were excellent.) People are taking to the candy-colored iMacs, and Power Mac sales are also growing at twice the industry average, the company s...

Compaq Computer Corp. gave the stock market a big scare Tuesday. The company said it would miss earnings estimates, and the stock lost about one-fourth of its value. There was fear this might be the start of a real technology slowdown, but when Intel's earnings beat estimates that fear dried-up It turns out Compaq does have a problem, and it's us.

A year ago, when the Fortune 500 discovered e-commerce, Web ad agencies were bought specifically to capture their people for work on large accounts. Small accounts were left in the cold That hasn't changed, but suddenly there are a host of companies offering to let you create a quick storefront, and offering help in hosting and drawing customers. S...

On the Web, exporting and importing are like the weather. Everyone talks about them, but few do anything about them While any Web site is accessible from anywhere, that doesn't mean you can automatically do business anywhere. You have to contend with customs duties, import controls, and the marketing quirks of every nation you do business with. You...

The Web has seen many great business rivalries develop over the last few years. There was CDNow vs. N2K, who merged. There was Amazon vs. Barnes & Noble, which continues. The most telling Web rivalry of 1999 may be Office Depot vs. Staples.

Before Seagam's Universal Music Group and Bertelsman's BMG Music announced their link-up on April 7, there were rumors the announcement might mean a merger between America Online and CBS For musicians, it was just as big, and just as nasty as that.

Lately Network Solutions Inc. has become the company everyone likes to hate, and I wonder if you're one of them Since being ordered to end its monopoly on registering names in the .com, .org., and .net domains, NSI has been doing everything possible to tilt the new competitive playing field in its direction.

You're going to hear a lot more about Internet privacy in the next month First, the Federal Trade Commission issues another report on the subject this week. Regulations may follow, because despite the efforts of TRUSTe, most sites still don't have privacy policies, and many are either hard to find or figure out.

A few months ago rumors swirled that Yahoo was about to buy CBS. The reports were fueled by the fact that Yahoo's market capitalization -- the value the stock market placed on it -- had passed that of the Tiffany Network Well, the fact was it hadn't passed by too much, and the people who own CBS would be unlikely to accept an Internet stock in paym...

Creating, maintaining and enforcing a privacy policy is a hassle. It's much easier to give privacy lip service while using cookies, registration, and server logs to understand our customers For two years the industry has dragged its feet on privacy, according to audits by the Federal Trade Commission. The European Union has passed a strict privacy ...

As the Web is extended into areas where skirting complex laws endangers people, many Web stores are finding the cops to be their best friend This starts with a trip to the pharmacy, where one person's necessary medicine can be another one's illegal high. This has become the broadcast media's latest cause celebre -- Web pharmacies that dispense pill...

You're probably wondering about that headline. But there is good news today concerning the Melissa virus. Melissa was the first virus of the year directed, not at individual computers, but at the Net itself. And, the Net has responded well to it....

I don't remember the program, or the programmer, but I remember the interview. My subject had made $4 million selling shareware on the Web, and I asked him his secret. He said the basic version of his program included ads on every screen, and since it worked through the Web he could target and update those ads regularly. Once someone paid him for ...

Want to be in the search business? First find a good lawyer. The International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has filed suit in Norway to close that country's FAST music search engine, which is the basis for Lycos' own MP3 effort. FAST is in the business of developing search engines, and is also developing a "family friendly" search en...