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[agsoldier]

Here are two posts from the SI INSP Where GNET went thread:

(1) http://www.siliconinvestor.com/stocktalk/msg.gsp?msgid=15664826

To:levy who wrote (25866)
From: silversoldier a/k/a SI Sy Sunday, Apr 15, 2001 1:33 PM
View Replies (1) / Respond to of 25872

levy, after a stimulating evening with a certain shark lady and Ron Reece, I retired to contemplate my pond and parkland. This morning my reveries were interrupted by a NYT email serving up a copy of today's Op Ed piece composed by Maureen Dowd. I believe I found the answer to the oft asked question (with apologies to HRH Fat Henry), "Will no one rid us of the accursed Pain of Jain" Ms. Dowd, whose opinions may be despised by even her admirers, may be the new Messiah to take on the task. I nominate her to be CEO of the Awesome Society of Accredited Shark Ladies. She is a most literate, incisive and humorous satirist, worthy of mention alongside GBS and Bill Buckley. Moreover, she is fearless, bitter, saturated with hubris, delightful, combative and satanically vicious, taking on all comers, no matter the spectrum. Nevertheless, to me, on whichever side of her column's fulcrum I may teeter, she is captivating, desirable and lovable. She embodies all the sweet qualities one has come to expect of a shark lady. She epitomizes the visible demiurge (that word appears in the article). Do we know anyone who can enlist her assistance in delivering us of our travails? One stroke of her Toledo bladed keyboard will suffice.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/15/opinion/15DOWD.html

Sy

(2)http://www.siliconinvestor.com/stocktalk/msg.gsp?msgid=15668194

To:Carolyn who wrote (25870)
From: silversoldier a/k/a SI Sy Monday, Apr 16, 2001 1:47 PM
Respond to of 25872

Carolyn, I am beginning to suspect that INSP is censoring news about INSP. Here is an article from the Wall Street Journal Online, dated April 13, reporting on SI (Bob)'s new position with Investors Hub. Y financial news of April 15 reported the WSJ article.
.http://public.wsj..." target="_new">http://rd.yahoo.com/finance/external/wsj/*http://public.wsj....

April 13, 2001
'SI Bob' Joins Rival Web-Chat Site
After Ouster From Silicon Investor
By Riva Richmond
Dow Jones Newswires
NEW YORK -- Bob Zumbrunnen doesn't just get mad, he gets even.

Mr. Zumbrunnen, known in online-trading circles as SI Bob or SI Admin (Bob), was police chief at stock-discussion site Silicon Investor until he was laid off in February by the Web site's parent company, InfoSpace Inc. The move sparked a user campaign to bring him back, to no avail.

But now Mr. Zumbrunnen, 42, is back in the game. On Thursday, he became operations manager at startup stock-talk site Investors Hub Inc., Tallahassee, Fla., and assumed a new screen name, IH Admin (Bob). From his new home he wants to build the online community he always dreamed Silicon Investor could be.

Investors Hub "reminds me more of the old Silicon Investor than anything I've seen out there, from a philosophical standpoint and from a technological standpoint," said Mr. Zumbrunnen in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires. "We think we will become more popular than [other stock-talk] sites by taking the best aspects of those sites, and avoiding the worst aspects."

Investors Hub promises to be both a kinder, gentler place to talk about the market -- absent spam and personal attacks -- and highly responsive to community complaints and suggestions for improvement. The way it's programmed also makes it "speedy and secure," he said.

A Taste For Worlds Of Passion And Risk
Mr. Zumbrunnen chose Investors Hub after being "inundated" with other offers. It was "basically the site I wanted to write myself," wrote Mr. Zumbrunnen in a message on the site Thursday.

He will be a key figure at Investors Hub, acting as both liaison to the community and one of the site's programmers. He has not invested his own money in the site, but part of his compensation included a stake of less than 5%, he said.

Mr. Zumbrunnen, a resident of a Missouri town with less than 200 inhabitants, which he likes to call "Boogerville," will be "100% telecommuting."

The jump may seem risky considering the current environment for financial Web sites, which are facing both dot-com disdain and a steep stock-market decline. Most message-board sites have seen large drops in usage as surviving online investors seek more reliable educational content. Analysts, and participants like Mr. Zumbrunnen, expect the sites to rebound with the market.

It helps that Mr. Zumbrunnen has a taste for worlds of passion and risk. When he's not immersed in the online stock world, he's racing one of his souped-up Mustangs. "This [cyber-cop] role does test your sanity," he said. "I really only truly relax when I'm on a race track and going as fast as I can go."

It also helps that he apparently found a site with founders who share his vision and will give him wide latitude to act.

"He was basically my golden opportunity," said Matt Brown, the 18-year-old president and co-founder of Investors Hub. When Mr. Zumbrunnen was fired by InfoSpace, Mr. Brown quickly offered him a job, figuring Mr. Zumbrunnen's experience in managing an online community, and his good name in the stock-chat world, would be a boon.

With Mr. Zumbrunnen on board, Mr. Brown could focus on the business. "I don't have the patience to deal with a bunch of kids," he said.

Investors Hub was founded a year ago and is still in the beta testing stage while a number of other tools and stock-research features are developed. Its message boards receive about 800 posts a day, said Mr. Brown. Mr. Zumbrunnen's debut Thursday caused a jump in usage, he said.

Another Product of SI
Mr. Brown is a pure product of the golden age of Silicon Investor, where he was part of an investing club that ultimately became the seed for the site.

He was introduced to stock trading at age 13 by his mother, who was an assistant to a broker. His first stock purchase was ValueJet the day before the bottom fell out of its stock when one of its planes crashed and killed 110 people. Mr. Brown lost most of the $2,000 he had saved during summer vacation.

"That's when I got mad, and I got on the investment boards," to learn about investing, he said.

But Mr. Brown became disillusioned as the quality of the discussions deteriorated. "It's like a trailer park out there," he said. "I don't want to lose what was once there and I enjoyed so much."

Mr. Zumbrunnen and Mr. Brown are of one mind about what their task will be -- "making sure spam and personal attacks are no longer part of investment discussion forums," as Mr. Brown puts it -- and how they will accomplish it: Community self-policing.

"There's nobody that knows the community better than the community. And the community can take care of itself if given the chance," said Mr. Brown, who disdains the "centralized government" style of the leading message-board sites.

The heart of Investors Hub's strategy is the "chairman of the board," the founder of each discussion, who is charged with keeping the conversation clean and on the topic. The chairman may quickly and easily remove spam and objectionable messages and ban habitual offenders. Mr. Zumbrunnen will act as an advisor to the chairpeople as well as the contact person for community-member complaints.

While Mr. Zumbrunnen prefers to be as unobtrusive as possible, he will intrude as necessary. "You try to keep a lid on the pressure cooker," he said. "If you try not to interfere at all, you will have chaos."

Write to Riva Richmond at [e-mail]

Sy