The goodspider.com - the Irish equivalent of the US Hunger Site - has generated enough money for 20,000 meals of grain for people in the developing world in the six weeks since it was launched. To generate more traffic, Concern is now appealing to businesses throughout the country to make www.thegoodspider.com their default home page, facilitating employees to make daily visits to the site.
The concept behind the site is simple and effective: revenue comes from business advertising with no charge to the Web user. Once the site is set up as a user's homepage, one click will purchase 162 grammes of grain - sufficient to provide a meal for one person. If users do not wish to, or cannot, make the site their homepage they can still make daily donations by accessing the site.
IN THE DOCK: Yahoo! is back in French court in a legal battle over who should be held responsible for online racism. At issue is Yahoo!'s auction site, where Nazi medallions, swastika-emblazoned battle flags and other Third Reich paraphernalia can be bought and sold.
FINE IDEA: A Fine Gael Councillor with Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council is using Internet telephony to provide constituents with the opportunity to talk directly to him. Councillor Eoin Costello's "virtual clinic" allows two-way spoken conversations over the Internet. The clinic is open on Saturday mornings from 10.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. and can be accessed from www.eoincostello.ie.
NUTT CASE: World football's governing body, FIFA, scored an important win when the world trademark body, WIPO, ordered a cybersquatter to hand over the Internet domain name fifa-world-cup.com. FIFA was battling Briton Jonathan Nutt, who had registered the name. WIPO ordered Nutt to hand it over after deciding that he had not obtained it in good faith. Meanwhile the family of Jimi Hendrix has won a case to evict the holder of the Internet address www.jimihendrix.com
SAY WHAT? And speaking of cybersquatting, the word has now officially entered the lexicon after being given the nod from the new edition of the Oxford Compact English dictionary. Dot.com (as in a company that conducts business on the Internet) flexecutive (worker whose hours and place of work are flexible due to new technology) and Screenager (an Internet or computer-addicted teenager) are also in.
FIGHTING ENEMY FORCES: China has called on Communist Party media to build Web sites for a propaganda fight against what it said were enemy forces at home and abroad. In one of China's clearest statements yet of its ambivalent embrace of the Internet, the Communist flagship People's Daily said the global computer network had made political thought and work more efficient but had brought unwelcome ideas. "Enemy forces at home and abroad are sparing no effort to use this battlefront to infiltrate us," the paper said.
ANTI-SEMITES ONLINE: America Online and other sites have moved swiftly to combat anti-Semitic postings related to Al Gore's selection of a Jewish running mate. Though the remarks about Joseph Lieberman were mostly limited to sites and discussion groups frequented by hate groups, some did spill into chat rooms and message boards from mainstream ISPs. AOL, which recorded more than 28,000 postings on Lieberman, said it deleted an unspecified number for violating its policies against hate speech.
NEO-NAZIS NO THANKS: The German government is to intervene to stop neo-Nazi websites from being registered. It follows the registering of the site www.heil-hitler.de The country's Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin told German radio that she would work with Denic, the German cooperative that issues Internet addresses in Germany, to look out for such addresses. She said she supported the idea of automatically linking such sites to sites that would give anti-racist information.
SMART MOVE: Netscape is to revise a program for downloading files from the Internet so that it will no longer collect data about users' online activity. The software, called SmartDownload, is the subject of a federal class-action lawsuit that claims it violates a US federal law protecting computer users' privacy.
MORE WOMEN: The online gender imbalance has shifted in favour of women for the first time in the US, according to a report published by Media Metrix. The report, based on measurements of more than 55,000 home and business users in May, found that 50.4 per cent of US Internet users were women, with teenage girls representing the fastest-growing age group. There were more than 4.4 million girls ages 1217 online in May, a 126 per cent increase from a year earlier.
HARRY'S GAME: Electronic Arts, the world's largest interactive entertainment software company, has received exclusive worldwide rights to develop, publish and distribute computer and video games based on J.K. Rowling's hugely successful Harry Potter books.
ONLINE CRIMELINE: Police in Britain are considering plans to enable victims of homophobic crimes to report incidents over the Internet. Transsexuals, lesbians and gay men will be encouraged to visit special crime reporting sites to give details of attacks.
IN BRIEF...Circle Network, a provider of public Internet access kiosks, has signed on the online European travel agency e-bookers as a partner. . . Irish-based Access Gaming Systems has signed an agreement to provide its interactive gaming system to the French national lottery, La Francaise des Jeux. . . Amazon.com and Toys R Us are collaborating to create a toy and video games store and a baby products store. . .