By Hays Goodman
Associate Editor

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Attendance at Interactive Newspapers last month in San Jose, Calif., was predictably thin. Two years ago it would have been fairly described as “shockingly thin,” but after a few shows one begins to get used to it and look back on the “bubble days” as the true anomaly.

The vendors that were there certainly were looking hard for qualified prospects, and there were plenty of new faces along with the established players offering interesting products and services.

Domain registration can be a real hassle for a number of newspapers. Not for the ones that have small groups numbering 10 to 20 or so, but for the ones that also do Web development for clients and end up registering hundreds of names. This leads to a huge stack of paper being delivered from Network Solutions or another registrar at regular intervals, with multiple copies of billing for each domain that the accounts payable department then has to sort through.

Domain Registration Systems Inc. has a solution to simplify the situation: The company handles all the registrations and renewals and sends a simple spreadsheet instead of reams of paper, and each registration is tracked by company, affiliate, group, individual registrant and end user.

“Basically, accounting loves us because there’s no paperwork, [information technology] loves us because they have genuine control and can make changes to the domains at any time, and the executives love us because it costs less,” said Ross Lasley, chief technology officer of the firm.

Los Angeles-based Applied Semantics showed technology at the show that can automate the selection of metadata as well as perform sophisticated categorization of documents and Web pages. The Metadata Creator examines each word, phrase and concept within a document in the same way a human does: by putting it in context with the other words on the page and determining the relative importance. Metadata Creator can suggest only metadata that appears in the document, or to suggest metadata that is conceptually related to the document contents but does not directly appear.

Mycomputer.com is making inroads into the Web analytics business with their SuperStats line of products. In October 2001, they signed with MediaNews Group Inc. to monitor the company’s 49 daily newspapers’ Web sites, including The Daily News of Los Angeles and The Denver Post.

SuperStats allows tracking of the expected data and offers users high levels of detail such as monitor resolution, screen size and color space of the pages that are being viewed. Mycomputer.com expects to roll out a product in the near future that emphasizes e-commerce applications, and will generate complete reports on products purchased, financial terms of transactions, and where transactions were aborted during the process so sites can tune their check-out procedures.

Sell.com launched an interesting new product at the show, designed to help newspapers’ classified sites compete a bit closer with services like eBay. What sell.com provides is the hosting space and unique, very short URLs to customers who would like to place pictures and descriptions of their products online. For example, an ad might contain after the phone number, the URL of www.sell.com/207J. The newspaper is provided a bank of unused codes and merely marks them off after assigning them to callers who wish to use the service. The URL appears in the print ad as an upsold service, and sell.com pockets part of the upcharge as part of a revenue-share arrangement.

Customers with the codes then use a standard Internet browser to build a mini-site for their item using a simple drag-and-drop and menu selection interface. In addition to the usual features such as pictures and descriptions, the user can also allow people to bid on the item in an auction arrangement, buy it at a fixed price or use a combination of the two. A feedback system is also in place to allow rating of individual buyers and sellers.

For more information on the print program go to www.sell.com/print.