In The Internet, Size Doesn't Matter!Written by Nach Maravilla
In good old days, a company was considered BIG if they occupied spacious and well-furnished offices, owned their buildings complete with spacious parking lots, hired hundreds of employees and purchased expensive advertising slots in TV, Radio, Magazines and Newspapers. These companies are visible everywhere. Their corporate names are printed in capitalized bold letters in phone books. Everyone – well, almost everyone -- are familiar with their names. It’s a different story now. In virtual community, small guys are giving big boys a run for their money. With sheer guts and a few thousand dollars to start up, a lot of home-based entrepreneurs are making a killing day-in and day-out on Internet. All done in private confines of their little home-offices (very often called, kitchen, dining, garage, bedroom, den or whatever part of house). In Internet, we small guys don’t have to fear big guys. We can spend sleepless nights pouring all those tutorial books on HTML programming to create site that will clobber those million-dollar creations to pieces. If they cannot stand you, they can buy you out! And I am sure that you like that, as it will make you rich! We small guys have more flexibility with our operations. We have more control. We can do what we want. In fact, although big boys have money to squander, they are incapable of doing what we small fries can do at a click of “mouse”. For example, it will take five working days or maybe a week or more, for a big corporation to make a very simple change of a misspelled word on website. If that mistake was observed at time when person in charge of Internet was on three-month vacation leave, that error may have to stay there while whole company suffers degradation that a simple word brought about. One thing we can observe in most websites of big boys is that it remains same almost forever (except for news and media sites that need to be updated daily). Why? Because, nobody can change it on his own volition. Changes may have to pass approval of manager; sometimes even board of directors or chairman of board. When a thing is approved, it then goes back down corporate ladder following same steps as when it went up. When changes are made, new developments have happened and change may not be needed anymore. Ironically, because of internal squabble necessary to get things done, big corporations are not very enthusiastic about their presence on Web.
| | Heavy Online Usage During CrisisWritten by Rob Spiegel
The Internet played a considerable role in aftermath of terrorist attack on New York City and Washington, DC. The best and worst of online usage emerged as email and instant messaging became prime sources of communication. News-based Web sites bogged down from high traffic. Many popular news sites froze from spike in traffic. Here are a few of more striking uses of Web during early hours and days of disaster.Instant messaging worked when phone failed Instant messaging became one of stars in early hours after attack as consumers and businesses corresponded one-to-one when phone lines quit working in part of New York City. America Online reported that 1.2 billion messages were sent via instant messaging and on AOL's proprietary client software on September 11 alone. Amazon and Yahoo accepted Red Cross donations Both Amazon.com and Yahoo.com allowed contributors to make donations to Red Cross to help victims of disaster. By Friday morning after disaster, Amazon reported 121,579 payments had been made to Red Cross, totaling $4,394,870.41, according to News.com. Both companies waived fees they normally charge for facilitating payments. Hackers waged vigilante strikes against Palestinian and Afghani sites Online hacker groups hacked into Palestinian and Afghani Web sites after terrorist attacks. One vigilante group, The Dispatchers, is a group of 60 hackers that includes The Rev, a hacker who defaced New York Times financial quote service last February. The hackers released a statement claiming they had united to fight back and disable sites. According to The Rev, several Palestinian-affiliated Internet service providers have now been disabled. The group claimed it will next work to shut down Afghani sites. Online scams exploited disaster A particularly ugly creature of online world rose its awful head when Internet scammers started to solicit donations for victims and survivors of attacks. The scams came in form on unsolicited email and postings in community forums. The crooks claimed to be part of an "Express Relief Fund" or "Victims Survivor Fund." Another scam actually asked for donations for Red Cross, but link led to a Web site unconnected to organization. The scams started within an hour of WTC attack, according to ZDNet.
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