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From Scott Walker, Producer & Listener-in-Chief:

One great thing about working at Tripod is the number of ways a company like ours can fail.

We face some issues that are normal for any business. Five out of six companies flame out in their first three years. We're growing pretty fast too, which means that we make a zillion or so little adjustments weekly, to new people and new ways of doing things.

But Web work brings its own set of challenges.

• No one has done this before. Web work is pioneering; there are no models to look to, to show us how. Nobody's making money. Nobody has found quite the right combination of content, context, and community that is especially tuned to this medium, yet.
• We not only have to do our jobs well, but make them up as we go along. All "job descriptions" mutate.
• No one is sure whether the medium itself will last. Even if we do this Web thing magnificently, will it matter in three years? Is it like CB radio? Or is it like radio or film?
• At almost any time, our audience might we swept out from under us. We hear about Web-blockers being installed in companies, as more employers discover how much time is spent online by their employees. Some colleges and universities, suffering budget-strain, are beginning to charge students for Internet access. That's probably bad news for Tripod.
• The number one complaint people have about the Internet is access speed. Will that problem lead more of them to software that will suck individual bits of content into their computers late at night? We're trying to develop context for information, and a place where people can exchange ideas on line; all that will be made much more difficult for us if our traffic goes into stealth mode.
• Will advertisers begin to compete with independent information providers by offering dynamic content that will drive folks to their sites directly?

All this makes us crazy, scared, insecure, and awake! With that comes a sense of discovery and invention, and the feeling of surviving another month, together. When we get a good review or someone writes to say something nice about what we do, we celebrate.

Working on the Web -- an extreme sport. Let's hope NBC doesn't make it an Olympic event.

--Scott

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Read more "Letters from Tripod" in the archive.

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