Right now The Online Net is in a comfortable and stable position in the world market. We have no financial issues or tension between our staff, we have a good backbone of genuine original articles laced with the choice comedy selected to perfection. It gets updated regularly and everybody loves us, except Todd Black, Richard Webb and Harry Waller.

The problem as I see it comes not in the present but in the future in the shape of a fat man eating a feast at Christmas. The Robe was originally dragged into the mix to form a partnership with Jay (me), and share work load and generally create a better site with two people working on it instead of one, and this has always worked fine. These days the problem is that apart from the recent christmas edition design stolen and adapated by the Robe, Jay is often a one man working machine and with time being the limiting factor not enough is added as i would like it to be. I don't know whether or not Robe will wake up and spend 30 minutes writing an article now and then or not, but this is an issue I thought i would raise all the same.

Also in the future is something which could threaten the very comfy position we find ourselves in. Our registration runs out in October 2002, yes this is quite a while away but i do worry about this menial things now and again. At the end of this I am curious to see whether or not it gets extended free of charge or we actually have to pay the £20 odd notes for another 2 years. I wouldn't say no to paying but it does go against a few of our values here at TON. If for an unavoidable reason the online net looses domain status. it will either be hosted at TTL or not at all. I guess as usual we will have to wait and see what happens.

There have been rumous flying around the place about a possible third partner in the business and a takeover bid by a large corportation or The Offline Net, and I can say we will not be intimidated by their spelling errors or briefcases, we will hold strong and sell for nothing less than the price found on our Information page.

There have been times in the past when i've been annoyed with doing all the work myself when i have considered adding in a third partner into the equation. As it is we have 3 guest article writers and at least 2 more i know of who have contacted me regarding appearing on the site and i have agreed to them both so we're waiting for their contributions now. We decided not to have Edkins on board as he moans alot and spends too much time playing about. We never offered a placement to Ryan even though he was the best choice as he didn't use the net much, these days he runs his own join over at the offline version of this beast so we're fine with him. Rawson is too volitile, Randy is not here enough, James the same and an outsider would just never work. So we're sticking with the two of us for now and settling with our guest article writers and our own design and content wizardry.

For now that is all i have to say on the future, we dont know what is going to happen but we've loved being The Online Net and will continue to be so until our arms fall off or we grow a breast on our heads. I hope you've enjoyed it too.

ps. Rona Colson, for ever and a day.

Article Written by Jay -
jay@theonlinenet.co.uk