Espen's favorite links

Useful tools

• Sprint Internet Conference Center is a very quick set up for teleconferences, all it takes is a creditcard and a phone.
• Olsen and Associates has a really useful currency converter, great when doing your travel expenses
• I also use Telstra's World Time converter, to find out what time it is in different parts of the world (great when setting up teleconferences).
• Din Side (in Norwegian) is a fabulous page for personal financial advice: Here you can calculate the effects of switching energy provider, mobile phone company, having another child (scary, that one), refinancing loans.  Prices for everything is up to date, the site shows smart use of Java, and illustrates the power of free processing and free communication.

References and locators

• Excite is an excellent search engine with a special quirk: You can download a small applet that gives you a search field in the top frame of Netscape (and I assume it works for other browsers as well.) Makes Excite the first choice of search engines, also because it lets you build your own page at live.excite.com.
• First Monday is a pioneer: The first peer-reviewed journal on the Internet.  Good articles on subjects related to the Internet, on the Internet.
• Digital's Altavista search engine does both Web and Newsgroups. Frighteningly accurate, subsumes the alternatives below.
• Webcrawler, Lycos, Yahoo and Inktomi are good directories all.  Yahoo is different because they have a hierarchy of information, use it as the starting point if you want to hone in on a topic.
• DejaNews lets you search current and former postings to Usenet. Reminiscent of the mythical Net Reaper, this is a wonderful repository of information.
• Wall Street Net. Information on M&A's, IPO's and other Street acronyms.
• Internet Society "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code". The Internet standardization body is the world's best, but I wonder if they can sustain it as the Internet is commercialized....
• RISKS-Forum digest. This electronic conference/newsgroup/magazine, moderated by Peter G. Neumann, is the key source for information on computer-related risks, security and privacy issues, interesting anecdotes. I have read it faithfully (and occasionally posted something) since 1986. A must for the serious Internet researcher.
• Salon, Slate,and Reason, are electronic magazines of more general interest. Salon, with its chic renegade/urban professional direction, is the one I tend to read the most..
• The InterNIC Whois is the official site for finding other users and sites (includes email addresses and domain names). Useful to determine whether than great domain name you wanted already has been taken by some two-bit operation in outer Mongolia.
• The Open Text Index has an advanced search engine, which allows you to search further from sites already found.
• The CIA World Factbook is useful, with lots of good statistics on countries. A great example of an existing institution that takes something they already have and use it for PR purposes (and let's face it, CIA, if anyone, need it) by putting it on the net. Incidentally, the CIA was one of the first organizations to make good use of Intranet technology.
• Hoover's Online Home Page has lots of company information
• The Federal Web Locator. Good for finding Federal (US) Web sites, but falling apart a bit.
• TECHWEB ARCHIVES SEARCH is really InformationWEEK, or rather CMP Publications. Lots of stories, advertiser-supported, good source of data (as long as you don't take their InformationWEEK 500 too seriously.) Datamation is also available on the net, check out their "classics" page with the straight dope on REAL PROGRAMMERS and Ted Nelsons's prophetic article on the Web (though he called it Xanadu.) Speaking of straight dope, how about Cecil Adams and his Straight Dope column.
• The Weird Places On The Net ...You better believe it...

Academic resources

• A Business Researcher's Interests is a tremendous page maintained by Yogesh Malhotra. One of my absolute favorites--lots of interesting links, continually updated, always something new and exciting.
• Excite.com lets you build your own newspaper, useful in research to continually monitor what goes on out there. A similar service is Crayon (CReAte Your Own Newspaper), though I haven't tried that myself. Netscape is building their home page to gradually become an information service.
• McGraw-Hill's online MIS Faculty Catalog has the names and other details of MIS faculty all over the world, searchable based on name, location, research interests, etc. Great tool.
• Yahoo - Business and Economy:Management Information Systems is a branch of the Yahoo tree, usefully browsed when you don't have a clue where to start--and no likely search terms.
• I spend time at ISWorld Net, a great collaborative effort to categorize academic IS information effectively.
• HBS Publishing's Cases search site is a useful teaching resource: You can search for material and order it over the Net. And read (rather uninformative) abstracts of HBR articles.
• Call for Papers for congresses and workshops
• The MIS Quarterly (editors) page. A number of other journals on the net: Information Systems Research, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, Communications of the ACM, and other journals from ACM, etc.
• The Virtual Museum of Computing contains information on the history of computing.
• MIT Sloan School of Management is the university with the most experience in using Internet wisely. Excellent use of the Web, not too much graphics, lots of content, especially the pages containing working papers. For a slicker look, try Harvard Business School, which is notable for their use of the net to maintain the financially crucial alumni connection.
• London Business School has an excellent home page, good overviews of school, but is also an example of a page that could do with a bit less structure and "corporate" feel to it. Has listings of working papers, but in the English public tradition, they charge for them.

Interesting companies

• American Airlines has used computers and communications capabilities to derive competitive advantage since 1958. Their moving of SABRE onto the net is just the next logical step--but may be a challenge as huge infrastructure investments no longer will frighten away the competition
• Amazon.com continues to be the premier bookstore on the Net, but will probably move to become a book club as time goes by.  Incidentally, check out Octavo, which sells high-quality digital versions of old classics.
• Premenos is the first company to offer products for doing EDI over the Internet
• Brooklyn Union is the premier example of use of object orientation for real business systems. Does not show up in the Web site, though, but, boy, what a company.
• 3M has 60,000 products catalogued online.
• Marshall Industries has a product catalogue with 25,000 products--the standard in their industry. Note their link to UPS package tracking--an example of effortless electronic integration. UPS was not first offering this service--Federal Express did that, and is now offering a number of other services as well.
• Shell Oil Company Home Page. This page was linked in by Greenpeace--and Shell learned the perils of instant globalization.
• TRW's home page is rather slow, but they have a very aggressive "Intranet" strategy, with 12,000 employees using their internal Web servers and a "free-for-all" philosophy.
• Open Market is one of the first of what will be many "storefront" companies on the net.
• CommerceNet is a non-profit, government-supported consortium to investigate and facilitate commerce via the NII.
• Digiphone is a long-shot threat to the telcos' profit margins
• IndustryNet has an interesting concept for business-to-business use of the Internet, but it could do with a bit more life.
• MecklerWeb Home Page. Early entry into making marketspace available.
• CDnow! The Internet Music Store has a good search engine and something important: A rating system, increasingly important for net-sold goods.
• Pizza Hut got a lot of press coverage out of letting you order pizza online. However, they failed in that they neglected to make it a real delivery channel: For instance, most Pizza Hut outlets won't let you take orders over the net, even though all it would take would be a fax server and credit card processing at their Web server.

Interesting people

• Benn Konsynski is the originator of the maxim "God created the world in 7 days, but he didn't have an installed base." He is also a shameless bowtie wearer.
• Bill Schiano is a friend and colleague with a dry sense of humor and knowledge on NT installs, strategic impact of IT in the retail industry, and electronic commerce.
• Tor Jakob Ramsøy (sorry, no longer Web page) is a Norwegian friend with a US bent. For a while, he had the shortest email address I know of: t@bi.no. Now does strategy consulting for Andersen Consulting Norway.
• Hal Varian, economist and Internet pricing guru, has a great home page with plenty of content, including his research papers and a special site on the Information Economy.
• Ragnvald Sannes, good friend and colleague at the Norwegian School of Management. An innovator on use of the Web in managing remote courses.
• Peter Cochrane, Head of Research at British Telecom, is an Apple Fellow, a terrific speaker, a time traveller, and a bonafide digeratus. And he puts all his writing and other work on his web site. So there.
• John Sviokla wrote an interesting article on the emergence of the electronic "marketspace", where advertising, commercial transactions and post-sales support merge into one environment.
• Ajit Kambil, professor at NYU Stern School, incredibly innovative in the uses of Net technology for research and teaching, viz. Kambil Online, the EDGAR SEC filing site, and Web-enabled cases.
• James McKenney is a well known professor of IS management and history, my thesis advisor, and an excellent discussion partner.
• Vijay Gurbaxani is a professor at UCI with an interest in IS finance, management and outsourcing.
• Erik Brynjolfsson is a professor at MIT and a leading expert on the economics (and econometrics) of information technology. As far as I am concerned, he has cracked the question of whether IT really is worth the money we pay for it.
• Hal Berghel, columnist with Communications of the ACM and has the best personal Web site I have seen so far.
• Brad Cox, silver bullet writer on object orientation and other system engineering topics, has an interesting Web site called the Middle of Nowhere.
• Don Norman, Apple Fellow and author of The Psychology of Everyday Things (later published under a different title, sold in a CD-ROM version on the Net).
• Simson Garfinkel, technical columnist in Packet. and author, with Gene Spafford, of Web Security and Commerce, the first Web security book with a signal to noise ratio close to 1 (except, perhaps, Cheswick & Bellowin's Firewall book).
• Jerry Pournelle, sci-fi writer and "Chaos Manor" columnist in BYTE. Has a book on technology evolutions as means of war available on site--some interesting case stories on things like GPS.

Norwegian sites

• NORWAY - Online Information Service is a collection of information on Norway, maintained by the Norwegian US embassy. Nice graphics, good and complete documentation
• Norway's Home Page.... is actually a map of Norway with links attached. Works nicely.
• Norwegian Travel Information Network - NTIN
• Ståle Schumacher is the keeper of the international version of PGP, and has a well managed site.
• Aftenposten is Oslo's serious morning paper. The news is generally short messages based on their text TV service
• Dagbladet is sensationalistic, tabloid, liberal, shallow on news but good on culture and debate

Fun and Games

• Car Talk with Click and Clack (the Tappet brothers) is one of my favorite radio programs--and a highly entertaining web site.
• The James Randi Hotline is the outlet of James Randi, famous for explaining how clairvoyance, spoon-bending, non-evasive surgery and other frauds are perpetrated.
• The Work of M.C. Escher
• Universal Access Inc. Home Page... is where you can play black-jack across the net. 
• The Dilbert Zone A visit here and a cup of coffee is a requirement on grey mornings......
• Trojan Room Coffee Machine When you first look at it, this thing seems really stupid...but then, Edison started the grammophone industry by recording "Mary had a little lamb" (see the famous Arlo cartoon). Just don't forget your camera on...
• The Climbing Archive! has pictures and vertical stories.
• Michael Moncur's quotations page

News and magazines

• There aren't many serious non-Internet focused magazines (real good reads) created solely for the net yet, with two exceptions I know of. Slate is a good one, kind of like The New Republic, and then there is the rather trendy SALON 1999.
• Suck is just two guys reviewing Web sites. But what reviews they are.... Great "sucking smoke" effect on home page.
• Electronic Telegraph is a commercially successful full-fledged newspaper on the net, with 100,000+ subscribers, financed by (non-intrusive) advertising. Before you can access it, they ask you to fill in a form about yourself. They don't give this information to advertisers, but use it to be able to tell advertisers what kind of people look at which ads.
• Off the Record has interviews with movers and shakers in IT and business. You need RealAudio software to hear the interviews (they have some text versions as well).
• BYTE Magazine of course, I have subscribed since 1985. Fits like a glove.
• CIO Magazine, OK as long as you don't take their statistics seriously.
• Pathfinder is a lot of flash, and the content isn't half bad either. Time-Warner owns this one.
• Idea Cafe is an example of what Internet magazines should not be. While nicely formatted, the content is stale and shallow. Sponsored by Price/Costco, it is ostensibly a small business magazine, but any small business owner basing his actions on advice found here will find his business very small indeed.
• The Economist wrote a great piece on the Internet as the "accidental superhighway". You will find it here, along with other technology-oriented articles.
• Newspage has news, and lots of it.
• O'Reilly Home Page has good books on computer issues, and an interesting and well updated Web site.

Tools for WWW (various tools that have proved useful, not much updating at the moment)

• NetMechanic will check your pages for dead links. Should run it more often.
• The Internet for Dummies. The most sold Internet book. And not that dumb.
• Webmonkey's HTML Toolset. Toolchest from Hotwired.
• Strunk, William. 1918. The Elements of Style. That's right. The epitome of American English writing, in HTML.
• SME's WebPost: Register with all the locator services at once.
• Backgrounds etc.
• Daniel's Icon Archive
• Yahoo - ...WWW:Progr.:Icons
• Lines For WWW