Esther Dyson is one of the high-tech industry’s most renowned and appealing pundits—one part entrepreneur, one part analyst, one part international adviser, one part perpetual, peripatetic wunderkind. Ranked as one of the 50 most powerful women in business by Fortune magazine  in 1998, Dyson is chairman of EDventure Holdings, a company that publishes the newsletter Release 1.0 and sponsors two of the industry’s leading annual conferences, the PC Forum and the European-focused High-Tech Forum. EDventure Holdings also manages a high-tech venture capital fund geared towards investments in software and information startups in Central and Eastern Europe. In 1997, Dyson published a book called "Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age." The paperback version, deemed an "upgrade" according to company material, came out a year later, and was called "Release 2.1." Born in Switzerland, raised in Princeton, educated at Harvard, Dyson is the daughter of the celebrated astrophysicist Freeman Dyson. Family legend has it that Dyson didn’t start talking until she was two, but when she did it was in complete sentences.

   They’re going to be doing everything with it. It’s sort of like the telephone. You can do business. You can talk to your loved ones. You can organize a charity march. You can organize a bombing. It’s a tool to do anything.
    The great thing about the web, unlike television, is that it supports personal choice. It’s a uniquely diverse medium. It supports all languages. It supports different forms of content. 
    It really is pretty neutral about what people do with it. The idea that the web is ultimately going to be about this one thing or another is an illusion.

    Nothing, really.

   I think people are going to be surprised by how much more competitive the web is going to make our business lives. The web makes everyone have to run faster, which is not always comfortable.

    I notice what my friends point me to. There are a few new sites I go to. But fundamentally, I notice what people point out to me.

   It helps. But if you do a crummy job you just get into trouble faster. Being first is not all you need--it’s useful but not sufficient. You still have to be competent.
    Everybody wants to find the single winning strategy that will guarantee success. Unfortunately there isn’t one. You have to do a better job than the next guy.

   I don’t think so. To me advertising on the internet is much closer to direct mail, to two-way communication. I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about this.
   Even on the web people seem to think that advertising is about creating brand names. But what you’re doing on the net is you’re actually interacting with people. Whatever it is, it’s not your traditional "tell a story, catch their attention" approach to advertising. It’s much more interactive and intimate.
     The internet is fantastic for classified advertising, for direct mail, for two-way communication, for permission marketing. It’s a good medium if you like virtual vending machines—that is, if you like to see a button on your screen you can push to get to Amazon. It’s like with real vending machines: you put Coke machines in places you think people might want to drink a Coke. On the internet, you put Amazon buttons in places where there might be people inclined to buy books.

    Oh, they’ll continue but people will discover they’re not as effective as they used to be. They’ll be much more targeted, either to the person or the place the person is surfing in.
     Banner ads will be like everything else. Most things work and have a place. And most things get over-hyped for a while and then people have to calm down and realize when to use them and when not to use them.
     Banners are perfectly appropriate in certain instances, but not in as many instances as they have been used. 
    That’s what an advertising agency has to do. They have to have the wisdom to know when and where ads are appropriate.

    It will make certain experiences richer and more compelling. But a lot of people find that stuff annoying. They see ads that move and make sounds and they think, "I have better things to do then this." Me, I keep the sound off on my computer.

    I think it’s pretty important. What is the proper response to it? I think it’s got to be better education of people. It’s less a question of regulation than being sure people learn to look at information on the web with their eyes wide open.

    Well, it’s so easy to mingle the two, isn’t it? And it certainly can be a service to your customer to put an Amazon.com button next to the book you’re talking about on your web site. But it’s easy to get into trouble if things aren’t clear. It can be dishonest. And the editorial loses all credibility.

    It tends to be content. Content is very important. Your strategy won’t work unless you’re doing something useful. A gimmick won’t work in the end unless it’s selling something worthwhile.

   I think we may finally understand that just going on the internet doesn’t guarantee success. You still need to do things better than the next guy. I think we’re going to learn a lot about how important it is to actually deliver the goods and to deliver customer service. You can build a great virtual system but you also need to operate in the physical world.

     I basically use it for email.

    I go to News.com [CNET], Thestandard.com [The Industry Standard], The New York Times. 
    In a strange way, I sort of enjoy going to Estherdyson.com, which has nothing to do with me, it was set up by some guy who wants to annoy me. But I enjoy it because it illustrates the value of freedom of speech.

     What worries me is the people on it. The web itself is okay--it’s what people do on it that can be a problem. The issue is how to encourage them to do the right thing.

-Jeremy Schlosberg is the senior editor for new media.