Monday, April 05, 1999

New My.UserLand.Com channel: JavaWorld.

JavaWorld: XML for the Absolute Beginner.

Thea's Galleria: Sister Moon.

Chris Nolan: Will AOL buy CBS?

Press release: UserLand Ships Frontier 6.0.

Interactive Week: MSNBC Gets Caching Religion.

Tomalak: Hello Salon.Com.

Wired: Amazon's Auction a Bust. "Alongside of the back issues of Hugh Hefner's magazine was listed a 1979 copy of the raunchier Gent, which touts itself as Home of the D-Cups."

Jakob Nielsen: Intranet Portals. "An intranet should have a single home page that integrates a directory hierarchy, search, and news. Most intranets are chaotic, under-funded, and lack design standards, causing huge losses in employee productivity."

Nielsen identifies Directory, News and Search as the "Big Three" features of any website. That's exactly the same conclusion we reached. The same applies to every website, public or private. Frontier 6 already has News and Search and limited tools for directory authoring. But have great software for this, still in its early stages, we'll release it when it's more mature. You can see it in action at frontier.userland.com. Here's a screen shot of the directory for the website. It's all in a single outline. Makes it really easy to edit. Yahoo should be using one of these.

Epicentric: Custom portals for Intranet, Extranet and Internet.

Mozilla.org: Mozilla At One.

News.com: Ticker confusion drives up tiny stock. "What happens if, six months from now, somebody else decides they want our new symbol? Do we go through this again?" the CEO asked.

Heard on the XML-DEV list: "This mailing list occasionally has messages that note some feature or behavior of a Microsoft product, observe that it conflicts with the author's opinion on how the world should be organized, and impute some fiendish, nefarious and usually obscure motive to Microsoft. I don't generally comment on these. That does not mean that I believe they have merit; rather that I am very busy working with Satan and the International Trilateral Commission on an enigmatic master plan for global domination."