The Slow And Steady Internet War of Attrition

The internet is filled with sites and making it in the ever competitive sea that is the world wide web takes two things. First, something to say or sell that others are willing to read or buy. Second, the patience of Job.

The reality of the internet is that many sites come and the vast majority of them go, abandoned to the far corners of the web. Those that survive mostly through the tenacity of their owners are those that stand at least a chance of success.

That's the reality.

If you don't want to stick with your site you will never succeed. And even if you do you might not every amount to much. But running a successful site on the internet is mostly about accepting attrition as a way of life.

Many sites start out with a flurry. Updates happen daily. Then they start to tail off. Perhaps the owner thought she was going to make enough off placing Google AdSense on her site to retire, only to realize that it is harder than you might think to take such an approach. Perhaps the owner of another site thought that he had all the answers only to realize that after two years only about 10 people a day visit his blog.

When they give up, those that are actually fighting the war of attrition win small battles. When they give up, those that continue to post opinions, commentary, new products and update their sites become a little more prevalent in the search engines and increase their chance of being found.

Some sites start out with a bang and register thousands of visitors a day within a couple weeks. When they start to falter because people lose interest, if you are a competing site that is keeping your site up to date, you will win another small battle.

Eventually you move up the rankings. Eventually more people find you. And if you have something that people are willing to read or buy, they will keep coming back for more each time you update. You slowly gain more and more readers and customers and after years of outlasting all those that gave up because the money didn't flow immediately or simply lost interest and moved on to something else, you win the war.

Like most wars, the war of attrition for sites on the internet is a long hard slog. Before you get involved, make sure you are prepared to fight it.

J.J. Jackson is the owner of several successful internet sites including the T-Shirt Entrepreneur and VacationCruiseTravel and is the owner of the successful Funny When Wet T-shirts

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China's Internet Threat

In 1946, Albert Einstein made the famous statement: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." Well Albert, I can now tell you how World War III will be fought. The weapons will be keyboards and the battleground will be cyberspace. No longer does a nation have to bomb an enemy to destroy that nation's critical economic and military infrastructure. Today, industrialized nations rely on the Internet for every aspect of their economy, government and military operations. A total disruption of the Internet could bring the world economy to a halt and cripple the ability of western nations to effectively deploy their military.

A recent report by the Heritage Foundation entitled, "Trojan Dragons: China's International Cyber Warriors" describes the emphasis that China is placing on cyber warfare. The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) has cyber warfare brigades that are already at work probing, hacking and stealing data from US and European computer systems. The Chinese cyber attacks haven't been limited to government systems. In fact, their primary target is economic and industrial information systems. China's intelligence collection is the top intelligence threat to America's science and technology secrets.

"America is under widespread attack in cyberspace", testified General James Cartwright of the US Strategic Command to Congress in March 2007. There were more than 80,000 attempted attacks on military computer networks in 2007. These attacks were often successful in impacting US military operations. Of concern to the government isn't the high school hacker having fun, but the concerted Internet attacks that are coming out of China. In the last three months, attacks against the US government from China have tripled. The Chinese cyber warfare units have already penetrated the US military's unclassified but sensitive IP router network (NIPRNET) and have designed software to disable it in time of conflict.

The Chinese have developed a very sophisticated and advanced capability to attack and degrade US and European computer networks and it is time that western nations recognize the threat. This threat is not only to the military, but to commercial, financial and energy networks. The actions of the Chinese cyber warriors in penetrating and stealing data from foreign nations have crossed the boundary of acceptable international behavior during peace time. It is time for the US and Europe to take strong diplomatic actions to halt and control the cyber warfare actions of the Chinese military.

Michael E. Bennett has over 25 years of experience in federal government telecommunications and information technology systems. He is currently the operations officer for a Department of Defense organization that provides worldwide telecommunications for the US military. Mr. Bennett's expertise covers a wide area of disciplines to include broadband, SONET, ATM, DWDM, fiber optics and satellite communications. Mr. Bennett is a 1981 graduate of the University of Maryland and holds a Masters of Science degree in Telecommunications from the University of Denver.

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