Re: Is www.mctools.com dead?!? :-(((

[Warren 'The Howdy Man' Ockrassa]

Kevin Miller wrote:

> For the record, we communicated Simon Lord when our site become available,
> for his input on the matter, and his reply clearly indicated that he didn't
> consider our site a problem at that time.  He was always somewhat
> disillusioned with his site, because he didn't get a great number of
> contributions from the start.  We, on the other hand, rather liked it...

Overall I don't believe any of it makes any difference. If one has a
site one is doing it either to make a profit of some kind (be it fiscal
or something more abstract, such as ego points; many .com ventures fall
into this category) or out of love of doing the site (the site for the
site's sake; many personal sites fall here).

The first one always involves risk; the second never does. What no one
understands is that if your approach is to go for creating a site simply
for the sake of it, if you happen to make a profit by doing what you
love to do anyway, that's a bonus. (That's also the rationale behind
nightwares; I've never made a direct dime from the site, but I enjoy
having it and I know that it has been of benefit to others -- and to me.
If I started successfully selling something from it it'd just be icing
on the cake.)

The point is that presumably anyone who erects a site knows, going into
it, what s/he wants to get out of it, and if the economics of the net
don't satisfy that user's point of view, then s/he pulls out. (Unless
s/he decides to keep it going simply because having a domain and a set
of pages can be fun in and of itself, sort of like having a ham radio
license is fun. That involves, however, changing one's POV, something
most humans are not particularly good at doing.)

In other words no one needs to apologize for anything, or worry about
anyone, or offer explanations for any site-related behavior, or be
concerned about competition. Sites come and go. It's the way of the net.

That's my nickel. Call it the zen of the web. ;)

--WthmO