December 27, 2000, 3:53 PM — TECHNO TALES The horror, the horror.
Come on kids, circle up around the fire. There's no better way to mark Halloween than with a good old-fashioned horror story. Unfortunately for Jim and Audri Lanford, this one really happened.
Late last year the Lanfords, who run an Internet marketing business called NetRageous Inc. in Olney, Md., launched a new Web site at www.FreeFurby.com. FreeFurby.com rewarded Web surfers for filling out a marketing survey by giving away Furby toys. (No matter what you think of Furbies, we haven't gotten to the scary part yet.)
The Lanfords' goal was to create goodwill for an eventual e-commerce site. In the course of promoting the Furby giveaway, NetRageous contracted with its usual Seattle-based fax broadcasting service to distribute its press releases to 1,100 or so radio stations around the country. So one dark and stormy night, Audri Lanford, CEO of NetRageous, wrote a one-page press release and shipped it off for distribution. Alas, when the broadcasting service began to distribute the release, it included an additional 25 to 500 pages of random typographic marks, all attributed to NetRageous. And the automated system refaxed this compendium of gibberish to the same stations over and over and over again.
Other things were going on that day -- the Clinton impeachment, U.S. planes bombing Iraq -- and the radio stations were understandably irate about having their fax machines tied up. The complaints began to pour into NetRageous's offices, and they were notably lacking in goodwill.
"Our phone rang basically nonstop for seven hours," says Audri Lanford.
The problem was compounded and extended because when NetRageous called the fax service to stop the madness, the company's business day had not yet begun and there was no one in the office except a receptionist, who didn't know how to stop the fax. When the staff did arrive, it took NetRageous three hours to convince them there was a problem. "People in technical fields are often hard to convince if you suggest that their systems are at fault," says the Lanfords.
It took most of the day for the service provider to fix the problem. The fax company also wound up paying damages to some radio stations and compensated NetRageous by providing lots and lots of free faxing and paying for some of the expenses the Lanfords incurred.
NetRageous extracted these lessons for broadcast marketing:
1. If you use a service, make sure the company provides a 24-hour phone number and guarantees that it will be able to stop your transmission in case of an emergency.
2. If your service provider doesn't recognize the problem immediately, provide the unfortunate fax recipients the service provider's phone number. In other words, share your pain.
3. For companies doing their own fax broadcasting, physically pull the plug on the fax distribution machines, fix the problem in offline mode, then test and monitor carefully when you reconnect the systems.
Now sleep tight, kiddies. Don't let the bed bugs byte.
-- Derek Slater
Room 404, Where Are You?
GEEK APOCRYPHA So you're browsing the Web and instead of finding the site you want, your screen goes gray and up pops, "404 File Not Found," and you know that means that the page you requested could not be located on the server. You check the URL, check your spelling and move on to the next thing.
But why 404? Why not 403 orr 405? Why 40-anything?
The number 404 is a hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) status code. According to the World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org), HTTP status codes were defined by a team headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the man widely credited with inventing the Web (sorry, Mr. Gore) and the first Web browser at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics, www.cern.ch) beginning in 1990.
Which, of course, does not answer the question.
This from the Web site www.room404.com: When Berners-Lee and the other scientists were at work creating the Web, any request for a file was routed to a central database where people would manually locate the files and transfer them over the network. When they could not find a file, "usually because the person...typed in the wrong name," the scientists sent back the message, "File Not Found." They prefaced the message with the name of the room where they worked, the room where the data was physically contained -- room 404.
Berners-Lee, who is a principal research scientist at the MIT Computer Laboratory for Computer Science and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, could not be reached to confirm or deny this account.
-- David Rosenbaum
