Fool.

God.

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Posting I
Turning Point
March 23, 1999

Excerpt from Atomic Christ
January 5, 2002

Research NOTE [read]
June 5, 1999

Posting XV (ask about complete document)
nuCenters
February 10, 2002

Historical Record:
From correspondence of Richard Stands
E-mailed May 18, 1998

So the story is told in bits and atoms.

Once upon a time when I was young I saw a little man sitting on my mother's dresser. It was in one of those fever nights that I had as a kid. Dark blurry. "There!" My head spun. "See him!"

"There is no one there. Go back to sleep. You are dreaming Jon." That was probably when I started to mistrust what people told me.

Turning Point

I began my interest in everything virtual late. In fact late in 1994. Print was dead. Unless you were over 35 that is. But effectively it is dead. The audience was dying off. The paper mills were getting greedier. The young were turning to TV or worse yet turning off with respect to the new s altogether. The net and in particular, news online, was the only hope that the news publishing industry now had.

Unfortunately they were botching up the opportunity royally. Spending millions on directories, cool tech toys, half baked e-commerce, auctions and not accepting that ultimately print is just another step in a continuing transition to that perfect information provider service.

The big dog named evolution was now yelping and straining the links in the mighty publishing chains. To make matters worse they had almost forgotten that they were in the business of producing great content that people wanted to read and advertisers wanted to be associated with. Why? Because people wanted to read it! Duh!

From the vantage point of the NMN, oh they liked the N-N thing, like KodaK - like that would give them a big edge! To New Millennium Network the Newstronic project was what the news business was all about - margins. It would reshape the industry both in print and online.

From reading the board meeting minutes and personal e-mails that I had gained access to from this period NMN had high hopes for profits and dominance and little regard for the potential for damage that unleashing such an agent on the net could cause.

The Network was chaired by a bean counter from News Times-Era, Inc. The term no clue was meant to apply to this guy. The Vice Chairperson was an IT VP from Metro-Cities, Inc. who was more suited for specifying and installing computerized publishing systems that were already outdated. Couldn't interface with his dick let alone leading the charge toward a visonary news publishing application. As for the the rest of the board forget a'bout it'. It only got worse from there.

(continue)

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