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Summer 1997
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The MultiValue Ring started only two months ago and has already attracted some well-known companies from our Community with more queuing for acceptance to the Ring. The MV Ring is the brainchild of Herb Rubin which came to him whilst talking with Gus Giobbi at Spectrum '97 in Las Vegas. Herb had seen web rings on the Internet based on favourite movie stars, favourite sports teams, etc and thought "why not for the MultiValue industry?" There are probably around 1200 web rings by now on the Web mainly covering the following: Entertainment, Sports and Regional Topics.
So what’s it for?
The MV Web Ring's purpose is to create a relationship of all the Web sites that
service the MultiValue community. Herb says: "Why not link them all together?
In terms of advertising we can all help each other by channelling web surfers
to each other."
Why should I join?
One of the reasons people might wish to become members of the MV Ring is to
attract Pick surfers to their site: curious surfers can just click on the “next”
button, or choose a random selection, and voila! They arrive at your site. In
addition to the random feature there is a List and Index feature. So, at a single
click a web surfer or potential client can see all the web sites in our community
with a little paragraph about each one.
Membership of the MV Ring is an easy way to increase the number of visitors to your site, with the added benefit of statistics generation. You can track the number of hits to that page of your site. Curiosity about the Ring and members and those in the queue can increase your visibility!
Who wrote the originating code?
The code is written by "Sage" at www.webring.org and it is kept very
generic. Pathfinders Software maintains the part of his database created for
the MultiValue Web Ring.
Who can join the Ring and at what cost?
The Ring is open to Web Sites of producers who provide computer products and
/or services to the Multi-Value Community. Web Sites of people who use these
products (end users) do not qualify for linking. Herb says: "Sometimes
companies outside our community try to get into the Ring to get more corporate
advertising, like travel agencies or other unrelated web sites, but I just bounce
them out politely."
There is no cost to being a member. All that is requested is that you maintain
your HTML properly so the ring doesn't get "broken". Dead links are
not appreciated. Current members of the Ring include: JES & Associates,
Prospectus, Cuebic Systems, Malcolm Bull Training & Consultancy and Weaver
Consulting to name but a few. More are in the
queue awaiting acceptance.
Who maintains the Ring?
Sage maintains the hardware and Pathfinders Software maintains the records
in the database. However, Ring Members can update and maintain their data/records
by using the on-line forms with their passwords at the MV Web Ring's home at
http://www.pfinders.com/mvring.
This is also the same place to sign up!
How do people know about the Ring?
The MultiValue Web Ring is listed with Yahoo. If you type "multivalue"
it’s the first entry that comes up. People also get to hear about it by
colleagues within our industry and surfers find it seeing the code on members
sites.
Current volume/hits
The MV-Ring has only been running for 8 weeks and has already had 1,978 hits,
increasing hourly!
CONCLUSION:
So, if you have a web site in the MultiValue community, join the Ring! Here’s
how...
AND THE GOOD NEWS IS: You will not need to know any Site ID numbers
for the ring to function from your web page as it is all database driven. No
future changes to your HTML code will be required. whenever you enter the queue
and another when and if you are inserted into the ring.
You can change, update or delete your site anytime after its insertion by editing
your web site information from http://www.pfinders.com/mvring.
Elkie Holland
Last Updated: 30 June 1999