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INFORMATION QUALITY WWW VIRTUAL LIBRARY

Top 10 Ways to Make Your WWW Service a Flop

originally published as
Ciolek, T.M. 1995. Beyond the Cool Site. LAN Magazine, May 1995, pp.128.

by Dr T.Matthew Ciolek

[Est. 8 March 1995. Last updated: 11 Mar 2000. This facility is provided by www.ciolek.com.]

The purpose of these notes, written in March 1995 (and checked for integrity of reported hypertext links many times since then), is to provide advice on how to turn your normal WWW-based information system into the world's most obvious roaring disaster. Please mail tmciolek at ciolek.com if you know of other efficient ways to establish and operate a truly memorable networked flop.

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TOP 10 WAYS TO MAKE A WWW FLOP

In January 1995 there were 4.8 million hosts carrying over 2 mln WWW documents (see the Lycos crawler database details). Assuming that an average WWW-based information system publishes some 50 Web documents (eg. 5 projects with 10 documents each), it can be estimated that in January 1995 there were some 40,000 Web sites. Two years later, in February 1997, there were an estimated 2,190,000 Web sites on the Internet.

Services provided by these sites seem to belong to one of the three general categories: Very few of the Web sites, if any, describe themselves as normal or ordinary ones. It is apparent that the overwhelming majority of Web sites eagerly strives for the status of the 'hottest' and/or the 'coolest' Web-system known to humanity.

To satisfy this passionate urge for the greatest possible 'coolness' and 'hotness' in a networked information facility I am providing here a list of 10 simple techniques. They are guaranteed to transform even the most unassuming, down-to-earth and normal information system into the most frequently discussed, commented and looked-at Web facility in Australia or perhaps (with a bit of luck, for the competition is really stiff) - on the entire Internet.
  1. Be assertive & gutsy
  2. Be yourself & always re-invent the wheel
  3. Be cooperative & encourage resources sharing
  4. Be generous & wholehearted
  5. Be startling & unforgettable
  6. Be open-minded & flexible
  7. Make your system stable
  8. Be self-sufficient
  9. Be people-orientated
  10. Maintain a distributed infosystem

For supplementary ideas on bringing your site to the everlasting notoriety see

Conversely,
If you are interested in a less cheeky advice, check-out

Cheers !

T.Matthew Ciolek
Corrections, additional materials and suggestions for this page have been kindly provided by:

D. Agostini, K. Clark, D. Hedman, P. Katoch, W. King, M. Smallcombe, I. Smith, A. Zito

Maintainer: Dr T.Matthew Ciolek (tmciolek at ciolek.com)

Copyright © 1995-2000 by T.Matthew Ciolek. This Web page should be linked to any other Web pages. Contents may not be altered. Contents may not be altered. Unauthorised use or electronic dissemination is prohibited by applicable laws. Please contact the appropriate section maintainer for permission to re-use any material.

URL http://www.ciolek.com/WWWVLPages/QltyPages/FlopMaker.html

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