net buzz

So all those Internet stock speculators finally experienced their "warning" heart attacks last week. Only the true idiots among them could have been surprised to be clutching their chests.

NASDAQ's subsequent recovery should have returned the color to their cheeks. But if that didn't do the trick, Dr. Buzz offers this free prescription: Take a look at these two Web sites and call your broker in the morning.

HeyIdiot.com purports to be the site for a start-up of the same name. In fact, HeyIdiot.com is a parody and the brainchild of a trio of real entrepreneurs: Dave Roux and Mitchell Kertzman, respectively chairman and CEO of Network Computer, and, that Popeye the Sailor Man of databases, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

"HeyIdiot.com is focused on selling just one product," promises the home page. "That product is the stock of HeyIdiot.com. . . . You can buy as much stock as you want with the only rule being that each new purchase must be executed at a successively higher price."

Kertzman calls coining the name HeyIdiot.com "not quite what I was imagining for the pinnacle of a 30-year career in software," but he otherwise readily accepts the credit.

"As we at HeyIdiot.com believe, if you create a business without products, customers or employees, you eliminate most of the distractions that frequently plague the managements of companies that are more real," Kertzman says. "This has given us the ability to focus on the important stuff, namely the stock price."

Kertzman is also on the board of directors at another Internet start-up parody, eTattler.com, which is a wholly disowned subsidiary of the San Jose Mercury News and its technology columnist, Dan Gillmor. Borrowing a page from the eBay playbook, eTattler is an online auction house for buyers and sellers of gossip about celebrities, politicians and business leaders.

What do I hear for this juicy tidbit about Ellison and some skinny dame named Olive?

"Portal frenzy is everywhere, which is kind of leading to portal angst," says Drew Banks, an intranet guru at Silicon Graphics, Inc. SGI's intranet, called Junction, has been keeping such angst in check at the computer maker since 1993, or, in other words, since long before the word portal meant anything in geek-speak.

Banks and his colleague, Kim Daus, delivered an entertaining hour's worth of intranet "lessons learned" recently at Spring Internet World '99 in Los Angeles. You can check out their presentation and get a taste of Junction at http://reality.sgi.com/shawnw_corp.

Two of their tips struck these ears as particularly wise: Go easier on the graphics and loosen the corporate reins on content contributors.

"We chopped the graphics in half," says Daus, who, it should be repeated, works for Silicon Graphics. "Although they were fun and beautiful, the functionality [of the larger graphics] was horrendous."

The second part of SGI's strategy - loosening those reins - involved Junction team members ditching their PR hats in favor of a "corporate journalism model." Daus and Banks insist this is neither an oxymoron nor a joke. SGI communications staffers are expected to act like reporters, not parrots, when writing about the company's internal goings-on. The theory - and it's a good one - is that workers won't bother using an intranet if all they're going to see there is fluff.

Banks and Daus have written a book on this subject, Beyond Spin, which will be available from Simon & Schuster in the fall.

The let's-be-more-candid approach has met with pockets of resistance in upper management at SGI, Banks acknowledges.

"They're used to the Pravda way of communicating, and moving them away from that is difficult," he says.

Wow. Candor like that can get a guy reassigned to the Siberia Office at most companies.

E-tattle on your favorite Internet companies by contacting McNamara at (508) 820-7471 or pmcnamara@nww.com.