Dateline: Oct. 1, 2001

On Tuesday, September 25th, around 300 About.com Guides were hit by a bombshell. They found an email in their inboxes advising them that their sites were being dropped from the service.

Since its inception, About.com has been bleeding red ink. Things were looking good for a while and the company was expected to get into th black in 2000, but then came the dot-bomb crash. Advertising revenues dropped off. And the company had to scramble to keep afloat. Staff were layed off, expenses were trimmed and more emphasis was put on sales. The company tried hard to avoid cutting into its content providers, the independent contractors known as Guides who aggregated net links and wrote the often scintillating and always informative articles.

Unfortunately, Investing: Canada at About.com was one of the sites cut. In fact, nearly all of the Canadian oriented sites were given the ax.

Because of the circumstances, About has decided to let Guides use their content in other sites and projects. Yours truly has decided to completely reconstruct the Investing: Canada site with its own domain. I'm even exploring the possibility of a joint venture with other former Guides to form a new Net Aggregator. The 300 topics dropped by About represent over a third of the content. Even a minor participation by other former Guides would form a solid nucleus for such a venture.

The attractiveness of the About model was the human element. In fact, its tag line was The Human Internet. Real people aggregating the best net links and providing insightful commentary on their pet subjects. Most Guides, including myself, received a steady stream of email from readers asking for advice and help with problems. And we always answered, forging a relationship with our audience.

Right now, the new Investing: Canada is being hosted at a domain I created six months ago when I decided to set up a small bookstore - Tycoon Books. Small is the operative word - books have not been flying off the shelves - so I've decided to use it for Investing: Canada until I get a better domain name.

Because About has terminated our newsletters as well, not letting Guides send off a final letter to readers, or to post a final farewell article, a lot of readers are left in the lurch and may have trouble finding their old favorite About sites and Guides. So I've registered a new domain - www.formeraboutguides.com - which I plan to launch soon as a base for reuniting former Guides and their readers. It will list all the former About topics that were dropped. Each topic will link to a special page that will tell what the former Guide is doing now - whether they have started a new website somewhere, are writing for another site, and how to contact the Guide by email or messaging system.

There is a private forum where former and current Guides get together and it will serve as a recruitment area for information to be posted. (All the former about email addresses for Guides no longer work - investingcanada.guide@about.com no longer is redirected to me so readers who do not know my personal email address will not be able to contact me. If you want to be added to our contact list, please send me an email to info@tycoonbooks.com for now.

This new site is under construction, so if some links don't yet work, rest assured they should be working by the end of the week. And next week I get back to my regular weekly reports. As you can imagine, reconstructing my site has been a bit of work!

I look forward to continuing to serve you!

Marco den Ouden
former Guide to Investing: Canada
current host of the new Investing: Canada