Michael Martinez |
The Official Web Site for Michael Martinez |
Questions and Answers, p. 2 |
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Michael Martinez |
The Official Web Site for Michael Martinez |
Questions and Answers, p. 2 |
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Q: You have been creating and contributing to Web sites since 1996. How did you get started? And did that have much of an impact on your writing career? A: I created my first Web site as a Compuserve user. I called it "The Worlds of Michael Martinez", and it was just a loosely organized collection of pages about me. I rambled on. People liked it, though. I received quite a bit of email about that site. Especially about the page where I discussed the movies I liked. Eventually, I created several more Web sites, and placed them on different servers because space was limited and expensive back then. In late 1996 and early 1997, the average free Web account had about 1-10 megabytes of disk space to use. By February 1997, I realized I had enough Web sites (four relatively large ones) to justify setting up my own domain. I agonized over the domain name for three weeks. Finally, I settled on Xenite.Org and it went live on March 14. Within a few months, a team of volunteers began helping me with Xena Online Resources. Dixie, one of those first volunteers, is still with me and she is now my full partner in the Web property. Writing content for Web sites, and promotional copy for them, has helped tremendously. It has also provided me with a solid foundation for marketing my books and promoting my essays at Suite101 and MERP.COM. Q: You spent a lot of time in certain Web marketing communities for a few years. How did that experience help you? A: When I first joined those communities, I was frustrated and confused. No matter how hard I tried to build traffic for my sites, it seemed like other sites with less content kept getting more. So, eventually, I found references to search engine optimization on a few Web sites. I tried some of the submittal tools and they worked okay for a while, but the traffic began to die off. I didn't understand how other sites with less relevant content kept coming up for searches I made on Altavista, Yahoo!, and other popular engines. When I joined my first search engine forum, I learned a great deal about the marketing strategies and techniques that many professional promoters and Web operators employed. I also learned about search engine spam. As people helped me learn to improve my rankings, I gave back to those communities as much as I could. As my rankings on search engines improved, my traffic improved. But I also disovered that a lot of people were sending traffic to my sites from their sites. The more well-known Xenite.Org became, the more popular it became. Learning the fundamentals of Web design and optimization helped tremendously. Q: Do you recommend that other Webmasters join these communities? A: I think it's important for Webmasters who truly want the traffic, who have the ambition to be competitive, to learn how the work is done. I'm talking about learning the fundamentals. The special tips and tricks, the neat gimmicks, those really are not important. They are icing on the cake, as it were. There are some very good tutorials out there which people should read. But the biggest problem with search engine tutorials is that they quickly become outdated. I've written a few myself. The search engines and directories are constantly updating their technologies, and many older search services are either no longer active or they have been relegated to advertising. The real problem for people is that there is no way to tell which advice is good and which advice is bad. A lot of people run into problems where they try out something and it either doesn't work or it backfires. Unfortunately, there are no reliable or credible professional Web promotion organizations. Furthermore, many of the SEO communities have compromised their integrity by closely alligning themselves with search services. One community operator even accepted paid advertisements from search services while claiming he was independent and neutral. It's a world where you have to take everything you see with a grain of salt. And anything which is hysterical, extremely negative, or super-positive and enthusiastic, is probably as far removed from reality as can be. It's still a field where most people are learning by doing, and at the same time they are being preyed upon by unscrupulous or well-intentioned-but-poorly-qualified hucksters who claim to have the answers and tools that Webmasters need. Q: Do you do any professional consulting? A: I do now offer SEO Consulting services. Q: Xenite.Org comes up first or close to first in hundreds of popular searches. Can anyone duplicate that success? A: Anyone should be able to do much the same thing, but as with all markets, the best time to get in was at the beginning of the growth period. Now, the megasites like Xenite.Org tend to dominate listings because so many other sites link to us, and because we have lots of content. Xenite.Org is actually not as large as it used to be, but we still do very well. Q: You make a good point. What happened to all the content? A: Most of it is still archived. But we experienced many setbacks through the years. There have been more server failures than I can remember. As our traffic grew by leaps and bounds, we chewed through hard drives at an incredible rate. We seem to wear them out in less than a year. And we haven't been able to rely on shared hosting for several years, now. We've had to lease dedicated servers. Thank God for Linux and rack servers! Q: Do you plan to restore the archives? A: That is always my hope. But I haven't had as much time for Webmastering as I once did. I keep working on it. Q: Does Xenite.Org make a profit? A: No. It really doesn't even pay for itself. Dixie and I have to make up the expenses out of our pockets. It costs about $1500 a year to lease the server, but there are other expenses. And we have experimented with paid advertising in other media. We do have good months, especially around Christmas time. Our visitors have been pretty good about helping to pay the bills. I don't want people to think their clicks on our advertising links are not helping. We do bring in a lot of money, but not enough to pay all the expenses. Q: So why not sell registrations, especially to SF-FANDOM? A: Because I don't want to do that. Paid memberships annoy me no end. I like free content, and I want to continue providing it for as long as I can. That is what the Web was originally all about. The business community has to continue doing business. We are not in this for the money. We do it for our own reasons. And the day may come when we stop doing it. If I ever decide to create a real business site, Xenite.Org will remain a free content site nonetheless. Q: White cheese dip. What is the deal with white cheese dip? And is it really that popular? A: I now receive more email about white cheese dip than about any other topic at Xenite.Org. It's simply a very delicious product I learned to enjoy while I was living in Georgia. You cannot find it in many places west of the Mississippi River, although I hope that changes. Q: Do you answer all the email you get? A: I can't. There is way too much of it. And most is not spam. We were getting inundated with spam through all the Web-based email links, so I set up a Contact Us form which allows people to contact us but without revealing our email addresses. Some people still try to spam us manually, but that has dropped off. As for the legitimate email, my inbox usually has hundreds of messages. I cannot respond to them all. I spend a lot of time filing messages away. I try to save some for later responses. Every now and then I come across one I should have answered -- months later -- and write back to the person, to make sure I answered them. Sometimes they say I did not get back to them. But I do my best. Q: Who is Hardball Jones? A: Someone who whishes to remain anonymous. He hasn't written anything for us in a long time anyway. Q: How many volunteers have you had at Xenite.Org? A: I don't think we've ever had a full count. There are twenty-to-thirty forum moderators and admins at SF-FANDOM. We've had four or five people write essays, I think (although Dean Kish was never formally one of our volunteers -- he just distributed movie reviews to us). There were about eight people who wrote for The History of Xena: Warrior Princess. I think around 20 people helped edit Xena Online Resources. A couple of the Herc/Xena FAQs were written by other people but they were not formally associated with Xenite.Org. And we've hosted some fan fiction. So, maybe there have been 60-70 people through the years, allowing for turnover and including some one-time contributions or general distributions. Q: Are you a good Salsa dancer? A: Other people say I am, but I am still learning. Q: Do you take lessons? A: Yes. I've been taking classes and private lessons from Gloria Jones of Dance Passion in Houston since 2002. Q: Why Salsa (and Merengue and Cha Cha)? A: These are fun, sexy dances. I'm also trying to learn Bachata and Cumbia. Salsa is the hardest. My friends and I have a lot of fun when we go dancing, and we've even helped Gloria put on some exhibitions. Q:When Elizabeth Smart went missing for several months, you carried her picture on Xenite.Org's main index. What prompted that show of support? A:I just had this overwhelming feeling that she was still alive and would be found if someone saw her. I wanted to make sure that as many people as possible were familiar with her story and picture as possible. Q:Why not carry other missing children's pictures? There are national organizations which need help in finding lost children. A:Those organizations are doing some admirable work. But many of the cases are not as cut-and-dried as Elizabeth's kidnapping was. She was abducted at knife-point by a (near) stranger who broke into her home. Many of the missing kids are with one of their parents. The parents are often violating court custody orders, but I know from close exposure to such situations that the fleeing parents -- while breaking the law and setting bad examples for their children, as well as denying their children opportunities to heal their relationships with the other parent -- are not simply being selfish. Often, our family court systems compel people to make desperate acts. It is a national tragedy, and I cannot in good conscience support a system which turns a blind eye to the suffering it causes many families. Beyond the basic criminal activity itself, I don't know the rights and wrongs of the invidual child-abduction cases where well-meaning parents take their children. Yes, these parents have broken the law. That is wrong. But the law itself is not working. When a court refuses to hear appropriate evidence, or is swayed by unscrupulous attorneys (including guardians ad litem, who are supposed to protect the child), or participates in a system which punishes its own members for criticizing decisions, the process, and so forth -- when a court does these things, it is morally in the wrong. And its decisions should not carry the weight of law. I am not saying we should disregard those decisions. I am saying that we need to change the way family law works. It is broken and getting more so. I have seen tragic, corrupt abuses of the court system at first hand. And there is nothing the average citizen can do to stop it. Even the press has been powerless to change the way things are done in these tightly controlled systems. I am sure there are many good judges, and many good attorneys. But I am not in a position to know which of those decisions are the best ones, which are not. So I am not going to blindly support them all. That is just wrong. And Xenite.Org will not carry the missing child photos and links because I feel that way. Q:There is a controversy over the number of Thrains J.R.R. Tolkien really included in the first edition of The Hobbit. How important is this controversy, and have you said all you're going to say about it? A:Is it important? Not really. But some people seem determined to misrepresent the facts of the controversy. At the very least, what I have seen of attempts to "fairly" summarize the arguments leaves me rolling my eyes at what is supposed to be fair. The question occasionally arises among Tolkien fans of why Tolkien included an explanatory note in the second edition of The Hobbit which points out the mention of Thrain King Under the Mountain on Thror's Map. Many readers infer that Tolkien felt he had made a mistake with the map and was so embarrassed by it that he decided to explain it all away. Tolkien is no longer around to explain his intentions. We have to infer the sequence of events on the basis of materials which only a very few people have seen, and which even fewer have published any details about. The chief sources of information are some comments by Christopher Tolkien in The History of Middle-earth and the revised edition of Douglas Anderson's The Annotated Hobbit. Both authors have suggested there should only have been one Thrain in the backstory for the first edition of The Hobbit. Christopher Tolkien noted that his father had, at one point in the course of typing the manuscript for the publisher, reversed the names "Thror" and "Thrain". This mistake, according to Christopher (and confirmed for me by Anderson through private correspondence), extends throughout the book from that point forward. The mistake was not corrected until after the first proof of the book had been sent to Tolkien for comment. The person who has made the biggest fuss over this controversy insists that the mistake only occurred in one place in the book. His argument is therefore flawed, because it requires that we ignore the published statement of Christopher Tolkien -- that the mistake was repeated throughout the book. It is impossible to explain things to people who so rationalize their arguments that they distort and "interpret" the facts in favor of their own points of view. It's frankly not worth the effort to try any more. The bottom line is that the backstory in the first edition of The Hobbit includes Thror's map, and that map establishes a Thrain as King Under the Mountain (not in conjunction with Thror, as some have suggested). So, the first edition of The Hobbit indisputably includes TWO Thrains, not one, and it really doesn't matter if J.R.R. Tolkien made a mistake. The mistake, if that is all it was, went into publication and became part of the first edition canon. It is probably no coincidence that, after he had written a history for Durin's Folk (to be included in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings) in which there was only one Thrain, Tolkien changed that history to include two Thrains -- sometime after he had received a proof of the second edition of The Hobbit. Everyone can probably agree that Tolkien noticed the discrepancy between his yet-unpublished history of Durin's Folk and the inclusion of a Thrain, King Under the Mountain on Thror's Map at that time, and he elected to change the as-yet unpublished Lord of the Rings rather than the map. And it would not be until the 1960s, when the third edition of The Hobbit was published, that Tolkien altered the text of the book enough to warrant removing the explanatory note. But in doing so, he didn't add any text referring to the two Thrains. |
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Michael Martinez
