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Microsoft will pay AOL users to switch to its internet access service, MSN. People who make the switch get a $50 refund if they pay for a minimum of three months of service, either dial-up or broadband. This is not the first time that MSN has launched a campaign for the sole purpose of poaching AOL users. The company says that it is spending $50 million altogether just to gain some of AOL’s user base. When AOL raised its rate to $23.90 a month last year, MSN countered by offering access to new subscribers at AOL’s old rate of $21.95 a month. Additionally, MSN revamped its web and ISP offerings in October to bear a stronger resemblance to AOL’s network. Currently, MSN has about 7.7 million users, making it the second-largest ISP around, but its total users are still a far cry from AOL’s 33 million.
Nerve.com: No free chat for you
Sex-on-the-brain internet magazine Nerve.com, that journal of supposed highbrow erotica, has scotched its free chat rooms, arguing that the cost of maintaining them was too great to keep offering them gratis. Starting last Thursday, even the most popular chat rooms, which have names like Bar, America Under Attack, Bedroom and Lisa Lounge, were closed. While the chats will no longer run, former participants will still be able to look up the folks with whom they used to chat. Additionally the site says it will continue to offer its bulletin boards, which are much less expensive to operate. Nerve says it will now focus its energies upon its relatively lucrative personal ads and its online magazine.
ESPN.com shoved back under TV umbrella
It’s final: ESPN.com is being placed back under ESPN’s cable division. The company announced the plan back in December, ESPN.com officials say. According to Silicon Alley Daily, news of the decision has resurfaced because meetings are being held about transferring staff. The web site’s 50 workers, according to reports, have the option of relocating from Seattle to ESPN’s East Coast offices. The ESPN.com changes are representative of a larger restructuring at its parent company, Disney Internet Group, which is still rearranging itself after the pricey demise of its Go.com portal. Disney previously cut costs by closing its MrShowbiz.com and WallofSound entertainment news sites.
London’s Tate Gallery displays Turners online
John Mallord William Turner, one of the fathers of impressionism and the United Kingdom’s premier romantic landscape artist, now has an online presence--despite having died more than a century and a half ago. The Tate Gallery in London has set up a virtual gallery of Turner’s works accessible through its web site, Tate.org.uk. The online exhibit is notable because it marks the first time that so many of Turner’s paintings have been displayed publicly. After living a long, eccentric life in which he often refused to sell his paintings, the artist left to Great Britain his entire body of work, a collection of more than 300 paintings and 30,000 watercolors, including his famous sunsets and sunrises, seascapes and Venetian landscapes.
Britney Spears email worm makes its way
Joining fellow pin-ups Jennifer Lopez and Anna Kournikova, Britney Spears has had her name attached to an email worm. The "VBS/Britney-A" or "VBS_BRITNEYPIC.A" virus hooks users into opening the attachment by claiming it is a picture of the bubblegum pop songstress. Security experts were alarmed that the virus could spread easily due to Spears's continued status as one of the most-sought-after names on search engines. But the virus’s lack of sophistication, in addition to its ".CHM" extension, which tips off users that it is not a photo attachment, has limited its spread since its detection Thursday morning. The Britney bug spreads via email program Microsoft Outlook and the IRC chat channels. Last May, world internet traffic slowed and computer servers were stalled by the Anna Kournikova worm, designed by a Dutch man who has since been sentenced to 150 hours of community service.
How Germany got its groove back
Usually, domain name squabbles concern trademarked names, but sometimes they’re a little bigger than that. For example, Germany—yes, the nation—has just won the rights to the internet address www.deutschland.de. The domain name had been held by German internet consultancy Medianet. The country had been trying to gain control of Deutschland.de for two years, and now that it has, plans to turn it into a general information portal. Medianet had owned and used Deutschland.de since 1995, and company officials say they’re not happy about having to let it go. But the struggle to retain it simply was growing too expensive. Still, it’s not exactly imperative for a nation to own its very own domain name. America.com belongs to an internet service provider based in Florida, and UnitedStates.com is an information service that belongs to AreaGuides.net.
March 4, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
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