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To: wlcnyc who wrote (18010)	5/30/2003 2:20:00 PM
From: Jon Tara	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32883

Off the air, Bill. It was always just a hobby. I think I made $275 in advertising revenue my peak month. :) I didn't have the time to do the stuff that I thought was really interesting - AI rating of posts (bullish/bearish, analytical/emotional, correlating message content to stock price, etc.) The site came about when I was hanging out in a Usenet news group on investing. I was frustrated that there was no place to discuss individual stocks, and the powers-that-be there were resistant to the idea of creating news groups for individual stocks. They felt strongly that they wanted to see every message about every stock. They were incredulous that anyone would want to narrow the focus to individual stocks. I liked SI (then, techstocks.com) but it's universe was limited to tech stocks. :) So, after a few months of trying to convince the unconvincable, I just started a message board, customizing off-the-shelf and free software from NCSA. (HyperNews), initially running it on a shared server at a local ISP. While Brad and Jeff moved in with their parents to cut expenses and spend 100% of their time on SI, I was doing contract work and spending a few minutes a day maintaining the site. I was doing some pretty exciting embedded work (a Sony product, for example), drifted into Bluetooth, and now writing software for black box trading. When advertising rates plummeted, I really couldn't justify the colocation cost, and could see that advertising wasn't going to support it in the future. (As had once appeared to be the case.) And the growth of SI, Yahoo, and RB diminished the need, while the legal environment just made it a liability without spending money on legal fees for proper user agreements, incorporation, etc. (I never did get a single discovery request, despite one user who was pretty relentless about a local company.) So, I pulled the plug. BTW, I really admire what Brad and Jeff did. I'm not that much of a gambler, nor did I have living parents to move in with. And there's only one of me. :)