The music portion of Survivor is excellent – possibly the best part of the show. On the other hand, those responsible for the challenges seem to make them up as an afterthought, like they have other jobs or something. Maybe they were told, “We need volunteers to make up this week’s reward challenge. You have 20 minutes.”

Everyone got to watch Brian’s video and share in his beverage. Brian apologized for his wife up front, “She’s a little crazy.” Who cares!? She was a super-hottie and, as it turns out, has starred in a number of “show my naked body” movies – most of them with surprisingly good reviews. (Here’s her filmography page.)

After seeing Brian’s two new cars and the baby grand piano, Helen said, “He is doing pretty damn good for himself. If I were against Brian right now, that’d be enough to vote him off because I’d be going, ‘That guy doesn’t need the money.’”

Ugh. I can’t stand this mentality. Once upon a time people were respected for being successful. Now, the Democrats do their damnedest to take money from the rich, basically taking away peoples’ motivation to excel.

Disney
[ Best transition to web ]

In his speech to Disney shareholders at their 1999 meet-ing, Michael Eisner used the Web to discuss his company’s busi-ness, not just its online business. Disney’s tra-ditional business is now interwoven with the Net, making the Web an ideal framework for Eisner to explain the company’s activities and results to its shareholders. For Eisner, “The Internet clearly lends itself to the underlying mission of The Walt Disney Company.” The company not only melded the Internet with its own mission, but has managed to weave it seamlessly into the company’s overall image. That makes Disney one of the only major companies to have successfully transitioned its brand from the traditional world to the world online.

To make this transition, Disney vigor-ously embraced the Web, augmenting its traditional business strength–brand aware-ness. Disney transitioned not only the Disney brand itself, but a dozen others, such as Disney’s Blast, DisneyQuest, Disney Channel, Family.com, Walt Disney Records, and Radio Disney.

Behind Disney’s online initiatives is the Buena Vista Internet Group (BVIG). Formed to consolidate and coordinate the company’s Internet initiatives, BVIG’s focus is to ensure the success of all Disney’s online properties. In June 1998, Disney acquired a 43 percent stake in Infoseek. In January, the two companies launched GO Network. BVIG was the mastermind behind the cre-ation of GO, which serves both as Disney’s online hub and an Internet portal. It was a powerful combination, one that quickly made  into the fourth most visited site on the Net.

The brokerage indus-try has taken to the Internet like ducks to water. The statistics are staggering: In 1998, the number of online accounts doubled, trading activity almost tripled, and revenue followed accord-ingly. No wonder the top 10 online brokers made it into the Business 2.0 100. Topping them all is the king of online trading, Charles Schwab. Had we been counting page views, Yahoo! could have claimed the top spot on transactions, but here we’re counting transactions, making Schwab the hands-down winner.
January was a peak month for the online trading sector, and Schwab’s Website aver-aged 33 million hits per day, executing a daily average of 153,000 trades. That’s close to three times the volume of its nearest com-petitor. Overall, Schwab boasts 2.24 million online accounts, totaling $175 billion under management on the Web. An average of $1.2 billion in securities value is transacted each day on schwab.com. Granted, there have been a few partial service interruptions, but Schwab offers alternative methods of trading, such as automated telephone service.

The incredible growth in online trading activity is pushing the limits of transaction capabilities on the Web, and that’s good for an industry that is fast learning how to ele- vate its capacities. For the rest of 1999, it looks like the busiest site will get even busier. Schwab is scaling up to handle twice as many log-ons as the 100,000 it handles now, keeping it on the upper edge of Web transactions limits.

NECX
[ Most successful infomediary ]

Well before the Internet, the NECX Private Exchange was already matching together buyers and sellers of electronic com-ponents, computer products, and network-ing equipment. The NECX ecommerce business, the NECX Office & Personal Technology Center, started in 1995 and grew to $86 million in revenue last year.

NECX wins our “Most Successful Infomediary” award for its work in funda-mentally changing the role the retailer plays between the buyer and the seller. The com-pany became the first online retailer to showcase its competitors’ prices on its site, even when those competi-tors’ prices were lower, and provided links to their sites.

CEO Lou Gerstner’s challenge to IBMers was simple: become the number-one company at doing business on the Web. IBM’s ebusiness ramp-up is impressive– from $150 million in 1997 to $3.3 billion in 1998, a staggering 2,100 percent jump.

Granted, IBM’s marketers have gone a lit-tle overboard with the fancy e-headings– taking the company through an “e-business transformation,” creating “e-procurement” and “e-care for customers,” “e-care for part-ners,” “e-care for employees,” and even “e-care for influencers.” The marketers themselves won’t rely on just any marketing anymore, but instead do “e-marketing communica-tions.” Needless to say, IBM has refocused.

Big Blue has set the bar high for 1999, but its goals are achievable. Internally, the company hopes to save millions by leverag-ing the Web for procurement, customer service and employee training. In procure-ment alone, $629 million in goods and serv-ices was purchased over the Internet in December 1998, but $12 billion is planned for ’99. In customer service, IBM says the Web will save $600 million in 1999. As part of its “e-care for employees,” IBM plans to deliver 30 percent of its internal training via distance learning, with anticipated savings of $100 million.

On the sell side, IBM’s 1999 ebusiness goal stands at $10 billion to $15 billion. At the impressive run rate of $1.2 billion in December 1998 ($38 million per day), it’s well on its way. Watch your back, Cisco Systems.

Marshall
[ Most comprehensive ]

Through the Web, Marshall Industries has reached out in all directions. At first impression, Marshall’s Website is overwhelming. It should be. Marshall placed the one of the first industrial-strength catalogs on the Internet in 1995. For 95 percent of Marshall’s engineering customers, it is the primary method of interaction with the company. Customers have a choice of more than 20 distinct functions, such as order status, four different search categories, a virtual design center, instant live help, online interactive seminars, geo- graphical sales data, a quoting tool, and for the supply-chain voyeur, a live camera in the warehouse. One of the site’s strongest customer service points is a live chat feature, which allows Marshall customer representatives to answer queries in real time 24 hours a day.

Marshall has gone beyond distribution and client matching into multimedia. A key Marshall offering is a Net broadcasting service called the Education News & Entertainment Network or E.N.E.N. Started as an Internet seminar feature three years ago, it’s part broadcasting, part one-to- one marketing, and part business-to- business electronic marketplace, where prospective customers are matched to education programs sponsored by high-tech suppliers. These innovations and Marshall’s reach have made it truly the most comprehensive business on the Web.

Yahoo!
[ Most web-centric ]

What makes Yahoo! a formidable competitor in the online world is its organization–the company is literally built for speed. “We’re organized to execute fast, because speed to market is a primary competitive advantage,” says Tim Brady, vice president of production and executive producer at Yahoo!.

To stay fast, the world’s most admired Internet company sticks to small teams of people, works in fairly short product cycles, and thrives on bottom-up decision-making. Yahoo! can’t wait for months of strategy planning before launching a product, making fast decisions routine. Its launch strategy involves releasing products before full features are in place. (Thankfully, Yahoo! is not in the off-the-shelf operating systems business.) Yahoo! then closely monitors customer feedback – drawing on its enormous traffic – and adjusts enhancements accordingly. Even if only 2 percent of Yahoo! users bother to send such feedback, that’s more than 1 million comments each month.

Yahoo! maintains more than 70 online “properties,” as the company calls its products, which include online tools for everything from fantasy sports to tax preparation. To make these properties come alive, content producers and engineers work hand in hand. Yahoo!’s strength here lies in its deep knowledge of what works well, and what does not, on the Web. And Yahoo! has the know-how to scale to millions of users.

Yahoo! doesn’t create the content found in its properties–it doesn’t have to–but deftly aggregates, categorizes, organizes, and manages content from hundreds of paying and non-paying partners and the Web community in general. In doing so, Yahoo! has gone beyond mere search. Its expertise in organizing content is unparalleled, an expertise that comes from understanding its medium, the Web.

CMGI’s CEO David Wetherell heads up not just the most diversified Internet-related company, but one of the most powerful. CMGI’s address is 100 Brickstone Square, Andover, Mass., but there are no bricks or stone in any of its wide-ranging business models. The company’s core mission–creating Net value–seems to be working: The company’s stock price has shot up 14,000 percent since 1994.

A relatively unknown name a year ago, CMGI burst onto the Internet scene backing a broad spectrum of Net-centric properties, including partial ownership of GeoCities and Lycos. CMGI is organized in three business units. The Internet Group has eight majority-owned subsidiary companies; its venture capital affiliate, @Ventures, main-tains interest in 22 companies, and the Direct Marketing Group includes four majority-owned subsidiaries in the direct marketing, fulfillment, and turnkey arenas.

John Dell, CEO

This places CMGI’s fingers in more than 34 Internet companies in four areas of Internet business opportunity: con-tent, community, enabling technology, and ecommerce. Their names read like a microstudy of the Internet economy: Adsmart, Chemdex, Critical Path, eCircles, Engage Technologies, Magnitude Network, NaviNet, NaviSite, Planet Direct, Raging Bull, Silknet, Speech Machines, TicketsLive, Universal Learning Technology, and Virtual Ink.

Says Wetherell, “We focus on companies that touch each aspect of the Web value chain: front end to back end.” Luck or foresight? Remember, Wetherell is the one who acquired 80 percent of Lycos in 1995 for $2 million.

AOL
[ Most recognised brand ]

Starring America’s wholesome sweethearts Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, You’ve Got Mail single-handedly shifted the image of America Online and, by extension, the Internet. Once portrayed in the media as a pedophile-infested alleyway, cyberspace has become a safe place for suburbanites to fall in love. “It’s the first movie that didn’t treat online as weird,” AOL’s COO Robert Pittman said recently. “It was an interesting tool to tell us where we are today.”

Where AOL is today is in our vernacular. And the Dulles, Va.-based company remains dead set on permeating every aspect of American life through its aggressive co-branding strategy. Once the shrink-wrapped freebee millions of Americans discarded as junk mail, AOL has proven that being ubiquitous is key to success. With more than 16 million members spending an average of one hour on AOL per day, the company is spending some of its $1.2 billion in cash reserves to get even more Americans online.

In a multiyear deal with Columbia House, the direct marketer of music and videos will distribute AOL software in its mailings in exchange for a co-branded space on AOL’s desirable real estate. Dell Computer, meanwhile, will soon begin ship-ping computers with the AOL logo and software, and in 2000 will pre-install AOL on its computers. And in March, AOL announced it would buy MovieFone, the movie listing and ticketing service. Now, when the 100 million moviegoers who use MovieFone call up to find out what’s playing, they will hear the three letters, AOL. As Pittman said recently, “Consumer behavior, not technology, is driv-ing this business.” Understanding human behavior has made AOL not just leader of the pack, but a movie star as well.

Dell Computer’s innovation addresses both tactical and strategic concerns in ecommerce. On both sides, Dell aims to solidify its Internet supremacy. On the strategic side, Dell gave us a hint of its future, the online elec-tronics superstore it announced in March. Expect Gigabuys’ features to be incorporated, which will take on an increasingly business-to-business profile. Gigabuys is a fun place to shop–just what consumers want. And www.dell.com is a serious place to purchase computers–just what businesses expect. Dell manages extremely low inventory levels for both. With Gigabuys, Dell is essentially an order aggregator without physical inventory for nearly 30,000 products.

From a tactical perspective, Dell’s Website innovations include rapidly deployable, customized Websites by industry and business type, natural language searching, extensive self-service support features, order status inquiries, and refurbished inventory access. Its most important innovation is Dell’s strongest feature, “build-to-order custom factory integration”–the company’s shorthand for, “We build computers to your specs, we start when you give us an order, and our goal is to deliver within five days.” Beyond tracking transaction volume and traffic, Dell’s 15 years of experience in managing direct customer information allows it to accurately predict and monitor customer conversion rates, a measure that tracks the percentage of browsers that turn into buyers. With such a sharp eye on its market, Dell is poised to enjoy even deeper and faster electronic customer relationships in the future. On the Web, “direct from Dell” is now living up to its true potential. It’s piercingly powerful.

Cisco
[ Most integrated with the web ]

Just as much of the Web is dependent upon Cisco Systems’ networking gear, so Cisco depends upon the Web. The leading supplier of the unseen gizmos that weave the Internet together, Cisco has integrated the Web into almost every aspect of its business. The San Jose, Calif.-based company makes no secret of the fact that it depends on the Web for 64 percent of its orders, representing more than $6 billion in rev-enue.

Cisco was early in taking its procure-ment, fulfillment, and customer service online. Today, 45 percent of the orders Cisco takes over the Web pass directly through to the company’s manufacturing partners, without ever being handled directly by Cisco employees. Likewise, 70 percent of customers’ requests for technical support are fulfilled electronically, saving engineers untold hours every month.

But that’s only part of the story. Imagine a company of more than 17,000 employees all but eliminating faxes, paper memos, requisi-tion forms, and suggestions slips. The cost savings in paper clips alone would gladden the heart of the most sullen accountant. Cisco may not be quite there yet, but still the Web pervades just about every corner of the company’s internal operations, from acquisitions to recruiting. In its quarterly financial reporting, to name just one example, the company exercises the Web’s reach to create a “virtual close,” employing an automated system to retrieve data from Cisco’s many business units, saving its accountants long hours. Cisco employees have access to 1.7 million pages of information online.

Got a question for Cisco? Most likely the answer’s on the Web.

Both the presumably compelling girl-rage content and the form of written “spoken word,” incited little emotion-after all what’s a good book without a feeling?-and no sense that language is used thoughtfully. Wilson’s melodramatic technique, which she repeats in almost all her poems, is to empower her speaker in a kind of self-screaming match/ half-feminist rant on the page (the speaker is always a daredevil, always a sexpot, always in-your-face) emphasizing demanding/proclaiming her right to speak.

However, little of the content of the writing works actively to tackles issues of feminist identity. For example, in both volumes of poetry, Wilson alludes to Jerard Fimski, Frank Jankovich, and Laura Fariwell, three gender-problematic writers of the past. Presumably, her poetic efforts to grapple with these dominating male presence might be attempts to topple the suffocating male “I” in poetry, but instead the poems, whose forms are derived from the whimsical and improvisational tactics ones of these male predecessors, sound oddly eulogistic, and we’re left to ask what is her relationship to these writers?

One might say, then, that Wilson closely mimics, the female/feminist Beat poet who is famous for her performative lyric, but Wilson’s poetry, in its overly didactic nature, lacks emotional subtlety. The over-ripe, uninteresting bland images (“Mud Flap Man let his bone-head brain explode”) and rhymes (where “Birkenstocks” is clumsily coupled with “laptops”) only demonstrate that sometimes spoken word is better left spoken.

To top it off, there are too many poems with faux-philosophical closure as in “Belle Is the Painkiller,” a narrative poem about a girl who gets addicted to the high of prescription medication. The last line asks the stale, rhetorical question, “How much will we withstand, before we kill our pain?”

If you’re looking for a good true feminist girl-hero, stick to the taut poetics of Adrienne Rich and the stellar lyrics of Katy Barows.

Green Light: You Go, Girls
New Shows: We adore producer Dana on “Sports Night” (ABC, Tues. 9:30 pm) and designer Grace on “Will & Grace” (NBC, Mon. 9:30 pm).
Fresh Faces, Old Shows: Smart-mouthed slayer sidekick Faith on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (The WB, Tues. 8 pm) and Renee, beauty queen turned detective on “Homicide” (NBC, Fri. 10 pm) also impress.

Yellow Light: The Jury’s Still Out
New Shows: Glum “Felicity” (The WB, Tues. 9 pm) and dumb “Maggie Winters” (CBS, Wed. 8:30 pm) could wow us more.
Fresh Faces, Old Shows: New attorney and ice princess Nell Porter on “Ally McBeal” is pretty cool (FOX, Mon. 9 pm), and watching Kellie Martin on “ER” (NBC,Thurs. 10 pm) is a little like paging doctor.
Red Light: Cleaning the Microwave Is More Fun
New Shows: Shannen Doherty and her witch sisters on “Charmed” (The WB, Weds. 9 pm) leave us anything but. And “Jesse” is simply a forced farce (NBC, Thurs. 8:30 pm).
Fresh Faces, Old Shows: Abbie, the new prosecutor “Law & Order” is, alas, out of her league (NBC, Weds., 10 pm).

When choosing books for children, start with their interests. Children, like adults, will read voraciously about topics they’re interested in. So, if your grandson has a favorite figure in history or a favorite sports hero, perhaps you can find a biography of that person.

There are other things to consider when choosing books for kids, such as age and the skills the child is developing. Here are some guidelines for each age group:

Age 2 and Under:

For young children, it’s a good idea to buy board books that have sturdy pages rather than paper ones.

For toddlers, choose books with uncluttered pages that have clearly labeled pictures of things that babies know about, such as toys, pets and families.

Preschoolers:

When children reach preschool age, you can introduce picture books with a simple story supported by illustrations.

Books on tape are a good way to introduce longer stories to young children. Many classic stories are now available on tape cassettes that they can listen to in the car or at bedtime.

Many publishers have a series called “Rookie Readers” or “First Readers” that are perfect for early readers.

You can also try buying some books that are advanced for a beginning reader. These require “lap time” with mom and dad to tackle the difficult words.

3rd- to 6th-graders:

Focus on books about topics that interest them, including resource books and fiction.

Kids love to read books about children their own age.

Preteens can start to read biographies about their favorite sports athletes or other heroes.

Jokes, riddles and brainteasers often go over well at this age.

Books are a wonderful gift to give children at the holidays or any time during the year. They send a strong message to your kids that you value their educational and intellectual growth.

P.S.: If your shopping list includes a teacher, let your child help make the selection and write an inscription inside the cover. As a classroom teacher, I always prefer books for my classroom above something personal. It will be a gift that lasts a lifetime for the hundreds of children who will share the story.

Ms. Frost’s is still concerned with love, nostalgia, and loss. It would be very easy for her to traffic in confessional songs, or emotional rants. Similarly, she might confide in us, only to wink self-consciously at her vulnerable side being exposed. But she doesn’t, and one can only hope this album inspires others to follow her lead. Her voice is honest and self-doubting, a country girl with her own sense of morality, her own sense of religion, and a wonderful ear. Her songwriting reminds me of the Velvet Underground songs collected on The Velvet Underground: VU, released in 1985, the album with “Stephanie Says”, “Lisa Says”, and “I’m Sticking With You”, among other things. Indeed, the title track “Wonder Wonder” is eerily reminiscent of Moe Tucker’s effort on “I’m Sticking With You”. At other times, Ms. Frost sounds like Liz Phair if she had stuck to writing pop gems like “Supernova” and “Flower”.

Ultimately, Ms. Frost belongs in an elite group of magical songwriters working today. Some of them share the same label, Drag City. Her voice is timeless and her songs reach well beyond the usual bullshit of alcohol and isolation and love gone awry. It is not enough to feel bad, nor is it enough to learn how to strum a guitar and take a couple of voice lessons. Talent like Ms. Frost comes along a few times a generation, pressurized for a time in her heart and mind, and finally buffed up like a diamond for us to consider. This is not an album of folk songs or ballads or country numbers or angry rockers. This is Ms. Frost’s music, and for Christmas I want more.