About.com Launches Live Net Radio Show.

NEW YORK--(ENTERTAINMENT WIRE)--Aug. 5, 1999--

Show Hosted by Stewart Cheifet Featuring Discussions With

About.com Expert Guides

About.com, Inc., (http://About.com), the leading network of niche vertical sites, has launched an all-talk Internet radio show "Talking About This Week." The show is transmitted live every Thursday from 3-4 PM (ET) (http://www.broadcast.com/shows/aboutcom/radioshow) and takes a topical look at the people, news and events around the world through the lens of various experts.

About.com has signed Stewart Cheifet as host, familiar to many from his popular PBS TV shows "Computer Chronicles" and "Net Cafe." The format includes timely and topical interviews showcasing the many perspectives of About.com's network of 650 expert guides offering their opinions on the issues of the week whether it be current events, politics, health, travel, human interest stories or seasonal news you can use.

"The incredible popularity of net radio gives us a whole new format to leverage the expertise of our network of 650 expert human guides," said Scott Kurnit, Chairman and CEO of About.com. "The increasing interest in a human-guided approach to the web makes it an ideal time to leverage that expertise in a compelling talk radio format with a lot of opportunity for interaction."

About.com Guides who will regularly be included in the commentary include Keith Porter, About.com's Current Events Guide; Brenda Ross, About.com's Dating Advice Guide; David Emery, About.com's Net Hoaxes and Urban Legends Guide; Frank Fiore, About.com's Online Shopping Guide, Chris Sherman, About.com's Web Search Guide and Philip Kain, About.com's Net Culture Guide. Also featured every week is "Stump the Guide," where Websearch Guide Chris Sherman tackles an on-line search in real time. If he can't find the answer by the end of the hour-long show, the caller who posed the challenge wins a prize.

The Webcast allows "Talking About This Week" to reach a huge "at-work" audience that otherwise cannot be reached via standard radio reception, as well as net users around the world. About.com's Guides are in 18 countries around the world.

About About.com

About.com (NASDAQ: BOUT) is the leading network of niche vertical sites for users and marketers. The network includes 650 highly targeted environments, each overseen by a professional guide. Each vertical niche provides a comprehensive consumer experience including the Internet's best link directories, original content, community features and commerce opportunities. Media Metrix (June 1999) ranks About.com as the 2nd largest news, information and entertainment site in the world.

Guide Biographies:

David Emery, Urban Legends Guide (http://urbanlegends.about.com/) David is a writer and an avid chronicler of urban folklore, with special emphasis on the lore and folklife of the Internet. His professional credits include stints as creative consultant for the stage show All Grown Up and No Place to Go and as a staff writer for the CBS-TV comedy series Life...and Stuff. He established himself as an arch commentator on the outer limits of Net culture with Iron Skillet Magazine, "a compendium of offbeat views run through the blender of the author's savage sense of humor (with) on-target skewerings of strange ideas" (Houston Chronicle). He has been collecting and writing about contemporary folklore on the Internet since 1997. He is the person to go to, to find out if a rumor you heard online is true.

Frank Fiore, Online Shopping Guide (http://onlineshopping.about.com) Frank Fiore is a writer, business owner, and e-commerce expert. Frank has over 14 years' experience in the online shopping industry, and has spent time on both sides of the customer transaction. He founded a successful computer mail-order company and has written about the industry he knows so well. He is the author of Dr.Livingstone's Online Shopping Safari Guidebook, and also writes a regular newspaper column on e-commerce called Biz Bytes.

Brenda Ross, Dating Guide (http://dating.about.com) Brenda Ross is a computer artist and slightly cynical romantic optimist. Brenda has always been fascinated by the subject of relationships, and for a number of years has maintained a Web site devoted to the romantic arts, Brenda's Dating Advice for Geeks http://home.earthlink.net/brendar/.

Keith Porter, World Current Events Guide (http://worldnews.about.com) Keith Porter produces and co-hosts Common Ground http://commongroundradio.org/, a nationally syndicated radio program on world affairs heard on 110 public radio stations each week. Keith has been involved in broadcast journalism for 16 years. He began his radio career in Effingham, Illinois, and later worked as a reporter and announcer in Normal and Bloomington, Illinois. He was a finalist for the 1995, 1996, and 1997 Livingston Award for Young Journalists in international reporting. For Common Ground, he has reported from Germany, Austria, Cuba, South Africa, Eritrea, Uganda, Tanzania, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Keith has also served as an adjunct faculty member in advertising, broadcasting, and speech at Iowa Wesleyan College, Scott Community College, and Muscatine Community College. Currently, he serves on the regional council of Iowa's statewide fiber optic network and is past chair of the Muscatine Cable Television Advisory Commission. When not on the road, he lives with his wife and three children in Iowa. Keith holds a graduate degree from Illinois State University where he served as a graduate teaching assistant in broadcasting and speech communication.

Chris Sherman, Web Search Guide (http:/websearch.about.com) Chris is President of Sequoia Multimedia, a Los Angeles based Web consulting and design firm. His published work includes The CD ROM Handbook, from McGraw-Hill.

Chris has nearly 20 years of experience in developing multimedia and Internet applications. Early in his career, he worked on prototypes of many products and concepts that are now commonplace, such as interactive video and two-way cable. Later, he was Vice President of Technology for a global management consulting firm based in Amsterdam. His clients have included Andersen Consulting, Motorola, Levi-Strauss, Porsche, United Technologies, and the Scripps Clinic. Chris holds a master's degree in Interactive Educational Technology from Stanford University, and a bachelor's degree in Visual Arts and Communications from the University of California, San Diego.

Philip Kain, Net Culture Guide (http:/netculture.about.com) is a Silicon Alley Internet professional, teacher, writer, and performer who keep abreast of Net culture by pushing the medium's envelope himself.

As a member of Interactive Telecommunications http://www.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/ at NYU, Philip has contributed a healthy ante to Net culture's pot. Some of his most recent projects include i-ball http://www.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/student/iball/, an interactive game that allows two players in two distant locations to play a game of catch in real time with a real ball over a computer network, and the world-famous toilets.nyc http://www.nycnet.com/toilets, a content-based spoof on Microsoft which has been featured on print, radio and television. He is also the former Director of Content for NYC NET http://www.nycnet.com/, and worked on the first International Internet broadcast of the Tony Awards http://tonys.org/ using SV2 from NNT for T3 Media. When not on the web or reading/writing articles about Net culture, he teaches at New York University in the writing program and at Parsons Design School in the digital design department.

Philip is finishing a Ph.D. in performance studies and a second master's degree in interactive telecommunications http://www.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/ at New York University.