No More Free WebRing

I joined WebRing for one purpose only, and it was not to make money. Businesses would not be in business long if they didn’t make money to pay for servers and bandwidth, not to mention the many other costs of running a large ‘free’ site. If the many ads placed on each page don’t produce enough profit, the owners will go directly to the users of the site - me and you. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

I picked and chose my Rings carefully to mirror other sites like mine for viewing, reading and enjoying. I joined to get new readers. I kept my sites in Rings that related to mine, while I hoped the others did too. They don't though. You'll find sites for shoes and tires alongside writing and crafts. But, pasting the ring codes were easy and I liked the look of the bars. The owners of the Rings are talented artists for the most part and so the Rings are attractive and catchy. A bonus - for free.

It seems WebRing is downsizing the number of rings a manager can own, and the number of sites in each ring. Boy howdy! People are screaming about the change! “Free should remain free, darn it, and WebRing has become only another money hungry American Corporation!”

Even a free member is allowed to belong to five rings and manage two, which can contain five sites each. That’s not many, true, but how many is needed? The next level of Premium 1 cost’s $1.00 a month for up to fifteen ring memberships. If you’re also a manager, you can own up to ten rings. Not enough? Go to the next level. Premium 2, where you can mange up to thirty rings of fifty memberships each. If you’re selling from your sites, $36.00 a year should be no problem. If it is, you’re in the wrong business. How much does an ad in the newspaper cost? Even the free throw-a-ways charge for their ads. WebRings offer affiliations where you keep some or most of the profits. This should help with the cost, and might even exceed it.

Complaints of, “I’m on a fixed income and can’t afford to pay,” are reasonable if you’re discussing medical insurance, but WebRings? I don’t see the connection and I’m on a fixed income too. There are free incentives aplenty available, and of course they are given in hopes that you will eventually pay for more. Even new car dealers give hot dogs and soda pop, or at least a balloon.

Join the five free Rings and enjoy them. I deleted all but five of mine today, and I'm willing to donate to at least one manager so she can upgrade to the level she’d need to keep me there.

About the Author

Harriet is an author on http://www.Writing.Com/ . This article has been submitted in affiliation with http://www.Facsimile.Com/ which is a site for Fax Machines .

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Esprit_Is

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WebRing

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

A webring in general is a collection of websites from around the Internet joined together in a circular structure. When used to improve search engine rankings, webrings can be considered a search engine optimization technique.

To be a part of the webring, each site has a common navigation bar; it contains links to the previous and next site. By clicking next (or previous) repeatedly, the surfer will eventually reach the site they started at; this is the origin of the term webring. However, the click-through route around the ring is usually supplemented by a central site with links to all member-sites; this prevents the ring from breaking completely if a member site goes offline.

Webrings are usually organized around a specific theme, often educational or social. Web rings usually have a moderator who decides which pages to include in the web ring. After approval, webmasters add their pages to the ring by 'linking in' to the ring; this requires adding the necessary HTML or JavaScript to their site.

[edit] History

Denis Howe started EUROPa (Expanding Unidirectional Ring Of Pages) at Imperial College in 1994. The idea developed further when Giraldo Hierro conceptualized a central CGI (Common Gateway Interface) script to enhance functionality. Sage Weil developed such a script in May of 1994. Weil's script gained popularity, pushing Weil in June 1995 to form a company called WebRing. In 1997, Weil sold WebRing to Starseed, Inc.

In 1998 Starseed was acquired by GeoCities, who made no major changes to the system. Just a few months later, in early 1999, Yahoo! bought GeoCities, and eighteen months after the acquisition, on September 5, 2000, Yahoo! unveiled a fully-overhauled WebRing, known as Yahoo! WebRing. Although Yahoo!'s implementation was meant to streamline the way the rings were managed and provide a more consistent interface for all rings, many of these changes were unpopular with ringmasters accustomed to the older system which gave them more flexibility.^{[citation
needed]}

A similar website is RingSurf.com, which uses the term 'Net Rings'. The site first appeared in the Internet Archive in June 1998.

Some have derived the web ring system to create a viral marketing system.^{[citation
needed]}

[edit] See also

Link farm

[edit] References

^ Member Program Transition. WebRing. Retrieved on 2007-01-01.
^ http://www.ringsurf.com/
^ http://web.archive.org/web/19980612213331/

[edit] External links

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The strange saga of Yahoo and WebRing

By Katharine Mieszkowski

The sad tale of a hip little software program for linking Web sites together that was swallowed by by a once-hip behemoth -- then crashed and burned.

Dec. 5, 2001 | It was a day known forever after as "Black Tuesday" or "The Day the Rings Died." On Sept. 5, 2000, the day Yahoo assimilated WebRing, the "ringmasters" responsible for tending the chains of Web sites linked together byWebRing software fumed with pitched fury.

Protest sites sprang up proclaiming the outrage of webmasters who saw themselves losing control to an all-devouring corporate overlord. On one especially melodramatic site, Edvard Munch's "Scream" wailed next to this lament: "The toll has been terrific. Rings are dead or dying everywhere ... Yet, we are victims and it's time that someone hears our Screams." Another site blared the theme music to "Mission Impossible" while displaying an image of a skull in a top hat with the logo of the new master.

WebRing is essentially little more than a way for sites devoted to similar topics to share links and boost each other's traffic. But to its fans, it makes beautiful order out of chaos. However, from all the wailing and moaning, you'd have thought a marauding King Kong bot had barged into these sites and started ripping out great hunks of HTML. Even now, more than a year later, after the somewhat anticlimactic liberation

"Yahoo took one of the best things on the Internet, a method by which ringmasters could create little garden paths through the uncharted wilds of the Web, and completely ruined it," says Richard Lowe, a webmaster whose sites include USA Memorial, a commemoration of Sept. 11.

The sorry saga of WebRing is just a squinty footnote in the history of one of the Web's biggest, still-standing companies, Yahoo. But it tells more about what was sacrificed on the Web in the Great Internet Bubble than a terabyte of spreadsheets detailing paper losses. It's what happened when a nifty little homegrown Web phenomenon that was never designed to make money got swept up and sucked in by the boom, only to be orphaned in the bust.

Today, WebRing once again has the chance to try to make it as an independent, guided by the members of its community. In mid-October, Yahoo sold WebRing to Tim Killeen, one of the early engineers who'd worked on the system. It seemed like a happy ending made for the Net: WebRing comes full circle!

But some ringmasters wish that the whole system had been put out of its misery: "Personally, I wish WebRing had just died. I think it's been decaying for quite some time and I don't see that it's going to be recovered," says Lowe.

And as for Yahoo? The once-mighty portal beloved by millions -- in part because it represented the original do-it-yourself spirit of the Net -- is now scrambling desperately, like everybody else, for ways to make a buck. Its inability to figure out what to do with WebRing is symbolic of the entire dot-com failure to transform the Net into a cash register.

Yahoo may still find the secret formula, though whether anyone will care is another question. After the boom and the bust, it's easy now to wonder if the do-it-yourself Net ever could have had a happy capitalist future. In any case, post-bubble, mid-recession, the execs of Yahoo and the ringmasters of WebRing are both struggling to survive. Now, Yahoo hopes to turn a fraction of its 218 million "users" into "customers," to make up for dramatically reduced advertising revenues. And WebRing has no greater ambition than to find a way to keep running obscure circles around the Net, without a multinational corporate parent to lean on or rail against.

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