Adam DiFruscio 5:54pm Jul 20
here is a site its called webdesign.tutsplus.com and has some good information here is a very simple light-box to use for yourself. if you go to this site you will see network in the top right corner there are many different sites like this one under the same name, like one for flash, illustrator, etc. so check it out
why were they using WEP?
Bill Woodcock: On an Internet Odyssey
He circles the globe to keep ISPs connected, returning occassionally to his high-bandwidth home
By Tekla S. Perry / February 2005
But the venture-capital chaos of the dot-com boom made running an Internet service provider with a real business model (that is, making a profit rather than losing someone else's investment money) difficult. And then the boom went bust, making the ISP business even more grueling. Woodcock saved his company by splitting it in two and giving the halves away, half to a friendwith a Web-hosting company, the other half to a group of employees. (Both companies have since done well.)
"I really just wanted my life back," he said. "It had gotten to be such a worry. My main concern was just that all the employees and customers be taken care of." Woodcock is proud that he brought a company through the dot-com collapse without, he says, "ever having to lay anybody off, without a pay cut, without cutting back on benefits, without overworking people, and without shortchanging customers. I made sure nobody got hurt in an environment in which a lot of people were suffering."
It was 2001, and Woodcock was now 29. He had made no money from the disbursement of Zocalo; while it was running, he had paid himself an annual salary of $37 500—less than most of his employees. But for the first time in his life, he had some cash in the bank—years earlier, he had registered a few domain names, and in 2001, he sold one of those, domain.com, for $1 million. His living expenses were low, as he lived (and still lives) in a small Berkeley duplex that he was then gradually buying from his parents.
With 1.2 gigabits per second coming into his house, Woodcock has more bandwidth than most universities
Since 1994, Woodcock had been involved with Packet Clearing House, an alliance of West Coast ISPs. Back then there was only one commercial Internet exchange point, or IXP, at which commercial ISPs could connect with each other to pass traffic, and it was in Washington, D.C., so all ISPs had to send their traffic to and from Washington over slow and expensive leased lines. With about half of all Internet traffic going to and from California, a West Coast IXP would greatly help West Coast ISP operators.
The group started by building an IXP in San Jose, and it soon added more in Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Diego. Next they began answering requests from ISPs in other parts of the country for help with similar efforts. The group had no formal organization and no budget; members donated equipment and labor ad hoc.
When requests started coming in from ISPs around the world, Woodcock decided that the ad hoc, no-budget model needed a tuneup. PCH incorporated as a nonprofit in 1999, and in 2001 Woodcock began working full-time as research director.
The money PCH needed to make the transition to being a real company initially came in the form of grants from the governments of Sweden and Singapore. Then there were funds contributed by individuals, and now PCH also gets funding from a number of other sources, such as the United Nations, the Soros Foundations Network, and Cisco Systems Inc. Woodcock put most of his savings into the organization, and he didn't draw a salary until this year; now he is paid $65 000 annually.
The organization has 10 salaried positions and some 30 to 40 regular volunteers. It has a small office in the Presidio in San Francisco, but Woodcock, when he is in the country, typically works out of his Berkeley home. The living room, filled with crates of networking gear, is a shipping and receiving hub. The dining room is an office where, when IEEE Spectrum visited, two engineers sat tapping on laptops.
Woodcock's air-conditioned basement is filled with networking equipment and servers; two fiber-optic circuits connect him to the Internet, and with 1.2 gigabits per second coming into his house, Woodcock has more bandwidth than most universities. It gets used in a variety of ways. One server takes care of his friends and family; another routes most of the Internet traffic for the country of Kenya; and another hosts the audio files that make up the Web site for the Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind.
At home, Woodcock spends much of his time building and testing equipment configurations before sending them off to remote sites. He also fields technical questions from engineers around the world via e-mail, voice, and videoconference. "If we are doing work here and we find out we need some little adaptor, we can run down to an electronics supply place and pick it up in 15 minutes for four bucks. The same part in Uganda is four bucks, plus $100 shipping, plus $100 in customs bribes, plus $100 in import duties, and all the time of the people to manage that process, and you've got the part six weeks later."
On the road, Woodcock has found himself in all manner of unlikely scenarios. He consulted with one group of engineers while onboard a boat sailing Vietnam's Ha Long Bay. He once wrestled his equipment into a roughly measured rack welded from scrap metal by a local craftsman. He has negotiated with government ministers in dozens of countries and has conducted countless workshops for senior engineers of ISPs.
Typically, Woodcock travels on "round-the-world" airline tickets, which are cheaper and more easily changed than point-to-point or round-trip tickets. One recent itinerary was San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Malmö, Jukkasjarvi, Oslo, Stavanger, Copenhagen, Bangkok, Taipei, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, Mauritius, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Dubai, Kabul, Singapore, and back to San Francisco. Antarctica is one of the few places Woodcock has never been.
This much travel, he says, has been life-altering. "I never would have imagined that I'd get to see this many places, and I value the perspective that has given me."
But while Woodcock loves the travel, that isn't the biggest satisfaction. "It sounds trite," he says, "but the fact that I'm helping people, that the work I'm doing is making somebody's life better somewhere, that's the big thing."
To Probe Further
Bill Woodcock’s efforts in Kathmandu were discussed in the Nepali Times, 6-12 September 2002, http://www.nepalnews.com.np/ntimes/issue110/economy.htm. For more information about Packet Clearing House and its work around the world, see www.pch.net.
One of the many unsung internet pioneers. Interesting reading
What The New ICANN Domain Names Mean For Google Rankings & SEO: Nothing
Jun 20, 2011 at 12:50pm ET by Danny Sullivan
ICANN – the organization in charge of internet domain names – has approved plans that may create hundreds or thousands of new “top level domain names.” I’ve seen some reports already that this will help with search engine optimization. It won’t. It’ll just enrich some new TLD owners at the expense of brands who will now spend even more to fight cybersquatting.
The New Domain Names Are Coming
ICANN is the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names And Numbers, and it oversees the world’s domain name system. In its wisdom, it decided yesterday that the 22 generic top level domain (gTLD) names we have at the moment — things like .com, .org and .net — aren’t enough. More are needed.
ICANN doesn’t have anything up in its news section or its blog on this yet, but within its press room area, there’s a news release (PDF format) with more details, which in turn leads to a helpful fact sheet (also PDF).
Winners & Losers
For $185,000, businesses or organizations can apply for to run their own gTLD. If Apple, Google or Facebook wanted to have .apple, .google and .facebook names, that now becomes possible. That could be pretty cool for companies that want to have domain names that fully reflect their own brands.
Of course, not everyone will necessarily be granted a top level domain name. Who gets lucky depends on what ICANN decides. Smaller brands — which are brands nonetheless — won’t be able to afford the names. Who gets to have hot generic names like .money or .tickets will be decided, to my understanding, solely by ICANN.
What happens when two companies with the same trademark both decide they want the same top level domain remains to be seen. Who gets to be .giants — the San Francisco Giants baseball team or the New York Giants football team. Maybe they could play each other. And those are the only organizations out there with a claim to the Giants name, right?
Domain Names & SEO
In terms of search engines and SEO, so far, I haven’t seen ICANN itself say anything directly about how the new names might be helpful. But my experience in watching the release of longer 63-character domain names back in in 1999, as well as the release new names in the 2000s such as .biz and .mobi, tells me that others will soon be making all types of SEO claims about the new names.
Bottom line — the new names will almost certainly mean nothing special to search engines. They won’t have any super ranking powers. If you managed to get .money, that doesn’t mean you’ll rank tops for money-related terms any more than people with the existing .travel domains do well for travel — because they don’t.
Go do a search for “travel” now or any popular travel-related term on Google. Count the number of times you see sites coming up with .travel in their domain name. You won’t need more than one hand. You probably one need more than one finger. You probably won’t need any fingers at all.
Search engines like Google and Bing give no particular credit or boost to generic top level domain names in general. They don’t say, “Hmm, .com — that’s more important than .net, give it a boost.” They don’t say “Hmm, .travel, boost any site with that over other travel sites.”
Search engines do use country-specific domain names, when these can be trusted, as a signal for making content tailed to a particular country. Many UK web sites use the .uk domain. It’s a trust worthy signal.
In contrast, many non-Libyan or non-Tuvalu businesses make use of the .ly and .tv domain names intended for those countries. As a result, those are a less-trustworthy signal of whether a site is from those countries. That’s why other signals such as links have to be used.
So the new domain names? Sites will do well with them not because they have a tasty top level domain like “.travel” but because particular sites might get enough links and other signals pointing at them to do well.
In the end, the domain names do present new opportunities for some businesses. A few companies are going to get very rich off of this. Some are going to wonder if they need to buy their names again with all these new spaces to avoid cybersquatting.
But from an SEO perspective, be calm. Having a new name won’t rocket you to success; not having one doesn’t doom to you never being found.
To learn more about SEO and ranking signals, see our guides below:
Related Entries
Related Topics: Featured | SEO: Domain Names & URLs | Top News
About The Author: Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle (and maintains his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google Buzz and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan
It was just five years ago that this magazine and its design conference offshoot sought, with your help, to begin determining the precise professional dimensions of our shared craft.
Most serious professions take this kind of self-knowledge for granted. Architects and prospective architects know which are the best architecture schools; they can readily find out the average salaries of apprentice, mid-level, and senior architects in their country and region; they know what titles and honors they can aspire to, and have a generally accurate idea of how long they must toil as apprentices before they can expect to be promoted—or start worrying if they have not been.
Web design, if that’s what we call it, has had no such data. Moreover, no professional organization is dedicated to our field’s advancement in the way that, say, AIGA promotes, explains, defends, and takes the measure of graphic design.
With your help, we took the first steps to change that with the publication of our 2007 A List Apart survey and findings. We have published surveys and findings each year since. Here, admittedly a little late, we present our findings from 2010.
You’ll find plenty of matter in the pages that follow, but little that is unexpected—and that’s to the good, as it suggests that our profession is maturing and developing fairly consistent parameters despite the immense technological change and extraordinary market turmoil of the past four years.
As always, when our findings differ from those of previous years, we call your attention to those changes; when they are about the same as in years past, we point that out as well. And, just as we have always done, at the end of the present findings, we offer the anonymized raw data files for those who wish to slice, dice, and inspect the data their own way.
Our 2011 survey will come out in mid-summer. Watch for it! We can't do this without you.
