Get Your Business Failure Here! FREE!! Written by Mike Banks Valentine
I want to yell at someone or give 'em a good poke in nose for this! How could they do this to me? What gives them right to blow off my best customers, to rob me of potential business and make my clients angry at me? How dare they do this!! I'm just fuming and ready to explode! Don't get too close to me right now! Why I oughtta . . . what? Complain because a free service isn't available? Threaten to sue them for having troubles of their own? Why don't they have backup servers? Well, I guess it's possible that *I* could at least provide a secondary free service to cover my assets. Those clients that planned to spend an hour of their valuable time to chat with me in first place. Maybe I should have prepared for worst so I don't have to go apologize to everyone when free chat services suddenly became unavailable. OK, so maybe I ought to upgrade that chat room to premium version, one that costs a few bucks a month, one without advertising banners, one with customer service and support. The one that WORKS when I've invited over 3,000 people to come to a Grassroots Internet Marketing Forum and chat! Maybe this will teach me that you can't rely on free services. What does it cost me to fail to deliver on my promises? The web has got us all relying on free services to run businesses and expecting those freebies to be trouble free and convenient at all times. I upgraded from free internet access when I tired of their glaring ads across my web pages. I upgraded from free autoresponders when they stopped working during a major promotion launched via press releases and direct mail campaigns. *That* cost good-will of my clients that didn't get responses from me as promised.
| | Information Wants to Be FreeWritten by Mike Banks Valentine
From Web2001 Internet and Mobile conference and exposition at Moscone convention center in San Francisco August 4-8, comes an interesting set of keynote speakers offered to attendees. Rather than major computer or software company CEO's, we have commentators on our culture speaking to a conference full of web developers and corporate strategists charged with developing web initiatives.One very important speaker was Dr. Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law professor, speaking on threat represented by corporate interests to creativity of web. A creativity being regularly squashed and supressed by legal wrangling and debate. I attended Dr. Lessig's talk given to web developers at Web2001 9-7-01 and expected a lively debate when I visited his discussion forum at Harvard Law web site. To visit and see posts over a year old is disappointing and worries me. I purchased his book, "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" at show and highly recommend it to all small business webmasters. Dr. Lessig strongly advocates that creativity not be stifled by intellectual property owners asserting control over software and coding of web pages. This basically represents a viewpoint (and only in my own humble opinion, not Dr. Lessig's) in support of Open Source computing and freely available content for web with appropriate copyright protections extending only a short time to allow compensation of creator. As a list owner that distributes content freely to web publishers and a columnist that publishes in multiple small business forums and portals around web, I am disturbed by control being sought by information "owners" over content. My list at http://yahoogroups.com/group/free-content distributes articles written by small business owners to publishers of small business ezines and web sites across web. We have over 700 members, some representing very large distribution ezines and high-traffic web sites with potential exposure approaching 5 million readers.
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