IT'S hard to overemphasise the dominance of the Web in the Valley at the moment: every technology business that wants press, money and employees needs to pay the Web continuous and vocal homage.
"Internet commerce" however is still an oxymoron, despite what Wall Street thinks. Few companies are actually making any money from the Web (except maybe the companies that stage conferences and create newsletters), but everybody wants to stake a claim on it.
The wild west metaphors are apt. Large corporations from American Express to Toyota are falling over themselves to put elaborate Web sites online, hoping they are doing the right thing, but all the time suspecting they are actually spending all this money to reach bored, reclusive male students who find surfing the net to be the cheapest way to spend a Saturday night.
There is speculation as to what will happen over the next year, when the management of these large corporations is faced with spending another $1 million or so to keep their site up to date with real-time video, audio, animation and all of the other goodies coming out of the Valley.
These companies are not in the entertainment business - they are card issuers car manufacturers, soft drinks marketers and so on. They have successfully downsized and re-engineered for the past 10 years and now they are faced with a growing headcount and seemingly endless demands for increased budget in order to keep their Web site fresh.
Where are they to turn? Perhaps they will remember management guru Tom Peters' command to "stick to their knitting" and leave the entertaining to entertainers. That points to a major opportunity for those Web sites which can attract the right type of audience and keep drawing them back.
If companies want to stay "wired" without spending millions of dollars in an endless quest to be relevant and technologically up to date, they may well choose to spend those dollars associating themselves with high-traffic sites through advertising and sponsorships.
Currently much of the advertising money on the Web goes to the sites offering directories or search engines, such as Yahoo, Alta Vista and Lycos. That's a rather blunt way for sophisticated advertisers to spend money. It's equivalent to sticking a banner across the front of every television screen in every living room instead of advertising within the actual programmes. Not very subtle.
Increasingly, therefore the advertising dollars will be drawn to more sharply defined audiences. Several sites on the Web have been generating the kind of repeat audience marketeers adore. The Spot, for example, is a sort of yuppie soap opera that's been going on for around a year, you can "tune in" daily to follow your favourite character. Inevitably their lives are intertwined and complicated in a mundane way - it's like a Coronation Street with sunshine.
Given the potential opportunity for significant advertising dollars, and the greatly increased access to the Internet promised by the market entry of behemoths like AT&T, the challenge is to define and set up Web sites that will be attractive to advertisers and repeat visitors alike.
There are a number of companies proposing compelling content for Web sites that takes advantage of the technology rather than simply transposing text and graphics from one medium to another. One such company is Big Story, a San Francisco-based partnership of designers, film-makers and writers.
Big Story's big idea, which it is pitching to Hollywood studios, owners of high-traffic Web sites and media corporations, is to fully exploit the capability of the Web to blur the line between reality and fantasy, developing a set of serialised storylines so compelling that large numbers of advertisers will want to tap into the audience the stories generate.
The plot of Big Story's first serial, e-murder, is complex and multi-faceted, but basically it's a whodunit about a man's search to find his girlfriend's murderer. The main characters in the story, of course, have Web sites, as do their companies, and Big Story wants to have all those Web sites really existing so that readers of the story can go into them looking for clues as the story unfolds, and send electronic mail to characters within the plot. The company calls their proposition "Web verite" and is hopeful that e-murder will find an online home by this summer.
The Web verite concept is interesting, as it integrates technology with content in a way that hasn't yet been done on the Web - Big Story wants to take advantage of the Web as a medium just as Orson Wells used radio so effectively with War of the Worlds.
With the one difference - they want their audience to not just be excited but to come back for more, thus giving their advertisers the exposure they promise.
Will advertisers go for it? Probably not until corporate America's infatuation with the Web cools off a little - that could come quickly as users get tired of visiting expensive sites that are just eye candy - devoid of content, but with high visual appeal.
Many industry analysts in fact point to Motorola's Web site as the corporate model for the future. It is spare, undynamic and linear. However the site is full of useful information about Motorola's products and technologies. Because of its lack of graphics, the Motorola site is extremely quick to access. Motorola seems to be quite deliberately leaving the entertaining to somebody else and most definitely "sticking to the knitting". This is the kind of company that could spend its marketing money on a Big Story-type site to give them the hip, on-the-edge sheen that companies strive for among younger audiences.
Investing in Web sites is going to become ever more expensive in the US as customers demand more interactivity: many companies will eventually opt out of that race to concentrate on their core business, while supporting those Web sites that can offer them the nirvana of marketeers - young, affluent, upscale high spenders. And not that socially challenged lonely student they suspect they are attracting now.
