Tonight I am attending a meeting of the Circle of Progress. It evolved from a Chicago Meetup.com entrepreneur group, where the concept of attendees talking about what they did the last month and what you plan to do the next month became the focus of the meetings. Where many networking events for small business people tend to simply be card swap events, this meeting has depth to it that I have been seeking, and brings people back each month.

As I was thinking about my accomplishments and plans, I recalled this blog post about paying the price for success. It served as a check for my plans in the next 30 days and if they are directly related to the growth of my business. It is often easily to get wrapped up in something that is more time consuming that the reward for the time spent. Stepping back and taking a look at it in the context of the big picture is required. I view the Circle of Progress as one way to ensure I am doing all I can to grow my business.

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A couple of weeks back I posted about the abrupt shutdown of the ChicWIT email list and organization, as well as its parent organization, WorldWIT. I am now happy to write that a replacement list and organization has been formed to replace it, under a new moniker.

I just got the following email from Gigi Bozzano, who was the leader of ChicWIT, and it stated the following:

Warm greetings to all of my much missed friends!

I'm thrilled to let you know that I've started a new women's networking organization to replace the one that recently closed - guaranteed to be even more benefit for all of us women (and men)!

Called CW-Network (Chicago Women Network), it will feature moderated online discussion, networking events, educational opportunities, and as the group expands, discounts on services and products for members.

The site will be live by no later than mid-week next week so please watch your email box for instructions on how to sign up! Also, please forward this information on to your friends, colleagues, and any former members of the recently closed women's organization.

I'm looking forward to continuing the friendships and alliances that have already been formed and to establishing many, many new ones. Hopefully, you'll join us!! And...if you would like to contribute your ideas and suggestions please get in touch with me. CW-Network - Chicago Women Network - is for all of us!

Cheers...
Gigi Bozzano

That Web site mentioned will be at cw-network.org, and as of me writing this it is not live yet. Where it may take some time to ramp back up to the thousands of subscribers, it will be good to see this community, valuable to women and men in Chicagoland, back in action.

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Earlier I had posted about knowing who manages your domain names. I would like to build on this by adding being aware of solicitations that appear to be invoices for domain name renewals or services.

Recently the mail has increased with what appears to be an invoice for the renewal of a domain name or for Web site services such as search engine submissions. These usually come by US Mail, but are now starting to come by email. Where they look like an invoice, they are in actuality a solicitation, and further inspection will show small print to that effect. The hopes of these scam artists is to trick you into moving your domain name to them or to pay for services you may not want.

In that original post I said there is a big business around domain names. You can register domain names with any number of sources. My business Dunkirk Systems is a reseller of domain names, and all domain names are registered through ICANN-accredited domain name registrars. Asking a person or entity for their business is not deceptive or unethical itself, but it can be in the way it is executed.

If you receive such an invoice letter or email, verify who it is from. Contact whomever you have your domain names registered through to verify if the invoice is legitimate or not. If you do get a letter or have any questions, please post a comment here – I am more than willing to help!

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One of the largest consumption of my time, next to delivering Internet solutions to my clients, is following the news and trends in the Internet space. It is tough to keep up with all that is new, some of those things more relevant or interesting than others. Twitter has been in the headlines since the recent South by Southwest (SXSW) conference. I won’t rehash what Twitter is, and fellow Chicagoan Andy Wibbels wrote this good overview of Twitter.

To me, the fact that someone will care about what I am doing right now, the core of Twitter, is as much fascinating as it is odd. However, when I hear of new services or gizmos such as Twitter, I tend to think of more practical implications. Perhaps knowing what I have been doing all day, at the end of the day, would help in accounting for my time? And in addition to logging what I am doing, could I also log what I just did or notes on something I need to do? Could an application like this replace scraps of paper and sticky notes all over my desk?

Twitter has inspired me in this regard. But I won’t be using the application itself, as I don’t want the world to know what I have been doing all day. A small enhancement to an existing custom Web application could just do the trick. I’ll let you know how this plays out.

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How would you expect a widely-popular email mailing list with thousands of subscribers, where people would post requests for information on a wide variety of personal and business topics, to shut down? Not to mention that it was shutting down altogether, without any justification other than the fact that the owner was “moving on.” Then take this confusion and multiply it by dozens of cities around the world, and you are wondering, as I am, why the ChicWIT mailing list and its "owner" WorldWIT are really shutting down.

WorldWIT, by their own description, was "the free, friendly online and offline resource for women in business and technology." That being said, men were never excluded from joining their mailing lists or participating in their events. In Chicago, the “chapter” was called ChicWIT, and the name refers to the first four letters of the city, not women. Its most outward function was its email mailing list, where at last count had over 6,000 subscribers. It was an eclectic list of requests, everything from requests for Thai restaurants to pet psychics and everything in between. It was a moderated list, and it required things like event tickets be sold at face value and it would not promote events for other organizations. ChicWIT’s own events were every few months, from paid topical events to open socials.

On Wednesday, March 21 someone posted to the list that they read that the mailing list would cease to operate on Friday, March 23, two days later. Upon further review, this message was posted on the WorldWIT Web site’s home page, on the right under the heading of “What’s New.” The reason given was “WorldWIT founder Liz Ryan’s demanding speaking and training schedule prevented her from taking the self-funded WorldWIT to the next level.”

Where we all wish Liz Ryan the best, why just shut it down? I had no idea that she was the sole owner and was footing the bill herself. Why didn’t she remove all transparency and reach out to the community and ask for help – either to fund it, or to sell it? And I intentionally use the word community, as she had truly created a virtual community of people, and their connection was the several-a-day email messages, as well as the events. I emailed Liz Ryan yesterday to ask why, and as of this post I have not received a reply.

The ChicWIT list was a tremendous resource for me. I can trace most of the connections I made here in Chicago over the past 3 years to that mailing list, whether directly or indirectly. It was a resource not only for specific questions I wanted an opinion of from the community, but to keep a pulse on what others were looking for and thinking of. For a professional “organization” its demise is anything but.

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