***OFF TOPIC*************** JUST CURIOUS on SI BOB!
Found this on the CCEE thread.
Is this the same Bob Zumbrunen of the RMIL/OVis Board.....you know the one Bashing the people/shareholders on the RMIL Board...is he the one from SI feeding smartin, tonto, Janice shell and others some "inside info" on the identities of the "YAYS/shareholders".....i HOPE NOT.
I am not an RMIL fan, but just went through most of the posts and found a dozen bashers on that board.....hmmmmmmm.
www3.techstocks.com
As what they say on the X-Files...THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE!
Goodbye To Jill
For the last two years, Jill McKinney has been a solitary soldier
in the army of good taste and Internet decorum, standing guard in
a watchtower over the millions of messages posted to the mammoth
Silicon Investor stock-discussion Web site (www.techstocks.com)
and booting out folks who broke the rules.
The legendary Webmistress of the 100,000-member SI, she has broken
up ferocious online fights, ejected shameless pitchmen, and
stepped in to warn countless users about cussing, vulgarity and ad
hominem attacks. For her efforts, she has received death threats,
marriage proposals, a dozen roses, and even accusations of
impersonating a woman. "She's a babe," says Chester Lee, a San
Francisco chemist who met McKinney at a party (everyone knew who
Jill was) and has since become a pal.
As Money.com caught up with the number three player at SI, the
first employee hired by co-founders Brad and Jeff Dryer, the
27-year-old Birmingham, Ala. native was thinking about marriage
and what to do with her cut of the $35 million in stock
Seattle-based Go2Net (Nasdaq: GNET) paid in June to buy the
booming financial discussion board.
McKinney's packing her bags. Gone are the days when she sat home
listening to Rush and Elton John in her pajamas while answering
floods of user Email and patiently waiting for the Dryer brothers
to cut her paycheck. "It's not because they didn't have the
money," she recalls. "It's because they forgot."
McKinney will soon hand over her linguistic enforcer badge to her
assistant, Bob Zunbrunnen, whom she recruited as a poster on her
boards. And yes, fans, in December she's going to marry that boy,
Go2Net ad salesman Nate "Lou" Munden, then move to New York City
to do public relations work for the company.
Alas, McKinney is growing up. Six years after dropping out of
South Alabama University, she's a player at a company with a
$111.6 million market capitalization that actually is big enough
to worry about things like public relations and lawsuits. "We've
gone from three people who didn't think we were going to be around
in 3 to 6 months to a corporate environment," McKinney says.
"When we were independent, we would just laugh at lawsuit threats!
We didn't have any money! Brad and Jeff were sleeping on the
floor. I was living in this awful basement studio apartment and we
are all wearing the same T-shirts everyday!"
McKinney's role as moderator and conflict-resolution specialist on
the frontiers of new media has no offline parallel, save
playground monitor - in a schoolyard where all of the kids are big
and vociferous. Even SI's policing of its threads is an exception
to the general unruliness of Internet stock discussion boards.
SI doesn't really care what you say about a given company, so long
as you don't cuss, use vulgar terms, spam the boards or personally
harass other posters. If you do, you may find yourself serving a
two to three-day suspension, what members jokingly call "Jill
Jail" or "Fort Bob." Do it again, and you may be exiled
permanently.
McKinney's rules allow posters to poke fun at her (or at Bob)
without fear of reprisals. "Let's all light some incense and pray
to Jill McKinney, the Goddess of good manners on SI," one wiseguy
wrote. "I find it amusing that I have this supposed authority over
all these people," says Sheriff Jill. "They actually threaten one
another with turning each other in to me."
While anyone can read the boards, members must pay a $200 lifetime
subscription fee if they want to speak up. Though that requirement
has kept some of the rabble off the boards, the attacks can still
get downright personal. And if you're booted out, don't expect a
refund.
During a recent discussion about Franklin Telecommunications (OTC:
FTEL), one member who was bullish on the stock started a brouhaha
after he likened a short-seller to Hitler. Pretty soon, a third
guy was inviting the accuser to visit the Holocaust Memorial so he
could understand how Hitler's victims felt, thus drawing a body
block himself ("It baffles me how someone from my heritage could
lower themselves this far") even as the accused was doing the
Rodney King, appealing for peace: "It is my hope that we can cover
over what we see as the shortcomings of each other and live in
harmony".
McKinney's real accomplishment may be that she managed to keep a
wary eye on 15,000 new board messages per day, while fielding
hundreds of Emails reporting infractions, outrages and hurt
feelings. In a series of Email and telephone interviews with
Money.com, she described SI's early days and her endless battles
to enforce the bulletin board's "Terms of Use."
Money.com: What sorts of posts will get you in trouble at SI?
Jill McKinney: Posts that will require administrative action
generally include spamming [repetitive and annoying Emails],
vulgarity, personal attacks and off-topic conversation. These
won't get you booted from SI unless you have received previous
warnings and/or have had a prior suspension. Getting booted right
off the bat would take something pretty serious, such as
threatening someone's life or physical safety, or printing
someone's home contact information for purposes of harassment. I
am basically dealing with the world's largest sandbox. And the
kids are stealing stuff left and right! I just have to maintain
some semblance of order.
M: What are some of the incidents that stand out in your memory?
JM: I've had people trying to get flirty or downright crude in
Email responses, sending flowers, threatening to wait for me at
the airport when I arrived home for Christmas. One guy sent me a
plaque stating I was officially inducted into his personal Cool
Person Hall of Fame. Someone sent me cookies.
I've been asked for pictures, what I look like, if I'm married.
I've been asked to autograph T-shirts with messages to the user
that were way over the line, with lots of dominatrix references.
All the normal things you get from being female and online. Some
of the gifts I've received were for unbelievably small things. I
once got a dozen roses for changing some guy's password.
M: Have you ever felt frightened?
JM: There are a couple of times when I've actually been scared.
I've felt there were some people who were crazy enough to follow
through on their threats, like the guy who said he would be
waiting for me when I flew back to Birmingham. More often than
not, it's just creepy.
M: What's your daily work routine?
JM: My daily routine used to be sitting around in my pajamas all
day on Email when I worked at home. (Trust me, working in your
pajamas is highly recommended.) Now I spend about 75 percent of my
time in an office in Seattle. I spend about 10 hours a day just on
Email. I don't read posts unless they are called to my attention
by another user. I definitely work dispatch, as opposed to patrol.
M: Has SI changed since it became a paid site?
JM: The quality of the site has increased. The users felt more
accountable. The quality of the posts improved.
M: Has it changed since you joined the suits?
JM: At the beginning, we had no income, I had no real hours, and
the bosses slept in the office. The acquisition by Go2Net was the
best thing for the SI community. We didn't have the resources to
expand the site.
Before, we had just three people running the whole thing. None of
us could be away from the computer. It was unrealistic that we
could go on like that much longer. Personally, it was a great
decision. We have lives again!
M: Does it feel weird being a young woman in the guy-dominated
worlds of finance and the Internet?
JM: If Jeff and Brad had not known me prior to needing an
employee, the position might very well have gone to a man, simply
because the only people with experience up to that point were the
old bulletin board users, most of them men.
You certainly do get the sense as a woman that your opinions and
ideas are taken for granted, especially in situations with venture
capitalists and almost anything involving funding or running a
start-up company. I always got the impression that Brad and Jeff
considered me an equal, but I almost never got that feeling from
anyone else.
M: You've taken some big risks: quitting college in 1989 to ditch
your hometown and move in with a friend in the Bay Area. What made
you do it?
JM: I didn't necessarily quit school to pursue the tech thing, but
I definitely dropped out to pursue something better. I just wasn't
sure what it was until I got to Silicon Valley. I continued my
education . . . I now have enough college credits to get a
master's degree, but not at any one college.
M: How'd you find your way to SI?
JM: I knew Brad as a friend from before he and I moved out to the
West Coast. When he told me his brother was moving out and that
the two of them were quitting their jobs to start a website, I
said what most people with boring but comfortable jobs say to risk
takers: "Hey, you'll have to hire me when you make it big!"
M: And you quit a fairly safe job when he did call?
JM: That was nearly three years ago. Not having a degree or any
clue about what I wanted to do, but having taken two years of
typing in high school, I took administrative jobs that bored me to
tears. Then one day Brad said, "Jeff and I need someone to answer
Email, but we don't feel like interviewing anyone or dealing with
people we're not sure we can trust."
They were very honest about the fact that the company could very
well go under, that there was no security and to seriously
consider the risks before taking the job. I took the job. |
