The Netty Professor

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And she got blamed for what Weinberg describes as "perhaps the dreariest moment in my Internet-shopping life." It unfolded on a fateful day in May, when he came home to find that his beloved spouse had left the kids with a baby-sitter and gone out to buy a bed -- the very bed he'd hoped to purchase on-line. "Amy came back, and before she could say, 'Honey, I'm home,' I asked, 'You bought the bed, didn't you?' " he wrote in his diary. Ebersole came up with a "consolation prize" for him: the mattress. "I said, 'Will it make you happy if you can buy that on-line?' " she recalls.

It did, but the time it took him to do it made Ebersole miserable. "I can't begin to tell you how many hours went into that one," she says. "It just seemed like a waste of time, and I told him so. He said, 'You just don't get it. You just don't get what I'm doing.' I get it. But it feels like he's always on that computer."

Technically, Weinberg didn't even buy the mattress on-line. He used the phone.

Frustrated that he couldn't find what he wanted on the Web -- a fact that he might simply have noted about the limits of e-commerce -- he persuaded 71-year-old Sam Cohen, a distant relative who has driven a taxi for 40 years, to pick up a mattress for him at Costco. Weinberg rationalized that using Cohen would keep him pure, keep him from violating his vow to stay away from dirt-based stores. As he saw it, he wasn't simply hiring someone to go to a store for him. No, he was testing a new concept for a consumer service called My Personal Internet Valet that he'd come up with, whereby customers could send shopping requests by E-mail or through a Web site and have merchandise picked up and delivered to them. It would not be "just a transaction or a delivery service," Weinberg explains, it would be "someone who is always on the lookout for me. He's out there, and if he sees Charmin toilet tissue at an unbelievable price, he'll get it for me because he knows that's what I want."

Cohen didn't exactly fit Weinberg's specs for an ideal Internet valet, especially since he didn't even have a computer. "If Bruce thinks something like this will succeed based on the Internet -- which I know nothing about, incidentally -- then who am I to comment?" Cohen says.

With that vote of confidence, Weinberg forged ahead. "As a researcher, I felt I had to test the concept," he now says. "Maybe this is how Kozmo.com started. Or look at [Idealab founder] Bill Gross. He gets these ideas and just does them. I'm not saying I'm Bill Gross, but why can't I build this?"

Well, he did. And he's got the pictures to prove it, having snapped Cohen in Costco's parking lot. "It was historic," Weinberg insists. "It's like when you go into a restaurant, and they have that first dollar bill on the wall."

Except Weinberg's supposed to be the restaurant critic, not the owner.

As the experiment progressed Weinberg seemed at least as interested in dominating E-commerce as in testing it. Nine months into his "Internet Shopping 24/7 Project," he went way beyond simply cataloging his on-line shopping experiences. Weinberg just couldn't stop himself, despite warnings from Hibbard.

A former student refers to Weinberg as the "E-commerce vampire" because he's corresponded with his prof as late as 3 a.m.

The more he explored E-commerce, the more untapped potential he saw, the more he wanted to make it his own. He was led astray, seduced. "Why do people like to work at dot-coms?" Weinberg reasons. "It's because you get to use your brain. There's nothing rote, and it's always stimulating."

And he means always. By the early part of this year, Weinberg extended the time he would spend holed up in the nerve center -- a walk-in closet of a room, doused in pale yellow paint -- into the wee hours. Moshiko Levhar, a former student, refers to him as the "E-commerce vampire" because he's corresponded with his prof as late as 3 a.m.

Weinberg detects the changes in himself. "Shopping on-line is just a gateway. I haven't come up with elegant words for what it is that happens, but it's not just about becoming a great E-commerce shopper," he says, hoisting Sam onto his lap. "I've become a little more self-confident, a little more open in who I am."

Put it this way: he's now a bit of a cyberbully. In December he clashed with Hibbard after deciding to open his own e-commerce page, an Amazon.com affiliate called Bruce's Corner Five and Dime. "I told him, 'Get that off your site,' " Hibbard says. "You can't be objective about your shopping and be commercial at the same time."

Weinberg ultimately relented -- but not before assuring himself and readers of his diary that "I am evolving and behaving in an absolutely normal way." If there's any truth to that, then who can help wondering what will happen when the multitudes maneuver on-line as nimbly as he does? Will E-commerce inspire regular folks as it has inspired Weinberg in particular, so that we're all hoarding domain names (he's already got redsoxyankees.com, redsox1918.com, and bruceweinberg.com, among others) and declaring a nationwide "Shopping On-line Week"? (He's aiming for mid-October.) Will medical journals tally the dimensions of this hidden epidemic, outlining symptoms that sound strangely similar to those that have already come to characterize Weinberg?

Symptoms? What symptoms? "I think I'm becoming a little bit evangelical," Weinberg says. So intent is he on proving the superiority of E-commerce that he agonized with Hibbard over whether he should have the pictures he'd taken of Cohen developed at a photo-finishing store. He's agonized all along about breaking the rules. "Maybe I'm becoming too militant in my thoughts," he allows.

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