ICANN's MAC and staff have tried to portray the Internet Community as
disinterested and lacking motivation to be informed and be a part of the
process.
An experience of mine over the last several weeks has shown me that this claim
has no real factual basis, and is instead nothing more than an assumption.
As many of you know, I have been running a website at www.dnspolicy.com for the
last several weeks. In the initial days, I saw from my logs and statistics
package that several hundred people were visiting every day, and that many of
them were visiting more than once each day. On average they would view the
front page and 1-3 internal article pages.
In the last 3 weeks, for several reasons I will elaborate on later, the site
has seen a vastly higher number of unique visitors and page views. The
average daily unique visitors has been over 1,200, with approximately 1,400
average unique "visits" meaning that some of these 1,200 were coming in and
visiting more times. A visit is counted as an additional visit when they
return after a 30 minute period of not accessing the site.
The average page views have been around the same per person, with the daily
average of page views now exceeding 3,500. (Note, these are page views, not
file hits, for those that know the difference).
The reasons for the site becoming well used are many, I believe. One is that
I have seen a great increase in the number of sites that are linking to the
site, and it has been mentioned in two online news articles, as well as a
couple other "columns" and features on news related sites. This has spread
awareness of the existance of the site. Another phenomena that has resulted
in the strong traffic is the existence of a "back end" file access so that
portal sites which provide customized pages for their users with collections of
information from sites around the internet can provide the option of people to
include the headlines and links to the articles on their "portal" page. I
never realized how many of these there were, or the diversity in their target
usergroups, until now. They include sites that cater to technically advanced
users, to business people using their Palm Pilots to keep current on the
issues, to relative newbies who like the easy of having all the information at
one location such as Netscape's Netcenter. These have enabled people to make
this site, and other sites that have content of interest to them, a part of
their daily net routine, and to quickly see a quick summary of what content is
available there on any given day.
In short, I think that the fact that approximately 1,200 unique people make use
of a site with such a narrow focus as this one on any given day, after the site
only being really operational for only 6 weeks, shows that the interest in this
process, and in the many facets that surround it, is much higher than ICANN
would have us believe.
This site has mainly been used by people for whom following the lists on the
subjects, or being active in the forums, is not an option or would be too much
for them. ICANN's use of the mailing list numbers to come to some conclusion
about interest was faulty.
But of course, they won't admit that, and will instead try and continue to
justify their attempts at making a public membership impotent within their
structure.
Regards,
--
William X. Walsh - DSo Internet Services
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax:(209) 671-7934
Editor of http://www.dnspolicy.com/
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