Cyberwinds -- which way are the winds of change blowing?

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From January to March, I wrote a book for Wiley, entitled Web Business Boot Camp. The book covers all aspects of Web business, giving practical hands-on advice for managers, helping them get a feel for what is possible and encouraging them to get their hands dirty, actually creating and promoting Web pages themselves, instead of depending on experts. I would have loved to have pushed a button to make that text available to the world the day I finished the writing.

The book should be in stores in December or January, but meanwhile the Web business environment has changed enormously.

Fortunately, the causes, direction, and pace of change were important themes in the book. And I frequently emphasized that not all of the useful services described in the book were likely to survive; and, whenever possible, I mentioned alternatives and provided instructions for what to do if any of these services went away.

To get a sense of how much the world of Internet business has changed in the last six months, here's a quick update on some of the sites recommended in the book.

• NBCi dropped its Web hosting service, which it had acquired in buying Xoom. And Homestead, which was free, now charges. But Angelfire, Tripod, and Geocities are still going strong.
• Whalemail which used to offer a free Web-based service that made it easy to transfer large files (up to 50 Mbytes), now charges, but their rates are reasonable. A related paid service from SwapDrive lets you share files with your team, and also do automatic Web-based backups. For Web-based storage that looks and feels like an extra Windows-based drive on your PC, check Mangomind from Mangosoft -- another paid but reasonably priced service. An

account with them works very much like a shared drive on a local area network
• Juno made its "free" service even more annoying, with persistent ads and busy signals, trying to get more folks to migrate to its paid service.
• Netzero is using the same obnoxious business model.
• I still have a cable modem ISP, but I'm not sure who my service provider is at this point. At Home is bankrupt and AT&T appears to be buying their assets. I'm hoping that the transition will be seamless.  But I do not look forward to doing business with AT&T. I've been stung by them too many times in the past.  (The old movie The President's Analyst expressed my sentiments very well.) In fact, I'd be willing to pay as much as 50% more to another service just to not have to have anything to do with AT&T. Once the smoke clears and they let me know aout the new pricing and services, I'll probably switch to RCN.
• My Web hosting service Hispeed.com was just bought by US.net. I loved Hispeed because of its low cost and excellent service and also because they offered unlimited Web space and unlimited traffic. I still don't know what the change of ownership will mean in terms of services and costs On the plus side, the new owner has added useful detailed traffic stats.
• Google now appears to have totally integrated Deja into its service. So now you can now search or browse through an enormous archive of newsgroup postings. But, of course, they bury this great resource -- to get to it you have to click on "Groups" from the Google home page.
• HumanClick -- was free. They made it easy for visitors at your site to initiate chat sessions with you -- so you could answer questions, and turn prospects into customers.  But they now charge $249/year so I've deleted them from my site.
• AltaVista -- was the search engine with the freshest content. They added pages to the index within a few days of submission. Now they are trying to get Web sites to pay for "Express submission". They charge $39 for a single Web page, with a sliding scale based on volume down to $12 per Web page, if you have over 100 pages. In other words, their pricing is so high that it locks out individuals and small businesses. Their free submission service now purportedly takes 4-6 weeks. Expect the content in the index to suffer -- becoming skewed toward commercial sites, with information about other sites becoming very stale. In the past, I depended heavily on AltaVista for traffic. If AltaVista had a glitch, I could immediately see a dip in my traffic. Now AltaVista only brings me less than 2% of my traffic, and about 40% comes by way of Google.
• Also, before AltaVista had a good affiliate program, so I had lots of AltaVisa search boxes on my pages, and gave instructions on how to set up a query starting with host:samizdat.com to restrict searches to pages at my site. I was averaging a couple hundred dollars a month in affiliate revenue because so many people used those search boxes on my pages.  But now AltaVista has done away with its affiliate program. So I deleted all those boxes and replaced them with FreeFind, a service designed to do just what I wanted. I can request that FreeFind spider my site on a regular schedule or whenever I like, and visitors who use that search box only get results from my pages. It's a good, useful service, and it's still free.
• On the plus side, Altavista's free translation service http://babelfish.altavista.com has added Korean, Japanese, and Chinese.
• Meanwhile, two of the top three directories have raised prices for their "Express submission" -- Looksmart from $100 to $299, Yahoo from $199 to $299.
• Excite, one of the first and best search engines, just filed for bankruputcy.
• GoTo, a search site that has Web sites bid and pay for position in search results (like paid advertising) is changing its name to Overture.
• Some very useful sites have changed URLs. Tracerlock, a service that lets you know when new results appear for pre-set searches at AltaVista and other search engines has moved from  peacefire.com/tracerlock to tracerlock.com. And the free translation service, Internet Translation, has moved to www.intertran.net
• Previously, the main benefit to me of the Amazon affiliate program, was that I could use my own links to buy books for myself at Amazon -- thereby earning a referral fee that just about offset the shipping price. Now they are cracking down, and do everything they can to disallow purchases by affiliates -- a policy which has probably backfired. At least it has in my case. Now I have no special reason to buy at Amazon and hence often shop elsewhere.
• While it can be confusing and time-consuming to set up an auction at eBay, half.com, a site that eBay bought, is much easier to use. If you have books, music, or videogames you want to sell, if you enter the ISBN number or UPC number, they already have the product description and photo online. You can put your item up for sale in less than a minute. And if you want to buy second hand, you can find just about every imaginable title here, at low cost -- even items that are out of print and normally hard to find. I now buy books at Half.com far more often than I do at Amazon.
• Lipstream went away, and a variety of popular voice chat services that depended on their technology disappeared.
• While Hearme used to offer free voice chat both directly and through partners like Telcopoint, the free alternatives seem to have disappeared.
• PalTalk is a still free and allows voice chat. But it isn't Web-based. It's a separate app that runs over the Internet.
• The choices for syndicating your content are dwindling. The largest, most professional site, iSyndicate went bankrupt and was bought by YellowBrix, which is scaling back services. Contentville too just went under. Themestream and thevines, which allowed individuals to share their content and get paid for it, both went under.
• I'm now looking into new players as uliveandlearn and life-tips as places where I might be able to get paid for my content -- as it as, or repackaged, or presented in the form of courses. I'm also checking Content-Exchange.com, Cyberjournalist.com, and Contentious.com for writing leads and syndication opportunities.
• And it is far more difficult to get free news-related content for your site. Individual.com, now owned by Office.com appears to have done away with its free services.
• In the realm of auctions, FirstAuction -- with its 30-minute or shorter "flash auctions" of new and refurbished equipment -- has gone out of business. But Egghead still remains (for now) and offers a similar service.
• In people-to-people auctions, Yahoo used to be free, with Amazon and eBay charging sellers. Now Yahoo too charges sellers. But otherwise things are pretty much the same as they were six months ago -- with eBay totally dominating the field.
• In the realm of services to support auction sellers, AuctionRover used to be the place to go. They were bought by GoTo Auctions, and now that site has been taken over by UPayless, and all the useful services have disappeared.
• Napster is shut down. But Yaga offers a very interesting alternative for sharing all kinds of files (not just music), and through the acquisition of a micropayments company, they could become a very interesting marketplace for buying and selling content at very low cost.
• But new sites and services keep appearing, such as software.xfx.net which provides a free popup killer, which eliminates the popup ad windows that many commercial sites now foist upon their visitors; and www.marksonline.com and www.nameprotect.com allow you to do free trademark searches.

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