Regarding Those Public Service banners....

First off, I hope everyone who visit here will consider entering our contest.

For those who have visited the new redesigned site, you probably have noticed the two public service banners. Both are subjects that I have a passionate concern for and, ideally, if I can get others involved, then I’ll be quite content. Let me try and explain why the issue of Internet Neutrality and Cyberbullying is such a concern and why it should be important to others.

All webmasters, especially in America, should be far more invested in the issue of Internet Neutrality. To put this as simply as possible, to quote from the site: Net neutrality prevents Internet providers from blocking, speeding up or slowing down Web content based on it’s source, ownership or destination. Various corporate telephone and cable companies want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data, to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, while blocking or slowing down their competitors, to limit the bandwidth, and no longer have a level playing field. In truth, this issue is something I could envision The Lone Gunmen being involved with….and this isn’t a conspiracy theory. The legislation for Internet Neutrality already exists, it just needs to be reinforced and strengthened. While many on-line users and webmasters may think: "This will never affect me," such thinking is incorrect and I’d advise everyone to visit the website we have a banner for and research this for yourself.

Now Cyberbullying is another issue that seems to be overlooked, or off the radar of most users. Yet it is a very real problem which people should educate themselves on. Now, I have never been affected by the kind of Cyberbullying that some teens experience, but I can sympathize. I had an internet experience that indirectly related to the issue, during the period of 2000 through late 2001, I was involved with another website and met a person that eventually put me into a situation that was similar to the book and the film of “The Night Listener”. This person would invent crisis after crisis and invent people who didn’t exist. This ended badly for me, damaging my reputation with the site I was involved with, only for me to find out the truth after the fact, and the experience was so devastating for me, that I nearly swore of all internet activity for a period. You live and learn.

I hope this will compel users and webmasters to look into these issues.