Just Released can be found on the Web at http://www.student.net/features/justreleased

Using Just Released, anyone can view complete lists of the current week’s releases of movies, CDs, videos, or games, or request complete week-by-week e-mail updates. These lists will be especially useful to students and others during the holiday season as shoppers finalize their last-minute gift lists. Users can also customize Just Released to their personal preferences by asking Just Released to monitor their favorite actors, artists or genres.

Just Released helps keep busy people aware of their favorite artists and actors by automatically sending them e-mail notification prior to the release of any item matching their favorite selections.

How It Works For example, if a holiday shopper has a niece who loves `Elton John,’ they could get e-mail reminders of any upcoming Elton John CDs and videos. Or, a shopper who wants to buy the latest Sony PlayStation game for their little brother can find out what has just come out.

“Just Released is perfect for finding the latest gift for the music, movie or gaming fan on any holiday shopping list,” said Stewart Ugelow, Student Net Publishing CEO. “People are extremely busy during the holiday season. Just Released will simplify their lives and help them in their gift choices.”

To ensure the accuracy and reliability of Just Released, Student.Net works directly with leading national retailers to track release schedules.

About Student.Net Student.Net is the first independent site with original daily content that serves all aspects of student life, produced by journalists who know what students want. It can be found on the Web at http://www.student.net.

Student Net Publishing LLC is the parent company of Student.Net. It was founded by students at Yale and Columbia universities in 1995 to provide college students with high-quality online content. Today it is a leading Internet publishing company, led by a highly regarded management team and backed by US WEST Media Group.

Along with five partners at Yale and Columbia in the fall of 1995, Ugelow started Student.Net Publishing, an online service that provides student-written articles, television listings, a dating service and a guide to student home pages. In March, U S West bought a 35 percent stake in the company.

That old Web rags-to-riches story - in which young webmasters toil at night for no pay and then greet a pile of corporate cash at the end of the tunnel - rings true again, this time in the offices of Student.net. With an investment from US West phone and cable company, the student-run site has gone pro and needs a designer to give it a visual punch on a daily basis.

Once part of the Nando.net site at the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, Student.net relaunched on its own in December 1995, when its founders - six undergrads from Yale and Columbia who sunk their savings into the project - produced it as a labor of love. The site provided a mix of homegrown how-to articles and interactive pranks for an audience raised on pre-CBS-buyout Letterman. “None of us took salaries for 16 months,” says the 21-year-old CEO and president, Stewart Ugelow. Last year, a gig for the Washington Post providing local college news for the DC area made the company what Stewart - in his new lingo as a Web mogul - calls a “stable product” and gave it “proof of concept” for potential investors.

It worked. A partnership with US West came along this year. Valued somewhere in the seven-figure range, the deal helped Student.net move from a cramped office in its college town of New Haven, Connecticut, to an upscale brick-and-exposed-beam number in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Traffic on the site, which was around half a million pageviews a month last year, will most likely benefit from US West’s marketing acumen (through its Yellow Pages and cable channels). And the new partnership also makes it necessary to do more issues-oriented reporting and better daily design.

A plan for beefed-up editorial is on its way. Stewart recently hired Bill Frischling and Chris Johnson as co-managing editors. As 25-year-olds, Chris and Bill are by far the elders among the eight-person staff. They bring a certain editorial gravity as former editors at washingtonpost.com. (Chris, by the way, once baby-sat for his current boss, when Stewart was a fourth-grader.) Among the topics proposed for the September relaunch are stories about student credit-card debt, an interview with the writer of the old TV show 3-2-1 Contact, an interactive tour of the Chicago subway tunnels, and coverage of national politics.

Now Stewart’s looking for a designer and illustrator to give the pages a visual boost. Looking through the primarily student-designed archive of last year’s articles, it’s clear that a more experienced eye is needed. The content of the articles is often sophomoric, but that’s all part of the appeal - in one place, a frat boy tells how to brew beer in your dorm room without attracting the health department; in another, an Ivy-League snot makes fun of incoming freshmen.

Bill, who’s hiring the new designer along with Chris and Stewart, says the amount of experience is negotiable - from just out of college to a few years on the job. They’re willing to pay US$30,000 or more, and are looking for someone who can make “seductive” designs for their features under deadline. The exact salary will vary depending on experience - like if you’ve worked for a content-driven Web site. Requirements for the job include experience publishing on the Web and fluency with HTML, Photoshop, and Illustrator.

Page templates for Student.net have already been created by a contractor, but Bill says the new designer shouldn’t be afraid to make changes. “They are going to have a lot of latitude,” he explains.

Stewart adds, “We want someone who likes to have a good time, has the ability to laugh at themselves, and has a higher mission than making money.”

Of course, every business would like to have a staff that works solely for the good of the product. But it says something about Stewart’s personal desire to see Student.net succeed that he forsook his own graduation to run the site, while the other five founders got their diplomas. In a moment of hubris mixed with acknowledgement of his new role as entrepreneur, Stewart describes his move away from school simply as “a Bill-Gates-style leave of absence.”

“There is a deep, interconnected relationship between economic growth and economic change,” lectures a briefing paper that Clinton aides will give to the top officials of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan — countries that, by and large, are averse to turbulence — and to Russia’s president, who is trying to decide which Group of Seven economy to emulate. “The process of economic change inevitably involves a certain amount of creative destruction,” the paper adds.

How does America’s flexibility spur America’s prosperity? Can other developed nations replicate it?

Probably. “It’s not genetic,” says Mancur Olson Jr., a University of Maryland economist who studies international economic patterns. But to match America’s dynamism, they must overcome significant differences in culture, history and geography. While Americans tend to embrace change for its own sake, Europeans and Japanese tend to mistrust it.

“We have a private sector … where there’s a very strong entrepreneurial, risk-oriented spirit,” Mr. Clinton said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal Wednesday. “It’s indefinable and intangible, but I think it has a lot to do with why we are who we are… . We’re sort of constantly in the act of becoming.”

One place where the foreign leaders — who open a three-day annual summit here Friday — could study American-style creative destruction, of relentless reinvention, is the Rockies’ booming capital.

Born on a Bet

Denver was born on a bet. In the mid-19th century, 100,000 people scrambled here on the long-shot hope of finding gold and, ever since, the city has ridden wave after wave of boom and bust. One silver tycoon, Horace A.W. Tabor, lost his shirt but remains a local hero; a downtown marketplace carries his name. “There’s a Western optimism, almost a romanticism of the roller coaster,” says Thomas J. Noel, a University of Colorado at Denver historian known as “Dr. Colorado,” who will give guided tours to the eight leaders’ wives. “This is a flexible, open city. Look at the movers and shakers — they all moved here from somewhere else.”

The latest bust came a decade ago when oil prices plunged and the city’s dominant petroleum companies either shut down or left town. Office vacancies neared 30%. “It became difficult to find a U-Haul because everyone was moving out,” recalls Chamber of Commerce President John I. Lay.

But, as in the wake of earlier collapses, the city rose again, not by preserving old foundations but by building new ones. The tally of mining, oil and gas industry jobs is half that of a decade ago. But that loss is more than offset by the 1,000-plus technology firms — such as computer-equipment makers and telecommunications companies — that have started up or moved here since 1992, according to the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce. They have contributed to a gain of about 150,000 jobs in the past five years. Meanwhile, about 150,000 people have moved to the metropolitan area — many from California, once the main magnet for restive fortune-seekers.

Signs of Growth

Signs of creation amid the destruction are everywhere. John Hickenlooper, a furloughed oil-company geologist, used his severance check in 1988 to open Denver’s first “brew pub,” which now claims to be the country’s biggest. When his Wynkoop Brewing Co. opened in an abandoned warehouse, it was in the heart of a downtown skid row. Now, this neighborhood is home to busy restaurants and residential lofts, some costing more than $1 million. A few miles east, a failed Burlington Coat Factory store is now kept humming round the clock by TeleTech Holdings Inc., which has nearly 900 people working at the site with computers and headsets in a business that didn’t exist 15 years ago — taking toll-free phone calls for corporations that outsource the job.

Along U.S. Highway 36 toward Boulder, new corporate headquarters are rising from once-empty fields. Standing out is the jagged glass roof of Corporate Express Inc., a supplier of office products and services that was founded a decade ago by a Czech immigrant who claims to have set a national record for acquisitions last year. Meanwhile, the downtown Petroleum Club atop the gleaming Anaconda Tower, once the exclusive preserve of rich executives, changed its name just before its 50th anniversary last year to “Top of the Rockies,” reflecting the city’s corporate changing of the guard.

Not all Coloradans embrace change, of course. Conservationists constantly battle development. And the old guard frets as its clout erodes. “All these newcomers came here and want to change the rules after they get here — they immediately want the mountain roads paved, and fiber-optic cables and sewers put out to their homes,” gripes Greg Walcher, president of Club 20, which represents the mining, logging and agricultural interests in Colorado’s 20 western counties. “The traditional businesspeople are finding themselves in a small minority all of a sudden.”

Colorado Gov. Roy Romer notes, “I’ve tried to stay with traditional industries, but you know that’s not where the new world is.” Recently named chairman of the Democratic National Committee as a symbol of the party’s attempt to appear more centrist and pragmatic, he explains his governing philosophy this way: “I have never been a person who tried to draw a line or build a fence around Colorado. The free market just doesn’t work that way.”

The Flexibility Factor

An essential force behind America’s comparative dynamism is its flexibility — in labor markets, capital markets and corporate culture. “The real issue is whether the economy can take a fixed set of resources at any point in time and allocate them to their most productive uses,” says Paul Romer, a Stanford University economist, an expert on growth — and the governor’s son and sometime adviser. “If you lock in those resources where they are, when opportunities change you won’t be able to respond.”

One basic tactic for reallocating resources is the ruthless firing of workers, a common American practice that horrifies most Europeans and Japanese. Storage Technology Corp.’s record profits partly result from laying off about 1,700 employees — nearly 15% of its work force — in less than two years, says David E. Weiss, the chief executive of the Denver-area maker of mainframe tape and disk drives. “We looked in the mirror and saw we just weren’t fit,” he explains. “It took us too long to get products out, and it was too expensive to develop products.”

Mr. Weiss says he tried to handle the layoffs “with a humanistic approach.” But he shudders when contemplating how he might have revitalized the company if impeded by European-type labor rules. “Take France with their latest election — they want a 35-hour work week but don’t want to change pay,” he says incredulously. “Nobody knows how they’re going to pay for it.”

American-style volatility can impose severe side effects, such as job insecurity, wage stagnation and increased inequality of income. “The U.S. has done a better job of creating employment, but Europe has done a better job of maintaining wages for those staying employed,” says Lawrence Katz, a Harvard University labor expert. The Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce concedes that regional wages rose more slowly than inflation as thousands of jobs were created between 1993 and 1996.

Wealth in the Long Run

But the American model assumes that, in the long run, an economy usually produces new wealth by not trying too hard to preserve old wealth. “Our firms can fire; so they hire,” says C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Institute for International Economics in Washington. “Japanese and German firms can’t fire; so they don’t hire.” The American model, he argues, “is definitely better for everybody. In a world where all companies have to compete globally, you have to get with it in terms of market-oriented approaches, or you will suffer.”

In a vibrant economy, labor flexibility also lets workers job-hop for higher wages, an option not available to, say, the many Japanese workers still tethered to a lifetime employment system. These days, StorageTek worries less about shedding inefficient employees than about losing its best ones to Sun Microsystems Inc.’s research-and-development campus opening this fall just across the road.

Moreover, job-market flexibility helps foster the new companies that many economists say can spur job growth. StorageTek was founded in 1969 by defectors from International Business Machines Corp.’s Boulder facility. Then, in 1985, three StorageTek engineers moved on to create Exabyte Corp., a maker of tape drives and automated-tape libraries that now has more than 1,000 employees in the area.

American creativity also flows from a huge, free-wheeling capital market. In the late 1980s, analysts hailed the stable, centralized financial sectors of Japan and Germany, which supposedly permitted wise planning by freeing corporate managers from quarterly profit worries. But now experts say those systems didn’t force needed restructuring and shunned innovative outsiders seeking seed money.

“Anybody can raise money in this country,” says David Hale, chief economist of Zurich Kemper Investments Inc. in Chicago. “Our venture-capital market is unchallenged. Our banking system is highly decentralized. In America, there are all kinds of second and third chances to raise money.”

Rapid Success

Denver’s main telecommunications company, U S West Inc., recently cut a seven-figure check for 21-year-old Yale senior Stewart Ugelow — a former summer intern at this newspaper — for a 35% stake in his Internet Web site, which publishes news-feature stories and data such as TV and concert listings for college students. Student.Net Publishing LLC is less than two years old, and none of its six founders has any prior business experience. “We don’t have anybody on staff yet old enough to rent a car. That’s one of our goals for our next hire,” Mr. Ugelow says.

“You bet there’s a risk” in this investment, says Tony Pantuso, director of business development for U S West’s interactive-services group. But Mr. Ugelow’s very greenness makes him appealing. “In the multimedia world, a lot of good things are being done by people under 25,” Mr. Pantuso, 34, explains. “It’s not polluted by people such as myself that kill these things because they can’t see the business.”

Government also plays an important role in fostering Denver’s, and America’s, boom, more by providing the foundations for growth than by managing a lot of things in the European or Japanese mode. Gov. Romer supports new transportation projects, such as the Denver International Airport. The federal government is a large, stable employer in Denver. Colorado has a highly educated work force, thanks to heavy public spending on universities. The University of Colorado’s biology and chemistry departments have generated a thriving biotechnology industry.

To be sure, traits considered American assets could again become liabilities, as they were not long ago. Flexibility works “in an era of rapid change,” such as the current period of technological advances and globalization, says Yale School of Management Dean Jeffrey E. Garten, a former Clinton adviser. “If we get to another plateau where it’s possible to anticipate long-term trends, I think we’ll see a dramatic resurgence of Japanese and European companies.” The idea “that we have the superior model for all time is a very dangerous mindset.” And Mr. Bergsten concedes that America’s sometimes-excessive market brutality “could trigger a backlash against our model.”

Copying Some Ideas

But for now, the Europeans and Japanese are trying to emulate some elements of the American model. On Monday, European leaders endorsed creation of a European Investment Bank credit line to help small high-tech companies on a continent short of venture capital. When meeting with President Clinton, Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto is expected to offer a progress report on plans to deregulate Tokyo’s rigid financial markets.

However, some differences between the U.S. and its main allies transcend labor, capital and regulation policies. America is blessed with a large, integrated market — something Europeans are struggling to create — that facilitates great changes within national borders. Common language, currency and customs allow companies and workers to move easily among states. “Imagine if IBM was in one country, and Microsoft and Intel were in another country,” says Mr. Romer, the economist. “Nationalism would have led to a very strong attempt to protect IBM. We’re very fortunate to have a big-enough marketplace to allow this process of entry and exit to take place without invoking the kind of nationalistic fervor that makes people want to stop this process.”

U.S. companies don’t feel tied to specific states. When TeleTech founder Kenneth D. Tuchman grew frustrated with California’s business climate, he shut his headquarters there in 1993 and moved to Colorado. In California, “the governor never seemed to find the time to take our phone calls, let alone meet with us. We clearly weren’t big enough; we weren’t well-known,” he says. “In this state, I can pick up the phone, call the governor, and I’ll be put through immediately.”

There’s also a historical and cultural divide between the U.S. and other countries. Americans share myths and images about themselves quite different from those treasured by Europeans and Japanese. The American Revolution and the Jeffersonian ideals that shaped the early republic sought, in part, to abolish the Old World’s rigid hierarchies and government controls. France, too, had its revolution, in pursuit of “liberty, equality and fraternity,” but in recent years its policies have sometimes promoted equality and fraternity at the expense of economic freedom.

Frontier Mentality

The U.S. “frontier mentality” romanticized the notion of boundless opportunities to seek new chances and create new lives; the North American continent’s seemingly infinite natural resources enhanced that optimism. The Japanese, in contrast, call themselves “a small island nation with few natural resources” needing careful planning and sharing; they speak with mistrust about “confusion in the marketplace.” Mr. Clinton cites “the fact that we’ve remained open to new entrants, to new immigrants, to [this] sort of new energies” — in contrast to other developed nations defined more by common race, religion or nationality. Despite great social changes, Britain’s elite is still strongly shaped by family and old-school ties.

American innovation is spurred as well by an acceptance of business failure that other countries find unnerving, plus an embrace of rapid success that others consider crass. Failure in the Old World can permanently stain a business reputation. But to Bank of Boulder President Steven K. Bosley, “bankruptcy doesn’t have a stigma” if it isn’t because of poor ethics or poor management. “We’ll lend money to such a person in another venture. There are examples of people here who haven’t made it, but come back on their second, third or even fourth try to be successful.”

And entrepreneurs can get very rich very quickly. Bill Phillips used $185 of savings a decade ago to found Experimental & Applied Sciences Inc., a maker of nutritional supplements for athletes. He now estimates his net worth at $40 million. Last week, when the 31-year-old was honored as a “Rocky Mountain Entrepreneur of the Year,” his acceptance speech was an unabashed defense of American-style success. “I’m sorry,” he told a cheering crowd, “but winning does not suck!”

In a high-level form of corporate recruiting, US West announced Thursday that it is acquiring a 35 percent stake in Student.Net Publishing - the largely self-financed publisher of college-interest Web content run by a group of Yale and Columbia undergraduates. The deal represents the sixth Internet content partnership that the telecommunications giant has formed since last summer.

Student.Net - which has been run for 16 months from what the site calls “a room with an unhealthily high computer-and-takeout-container-to-person ratio in the center of New Haven, Connecticut,” on a total of US$150,000 - stands to gain a seven-figure cash infusion. “It lived on fumes,” says 21-year-old CEO Stewart Ugelow, who intends to use the unaccustomed wealth to bolster his staff of six, work up a formal marketing campaign, and buy improved hardware for the new office in Boston.

US West hopes, in return, to move into the college market that Student.Net serves because “the demographic is so strong,” says Tony Pantuso, the director of business development for US West Interactive, explaining that students are appealing to advertisers and is a group that spends the most time online.

Ugelow explains that it’s just that kind of undergraduate immersion that makes his group so valuable to US West, despite their extreme youth. “We were freshmen when Mosaic came out,” he says. “We had a lot of spare time.”

The site is a far cry from an extracurricular time-killer for a group of dorm underachievers, however. Rather, it was originally conceived as a Nando.Net project, before the student-founders - who have summer job experience at companies like The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft, and Nortel - took over when Nando itself was bought out and dropped the project in 1995.

The college arena has more to offer Web companies than just an audience of “7 million cherry-picked students,” agrees Roland De Wolk - who teaches Web journalism and runs a student site out of San Francisco State University. It’s difficult, he says, for journalists with old-media experience to “turn it on its head” and create innovative Internet content. Instead, “real smart journalism students with some brains and some moxie are where to look for it.”

Ugelow used his undergraduate connections at The Washington Post to forge a sponsorship deal with that paper. The relationship consisted of advertising, consulting work, and the licensing of Student.Net content for a local version of the site, which became the college area of the online Post.

That site will probably serve as a model of sorts for the localized Student.Net content US West plans to adapt for the education section of its Dive In network of local sites - scheduled to launch this month in 10 cities. This time, however, Student.Net “can be local in a way we couldn’t before,” says Ugelow, citing the sales forces already in place for US West’s various cable and phone systems.

The timing of the investment aids Student.Net students as well, since they all graduate in May and will now stay on with the company. But Ugelow sees dangers in the sudden wealth. “We’ve been good about keeping frugal,” he says. “We want to keep the incentive to come up with creative solutions.”

Student.Net Publishing, based in New Haven, Conn., operates Student.Net (http://www.student.net), a critically acclaimed World Wide Web site for college students. Students can read lively articles written by college journalists around the world on everything from quirky university personalities and traditions, to hard-hitting political coverage, to humorous essays about job rejection letters. The site also features award-winning interactive services such as ‘TV Search & Remind,’ searchable television listings that send users reminders about shows by electronic mail; ‘Personal Page Direct,’ the most comprehensive guide to student homepages available on the Internet; and ‘Yenta: The Student.Net Matchmaker,’ a dating service.

“Although we don’t typically invest in first-round financing, Student.Net Publishing is a compelling partner for U S WEST Interactive,” said John O’Farrell, U S WEST Interactive president. “The Student.Net site appeals to college students, an important audience for the Internet and for advertisers.” About 98 percent of the 8.8 million four-year college students in the United States have free access to the Internet and they spend more time online than any other group — about five hours each week.

“The popularity of Student.Net can be traced to the fact that it’s built for college students by college students,” noted O’Farrell. “So in addition to providing access to practical and interesting information, the editorial tone of Student.Net also rings true across college campuses.”

“We’re thrilled to be working with a renowned company like U S WEST Media Group,” said Stewart Ugelow, Student.Net president and CEO. “The combination of our skill in developing innovative online content and U S WEST’s unparalleled marketing and distribution channels make this a perfect strategic partnership.”

As a part of the investment, Student.Net Publishing will work with U S WEST Interactive to develop local editions of the Student.Net web site for universities located in cities served by DiveIn, U S WEST’s Web-based community information service slated to launch in ten cities this month. In addition, Student.Net Publishing will develop audio and video programming maximized for the high-speed, broadband capabilities of cable modems and networks provided through U S WEST Media Group’s businesses.

“Cable modems are about more than getting the same content everyone else gets faster,” said O’Farrell. “We’re committed to providing genuinely new programming and applications that enrich the experience of Internet users who connect using cable modems.”

To that end, U S WEST Interactive has taken an aggressive posture in the Internet content marketplace. Student.Net is the sixth equity-based partnership the company has formed since last summer. U S WEST Interactive also holds stakes in SportsLine USA, Preview Travel, golf.com, The Trip.com and VDOnet. In addition, the company is a limited partner in a venture capital fund sponsored by Kleiner Perkins and aimed at Java technology-based companies.

U S WEST Interactive Services is part of U S WEST Media Group, one of America’s largest broadband communications companies. Media Group is involved in domestic and international cable and telephony, wireless communications, print and Internet directories and information services. For 1996, Media Group reported proportionate revenues of $6.4 billion. U S WEST Media Group has the third largest domestic cable footprint passing 27 million American homes in 60 of the top 100 U.S. metropolitan areas.

U S WEST Interactive packages Internet content that complements U S WEST Media Group’s extensive national and international distribution. To do so, U S WEST Interactive has made strategic investments in world-class Internet companies, and will launch DiveIn, its Web-based community information service in ten metropolitan areas in March 1997.

Media Group is one of two major groups that make up U S WEST, a company in the connections business, which helps customers share information, entertainment and communications services in local markets worldwide. U S WEST’s other major group, U S WEST Communications, provides telecommunications services to customers in 14 western and midwestern states.

First of all, I can tell you a little bit about myself and our company. Unlike most Internet businesses, we are particularly unusual in that when we started this project, we had never expected to start a business. Our company was founded in November of 1995, while I was a junior at Yale University, and my partners were four classmates of mine at Yale and a classmate from high school who goes to Columbia University. My background is not that of a businessman or a computer person, but as a print journalist.

Over the last five summers I’ve written for the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the Raleigh News & Observer as a reporter and in other capacities, and have been covering the Internet for them since things started taking off.

Many of you may have seen some of my stories on things like domain name speculation, which was a few years ago when there were people who were out registering all sorts of domain names that were potentially [useful] for Fortune 500 companies. That story has been reprinted in a lot of places.

The question before us is really, if you’re going to build a business from content, how are the ways to do it? I think, while Student.Net may be a bit on the unusual side, there are a lot of things that we have learned over the past year that may be applicable to your business that you’re running now, or that you’re contemplating running.

For one thing, there is how our company was started. We were cash poor from the beginning. We relied heavily on sweat, sweat equity, and volunteers to contribute content. We had to expend that with a number of different business models before we really hit on the one that we’re using now.

We had originally started working on the site with the understanding that we were going to be working with a larger corporate partner, the News & Observer, which had been one of the newspapers I had worked with. But during a corporate acquisition, their new media division had to switch strategic focuses and we were one of the projects that were sort of cast off on our own. We talked to a lot of people about working with us and we were told, “It sounds like you guys have great ideas, but I mean, really, you’re six college students with no products, no revenues and no experience. Why don’t you come back to us when you have a site and you have a business.” That has been sort of model that we’ve been operating from for the last 16 months.

So when we started the site, we basically had three rules. The first was that our content should be useful and compelling. The second was that we didn’t want to duplicate content that exists offline, that college students would ordinarily be exposed to. Finally, we wanted to update the site frequently to encourage repeat visits. So our original content mix was a combination of daily stories that were written by college journalists around the country, and even from Canada, who were either looking to do something that they couldn’t accomplish in their traditional college newspapers or simply wanted the exposure of writing for a larger audience.

To differentiate ourselves from the typical college newspaper that focuses very much on the day-to-day administration of a university, we focused on stories that were useful or quirky or interesting, that students wouldn’t normally find.

A good example was our cover story, which still gets us a lot of hits today. It was a guide to brewing beer in your dorm room. Over the course of the year, we did everything from guides to cheap travel, we sent reporters to cover the New Hampshire primaries and had all sorts of interviews with interesting students and professors around the country who are doing things that you wouldn’t ordinarily hear about.

We also had a number of interactive features, and the one that has gotten us perhaps the most attention is a feature that we developed called “TV Search and Remind,” which was a searchable listing with a twist. It still is the only place on the Internet where you can search television listings for up to a month. You go and you type in [something] like “Seinfeld,” and it comes up with all the Seinfeld [shows] for the next month, with the plots and the times and the show channels. Next to each one of those shows is a button, and if you click the button at the bottom, there’s another button that says, “Send me e-mail before this show is on.” So you would get an e-mail the day before saying, “Student.Net just wants to remind you that this show is on at this time, and by the way, be sure to come back to Student.Net and check out what we are doing.”

It allowed us to both build a relationship with our users — it gave them a capability that was not possible in traditional media — and got us a tremendous amount of press attention. Actually, that from the “Only on the Internet” story. Three weeks after launching our site, with no publicity other than word of mouth, we have been written about in the Los Angeles Times.

So it can happen to you.

We had chosen our market as college students for two reasons, both because we knew the market from an editorial standpoint, being college students ourselves, and also because we saw that there was this vast demographic group that was online in numbers larger than any other. We knew that 98% of U.S. colleges have access to e-mail, most of them have direct connections from their rooms or some sort of high-speed, T-1-level access to a public computing cluster.

And unlike traditional markets, college students were able to use the Internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week, unlike people who are at work and have work to do, or who were at home and were fighting their kids for use of the computer and were connecting over very slow modems. That gave us an advantage that we had this audience that was already there, that was using the Internet and was desperate for quality content aimed at them.

But obviously, there’s some things from our market that won’t apply to what you all are doing, so I thought I’d walk you through some of the steps that we used to identify the right market.

First of all, I want to address the misconception that a lot of people have going into an Internet business: the Internet is not inherently a mass medium. There are a lot of people on the Internet, but it does not work the same way as broadcast journalism does or traditional print media, in that people are able to very selectively jump from source to source, and even using just basic HTML, combine the various elements any way they want.

Instead, it’s helpful to view the Internet as a collection of overlapping special interest groups.

By that I mean that even though people who come to our site are college students, they actually have all sorts of different interests and align themselves in ways different than just by their age or where they live. Particularly in the area of city guides, I would point out that a lot of people are approaching those as, you know, here are people who are defined by a local group. They are all people who live in a certain city, but people really view themselves as defined in a lot of ways. They may be parents, they may be programmers, they may be sports fans.

So it’s important to keep that in mind when you’re designing your site. People really are in various niche groups that overlap at certain points, so you want to design it so that it appeals to the largest number of overlapping groups.

It’s important to remember that you also need to be able to segment those groups as well. I would advise you to try to find niches that cannot be easily replicated off-line.

In our case, the Internet was a perfect medium, because if you want to reach college students today on a national campaign, you basically have two ways of doing it. You can buy an ad in every college newspaper in America, which is not cheap, or you can try and do on-campus promotions where people hand out mugs to get you to sign up for your credit cards. That is not cheap either. Even something like direct mail is notoriously unreliable for college students. And I would point out that just from an expense cost comparison, that to just rent a name off the direct mail list costs ten cents usually, while an Internet impression can be had for a lot less. So there was a market there that could not be reached using traditional means. Advertisers desperately wanted to reach them and this was the perfect way of doing it more efficiently and more economically.

Finally, I would encourage you to try and be a “category killer.” That is the term that is used to designate things like Home Depot or Toys R Us. How that applies to the Internet is that you need to decide what your core strength is, how you’re going to leverage that and do it really, really well. Today, advertisers are looking for bulk ads. It’s the question of who can drive the most traffic to my site.

But in the 21st century, people will not be looking quite as much for just traffic as much as demographics. The sites that succeed will be the sites that can deliver the narrowest level of audience specificity to advertisers for the most economical dollars. If a site is built today simply to attract eyeballs, that site is going to have a hard time competing three years from now when advertisers finally figure out how to measure audiences properly and get sophisticated about their buying.

It’s sort of amazing how much advertisers today are just willing to roll the dice on a site compared to the level of justification they demand for a traditional print advertisement.

There they want to see psychographics, readership surveys, market-level income and all sorts of things like that. Today, everybody is sort of feeling their way around. That’s going to change, particularly as users become more experienced in surfing the Web.

The sites that try to be all things to all people are going to have an immensely difficult time competing, because as users learn how to use bookmarks, and as they start to create their own personal Web pages with guides to the sites that they’re interested in, they will very quickly start moving to a perspective where they control the order that the information is presented and which features they go to. So, content aggregators are going to find it enormously difficult, I think.

The second thing that I need to address is the concept-of-the-community myth. Right now everyone from Steve Case to Howard Rheingold from Electronic Minds says that you need to create community around your site for it to be successful. Vast amounts of money have already been invested in such sites, and I guarantee you that there are a lot of people here who are working on business plans, probably for the very same thing. But communities are not the panacea that most people think they are. When you talk about electronic communities, we really need to ask ourselves, “What are we talking about?” The reality is, when we say “community,” we mean that they’re cheap. Our users create the content. We don’t have to update it. We don’t have to maintain it. It can be automated, and we can just serve the ads. This is the real chat room model. The problem with that is that it takes quality for people to build around.

Community just cannot created by providing people space. There has to be a reason for them to get together. I really believe that in a few years we’ll talk about the rush to build online communities much the same way as we talked about the planned communities of the 50s and 60s where people built these huge, enormous, very artificial communities that they really didn’t want to live in. Huge amounts of money were lost, and nobody really understood why at the time.

What we’ve learned from that is that there’s a reason our cities have evolved that way. People like shaping their environment, and it’s not something you can force. You have to ask yourself, on the online communities, with so many sites trying to create community, “How much community will exist when you can get it anywhere you go?” Sites that have been successful in creating community so far have been the sites that really have been around for a long time, things like The WELL. When there really wasn’t very much out there before, this was the way that people interacted. It was a chance to interact with people who are different than you and from all over the world, but now there are all these business plans for sites that are trying to create communities on local levels.

You have to ask, “Why is that any different than what I can get today in my city? Why do I need to interact with people from my city online?” Is there a compelling reason for people to do so? Some sites will succeed in this, but I have to believe that the vast majority will fail because it’s so dependent upon the users you attract, whether one of them wants to be a strong influence in the site and how much people want to participate. So from our perspective, as much as we would love to have community created among our users, from a business perspective, there are three concepts that are far more important to us.

First is what I call “self identity.” I want my users to be asking themselves, not necessarily consciously, but to be thinking about, “What does it mean about me that I use this Web site?” We already do that everyday for a lot of different topics, things like, “I drink this beer and I drink micro-brew, so that says something about me,” or, “I drive a certain car and that says something about me.” In the future, I think those brand extensions will carry over to Web sites, that people will use Yahoo over Excite because it says something about them. You need to be very conscious of what your site’s identity represents, so that it can carry over and translate to your users.

The second thing is credibility. It’s focusing on how you can build a relationship of trust with your users, because the sooner that people begin to feel that you are a peer of theirs, the more likely they are to come back and to visit and participate in your community. Finally, I’d encourage you to focus on personality. I think a lot of sites are really missing an opportunity to convey that there’s more behind them than just monolithic corporations. It’s a chance to show your users that the people who work on your Web site are real people with real problems and the same concerns and daily stresses that the users have, and for a chance to build a marketing relationship that has not existed before.

We have been very conscious in our site design to always sign things with our first names, to include pictures of our authors whenever possible and to encourage people to e-mail us personally. We respond. It’s been really quite successful, and I think I’ve developed a relationship with a lot more of our users than I ever would have from my print experience.

So how does this apply to a site that you are building? Since this is “21st Century Publishing Strategies,” I thought I’d list a few 21st century publishing tactics for you to use.

First of all, I would encourage you to design your content to leverage what I call “self-selecting affinity groups.” If you accept that your site is really visited by groups of overlapping, selfspecialized interest groups, it’s important to design your site today so that when the ad dollars are there, you can easily differentiate between them. I will give you two examples of how we did that.

First, we were very conscious, in the TV search-and-remind feature, to design the response pages with the results of your search, so that we could very easily target different ads to different television shows.

If an advertiser came to us and said that they wanted to reach viewers of Seinfeld and another advertiser wanted to reach Murder, She Wrote, it’s very easy for us to do that. People feel very passionately about their television shows and their regular viewing. We found tremendous success in the people who have said, “Hey, here’s how I just push one line of HTML, and it’s my Web page, to automatically search for my favorite television show. We get a lot of people exposed to us through their peers, who wouldn’t have ever encountered any of the marketing that we do.

Another example is a story that we ran — I’m still sort of surprised by the reaction it’s gotten — called “My Parents Are Undercover Square Dancers.” It was by one of our students who wrote about how his parents had long been passionate square dancing fans but didn’t really want people to know. That story has gotten more reprint requests than anything else we’ve written on the site in a year. We get a lot of requests from square dancing newsletters in various Web sites. “Can we reprint your story?” “Can we tell people about your site?” The obvious answer is yes, because peer recommendations are often one of the most powerful ways of communicating your message to other people.

It’s the “Hey, these folks are just like me” attitude, and the sites that do that well will be the sites that succeed.

Secondly, I would encourage you to allow users to shape their experience. You can do this in a number of ways. We’ve enabled users to customize their environment in terms of how various things are displayed. We tried to build features that had dynamic responses based upon the information supplied by the users. One of the features on the site is called “Yenta.” It’s the Student.Net Matchmaker. Based upon information that users supply, it matches other users up as potential dates. That’s the perfect example of users providing us with information that enhances the functionality of their visit to Student.Net, and provides us with the necessary information we need to customize the site and continue to design it so it’s most appropriate.

Finally, I’d encourage you to think about designing your production system for maximum flexibility. Building your site out of databases that can be easily customized using server-side includes for various templates and parsing your pages based upon the browser and location that users are coming from will vastly enhance the user’s experience at your site.

I would encourage you to extend your offline product, if you have one, by taking advantage of new technologies. If anyone followed the press coverage of the New York Times Web site launch, very few articles were written about how great it was that you could read all the New York Times online everyday, and almost all of them focused on the fact that you could do the crossword online. It’s that type of “gee whiz” feature that people really seem to gravitate to.

Also, if you think about newspapers, that in the early days of the Web, used to print these regular columns with a vast number of Web sites to check out in the URLs, they really missed an opportunity to build an “early mover” advantage for their Web sites. If newspapers had been smart and said, “Today’s sites are featured on this Web site, this page on our Web site, and gotten users in the habit of going to the newspaper Web site to check out various sites that they’d read about in the newspaper, I would seriously question whether Yahoo would ever have happened. So in terms of an opportunity lost, I think that’s been a tremendous one.

Next, I’d encourage you to create what I call a “force of habit through frequent updates.” Our site is designed so that when users supply information through a personal section we have on the page, they need to come back to the site to see whether they’ve gotten new messages or new matches. This is something that can really be applied to a lot of sites, that you want to get your users, for lack of a better word, “addicted” to your Web site to the point where they need it. They need to come back several times a day, and they’re exposed to the new content that you put out. Advertisers will demand sites that are designed to encourage repeat visits, because that will increase the effectiveness and the exposure that the advertisers’ ads receive.

Finally, I just thought I would talk about a few other sites that get it so far, and I would encourage you all to check them out. I’m not connected to the Internet for this presentation, but one of the surprising ones that most of you, I’m sure looking at this audience, has never checked out, is a site called “Video Game Spot,” which is a site all about new video games. It has a perfect model in that every day it posts new reviews of video games, new previews, information about price cuts and all sorts of other video-game-related information from user tips and pictures of the games. But they’ve done something that’s really interesting. They have a page for each video game where they allow users to review the games.

What you see is three options presented to you when you look at a video game page. The first is the “Video Game Spot Review.” You have the option of looking at a professionallyrated review. Then they have links to user written reviews so you can see what people who are like you might like, and what other users think of it. Then finally, they put the company information online, so it’s all the promotional material from the company. You really get all the different perspectives that can let you evaluate the various games, and it gives you a sense that if you felt strongly about a game, you could participate as well.

The other sites each have different elements of what I’ve been talking about. MacInTouch is a site that combines all sorts of information about Macs and software for Macs. It’s a digest form created by a few people who started doing it just on their own, and it’s been so successful that they’ve turned it into a business. They compiled links to all the other Mac information several times throughout the day. For instance, when the Apple/NeXT merger was announced, they had an amazing amount of traffic because it was all there. People know that it’s there, and they know the people who run it. They’ve really done a great job of capturing personality.

News.com is a c|net site that covers the Internet. They’ve done a very good job in terms of being a resource for their users and providing frequent updates. If you haven’t visited that site, I’d really encourage you to. Firefly is a site that you’ll hear more about later today, I think. It’s a site that uses collaborative filtering technology developed at MIT to enhance relationships between users for music and movie reviews. It rates the movies that you’re interested in and compares it to the movies that other people have said they’re interested in. It says, “Hey, these are movies that these people who like the same sorts of movies as you’ve liked also like, go check them out.” I’d encourage you, if you have a chance, to go see that presentation and to visit that site.

Finally, for more information, you can feel free to contact me at this address. Also, if you want to leave me your business card, I’d be happy to send you a copy of this presentation. I guess I’d like to close with making an announcement that today, after 16 months of running this on our own, we’re pleased to be able to announce that we just received our first major investment. So, thank you very much.