www.anonymizer.com/
www.turntable.com/
www.io360.com/
www.erac.com/eqtest.html
info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html
ultra.infoseek.com/
www.digitaljihad.com/
www-usa.tpc.int/tpc_home.html
griffin.multimedia.edu/~ransom/

Screamin', streamin' Shockwave Nirvana. Peachy, huh? www.fusion-new-media.co.uk

  InfoVanity, By Jeeves

Subscription-based Web sites have had a chequered history. The online edition of USA Today finally gave up charging £8 per month for access to the site in August 1995, having attracted a measly 1,000 subscribers. The site now generates income from numerous webverts, and attracts over 70,000 visitors each day. The culture of free content on the Web runs deep - there's always plenty else to see, gratis.

But what about a site that offers precisely targeted, must-have content to a well-defined audience? The Web has always been best at bringing minorities together, so why not target an online community that just happens to be high-income? Logic suggests that such niche sites should prosper, adding value as a search and filtering service.

Billed as a total information solution for IT strategists, Business and Technology Online ( id code: "information") targets just such a premium-paying clientele. The IT news and information service aims to attract the UK's top 50,000 IT professionals, and then charge them handsomely for information that they would otherwise invest their own time gathering. The site also generates revenue from advertisers eager as beavers to reach a key decision-making IT audience.

After entering a personal profile, members are served up with a daily diet of pertinent IT news culled by custom-written agent software from existing online news sites. Each day, the agent also visits the Web site of every major IT company and sniffs out any fresh press releases. A small London-based team then edits this content, supplementing it with news coverage from a Reuters feed and a network of 30 freelance reporters dotted around Europe and the US. The service also provides in-depth reports on specific IT industry sectors, and more besides.

Potentially the coolest service of all is the "Jeeves's Personalised Briefing". Each time you log in, Jeeves will scour the B&T site on your behalf before serving up a selection of articles matching your personal profile.

But what really sets the site apart is its astronomical cost. Aside from the odd complementary hour, users fork out a whopping £35.80 (by credit card) for each hour that they spend on the site. Despite the cost, the service has proved popular: 3,500 paying subscribers joined the first month, each logging into the site for an average 40 minutes per week. Such success can be interpreted in one of two ways. Either B&T Online is doing a great job of meeting a need, or the nation's top IT professionals are a vain bunch who thinks it's hep to have chunky bills for online services appearing on their expenses claims.

- Gabriel Ratcliffe

  Framin' Hell!

Surf the Web over a modem and you'll soon reserve a special loathing for frames. The Channel Cyberia site is a shocker: pages littered with up to five frames, few of which serve any useful purpose. Navigational toolbars that are clickable graphics, but are stored in local cache so that they're only downloaded once, would suffice. Frames slow downloads to a crawl, forcing surfers to wait for every frame to stagger in before they can get clicking. Such a delay tarnished the otherwise awesome HotBot search engine until the offending frame was ditched.

Done intelligently, frames can be worth the wait. Trigger uses a couple that, when allied to much server-side ingenuity, give the e-zine its compelling buzz.

In the right setting an excess of frames can be fun. Trip over to the shores of insanity at www.state51.co.uk/currey/index.html for some true Mondrian madness.

- Alistair Jeffs

  Talking to the Taxman About Earthquakes

Theorists have always claimed that the Web would cut through local economic barriers to impose a truly global market. Now, at last, commercial reality is reflecting this compelling theory.

The Kobe earthquake in January 1995 caught thousands of Japanese unprepared. Blankets, torches, wet wipes and radios became the most sought after items in Kobe. Quake Gear of California, which produces earthquake survival kits, espied a potentially lucrative new market.

But selling survival kits through Japanese wholesalers proved problematic. Japan imposes exorbitant import duty on items such as pharmaceuticals and dried food, contained in every kit.

What to do? Sneak in via the Web, of course. Quake Gear teamed up with a Japanese-language Web site provider called Global Strategies and began marketing earthquake survival kits on the Web in Japanese . By claiming a "personal import exemption", Japanese buyers could avoid paying the high tariffs slapped on bulk imports. Quake Gear now processes up to 100 orders a week from Japan through its Web site, leaving the Japanese taxman frothing.

- Alex Balfour

  JPiG or a Poke?

The JPiG site has had my normally reliable bullshit meter swinging wildly. Outlining a proposal for a new transparent variant to the JPEG image format, the site was originally started as a wind- up. However, its authors claim that their joke JPiG proposal elicited such a positive response that the project is now for real. Certainly a transparent JPEG format would be welcomed by many Web designers, as it would allow them to play (and boy, do they love to play) with irregular shaped images and the like. Even more befuddling are the site's pages of meaty technical detail, which add credence to its authors' claims.

But with images of cartoon pigs littering the site it's tough not to be sceptical. Might be a scam site; might not. I sure can't tell. But how do you judge the worth of information published on any given site?

Slick presentation always inspires confidence, but be warned that any bum with a copy of Photoshop can produce a slick-looking site. A site's location can give a hint. It's probably wiser to trust reports of the latest advance in particle physics found on www.cern.ch than on home.aol.com/funkiphysics. Seeing exactly who is linking to a particular site can also provide a pointer, although this demands a Masters degree in AltaVista. As a ball-park rule, the shorter the URL, the more reliable the site - a generalisation to which RealAroma.com provides a hilarious exception.

Raw intuition remains the best guide to judging a site's authenticity, but when it fails you - as with my JPiGs - be as cynical as hell.

- Phil Gyford