This isn’t really that much of a shock. Microsoft itself has been pushing its users to dump IE6 for more than a year. Not just because the shiny new IE7 and then IE8 came out. But because IE6 is a security nightmare and they don’t want to expend the resources any longer. Also, newer technologies like advanced JavaScript and the new HTML5 extensions will not be supported by IE6 ever.

Google is pushing its Chrome browser. I use it every day and like some of the features, but for my money, Firefox, even with its large memory footprint is still the best browser out there. Explorer is a distant third.

If you sill use IE6, notable by its plain blue logo, then you should, at a minimum upgrade to IE8. But really, you should just get Firefox or Chrome
.

The plain vanilla Internet Exlorer 6 logo.

The logo for Internet Explorer 8

Gone forever? Closed for overhaul? We don’t know because management isn’t telling its paying and non-paying users anything. In fact, unless you had read one specific post in one thread in the forums over the last two weeks you wouldn’t have heard anything about it from management at all.

Head over to Aww, Martha!

Update 11:00 a.m. 9/1/09
Statement from the Clinton Herald

Today, CNHI, the Clinton Herald’s parent company, shut down the community forum software on its newspapers’ Web sites, leaving it up to each newspaper to decide whether to continue to offer forums as well as administration and platform responsibilities.

After careful consideration and much discussion, we at the Herald have decided to discontinue offering community forums on our Web site at this time.

We weighed many factors and this decision was not made lightly. Although we will no longer be offering the forums on this site, we will continue to offer local, state and national stories, breaking news and photos.

We are working to bring back the “Old Clinton Photos” thread that was popular on our site, as well.

Our site also will continue to evolve and we invite you to come back often to see what we have to offer.

More later.

Yes, we have been notified that our forums no longer will be Hey Martha forums as of Sept. 1. We currently are looking at our options concerning the hosting of the site. We know our readers like the forums and we are doing our best to make sure that continues. I’ll let you know more as those decisions are made.
Charlene Bielema
Herald Editor

The Herald is owned by Community Newspapers Holdings Inc. a Birmingham, Alabama-based concern that owns a metric buttload of small market newspapers. As of now, it looks like they have moved to a new content-management and/or hosting service.

The original posting in the thread was cross-posted from the Norman, OK Norman Transcript. It appears that the Transcript will be moving to a more community-based blogging and aggregation model. Something that has been talked about as a new business model for newspapers. See Jeff Jarvis’ blog buzzfeed. Mr. Jarvis just gave a rather compelling presentation of a very similar business model at an Aspen Institute forum.

Regardless of the fate of the Hey, Martha! forums, I’ve been wanting to get some serious hands-on time with the really cool-looking website development and management tools from squarespace.com for a month or so now. We’ll this is a good chance. I’ve set up a community site called Aww, Martha!. If the Herald pulls the plug, there will be a place for people to gather. It is a $50 a month hit, so its permanence depends on a couple of factors: a) whether it gets used at all and b) whether it is needed.

In the meantime, feel free to play around and post some stuff. Membership is required but totally free and privacy will be respected. Aww, Martha!

The curious thing, which I mentioned on the radio, is that CIS has significant assets both physical and virtual and could very easily sell the business to another provider or allow someone to come in and run the business for a fee. None of it makes much rational sense. But then everyone kind of knew that Bob always did things for his own reasons.

Here are your options:

• If you are an individual subscriber to CIS with just cis.net e-mail on the line
• I advise you to get with Iowa Telecom, Qwest or Mediacom and get on with your life. Unless CIS comes back up for some period that will allow customers to make an orderly transition, there is no way to access e-mails, address books or web pages on those servers.
• If you like webmail, get a Yahoo or Gmail account and get on with your life. Hopefully, you have a local copy of frequently used e-mail addresses and you can send a message to friends and customers that your address has changed.
• If you have web pages that you don’t have a local backup for, check the Internet Archive for a recent copy of your web page. You should be able to suck down most of the content from there.
• Business customers. CIS registered its own and its customers’ domains with Network Solutions LLC one of the major domain registrars. Get a copy of a billing statement from CIS that specifically states that you were charged X for registering and/or hosting your domain.
• Call Network Solutions at 1-800-333-7680 and explain what has happened and that you would like the administrative records for your domain transferred to your control
• Be patient and work the process. Network Solutions has had its own problems with customer service in the past.
• If you still run into a brick wall or you feel like going after CIS for loss of business, call a lawyer that has familiarity with Internet and intellectual property law. I have been using Des Moines attorney, Brett Trout as my resource on this issue. He gave a presentation at Ignite IT in Ames a couple of years ago and I was quite impressed.

Riverfront Technology is partnering with a Quad Cities-based web hosting and web development company to offer migration assistance and new virtual digs for homeless CIS domains. My advice here is that if you have a business that relies on the web and e-mail for day-to-day transactions don’t wait for Network Solutions, register a new domain now, get your web site back up and running. When you finally get your old domain back, it can be merged with the temporary one so that it will appear to be transparent to the user regardless of whether they use olddomain.com or newdomain.com.

Locally, it is a much different story. In the early years of the Internet Age, waaay back in 1996 or so, CIS Internet was a pioneer. A local link to this whole Interweb superhighway thingie. He was the first locally available wireless service provider for residents and businesses outside the service area of Mediacom and DSL.

Recently though, CIS has been characterized by poor to nonexistent customer service. Bob as primary technical contact was so irascible he made Gary Boden look like the milkman of human kindness. He maintained a sense of entitlement to private and public locations where he had been allowed to install antennas for his wireless service. Basically, it was Bob’s Internet and we were lucky to have it.

In the last several months a number of businesses had contacted us at Riverfront Technology saying that their CIS connection had been down for several days and they could not get a response from CIS. Some of these were very prominent citizens and businesses. We simply shrugged our shoulders and helped them transition to another provider.

We speculated that Bob probably owned all the equipment outright, having long since paid for everything. Therefore aside from his bandwidth bill from his upstream provider every month, everything else he made was profit. Ergo, he just didn’t give a shit about his customers any more. Those what worked would continue to send him money and to hell with those who didn’t. He would ride the gravy train as far as it went, so the theory went.

Of course that level of service was bound to draw unwanted attention and we heard that the Iowa Attorney General’s office began fielding complaints earlier this year.

So, no real shock when we learned today that CIS seemed to have been completely down since Monday-ish.

Not shocking per se, but surprisingly dickheaded.

Because he didn’t completely turn things off. He turned off his DNS servers for sure, which means that most of cis.net is un-findable to the world. But he must either have some services hosted elsewhere or still have something running. Mail for example: cis.net and other domains he hosts appear to still be accepting mail as usual instead of being down and out and rendering the mail undeliverable.

This means that everyone sending mail to cis.net and the domains hosted there thinks everything is normal and has no idea why no one is replying to them.

Furthermore, for those people who use web-based e-mail they can’t get to their mail. Maybe ever. And for those people who have domains hosted with CIS (KROS Radio, for one) those domains will now be in limbo until control of them can be wrested from the smoldering hulk of CIS and transferred to new web hosting companies. That is if those companies had good, current copies of their websites.

We have had some reports that Bob has been in touch with the authorities, calling from an undisclosed location (I’m totally not kidding!) and claiming to have been cut off by his upstream provider, Qwest. He has promised to try to get his customers access to their sites. I’m dubious. One, unless he was totally daft (a distinct possibility, I’ll grant you) he would never have had only one upstream provider. He should have had at least a DSL line or a Mediacom connection for emergency failover. Two, if he was shutting the doors and wanted to do the right thing, he could have just handed the backup tapes (assuming they exist) ot the keys to the server room to someone who could help out all those people who provided him with a rather comfy little living for the past ten-plus years.

Riverfront Technology is offering help sifting through the rubble and relocating.

There are also a couple of companies already sniffing about looking to pick up on the wireless ISP market in Clinton. So, it might all end up being for the good. Sure is good riddance to CIS, which was a walking corpse for a long time.

It is true that many states and municipalities have made their citizen’s lives easier by putting so much information on the web. But, in too may areas there is still a fundamental misunderstanding of exactly the type of sea-change that the Internet is bringing to society and governance.

Here is an excerpt of a teriffic post by Tom Steinberg of the UK-based mysociety.org, which builds community organizing and open government websites, called What The Government Doesn’t Understand About The Internet And What To Do About It:

Current government policy in relation to the Internet can broadly be summarised as occupying three areas:

1. Getting people online (broadband access, and lessons for people who don’t have the skills or interest)
2. Protecting people from bad things done using the Internet (terrorism, child abuse, fraud, hacking, intellectual property infringement)
3. Building websites for departments and agencies.

The government does all these things primarily because it believes that the Internet boosts the economy of the UK, and that IT can reduce the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality. Together, these outweigh the dangers, meaning it doesn’t get banned. Gordon Brown’s recent speech at Google was an exemplar of this mainly economically driven celebration of the Internet’s virtues, telling audience members that your industry is driving the next stage of globalisation”.

The first challenge for the government is to understand that whilst these beliefs are true, they are only a minor part of the picture. Tellingly, Browns’ speech contained almost no language that couldn’t have been used to explain the positive impact of electrification or shipping containers.

What is different is the way in which the Internet changes social and economic practices – the vector of attack. In the 20th century, advancement of human welfare went hand in hand with the rise of companies that used economies of scale to deliver better goods and services for customers. Technology effectively made it possible and much easier to be a big, highly productive company, to gather expertise and capital together and to target markets for maximum yields.

Now take a look for a moment at Wikipedia, MoneySavingExpert, Blogger or Match.com – all big websites, all doing different things. Each one, however, is in its own way is reducing the ability of large, previously well functioning institutions to function as easily.

These services are reducing traditional institutions ability to charge for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business, newspaper, repressive institution or religion. Nor is this traditional ‘creative destruction’ going on in a normal capitalist economy: this isn’t about one widget manufacturer replacing another, this is about a newspaper business dying and being replaced by no one single thing, and certainly nothing recognisable as a newspaper business.

Disruption like this is scary for any institution, which will tend to mean that as a public entity which interfaces with other institutions the temptation will be to hold back the sea, not swim with it. Government must swim with the tide, though, not just to help citizens more but to avoid the often ruinous tension of a citizenry going one way and a government going another. There are various things government can do to be on the right side.

1. Accept that any state institution that says “we control all the information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves, or about anything they care about (both private and public). This means accepting that federated identity systems are coming and will probably be more successful than even official ID card systems: ditto citizen-held medical records. It means saying “We understand that letting train companies control who can interface with their ticketing systems means that the UK has awful train ticket websites that don’t work as hard as they should to help citizens buy cheaper tickets more easily. And we will change that, now.”

2. Seize the opportunity to bring people together. Millions of people visit public sector websites every day, often trying to achieve similar or identical ends. It is time to start building systems to allow them to contact people in a similar situation, just as they’d be able to if queuing together in a job centre, but with far more reach and power. This does open the scary possibility that citizens might club together to protest about poor service or bad policies, but given recent news, if you were a minister would you rather know about what was wrong as soon as possible, or really late in the day (cf MPs‘ expenses, festering for years)?

The killer app of the Internet as it relates to human politics and governance is not any sorf of enabling of direct democacy, which is simply too unwieldy for a handful of people let alone hundreds of millions. Instead it is the ability to maintain honesty in government through distributing the load of watchdogging it among millions.

Take the groundbreaking recovery.gov: “The site will include information about Federal grant awards and contracts as well as formula grant allocations. Federal agencies will provide data on how they are using the money, and eventually, prime recipients of Federal funding will provide information on how they are using their Federal funds. On our end, we will use interactive graphics to illustrate where the money is going, as well as estimates of how many jobs are being created, and where they are located. And there will be search capability to make it easier for you to track the funds.”

This is groundbreaking in the sense that this is the first time an administration has seriously attempted to embrace the Internet not as an extension of existing media but as a new medium in its own right. But it is still not up to snuff, it still shows an attitude that the primary role of the Internet is to reduce the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality — in this case making it faster and cheaper and more efficient to maintain a (albeit well-intentioned) veil of accountability for the massive spending being undertaken.

The recovery.gov site is kind of clunky. It also doesn’t go very deep. Mousing over the map of Iowa for example shows that $1,08 billion has been announced for Iowa. Clicking on Iowa takes you to a list of spending programs (of which the state budget stabilization fund is at the top at $472 million) for which money has been allocated. And… that’s pretty much it.

On the other hand, recovery.org is far more in depth. At their website, I can see that there are 291 active projects valued at $250.4 milion. I can drill down by county to see that Clinton has 2 active projects valued at $1.6 million and by drilling down further I can see that those two projects are for replacement buses for the Transit Authority.

Now, recovery.org is the product of onvia.com, a for-profit organizaiton that helps companies find state and fedral contract opportunities. They have a large research staff that combs federal, state and local media to glean this detailed information and post it not only for the benefit of their customers but free for everyone. Onvia’s information is not complete, just showing what projects are currently open for bid, instead of all projects planned, let and in progress or complete. But that’s okay, that’s not what Onvia is about.

What it does show is the power of community production and how the creative collective production that creates something like Wikipedia can be harnessed to keep our government accountable. And while things like recovery.org can scale up to the national level, they can also be scaled down to the state and local level.