Web Site Ads: Nowhere to Hide

If you're on a New York subway and a man hands you a candy bar, don't freak. It could be Lou Weiss, chairman of Pittsburgh gift-registry site wishbox.com. Weiss's favorite snack sports his company's logo, of course. He also hired a local drama prof to design a costume sporting a W-shaped smile for the company's mascot Wally Wishbox. To teach Wally a few steps, Weiss even hired a choreographer.

Not much is out of bounds in this season's promos for dot.com companies. Worse, there's nowhere to hide. Not at the mall: E-town.com, an electronics e-tailer, is sending laptop-toting workers to urge consumers to shop online. In San Francisco, where a barge often totes a 40-ft.-by-80-ft. billboard through the Bay, carorder.com hopes to go one better. The company wants to string a banner across the Golden Gate Bridge's toll plaza one day a month. In exchange, carorder.com will pay all tolls that day, plus kick in for bridge repairs. That may be one ad no one shuns.

By Timothy J. Mullaney

TABLE: You Are What You Read

One of online superstore Amazon.com Inc.'s more intriguing, and controversial, innovations recently is Purchase Circles--lists of best-selling books at hundreds of companies. The goal: to give like-minded people buying ideas. But they also provide a peek into corporate priorities and attitudes.

Oracle
Bestseller is The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: Inside Oracle Corporation. Apparently, the CEO is as much a mystery to his minions as he is to everyone else.

WebTV Networks
Top seller is Web TV for Dummies. Jeez, doesn't someone there know how to use the darn thing?

Walt Disney
No. 2 pick is Work in Progress, by CEO Michael D. Eisner--as if he needs the royalties. Next two: The Disney Way: Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company and Disney: The Mouse Betrayed. More like a house divided?

Nabisco
Among top sellers are Protein Power and Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution. Hey, people, just lay off the Oreos.

Intel
No list. CEO Andy Grove's famous paranoia?

DaimlerChrysler
No. 4 seller is The German Way: Aspects of Behavior, Attitudes, and Customs in the German-Speaking World. Is a culture clash brewing?

Amazon.com
No. 6 pick is The Noodle Cook Book. Maybe their options haven't vested yet.

No Credit for Dot.coms

Many dot.coms feel like they're dealing with Scrooge when it comes to booking advertising space for the vital holiday season; it's cash up front or their ads won't run.

A large number of startups say they're being asked to pay in advance by radio and TV companies wary of companies facing post-holiday cash-flow ills. ''We're experiencing it everywhere,'' says Soon Chart-Yu, founder of gazoontite.com, which sells asthma and allergy relief products. And it's not just lesser-knowns getting dunned. Benchmark Capital--backers of eBay Inc., E-Loan Inc., and others--says at least four of its companies have been refused terms.

The response from the networks: Who, Me? CBS, NBC, and Turner Broadcasting all say it's what always happens to new clients with no media credit references.

By Timothy J. Mullaney

Search Here for Shoplifting

Online merchants, beware: If your e-commerce site isn't configured properly, there's a software glitch that could let someone change the price of the products you sell.

At the Web site of a PC maker, there's a sleek new laptop going for $2,999. But Eran Reshef, a co-founder of Perfecto Technologies Inc., knows of a way to pay less--$999, or even $9.99. Of course, Reshef, my cybercrime guide, sells software to prevent this. He's exploiting a flaw in the way the Web site has been set up. The software that does all the work when you click on ''add to shopping cart'' has a bug that lets a novice like me finagle prices.

It's frighteningly easy. Fortunately, most e-commerce sites are not vulnerable because they check the price against a central database. But we found at least one big name and a host of other shopping sites that are at risk. Finding them was easy: We used a search engine to look for Web sites where the programmer has instructions that can't be seen when you view a page. These are called hidden fields. By clicking ''edit page'' on a browser, the hidden fields become visible. For any online merchant exposed to this exploit, the holidays may not bring them much cheer.

By Ira Sager

How Many Clicks?

In the party game ''Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,'' players try to connect the actor to other Hollywood stars through movies he has appeared in. In research done at the University of Notre Dame, physics professor Albert-Laszlo Barabasi tries to connect Web pages scattered throughout cyberspace. The professor's conclusion: If you exclude direct links and avoid search engines, Web pages average 19 clicks between them.

What's the big deal? Using Barabasi's Web-crawling software, you can discover how many clicks it takes for Web users to find your site. If you want to be just a few clicks from high-traffic sites such as Yahoo! or CNN, the software identifies which sites you can link to in order to get closer to the giants. That way, you can advertise at those sites to boost traffic. But Barabasi is a physicist, not a businessman. So though he's open to a bid, his software isn't available yet. That means, for now, it's up to you to edge your Web visibility closer to that of Kevin Bacon.

By Roger O. Crockett

TABLE: Do You Know What This :-(*) Means?

Most casual e-mail users already know a few basic online symbols, such as the ubiquitous sideways smiley :-) face. But to be a real afficionado you have to bone up on hundreds of other symbols. Here are a few for starters:

#:-)
Person with matted hair, or a toupee

:-(*)
About to upchuck

#-)
Partied too late

8-)
Smiley with glasses, or a Bill Gates smiley

;-)}
Corporate type

[:-)
Wearing a walkman

8:-)
Brainiac

:-"
Chain smoker

DATA: THE ULTIMATE CHAT DICTIONARY, TRIBAL VOICE INC.