Letters

Readers respond to articles in Inc. Technology 2000, #4, including the Chairman of Agillion congratulating the 2000 Inc. Web Award winners.

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Personalized Best
Congratulations to all the winners of the 2000 Inc. Web Awards [ Inc. Technology 2000, No. 4]. The common denominator among those companies, it appears, is that they all created a way to quickly send personalized information to their customers. Many companies are so focused on the first and second stages of the customer-service process -- getting and selling to customers -- that they often overlook its most crucial role: keeping customers.

Steve Papermaster
Chairman
Agillion
Austin

Video's Rising Star
Thank you for your article on Internet video [" Video Births the Internet Star," Inc. Technology 2000, No. 4, by Jill Hecht Maxwell]. We produce streaming video for various companies. Some people haven't realized how good the technology has become. Overcoming that misperception, however, isn't the greatest challenge; conveying the ubiquitousness of broadband connections is. Company owners often tell us that their users "don't have streaming-video capability," without considering that people surf the Web at work. Many offices have high-speed Internet access.

Daniel D.J. Jordan
Business Development Director
Artisan Creative
Los Angeles

Block Buster?
There's considerable disinformation being spread in the marketplace by those opposed to Internet filtering for political reasons. One piece of that disinformation is that Cyber Patrol blocks valuable sex-education material on Planned Parenthood's site. Harvey Silverglate fell into the trap of reporting that error [" There Oughta Be a Law," Inc. Technology 2000, No. 3].

Here are the facts: Cyber Patrol's filtering software categorizes material that a team of Internet researchers deems "inappropriate for children." The criteria upon which the researchers base their decisions are posted on the Web site and contained within the software. The filtered URLs are broken down into categories to allow parents and others to tailor the software for specific users.

Planned Parenthood has a terrific site with a lot of very useful sex-education information on it. Its site has been placed in Cyber Patrol's sex-education category -- it has not been banned, as Mr. Silverglate suggests.

Sydney Rubin
Principal
Ignition Strategic Communications
Washington, D.C.

Harvey Silverglate replies: The issue I raised was whether Cyber Patrol's filtering technology was overinclusive, causing parents to ban more sites than they had intended. Rubin, who does PR for Mattel and Cyber Patrol's new owner, SurfControl, concedes that as late as 1994 Cyber Patrol used keywords as the basis for blocking sites, which can result in overinclusion. Now, Rubin says, the program categorizes certain sites as "sex education" and allows the parent to block that whole category. However, the parent does not get a list of the URLs included in the blocked category.

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