February 2003 Internet News Recap

Web trends are always fascinating. On the net, the world moves at a dizzying pace. It's fun to try to keep up, even knowing that goal is impossible to achieve. Here is a recap of some of the more interesting recent finds.

Have you heard of Cyberbegging? It seems some folks are throwing their hats in the web-ring to raise money for their favorite charities, themselves.

It all started last year when a young New Yorker named Karyn Bosnak launched a site to help defer her $20,000 fashion frenzied spending spree. She was an out of work freelance television producer with a seemingly insurmountable credit card debt. When she saw a sign in a local grocery store that read, "Wanted! $7000 to get out of debt", her idea was born.

The front page of her site www.SaveKaryn.com simply read, "My name is Karyn, I'm really nice, and I'm asking for your help! You see, I have this huge credit card debt and I need $20,000 to pay it off. So if you have an extra buck or two, please send it my way!"

In less than four months she was debt free. Karyn's story was picked up by People Magazine, the NBC Today Show and CNN. Not only that, but she also has been approached for deals by both book publishers and movie producers.

The media wasn't the only group who noticed Bosnak's success. Lots of other debt-laden folks did too. Now there are thousands of 'help-me' sites floating about in the cyber-sphere. There is even a portal site www.CyberBeg.com where you can register your site for free.

As for the success rate of these SaveKaryn.com wannabes, well, let's just say we hope they didn't pay their webmasters more than they could afford. Like so many odd success stories, once seems to be quite enough.

Now on to the other interesting internet news

Valentine's Day. Yes, indeed, shoppers were online in record numbers buying huggable goodies, tasty chocolates and sweet smelling unmentionables.Here are some of the numbers for the week ending February 9th according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

• Traffic to 1800Flowers.com was up 84%.
• VictoriaSecret.com was up 37% to 553,000 users
• Fredericks.com jumped 17% to 323,000 users
• RedEnvelope.com (specialty gift retailers) up 26% to more than 200,000 visitors
• AmericanGreeting.com was up 23% with over 1.3 million visitors
• BlueMountain.com drew 645,000 visitors

On the other hand, unwanted Valentine spam flooded inboxes by the millions. According to BrightBox.com, "Unwanted Valentines fell into the following predictable categories:

• Flowers and chocolates: 50 percent
• Sexual performance enhancers: 20 percent
• Lingerie: 10 percent
• Dating/matchmaking services: 10 percent
• Other Gifts (stuffed animals, jewelry, etc.): 10 percent

February was an interesting month in Search Engine land as well.

Google.com is buying Pyra Labs, the company behind the popular Blogger.com weblog creation tool and Blogspot, a weblog hosting service (more on blogging next time). The question seems to be, "Why?" Search Engine experts the world over are scratching their heads over this one.

Overture.com is buying AltaVista.com, the older than dirt, granddaddy of Search Engines. (AltaVista was founded in 1995. Time beats to a different metronome on the Net.) The question seems, once again, to be, "Why?" Then Overture.com turned right around and made the announcement that they intended to buy the FAST web search division. This move actually makes some sense since FAST's search technologies are stellar. The combo will make Overture one to watch as it looks like it intends to take on Google.com head to head.

Then there is the huge issue of Sales Tax on Internet sales.

Depending on who you talk to, this is either a very good thing or powerful fightin' words. None the less, the biggest of the big, Wal-Mart and Target started charging sales tax on their Internet sales in the month of February. Amazon.com, the largest online retailer is taking a middle-of-the-road stance. If one of their partner retailers (Wal-Mart, Target etc.) wants to charge sales tax, Amazon happily tacks it on. Amazon is not currently charging sales tax on purchases of their own merchandise.

Other news, Microsoft is getting sued by just about everyone, a study by International Data Corp shows companies are once again upping their IT budgets and a Jupiter Research report shows online companies still lag in good customer service. (I should write a whole article on my recent experience with EMS Computing.)

But let's go back to good old Karyn Bosnak. I remember way back when (even before 1995) in 1970 when I was in college at the University of New Mexico. The tidal-wave effect of the Kent State riots had embraced our campus and resulted in early student dismissal. Since the students were in control of the Student Union however, many didn't choose to go home. Rather they opened the "Free University".

For those of you who can remember back that far, "Free" was the word of the day, day after day. The Free University offered a number of very interesting courses, most of which I can't or shouldn't mention (my children might actually read this). The one that does stick out in my mind though was a class called Panhandling 101. I'm sure, if those rebellious quasi-instructors read Karyn's story, I bet they would be proud and a bit jealous that they didn't think of it first.