The Internet’s Big Secret-It Really Is WIRED!

See that octopus wrestling with a cable? He’s wrapped up with one of the internet’s biggest secrets–it’s wired. Really wired! And as a product creator and publisher, you need to know this.

One of the main steps in creating and selling your own digital products is putting up a web site or blog where visitors can click that "buy it now" button and then download their purchase.

Once that web site is published, a lot of people think the worst is over. "All I have to do now," they say to themselves, "is watch my PayPal balance grow."

Ah, the poor fools! They’ll soon discover that the next step is answering questions and complaints from people who think that web site isn’t working properly. Any web site that receives any measure of traffic also receives complaints. A video or audio won’t play. A picture isn’t showing up. A product didn’t download. These complaints usually come with an associated belief that anything wrong with a website is the fault of the publisher–that dummy!– and can immediately be fixed by him or her.

Yesterday I got an email from a visitor downloading a free ebook. His complaint was that his first attempt to download the book failed. His second attempt worked, but the book he downloaded was titled Book 2. So he tried again and this time got Book3. His complaint was twofold: he wanted Book 1, the book he originally came to get, and he wanted to know why I hadn’t explained beforehand that there were actually three books to be downloaded.

"I think you should fix your site!" he said.

Here’s what he didn’t realize: his first download attempt worked perfectly. But the book downloaded so fast that he didn’t even notice it was happening. Thinking that download had failed, he tried again.

His computer, of course, recognized that the book had already been downloaded, and that a second copy of the same file was now being downloaded to the same location. So his computer politely named the second file Book 2, just to help its master  keep things sorted out. When  a third download was made, the computer named the third identical file Book3.

I politely explained to my visitor what had happened, and moved on to the next email, a complaint that my video wasn’t working.

Letters like these are evidence that most people really don’t know how the internet works. They think their computer is taking a direct path to my web site and anything that happens there is my fault. But the truth is that a web site publisher has very little control over many of the problems that can appear on their sites.

Problem number one, as I’ve just illustrated, is often user error. A user just doesn’t understand how their computer works.

Problem number two is that there is no direct path between any two computers. When a visitor enters your web site, they do so through an electronic signal that may have jumped through a dozen or more different geographical hubs before they landed on your web site. At any one of those hubs, all sorts of things can happen to an electronic signal. It may be blocked by filters sorting out signals that might be malicious. It may be corrupted. Or it may be broken altogether because a power pole has fallen or an octopus has carried off a cable.

There’s a lot of talk on the internt about wireless this and that, but the truth is, the majority of the internet is very much WIRED. It runs through cables wrapping all the way around the world and even under the oceans. As you might imagine, cables lying on land and underwater are prone to all sorts of problems.

For instance, in January and February of 2008, almost eighty percent of the Middle East temporarily lost internet access when boat anchors accidentally cut undersea cables.

Later that year, Hurricane Ike smashed into Houston, a major internet hub. Both of these events affected web traffic all around the world. Yet the day after Ike hit, I received a record number of complaints that my web sites weren’t working. Internet cable failures happen every day, every hour, every minutes–and they affect your experience on the internet, both as a publisher and as a surfer.

Popular Science has published an excellent article explaining how the internt actually works and how prone to failure it is. In fact, once you read this article, you’ll be newly impressed that the internet works at all. Read it. It’s at the end of this link to the Popular Science web site. You’ll come away with a better understanding of how your web site works, and you’ll be better equipped to answer those inevitable complaints. And if by chance that link doesn’t work, don’t tell me—tell the ocotpus!

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Bonnie Boots publishes The Internet Wizards Magazine and this companion The Internet Wizards Blog to teach self-employed people and small businesses owners how to leverage the internet for advertising, marketing and promoting their business. To stay in touch with her, type your name and email into the subscriber box in the upper right corner of this page. You’ll be glad you did!

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