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Curious technology --
Sign up and they immediately crawl/spider your entire site and provide you with HTML code to add to your pages, which gives you a search box making it easy for people to do searches restricted to your site. Here's an example; give it a try.
There is no limit on the number of pages you can have indexed this way. (Competitor www.atomz.com limits you to 500 pages). You can request the spider to reindiex your entire site at any time or on a fixed schedule of your choosing. As a bonus, you can get some interesting reports: daily search activity at your site and most recent queries. Less useful is a list of the top 50 "key words" searched for. (It would be much better to see the actual queries, rather than just of list of the words that were part of queries).
By the way, if you carefully watch the traffic stats for your site, be sure to take into account the Freefind spidering. Otherwise, you are liable to get an inflated idea of how well you are doing. (e.g., if you had a thousand pages and scheduled Freefind to spider your entire site once a day, you could boost your traffic by 30,000 page views per month without actually having a single new visitor).
Free automatic translation to and from dozens of languages www.transexp.com/InterTran
The Inter Tran service provides you with translations to and from any of these languages: Brazlian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, European Spanish, Filipino (Tagalog), Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, ICelandic, Italian, Japanese, Latin American Spanish, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedich, and Welsh. This site is designed for people who know something about the target language, including translators who want assistance. Rather than a plain simple translation that would suffice for the clueless, every word has an arrow next to it. If you place your cursor over the arrow, you will see alternate translations. If you provide a URL, it translates the corresponding Web page (up to a limit that's the equivalent of a few typed pages).
Automatic translation with free chat service www.multicity.com
At MultiCity, click on "Live! Lounge", then on "All Active Chat Rooms". Use the drop-down menu next to "Topic" to pick a chat room. Click "Join" to enter that room. Next pick a pair of languages -- one to send in, and one to receive in. For instance, if you choose to send in German, even if you type in English, the output to the chat area will appear in German. If you choose to receive in Italian, everything that anyone types appears to you in German. It's ridiculously fast and easy to use. Like all automatic translation, you can get some hollers by entering idiomatic phrases. But for casual use, this is great. Languages currently available include: English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.
You can also create your own chat rooms that automatically come with this translation capability. Register, then click on "Access my tools", and, under "my CHAT ROOMS" click on "Create a New Chat Room." The room that you create doesn't go away when you leave. It has a static URL that you can link to from any of your Web pages.
Check www.samizdat.com/liz for an audio/text version of The Lizard of Oz, Now and Then and Other Tales from Ome, See You Later Elevator, Tiger in the Intercom, and Hundreds and Hundreds of Gerbils with narration by the author (me). These books are also available (with the audio) on CD from Amazon.com
See too www.samzidat.com/internet for an audio/text version of speeches about Internet business trends (The future of the Internet and the future of business, The power of words on the Internet: Content-based Internet marketing, and Why didn't the walls come tumbling down? An outsider's view of distance education) with narration by the author (me). These books were put together using eBookIt, free software available from Bob Zwick at www.cottagemicro.com/ebooks
(These notes are based on what I heard at Search Engine Strategies 2001, a conference held in Boston in March.)
The partnership dance (there are less search engines than you might think):
AltaVista receives 1 million add URL requests a day. 99.9% of those are automated submissions from site submission services and search engine optimization companies. 95% of those are spam.
This avalanche of deliberately misleading submissions clogs search engine
submission processes, to the point that many take several weeks or months
to include new material, and the quality of the content in the indexes
declines.
Software that automatically checks all the major search engines for
how particular web sites or pages rank for particular queries (such as
WebPosition Gold, TopDog, AdWeb) put a heavy, useless load on search engines.
Google, for one, is considering banning such bots
AltaVista has initiated a new page submission process that is designed to block automatic submissions. You need to enter a code which can only be understood by humans -- a set of letters and numbers in random typefaces and sizes and at odd angles. They you can enter 5 URLs. You can then enter another code and do 5 more, with no limit. Thanks to this process, it now takes an average of just 7 days to get into the AltaVista index -- at no cost.
Other sites are asking sites to pay to be included. (Payment has no
effect on ranking).
Inktomi offers two choices -- Search/Submit (which you can sign up
for through Network Solutions) costs $30 for the first URL (individual
page) and $15 for each additional. This gets you into the index within
two days and buys you a one-year subscription of having your pages checked
for new content several times per week. For sites with 1000 or more URLs,
they offer Index Connect, whereby they check all your pages (or all of
your pages that you want them to) every two days. You pay an upfront fee
and a price based on traffic.
We see a similar trend in directories.
Yahoo charges $199 for its Business Express, which means your submission
gets reviewed within seven days. They still allow free submissions; but
if you take that route it could be three months before you get into the
directory. Whether free or paid, there is no guarantee that you will be
included.
LookSmart no longer allows free submissions. You can pay $199 their
Express service and get into the directory within two days, or pay $99
for their basic service and wait eight weeks.
The OpenDirectory, which is used by AOL, Netscape, and MSN, is still
both free and fast.
Paying for ranking:
GoTo was a pioneer in charging Web sites for ranking in search engine results. You bid for position for queries that include selected words or phrases; and then you have to pay what you have bid for every time someone does such a search. If you are doing research, the value of such results is dubious, because there is no necessary connection between the search you do and the content on the pages that are high on the results lists. You won't get exact matches, rather general ones. But if you are looking to buy products, this approach isn't bad.
AOL, Lycos, AltaVista, HotBot, Netscape, and Cnet have now partnered up with GoTo, so if you bid on placement at GoTo, you also appear as "sponsored listings" at these other sites.
Newsgroup search
Newsgroup search is becoming very difficult. AltaVista dropped that service over a year ago. Now Deja.com went out of business and was bought by Google, which is bringing it back slowly. A few less well known sites still offer newsgroup search, including newsone.net and nooz.net.
Tips for being found by search engines:
Rather than pay a search engine submission company that might engage in such tricks on your behalf (without your knowing it), it's far easier and more effective to build good useful content and present it in simple static form.
According to Amazon.com, "An e-book, or electronic book, is a digital
book that you can read on a
computer screen or electronic device. A reader is the device or software
to which you download your
e-book in order to read it. Amazon.com currently supports the Microsoft
software reader. You can
purchase an e-book from Amazon.com at any time, but you must have a
reader installed and activated on
your computer before you can download an e-book you have bought."
For the world's largest seller of books, that is a very limited definition
of ebook, and an even more
limited policy -- as if Microsoft needs to be part of the equation?
Actually, I've been selling ebooks --
plain text on ordinary diskettes -- through Amazon for a couple years.
And now I'm adding a line of
audio-text books on CD ROM. You can find my works by searching their
main catalog. But you'd never
know I was in the ebook business from the ebook section of their site.
In my righteous indignation, I
wanted to send a message to Amazon, giving them an accurate definition
of ebook.
So what is an ebook? What's going on? What's likely to happen? And how
does this get tied into all the
silliness over Napster?
A book in digital form is an ebook. It need not have a physical form that can be carried around.
In an ebook, the content may be stored as text (etext) and/or sound
and/or images. It may then be copied,
distributed, and output in a wide variety of ways. It may be distributed
by email, ftp, on diskette, on
CD-ROM, on DVD, etc. Its format may be plain text, HTML, SGML, PDF,
or any of a variety of
encrypted formats. Unless special restrictive technology is applied,
an ebook can be freely copied to
computers and from computer to computer and saved on digital storage
media of all kinds. It can also be
printed on a computer printer and read in paper form.
But what is a book? Surely, not just a large number of printed paper
pages bound together, or a
mechanical gadget for displaying text...
A book is a large and meaningful set of words. It can exist in many
forms, both analog and digital, but its
ultimate destination is the human mind.
Computers can remember any sequence of characters or code, regardless
of whether it has meaning. But
humans can only deal with lengthy content if it can be interpreted
by them -- they can store very little raw
data, but vast amounts of meaningful information. So you might say
that when it comes to large sets of
data, computers can store anything, but humans can only store books.
Today, very few people bother to memorize entire books. It takes talent,
training, and dedication to do so.
In our day, it would probably take the incentive of strong religious
belief to accomplish such a
monumental feat, like memorizing the Koran, when such easier means
are readily available for saving and
accessing book content. But when necessity dictates -- e.g., prior
to written language and in imagined scifi
worlds like Fahrenheit 451 -- humans can expand their memorizing capability
far beyond what we
consider normal today.
The content of a book can be created by a human, communicated from one
human directly to another (by
voice or other direct signals), or stored in code for later retrieval
by him or someone else (if there is
agreement on the code). The first codes were visual (written language
and its forerunners on the walls of
caves). A visual code can be implemented by hand (using a chisel, stylus,
pen, etc.) on virtually any solid
medium (including sand) or by the use of machinery (like printing presses
and typewriters) on media
designed for their use (such as paper or cloth).
In the past, whatever could be represented visually could be duplicated
photographically. And whatever
you could duplicate photographically, you could make multiple copies
of, using printing equipment, at
some cost. And whatever could be represented with sound could be recorded
using analog media, like
tape, and then duplicated or broadcast, at some cost.
Today whatever can be represented visually or in sound can be easily
converted to digital form. Once in
digital form, it can be stored, copied, and distributed at practically
no cost.
The mind also converts sound to meaningful form to remember it -- as
words or music or both
combined. I hear a story and retell it to my kids. I hear a ballad
and play and sing it to other audiences. I
hear a tune, whistle it, sing it, play it on a variety of instruments,
improvising along the way. Someone
hears that and does likewise. The brain serves as a storage medium
-- sometimes imperfect, sometimes
creative.
So where does this lead us? What is the end point?
We need to remember that the human brain is the ultimate storage and
retrieval device for books and
music and that this means of storage and retrieval fundamentally involves
interpretation and change.
"Meaning" refers to the brain's interpretive power. We see or hear
raw data and remember the "meaning"
-- what results when we have decoded the data and adapted its content
to our unique needs and
perspectives.
Sooner or later technology will make it possible to vastly enhance the
memory power of the human brain
-- biologically, electronically, or a combination of both. Whether
it's a pill or a microchip that provides
the enhancement, the brain itself will become the primary storage medium
for books -- just as it was in
the days before written language. Today, advanced computers can
store and retrieve everything that their
user sees or hears over the Internet. In the future, your enhanced
brain will be able to store and retrieve
everything that it sees, reads, or hears.
In other words, sooner or later, books and music will be free. The pace
of adoption of technology and the
speed bumps of legislation can slow our approach to that point. But
that's where we are headed.
In the digital world, what do you sell and buy when you sell and buy
a book or a piece of music? In the
past, you sold and bought physical objects that were needed to store
the information. It cost money to
reproduce those physical objects, so you paid enough to provide incentive
for producers, manufacturers
and distributors to perform their roles.
Now there is no physical object and there is little or no associated
cost for reproducing, storing or
distributing the content.
Today, publishers of books and music are fighting a rear-guard action,
trying to artificially create in the
digital world barriers to reproduction, storage, and distribution.
They are doing this by means of
encryption schemes and associated devices for reading books and playing
music.
Mechanical and electronic devices (known as readers) may help and may
even be needed to make the
content of a book understandable. Such devices include print-to-audio
converters, etext-to-voice
converters, computers, cassette players, MP3 players, and specialized
gadgets designed to deal with
encrypted etexts.
Up until recently, the purpose of mechanical and electronic reading
devices was to make books accessible
by more people in more ways. The purpose of the new generation of readers
is somewhat bizarre.
Publishers deliberately make their content inaccessible through encryption,
and electronics manufacturers
sell devices and software designed to unencrypt that content and present
it in usable and attractive form.
You wind up paying them not just for the content, but for the means
to solve the problem that they
themselves created.
I hope that this is a temporary aberration -- an attempt to use technology
to block the advances of
technology and thereby allow old and obsolete business models to persist.
I hope that both publishers and
electronics manufacturers will eventually return to the task of making
books accessible to more people in
more ways.
Publishers are also depending on legal barriers to defend both their
ownership of the content and their
means for limiting access to it. They are turning to the courts again
and again to fight off new threats. But
since their content no longer needs to be embodied in physical objects,
it becomes very difficult to trace
where it goes and who copies it and stores it and redistributes it,
or to figure out the path by which the
copy on this computer got there. Also, in the past, if there was an
instance of theft, in most instances, the
perpetrators had the same economic incentive as the original producers
-- they wanted to make, distribute,
and sell physical copies of the content. If they were successful, they
were easy to track down. And if they
weren't successful, they were insignificant and not worth bothering
about. But today, the folks who are
copying, storing, and distributing books and music are doing so just
to enjoy it and to share it. There are
millions of them, all doing it on a small scale, and using technology
that makes it easy for them to
cooperate with one another without ever communicating directly with
one another. Just imagine the
enforcement nightmare that that presents.
It would be better for publishers to devote their money and their creativity
to finding new business
models that work in a world where books and music can be duplicated,
stored and distributed for free,
where they have no control over content once it has been made available
to the public, just as they have
no control over it once it has entered my mind.
The following list (updated May 2001) was originally based chat sessions that were held Feb. 15, 2001 and Feb. 22, 2001. To connect to these weekly chats, on Thursdays, go to www.samizdat.com/chat-intro.html
This was the topic: We want to share experiences and insights about
free products and services available over the Internet.
Many companies used to offer free stuff and services to quickly build
a large audience, with the idea of either selling advertising or selling
the business based on the number of registered users. With the dot-com
stock market crash, lots of free offers and the companies that depended
on them have disappeared over the last year. What's still available? What's
useful? What isn't worth the price? And what's the future of the Internet
business model of giveaways?
Thanks to participants Tim Again, John Hibbs, Ron Rothenberg, and Bob
Zwick. And thanks also to
Dave Sciuto, Allan Sherman, Arnold Reinhold, Jeff Pulver, and Steve
Ronan, who sent additional
suggestions incorporated here.
free Internet access (the only ones left):
info about free ISPs: online payments (small fee): examples of the business model base service free, pay for "professional level": free email (a few of the many):The following list is based chat sessions that were held Feb. 15, 2001
and Feb. 22, 2001. To connect to these weekly chats, on Thursdays, go to
www.samizdat.com/chat-intro.html
Transcripts of past chat sessions are available at
www.samizdat.com/chat.html
While some free services -- like free Internet access -- are disappearing,
we see new entrants and new
capabilities in online discussion services.
Perhaps the trend toward online discussion sites is related to the decline
of newsgroups, which used to be
the heart of the Internet, before there was a Web. For years,
services like AltaVista and Deja gave Web
users easy access to the enormous volume of content posted each day
to tens of thousands of
newsgroups. But AltaVista dropped its newsgroup search over a
year ago. And after a long slow decline,
Deja.com recently folded. Google bought their service, but temporarily
has left it in limbo. Yes, there are
alternate ways of connecting to newsgroups, if your ISP happens to
offer that service -- either by way of
your browser or through email programs like Outlook Express. But most
Web users have never even
heard of usenet newsgroups, and hence wouldn't know what they were
if they accidentally stumbled on
them. And no commercial service has made a concerted effort to educate
the public about these
long-standing online discussions and help bring new users in.
Rather, the natural urge to gather in groups of common interest and
discuss anything and everything has
found other outlets.
Yes, a handful of little-known Web-based services help keep newsgroups alive, with free search, post, and read service:
But numerous separate Web-based discussion and collaboration services now thrive (including document sharing, email, discussions, chat, calendar, etc.):And HumanClick www.humanclick.com
makes it free and easy for you to invite visitors to your
Web pages to open up text-chat sessions with you. (See my article about
that at
www.samizdat.com/fishing.html).
At the same time many of these services, like Yahoo and Excite, are
moving beyond text to provide voice interaction as well, and others like
www.paltalk.com
and www.telcopoint.com focus on
voice chat. Yes, much is lost when
you can no longer save a transcript of what was said and search through
it later. But the novelty and convenience of voice -- which works well
even with a 28K modem -- is compelling for
many.
So what does this mean for business on the Web? In the past, I
marketed my services with plain text
Web pages, and offered consulting face-to-face and by phone. Now, I
suplement my marketing with
HumanClick chats, and I offer for-a-fee consulting through text chat
rooms I set up on request and
through a voice chat room I've set up (for free) at Excite. The range
of what you can do to interact with
customers keeps growing. In some cases, the free services are all that
you need. In other cases, the free
version gives you the experience you need to decide on a professional
solution. In any case, now is a
good time to experiment and learn and figure out new ways to grow your
business.
In the past, many of the most successful public Web sites based their
business on banner advertising. The
larger their audience the more the ad revenue. Hence they did everything
imaginable to increase their
audience -- including giving away content and many different kinds
of services for free. Now, with the
sharp decline in advertising revenue, they need new business models.
That means reassessing what they
should give away and what they should charge for. For instance, many
newspapers are considering
charging for their online content.
Charging for content based on its age
The news value of newspaper content changes over time, and the marketing
value of content on the Web
also varies over time -- but in different ways.
Some newspapers now provide current news for free on the Web and charge
for access to their archives.
That model presumes that current news -- having inherent value, that
people are used to paying for in the
print world -- should drive traffic to the site. But, unless you go
to great expense to build your brand
name or unless you have the right partner agreements, no one will know
that you have the latest story --
no one but the people in your traditional audience, who you can prompt
with notices in your print
edition.
The best way to capitalize on free current news to draw new traffic
is in partnership with news
distribution services, such as NewsEdge, YellowBrix, and ScreamingMedia.
For instance, NewsEdge
provides newsfeeds to Individual.com, which distributes them, tailored
to individual needs, for free to
individuals and Web sites. It's far more valuable to have your headlines
dancing across the screens of
thousands of users than trying to charge subscription fees for the
latest content, like a subscription to a
print newspaper.
But the revenue likely to come from charging for archived newspaper
stories is very small, because only a
handful of experts and researchers have sufficient interest in old
news to be willing to pay for access to it.
It makes much more sense to make the archives available for free, and
use them to build traffic to your
site -- storing all that text in search-engine friendly ways (e.g.,
as static Web pages, rather than in a
database).
As for old news, a story from six months ago doesn't matter anymore
to very many people, but such a
story would have had time to be included in search engines, to have
been bookmarked by readers and
linked to by sites devoted to that particular subject -- hence such
a story could bring new traffic to your
site.
In other words, while the news value of content declines over time,
the marketing value of that same
content increases over time. So it makes sense to use the old content
as a marketing asset, rather than
trying to sell it.
So what should you charge for? Not the old news and not the very latest,
but rather recent news -- stories
a day to a month old. Those are the stories people pointed you to in
email or that you heard about the
next day or that you didn't get a chance to read on the day of publication.
You know what you want. You
know that you need it. You understand its value to you. And you'd be
willing to pay to get it -- either by
subscription or by the article.
But don't expect miracles. Live newsfeeds (through services like individual.com)
and archives fully
indexed by search engines can both boost your traffic. But, while you
could make some money selling
"recent" news, that's not likely to amount to major revenue.
Giving away "base" level content, and selling "professional" level
Other companies today offer a base level of content or service or software
for free, and charge for the
professional level.
In the case of a newspaper, you could provide headlines and the first
few paragraphs of each story for
free; but charge (a la carte or by subscription) for the complete detailed
story and related services (like
tailored news alerts). For this approach, you would want to have huge
content resources available --
perhaps the content of other newspapers owned by the same group as
yours; or perhaps content you pick
up from other newspapers in partnership deals.
If I am interested in following a story about an election or a major
archaelogical find or a riot or a very
successful business, can I easily search across a whole set of newspapers
and easily access all those
stories? Can I have access to the complete text of stories that were
shortened or that never made it into the
paper because of space constraints? Can I have access to similar information
provided by content
partners? Can I request alerts of followup stories about the same or
similar subjects?
Classified ads
Consider making the classified ads at your online site far more extensive
than those in the print edition of
your paper.
With classifieds, you want to make it easy for both the seller and the
buyer them to do business with you.
If all classifieds from numerous print publications are available through
the same site, then I could search
for a particular kind of product and focus my search however I like.
That's very convenient for me
(instead of having to search separately three or four times at different
sites), and it gives the advertiser
broader reach. Hence partner with other sites to build a larger pool
of classifieds.
Selling your audience
Even if you provide free access to the content at your site, you might
be tempted to force your visitors to
register, because you could then sell mailing lists based on detailed
demographic information you gather.
That model presents two problems. First, mandatory registration greatly
reduces traffic, even when
registration is free. People simply don't want to go through that hassle.
Your traffic might drop to a
quarter or even a tenth of what it is today if you suddenly added mandatory
registration. And if you then
sell those mailling lists, you could make lots of people angry, from
all the spam they would get.
It is an entirely different matter if you make registration voluntary,
and offer incentives for people to sign
up (like the customer discount cards at supermarkets). Let people opt
for email alerts etc. on subjects of
concern to them, and also for email ads for special deals they might
be interested in. Make it optional.
Make people want to do it. And then you can sell the mailing lists
-- but only very carefully, so these
people will only receive mail related to the interests they have expressed.
Actually, this approach is a variant of advertising -- you are generating
revenue by selling access to your
audience.
Serving your audience
Instead of selling your audience, consider offering them paid value-added services.
First build your audience -- and remember that your online audience
may well be both larger and very
different from your real-world audience. Then strive to understand
what they need and value, and build
new businesses around what they want.
For instance, how many of your page views are for business-related stories?
how many for sports? how
many politics, etc.?
In terms of business, you probably have readers who are investment managers,
investors, people looking
for jobs as managers, people looking for companies to partner with,
to sell to, and to buy from. Such
peeople would probably value alerts (by email, to pager, to cell phone,
etc.) when news directly affects
something of importance to them. They might also value online events
that put them in touch with
decision makers and people with the reputation of experts.
For teens, online interaction is probably more important that static
content (and is probably far cheaper to
generate). How many people in your audience, for instance, are teenagers
who are into video games?
what value-added services might they be interested in?
Think audience. Then think how can you serve that audience. Your present
content is an important
element of the services you will provide (so long as it is searchable
and alerts can be automated).
But once you have assembled such an audience, creatively consider the other ways you could serve them.
Also, remember this is the Internet. You don't have to do everything
yourself. You could partner with
companies that specialize in financial services or business information
and research. Use incentive-based
opt-in registration to glean good info about people's wants and needs.
Then have other companies offer
in-depth services to this audience.
Partner galore. Find people/companies who have services that would be
of interest to the dozens of
subaudiences you already reach, and link those services to those audiences
-- quickly and smoothly, with
you taking a piece of the action.
First steps
Your Web site should be its own separate independent business that is
empowered to take full advantage
of the content and audience your traditional business owns, but to
explore new directions.
Don't let your Web site be just an afterthought of your traditional
business. Give it the independence and
flexibility to advance to a new level.
"Cross-overs" (where a subscriber or advertiser in the print publication
is given a package deal including
the online version) are logical as a way of charging and getting paid.
But beware of starting with that
approach, because that sets your Web site up as just an add-on to your
traditional business in the eyes of
your management and in the eyes of your audience.
Try to start with a clean slate, free yourself from the usual internal
politics and road blocks, and creatively
partner to provide your audience with the value-added services they
need.
Internet capabilities are leading to a remarkable variety of unique
business models. We see online stores,
auction sites, and swap-it sites that provide the buyer with an enormous
selection of goods and low prices
(even taking the shipping charges into account).
For buyers of books, music, movies, and games, if you search at Amazon,
you see choices for new
merchandise direct from Amazon and also offers for the same goods secondhand
and cheaper from the
thousands of merchants selling through Amazon's Zshops. For rare and
hard to find books, you could
check out Bibliofind. And for foreign books, you'll get a wide selection
at Schoenhof's. And you might
find just about anything at eBay's auction site, though you have to
compete with others for what you
want, and there might be a delay of a few weeks before you receive
the goods. You could also try trading
your books, music, and videos for credit you can use to buy others
at MrSwap or WebSwap.com.
Now, you have another alternative -- half.com, which is now owned by
eBay. For the buyer, this site is
set up like an online store. Their catalog contains just about all
books, movies, and music produced in the
last 20 years or so. Not everything is in stock, but most items are.
What's different is that the inventory is
held not by half.com but by tens of thousands of individuals like yourself.
And when you buy, the owner
sends the merchandise straight to you.
The name is based on the typical price -- half or less than retail.
The merchandise is second hand, and
rated/priced based on condition. In many cases you can get "like new"
quality, for a very good price. The
sellers have agreed to ship within 24 hours of notification/confirmation
of a sale, and most seem to do a
good job of abiding by that. (Like at an auction site, buyers rate
sellers on their performance. So those
who sell regularly have plenty of incentive to make sure buyers are
satisfied.)
You pick the items you want; agree to pay half.com by credit card; an
email goes to the seller who must
confirm the sale; then you get confirmation, you credit card is debited,
and very soon you receive the
merchandise. There is no bidding, no delays, no uncertainty. There
is no need to exchange email with the
seller. Everything goes quickly and smoothly, like with a retail store
transaction, and the prices are very
tempting.
And about a month after you buy a book, you'll get an email suggesting
that if you've read it already you
might want to resell it now through half.com.
For the seller too, half.com is far more convenient to use than an auction.
To list an item, all you need to
do is enter the ISBN or UPC number (the standard codes found on all
recent products of these kinds),
and indicate the product's condition. The standard description and
photo is already in the database. That
means it usually takes just a couple of minutes to add your item at
half.com, while it typically takes 15
minutes to 30 minutes to add an item at eBay.
Here pricing too is easy (as opposed to the guesswork and research involved
in pricing at eBay). They
prompt you with a suggested price (usually half of retail) and tell
you the going price for other copies of
the same item in the same condition at half.com and also at other retail
sites. You name your price, and
the item is added to their inventory. Someone searching for a particular
item will see your copy
(condition, price, and brief comments) together with the info about
all the other copies of it now on sale
at half.com. And you don't need to collect payment from your customers
-- half.com does that for you
and sends you a check once a month (every two weeks if you sell lots).
Think about this business model from the point of view of half.com.
They can offer hundreds of
thousands of items for sale without having to pay for or warehouse
or even select any of the inventory.
They also don't need to deal with fulfillment -- sellers package and
ship their own merchandise.
Half.com gets paid upfront by credit card by the buyer -- the sales
price plus a shipping charge. The seller
gets the selling price plus an allowance for shipping costs, minus
a commission of 15% of the selling
price. The email notifications and confirmations are all automated.
I'd expect that this simple and powerful approach will be imitated again and again in other markets.
Today you can get extraordinary detail from automated analysis of Web
site logs. If you have a small site
and use a Web hosting service (rather than running your own servers),
don't simply rely on the free
statistical program your host probably runs for you. The added information
you could glean from a
top-notch program may well be worth the hundreds of dollars it will
cost; or at the very least you could
learn about important trends and fix serious problems with your site
running such software for a free
two-week trial period.
I recently downloaded Log Analyzer 6.0 from WebTrends http://www.webtrends.com/
This software runs
on your PC (and you'll need well over 100 megs of RAM, over 200 MHz
processor speed, and lots of free
disk space for good performance). You point the program to the log
files at your hosting site. It can
automatically fetch those files (by ftp) regularly on a schedule that
you set, and generate an html-style
report, covering the factors that you have selected as important, and
providing eye-catching graphs to
help you spot trends.
For me, the Technical stats are most useful -- providing not just a
list of errors (all the instances of
visitors not getting the page they requested), but also, often, the
referring page as well. In other words, if
the error is at my own site, I know what page to fix. And if someone
made a typo in a link to one of my
pages, I can see where the error lies, and send email to the webmaster,
requesting that he or she fix it. In
some cases, I see repeated errors from multiple search-engine links
-- people looking for a real page of
mine, but with a misspelling in the URL. In those cases, I simply make
a new copy of the page in question
and give it a new URL -- matching the misspelled one.
I also like the search engine referrer information. I see a list
of which search engines bring me how much
traffic, in a variety of useful breakdowns. About half of my traffic
comes straight from search engines
and directories. And about half of that comes by way of Google (including
Yahoo's implementation of
Google). AltaVista counts for about 12%. I also see exactly what
people were looking for when they
came to my site by way of search engines -- the full set of words that
they entered in their query. Most
people typed in three or four words or even more -- all kinds of combinations
that I would have never
anticipated. And I see what people from different search engines were
looking for -- giving me a sense of
how well represented I am in the various indexes. I also see lists
of "key words" -- single words included
in search queries, and that clearly confirms my long-standing belief
that "key words" are truly useless.
In addition, I see what browsers people are using to get to my site
(Microsoft's IE is outrunning Netscape
and Netscape compatibles by a margin of 2 to 1); and what versions
people are using today (over 85% of
the IE folks are using version 5; and over 95% of the Netscape folks
are using version 4, with less than
2% using a higher version of Netscape).
More important, I see exactly which search engine crawlers have been
visiting my site, and hence which
indexes have current information about my pages. And I also see how
many hits and sessions these
crawlers account for, so I can take that into account when judging
how my overall traffic changes over
time.
from Bartleby www.bartleby.com
This site, which originally was part of Columbia University, has grown
enormously. It now provides free and easy access to such great reference
works as: Columgia Encyclopedia (Sixth Edition), American Heritage Dictionary
(Fourth Edition), Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, American Heritage Book
of English Usage, Simpson's Contemporary Quotations, Bartlett's Familiar
Quotations, King James Bible, Oxford Shakespeare, Gray's Anatomy, Strunk's
Elements of Style and the CIA World Factbook.
In addition, Bartleby has a substantial collection of public domain fiction and verse. But the site is set up for reading online -- with everything presented in small (but attractive) HTML pages. It would be extremely tedious to print all the separate pages of a given book, or to copy them. Hence, while this site is terrific for reference works, I wouldn't go here looking for fiction.
from the Gutenberg Project ftp://ftp.prairienet.org/pub/providers/gutenberg/etext02/, http://promo.net/pg/
Adding dozens of new titles every month, Gutenberg has over 3550 etexts available for free over the Internet. These include classic works of literature and history, as well as out-of-print and little-known works by great authors. If you can, connect by ftp, rather than the Web, to get the most recent ones. Here's a list of those recently added, alphabetized by author. The file name is useful for fetching the text from the ftp site. Unless otherwise noted, the directory is the one for 2002. Text for earlier years are corrected editions. Many of these texts are available now or will be soon on diskette from PLEASE COPY THIS DISK for those who cannot get them themselves. For the current catalog, check http://www.samizdat.com/catalog.html.
1001 Arabian Nights, translated by Richard Burton, volumes 1-16 (unaccented
= 11001107.txt to g1001107.txt, accented = 11001108.txt to g1001108.txt)
The Koran/The Q'uran (koran10a.txt)
The Upanishads, translated by Swami Paramananda (upani10.txt)
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele -- Days with Sir Roger de Coverley
(cvrly10.txt)
Louisa May Alcott -- Jo's Boys (jsbys10.txt)
Roald Amundsen -- The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 (tspv110.txt and
tspv210.txt)
St. Augustine -- Confessions (tcosa10.txt)
Francis Bacon -- Valerius Terminus (vtrm10.txt)
Samuel Baker --
· In the Heart of Africa (ithoa10.txt)
· The Rifle and Hound in Ceylon (rifle10.txt)
John Kendrick Bangs --
· Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica (bncor10.txt)
· The Pursuit of the House-Boat (prhsb10.txt)
· The Enchanted Typewriter (nctyp10.txt)
· A Rebellious Heroine (rebhr10.txt)
John D. Barry -- The City of Domes (domes10.txt)
Isabella Bird -- The Golden Chersonese and The Way Thither (gctwt10.txt)
James Bryce -- William Ewart Gladstone (glads10.txt)
Thomas Bulfinch -- Mythology, The Age of Fable (bmaof10.txt)
John Bunyan -- The Jerusalem Sinner Saved (jrsns10.txt)
Edmund Burke -- Selections, Speeches and Writings (spweb10.txt)
Frances Hodgson Burnett -- T. Tembarom (tmbrn10.txt)
John Burroughs -- Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes, Etc, (babse10.txt)
Elllis Parker Butler -- Kilo (kilo110.txt)
Joseph Butler -- Human Nature and Other Sermons (hmntr10.txt)
Samuel Butler --
· First Year in Canterbury Settlement (frcan10.txt)
· Canterbury Pieces (cantp10.txt)
· Cambridge Pieces (cambp10.txt)
· Essays on Life, Art and Science (esslf10.txt)
Marcus Clarke -- For the Term of His Natural Life (fthnl10.txt)
Josef Cohen -- Dutch Myths and Legends (nsljc10.txt)
Confucius -- Analects, translated by James Legge (cnfcs10.txt)
James Fenimore Cooper -- The Deerslayer (dslyr10.txt)
Edward Corwin -- John Marshall and the Constitution (jmatc10.txt)
Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne -- Memoirs of Napoleon, volumes
1-11 (nb0110.txt to nb1110.txt)
Friedrich de la Motte Fouque --
· Aslauga's Knight (2001) (slknt10.txt)
· The Two Captains (2001) (2cpns10.txt)
· Undine (2001) (undin10.txt)
· Sintram and His Companions (2001) (sntrm10.txt)
Marquis de Nadaillac -- Prehistoric Peoples, translated by Nancy
Bell (mmopp10.txt)
Annie Hamilton Donnell -- Rebecca Mary (rbmry10.txt)
Arthur Conan Doyle -- The Valley of Fear (vfear10.txt)
Albrecht Durer -- Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries
[admjvxxx.xxx]3226
Mary Baker Eddy -- Science and Health/Key to The Scriptures (shkts10.txt)
Owen M. Edwards -- Short History of Wales (hstwl10.txt)
J. Henri Fabre --
· The Life of the Fly (tlfly10.txt)
· Bramble-Bees and Others (brmbb10.txt)
· More Hunting Wasps (mhtgw10.txt)
Carl Russell Fish -- The Path of Empire, a Chronicle of the U.S. as
a World Power (tpemp10.txt)
Juanita Helm Floyd -- Women in the Life of Balzac (wilob10.txt)
Philip Gibbs -- Now It Can Be Told, by Philip Gibbs (nicbt10.txt)
W. E. Gladstone -- On Books and The Housing of Them by W.E. Gladstone
(obhot10.txt)
Zane Grey -- The Man of the Forest (mnfor10.txt)
H. Rider Haggard --
· She (shrhe10.txt)
· The Virgin of the Sun (tvots10.txt)
Thomas Hardy --
· Poems of the Past and the Present (pmpst10.txt)
· Wessex Poems and Other Verses (wsxpm10.txt)
· Two on a Tower (twtwr10.txt)
· A Laodicean (laodc10.txt)
· Moments of Vision (mntvs10.txt)
· The Well-Beloved (wellb10.txt)
John Hargrave -- At Suvla Bay (suvla10.txt)
Vivia Hemphill -- Down the Mother Lode (mthrl10.txt)
G.A. Henty -- Saint George for England (stgfe10.txt)
Robert Hichens -- The Spell of Egypt (sgypt10.txt)
Homer --
· The Odyssey, Alexander Pope, Translator (dyssy10b.txt)
· The Odyssey, Butcher & Lang Translators (1999) [dyssy10a.txt]
Charles Hose and William McDougall -- The Pagan Tribes of Borneo (ptbor10.txt)
William D. Howells -- The Garotters (gartt10.txt)
Washington Irving -- Conquest of Granada (cgran10.txt)
Inez Haynes Irwin --
· The Native Son (ntvsn10.txt)
· The Californiacs (clfnc10.txt)
Will Irwin -- The City That Was (city10.txt)
Henry James -- The Author of Beltraffio (atblf10.txt)
J.F. Jameson, editor, Narrative of New Netherland (nwnth10.txt)
Albert Ernest Jenks -- The Bontoc Igoro (bntci10.txt)
Jerome K. Jerome -- Idle Ideas in 1905 (idlid10.txt)
Charles Kingsley --
· Froude's History of England (frdhe10.txt)
· Sir Walter Raleigh and His Times (srwal10.txt)
· Plays and Puritans (plpur10.txt)
Andrew Lang --
· Helen of Troy (hlnty10.txt)
· Ballads in Blue China (blchn10.txt)
· Letters to Dead Authors (ddthr10.txt)
· The Lilac Fairy Book (lifry10.txt)
· The Brown Fairy Book (brfry10.txt)
Francis Leggett & Co. -- Tea Leaves (tealv10.txt)
Maurice Liber -- Rashi (rashi10.txt)
Joseph C. Lincoln --
· The Rise of Roscoe Paine (trorp10.txt)
· The Portygee (prtge10.txt)
· 'Cap'n Eri (cneri10.txt)
· Cy Whittaker's Place (cywht10.txt)
· Cap'n Warren's Wards (cpnww10.txt)
Harold MacGrath -- The Puppet Crown (ppptc10.txt)
Ian Maclaren (= Rev. John Watson) -- Books and Bookmen (bkbmn10.txt)
Joseph Moore -- How Members of Congress Are Bribed (bribe10.txt)
F.W. Moorman -- Songs of the Ridings (rdngs10.txt)
William Morris --
· The Pilgrims of Hope (plghp10.txt)
· News from Nowhere (nwsnw10.txt)
· Chants for Socialists (chnts10.txt)
Louise Muhlbach --
· Marie Antoinette And Her Son (marie10.txt)
· Old Fritz and the New Era (fritz10.txt)
Ouida (Louise de la Ramee) -- Under Two Flags (u2flg10.txt)
Margaret Pedler -- The Hermit of Far End (thofe10.txt)
Samuel Pepys -- Diary, edited by Lord Braybrooke (pepys10.txt)
Bliss Perry -- The American Spirit in Literature (aslit10.txt)
Eleanor H. Porter -- Miss Billy (msbly10.txt)
Katharine Pyle -- The Counterpane Fairy, by Katharine Pyle (cpfry10.txt)
Pliny the Younger, Letters, Vol. 1 (ltpln10a.txt)
Ann Radcliffe -- The Mysteries of Udolpho (udolf10.txt)
R.E. Raspe -- The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (baron10.txt)
Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Tish (tishc10.txt)
Mark Rutherford -- Autobiography (mrkrt10.txt)
Rafael Sbatini --
· The Sea-Hawk (seahk10.txt)
· The Suitors of Yvonne (styvn10.txt)
· Shame of Motley (shmot10.txt)
· The Strolling Saint (strst10.txt)
Leroy Scott -- Children of the Whirlwind (cwwnd10.txt)
Robert Sewell -- A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution
to the History of India (fevch10.txt)
George Bernard Shaw --
· Caesar and Cleopatra (candc10.txt)
· Man and Superman (mands10.txt)
· Captain Brassbound's Conversion (brscn10.txt)
Upton Sinclair --
· The Machine (tmchn10.txt)
· Prince Hagen (prhgn10.txt)
· The Second-Story Man (2ndsm10.txt)
· The Naturewoman (ntwmn10.txt)
Adam Smith -- Wealth of Nations (wltnt10.txt)
F. Hopkinson Smith -- The Fortunes of Oliver Horn (tfooh10.txt)
John Speke -- The Discovery of the Source of the Nile (disnl10.txt)
Robert Stead -- Dennison Grant (dnsng10.txt)
Charles Warren Stoddard -- A Bit of Old China (ldchn10.txt)
Eugene Sue -- The Wandering Jew, volumes 1 to 11 (es1v10.txt to es11v10.txt)
Algernon Charles Swinburne -- Locrine - A Tragedy (locrn10.txt)
Rabindranath Tagore -- The Hungry Stones and Other Stories (2001) (hngst10.txt)
Booth Tarkington -- The Two Vanrevels (vnrvl10.txt)
Tom Taylor -- Our American Cousin (ouamc10.txt) (the play US President
Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated)
Aug. Thebaud -- Irish Race in the Past and the Present (irish10.txt)
Anthony Trollope --
· Doctor Thorne (drthn10.txt)
· Barchester Towers (barch10.txt)
C.A. Tyrell -- The Royal Road to Health (trrth10.txt)
Stewart Edward White -- The Blazed Trail (blztr10.txt)
Kate Douglas Wiggin --
· Marm Lisa (mrmls10.txt)
· A Village Stradivarius (vllst10.txt)
· A Summer in a Canyon (smcan10.txt)
Ella Wheller Wilcox --
· Poems of Cheer (pmchr10.txt)
· Poems of Progress (pmprg10.txt)
· New Thought Pastels (nwthp10.txt)
· The Defenders of Democracy by The Militia of Mercy (xdfdm10.txt)
Mary Wollstonecraft -- Vindication of Rights of Woman (vorow10.txt)
Mrs. Henry Wood -- East Lynne (stlyn10.txt)
Harold Bell Wright -- The Re-Creation of Brian Kent (trcbk10.txt)
Charlotte Yonge --
· The Dove in the Eagle's Nest (dvegn20.txt)
· Countess Kate (cntkt10.txt)
· The Clever Woman of the Family (cwotf10.txt)
· The Stokesley Secret (stksc10.txt)
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