Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

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Strategies & Market Trends : TATRADER GIZZARD STUDY--Stocks 12.00 or Less..... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NW_Trader who wrote (31562)	7/13/2002 10:26:28 AM
From: (Bob) Zumbrunnen	Respond to of 59879

Like so many other things in the past, the internet and specifically message boards on the internet were doing just fine until Big Business got into the act. Nothing wrong with BB using boards, but when they get involved in running/creating/modifying them, it's not a good thing. Ain't a single old SysOp among them. And they'll never understand. I'm here typing it in public just as clearly as I was saying it when I was on-board and it'll continue to come across as so much gibberish to them. There should be a law that unless you've spent over a decade during which you participated or ran a message board at least a few hours of each day, sometimes sitting at it for an entire day in your bathrobe interacting with people and modifying the site, then you shouldn't be allowed to operate, make decisions for, or do programming on one. Case in point: your 100-posts suggestion. I saw that, was semi-caught up on messages, taking a hiatus from tweaks, and not ready to start the next big project (message filtering), and thought "That's really a cool idea." and in very little time it became a new feature. While I'm on that particular soapbox, I'm hoarding money and talking to a VC on the side because I pretty desperately need to hire an assistant to take some of the non-programming and non-business load off of me and keep me organized (organization is not my strong suit -- I've always worked best with a "handler"). I can see iHub maybe eventually being composed of about 6 people, but there's more harm than good to having, for example, more than 2 programmers (only if 1 just can't do it all) or a committee of people who aren't old SysOps having meetings to decide how the board will work, etc. John made mention of "lean and mean" (for the record, I said it first <g>) and I hope he means it. It takes so few people to run these things and is counter-productive (and probably ruinously expensive) to have too many people doing it. If they get one really good web-programming/Oracle geek in there who does nothing but SI, he can eventually get the site running a lot faster and they'd be able to dramatically reduce their hardware and bandwidth requirements while making it run faster and more trouble-free. Make SI autonomous and staff it with a very small crew of hard-core people who know messages boards (and, more importantly, the communities who use them), and they'll not only survive, they'll start making a run at the likes of Yahoo, RB, MF, and keep that little upstart iHub safely at bay. iHub will do just fine whether or not SI gets its act together and survives. It'd make the big time if SI doesn't, but that's really a mixed blessing (my current workload is a big negative aspect of it, and it'll only get worse) and I'd really rather SI and especially its history survives. Even it becoming a lucrative business isn't worth the loss of this. I think that's probably apparent just from the fact that I've added a couple of SI-friendly features to iHub. Though we're not in business together, we're very much joined at the hip somewhat because of me but especially because we share a community. RB doesn't want you linking to other sites, SI (correctly, IMO) couldn't care less as long as you're not spamming, and iHub not only doesn't mind, it gives you shorthand to make linking to SI easier.