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Cc: online-news@marketplace.com
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There are some simple guidelines for posting this type of information in
newsgroups.

1.  LISTEN - know what that group is about and what the interests of that
group is about.  Read an entire thread before you respond.  Make sure that
the people you are about to send to want to hear what you have to say.

2.  JOIN - The internet community is more like a group of clubs.  Each
club or clique has it's own rules and conventions.  More important, there
is a great deal more tolerance for someone who regularly contributes
useful and meaningful responses to the group.

3.  COMMUNICATE - this means a dialogue.  Responding to a public article
in a news group or mailing list publicly is completely appropriate.  It
would not be appropriate for me to post "personals" in this group.  It
would not be appropriate for me to discuss the publishing and advertizing
opportunities of Dow Jones News Services on alt.bondage.personals.

4.  Become a RESOURCE - the 32kbyte promotional announcement may seem like
a very small message.  Unfortunately, it may be replicated several
thousand times.  A single posting to this group will be replicated over
4000 times.  A short 10 line post - pointing to your html, ftp, and e-mail
server will be greeted well and welcomed.

5.  Respond to what's going on - don't just toot your horn.  Ask questions,
answer questions.  We have people from Meckler, Dow Jones, and about 400
other publications and services on this newsgroup.  We do share our ideas
with each other.  We consider questions that are appropriate to publishers.

6. Be considerate - Some of these subscribers are paying 25 cents per
kilobyte to receive your mail.  Make every byte count.

7. Join announcement lists (unite, New-List...) and listen.  This is where
new lists are announced to people who are looking for new lists and
newsletters.

8.  Pick an appropriate provider.  AOL is a private service and may not
want you promoting newsletters on their feed.  It would be like going to
the local grocery store and setting up your own lemonade stand.  There are
many internet providers who would be happy to serve you.

9.  Become an appropriate service.  If you are starting a newsletter or
mailing list.  You should probably get your own (*nix) host and an IP
address.  This way interested parties can get to your newsletter in the
form that suits them best.  You can provide a listserv mail server, an FTP
site, an HTML/MOSAIC server, and a WAIS server, you may even want to
become an alt newsgroup server.

10.  Expect flames - Virtually any high profile commercial use of the
internet is likely to result in various forms of retaliation.  There are
issues of copyright, security, and access rights.  Access to CIX
(commercial internet exchange supernet) is expensive, but access is much
more tightly controlled (you don't have college students sticking
"sniffers" on that part of the net).  CIX nodes EXPECT to get commercial
traffic.

11.  Be concious of the culture.  Internet is an interesting culture.  It
is a network made up of several thousand brands of computers in several
hundred countries, and in several million homes and businesses.  You may
think Microsoft Word is the greatest program in the world but if you send
a word document to 30 million users, 1/3 of which are not using Microsoft
Words (or even windows), you WILL experience an onslaught of mail that
will intentionally fill the disk drives of every mail server from your
node to the backbone.

12.  Read your service contract carefully.  Using your internet provider
to conduct business on a personal connection may be a violation of your
service agreement.  Business access ranges from $1000 to $7000 per year
depending on speed, traffic, and services.  AOL is not going to like you
trying to run your newsletter at $100/year.  Especially if you start
generating 30 megabytes of duplicated incoming and outgoing mail every day.

At Digex, they just had a user send out a "green card" type mailing (sends
e-mail to every known mailing list and news group about some lawyer's
trademark practice.  The responses swamped the nodes in California,
Boston, and New Jersey. 






From jvncnet!marketplace.com!owner-online-news Wed Sep 28 02:34:18 1994
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