At the tippy top of my list of questions is "Why isn't this working out?" There are some things that this group organizer did right:

• Beginning the newsletter/discussion group name with "A," so it would place high in a canonical listing of newsletters, discussion groups and e-zines like this one. (I don't know many people who have read past the N's here.)
• Picking a very obvious market. There are supposed to be over 5 million Web sites on-line now, so the market for this type of newletter is gigantic.
• Providing an easily accessible Web site to join the group and check the archives.

  But this last one may be part of the problem, too.

  When I went to check out this list, there was too much information showing me that it was not working. Under the list of categories of recent discussions I found this:

  "*System Announcements March 20 - 10:27 am

  "*General March 20 - 01:24 pm

  "*Search Engines March 20 - 01:30 pm

  "*Web Site Promotion / Marketing March 20 - 02:06 pm

  "*Affiliate Programs March 20 - 02:07 pm

  "*Web Hosting March 20 - 02:09 pm

  "*Web Programming March 20 - 02:10 pm

  "*Members Only (Contact Moderator) March 20 - 02:09 pm"

  As you have probably guessed by now, this list was launched on March 20, 1999. The problem was, when I went to look at the threads under most of the open categories, I never found more than two or three postings. They ran along the lines of "Can anyone recommend a good Web Hosting service?" or "Where can I get more insight on how to list with the search engines?"

  And no answer followed. Zip. Zero. Nada.

  I'm not ready to call this a "ghost" discussion group yet, but it's definitely slipping toward rigor mortis.

  Maybe the mistake illustrated here is lack of a good promotional program. I don't know. But I do know there are enough Webmasters out there, and enough new ones, to support the concept behind this discussion group. Either they don't know it exists, or they don't want to be the first person waiting around for others to join it and re vivify it.

  Not Recommended.