xoom.com - The Giant Cable Company...

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     I've expressed in the past my fear that the Internet would turn into
something resembling a 500 channel cable TV company with a handful of powerful
corporations providing "content" (and charging for it of coarse) and everyone
else "consuming"...

     And of coarse that has been one of the driving factors in my remaining in
this business rather than selling out, taking the money and running so to
speak. 

     Today, I received e-mail from nbci.com which is affiliated with xoom.com. 
They announced today that they are discontinuing all member pages, no more
member supplied content but of coarse their own commercial content will
continue to be there.

     They were kind enough to give a months advance notice so that users could
get their data off and moved to another provider.  The problem with that is
that it takes much longer to get search engines to index your material at your
new location and people will just be getting dead links. 

     Perhaps I'm paranoid but I just see this as the powers that be squeezing
the vise, trying to drive the end user from being a provider of free content.

     The reason they say they're doing this is a change in the advertising
revenue situation, which I interpret as meaning they aren't getting enough
money from advertising tacked onto free content provided by their members but
of coarse my interpretation could be wrong. 

     I just wanted to take this opportunity to remind everybody here that web
hosting is included with your account so you can put your own web pages up and
I'd like to encourage you to take advantage of this capability.

     If you know anybody with web pages there I'd appreciate it if you could
let them know for a nominal fee we have an alternative for them that doesn't
litter their pages with banner ads and where they continue to own the content
they create. 

     For information on uploading a web site, please see:

	http://www.eskimo.com/support/www.html

     Thank you.