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How much for that Bunny in the window? As much as you're willing to pay: Adult entertainment company Playboy has teamed up with auction site eBay to offer themed merchandise for sale on the internet. The eBay section should be up and running in full by sometime next month. Items for sale will include tickets to events at the Playboy Mansion and goods such as jewelry, collectibles and clothing emblazoned with the famous bunny logo. Playboy says it paired up with eBay once it learned that the word "Playboy" is typically one of the most frequently sought terms on the auction site. Even before the launch of the official site, as many as 7,000 Playboy-related items could be found for sale on eBay on any given day. The items for sale, which will come both from Playboy and from eBay users who have Playboy goods to sell, can be found on auctions.playboy.com as well as within the eBay channel. Regular eBay users will not have to pay a commission to Playboy when selling Playboy-themed items.
MIT scientist builds robot war correspondent
As the recent murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl demonstrated, hostile territory can be extremely dangerous for journalists. Additionally governments tend not to accommodate journalists' requests for full information. An MIT engineer thinks he has one solution to these problems: a nonhuman, internet-enabled journalist. Chris Csikszentmihalyi has developed a wheeled, solar-powered robot he calls the Afghan Explorer that he hopes to dispatch to Afghanistan as soon as possible. The Explorer, which measures three-feet long by two-feet wide, is linked to a satellite and bears a microphone and a video screen. The robot must be controlled remotely by human journalists, who will prompt it to gather information. It has not been announced which, if any, media organizations will employ the Explorer, or when it will be sent out into the field.
Legal eagles create copyright site
While the internet's image as a lawless land akin to the Old West often rings true, the pendulum has been swinging back since the death of Napster. To make sure it doesn't fall too far back, legal experts from several law schools have created Chillingeffects.org, an online copyright law education and information center. Wendy Seltzer, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, who operates the site with colleagues from Berkeley, Stanford, the University of San Francisco and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the site is there as a basic tool for those seeking information on copyright law, so people will know whether they have grounds to fight back. Much of the focus is on documenting current copyright cases, especially ones where attorneys for large corporations might be unfairly bending the law to their advantage. This does not translate to a one-stop shop for ways to break the rules; Seltzer emphasizes that the site does not take sides in any disputes and is not a substitute for real legal counsel.
Surfers don't want to pay for music downloads
The Napster revolution has changed the way that online consumers see their music. Web users have grown very accustomed to free downloads, so accustomed that just 8 percent of people in the U.S. who have downloaded music have paid for it, according to a recent survey carried out by Ipsos-Reid. Eighty-four percent of people who have downloaded music for free say they're disinclined to pay for music online, even if no more free music is available. But whether or not this culture of free music has had an effect on the recording industry's bottom line is still debatable. Eighty-one percent of people who have downloaded music say that their purchases of CDs have stayed the same or increased since their introduction to free online music. Eighty-four percent of Americans over the age of 12 have conducted music-related research online, such as reading lyrics, looking for concert dates and listening to song clips. And nearly half of these individuals were inspired to purchase a particular CD because of information they found on the web.
NNR: Personal finance sites are addictive
Online investing can be habit-forming. Finance and investment sites with transactional capabilities are the stickiest at-home and at-work internet destinations, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, ranking above No. 2 news and information, No. 3 family and lifestyles, No. 4 search engines/portals/communities and No. 5 travel. Fully 44 percent of active web users, or 51.6 million unique users, logged onto finance sites in January. Of those visitors, 53 percent were male. The average finance site visit lasted more than 21 minutes, but people spent much more time than that on the top sites. The leading site was Schwab.com, with the average person spending 1 hour, 48 minutes on the site during the course of the month. No. 2 was Datek.com, where the average visit for the month totaled 1 hour 37 minutes. No. 3 was Etrade.com, where people spent 1 hour, 22 minutes. Ameritrade.com and CSFBDirect.com round out the top five.
February 28, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
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