Salon Media puts the Well on the market

SAN FRANCISCO — The Well, an eclectic online community whose profits have never quite measured up to its pioneering influence, is being put on the sales block by its current owner, long-struggling Web publisher Salon Media Group Inc.

Salon plans to take its time to ensure the new owner is a good fit for the Well’s main asset — its community of roughly 4,000 members. There were about 6,000 members when San Francisco-based Salon bought the Well for $5 million in stock 6 1/2 years ago.

Although its audience has shrunk since its heyday in the early 1990s, the Well still looms large in Silicon Valley because of its place in online lore.

The service started in 1985 as a quasi-social experiment by Steward Brand, the founder of the counterculture Whole Earth Catalog, and Larry Brillant, an entrepreneur trying to popularize the concept of computer conferencing systems. They called it the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, or Well.

Starting with just a few hundred people connecting over clunky telephone modems, the Well turned into a bustling online hub as high-tech geeks, iconoclasts, hippies, artists and journalists began to exchange ideas and share intimate details of their personal lives.

The emotional and intellectual bonds formed over the Well’s electronic connections inspired one early participant, Howard Rheingold, to coin the phrase, “virtual community.”

Internet voice services take off

BOSTON — The number of consumers bypassing the traditional phone network and opting for Internet voice service is soaring beyond expectations.

An analysis by the TeleGeography research group found 2.7 million subscribers nationwide in the second quarter, compared with just 440,000 a year earlier.

The technology, known as Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, requires a broadband Internet line but generally offers inexpensive calling plans and novel features such as the ability to manage voice mail on a Web page.

The revenue generated from consumer VoIP services remained relatively small, at $220 million, but that is expected to change quickly. TeleGeography forecasts annual VoIP revenue hitting $3 billion in two years.

The biggest factors in the numbers are cable TV companies, which are using VoIP to bundle phone service with their TV offerings in hopes of staving off competition from incumbent phone companies that are just beginning to get into the TV business.

Time Warner Inc.’s cable division is now the nation’s second-largest VoIP carrier, trailing only Vonage Holdings Corp., one of the earliest commercial providers of the service. Vonage is estimated to have 750,000 U.S. subscribers, more than three times its level a year ago.

Google mapping concerns Dutch lawmakers

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Two members of the Dutch parliament have questioned whether a free mapping program from Google Inc. may help would-be terrorists by providing aerial photos of potential targets.

Google Earth, launched this year, uses overlapping satellite photos to simulate the experience of flying from the stratosphere down to any spot on earth.

The photos come from a variety of sources. Though not all areas are highly detailed, some are so good that people can see details of their own homes, such as a pool or garden shed.

Lawmakers Frans Weekers and Aleid Wolfson read about the software in a Dutch newspaper article that raised the possibility that terrorists could use the program to study government buildings or nuclear reactors.

Google spokeswoman Catherine Betts said benefits of the software “far outweigh any negatives from potential abuse.”

“Google Earth is built from information that is already available from both commercial and public sources,” she said. “The same information is available to anyone who flies over or drives by a piece of property.”