After 5 Years Online -- Some links are broken. Old web pages never die, they just lose their referring links _ Anonymous If you build a website, how do you measure it's success? You can sign up with a site that provides statistics, like I did recently, and learn that this site received 7 hits last Tuesday. Or, search the web for other sites that have links that refer back to these pages. It’s called ego surfing. Idido.com has been on the web for more than five years, making it close to a the Big Bang in web-years, so there could be lots of links and referring sites out there. Right? I tested this theory, recently, when I checked the links on my home page. I tested the link to Yahoo which is there to help users find other sites with a name similar to IDIDO. (I was wondering, too if Yahoo was still.) I derived a list of 6 referring sites. Here’s what I turned up. I'm very fond of this list and the company it keeps. Although it is brief, it shows that in five years (with no advertising whatsoever) a link can travel halfway around the world. Take a look. (1) On a page of lesson notes for a course on multimedia from the University of Limerick (Idido's link is with the references at the bottom of the page) http://richie.idc.ul.ie/luigina/CS6021/Lecture7.htm (2) An old article in MacWeek that mentioned Interactive Design. You'll need a Japanese system (and Japanese) to read it. The English version on the MacWeek site disappeared a long time ago. http://www.zdnet.co.jp/macweek/9704/s0402_3d2.html (3) This site has a list of links about MAD magazine. It has a link to my rant on the first Mad CD-ROM, magazine give-away several summers ago that I didn't think much of. (Lots of links to chose from here) http://www.vivamad.de/links/secret.htm (4) Interactive Multimedia Arts & Technologies Association from Toronto has a link to Interactive Design's 3D examples http://www.imat.ca/rt/mm/3d.htm (5) Made the cut at Nerdweb! http://www.nerdworld.com/nw916o1o20.html (6) There is also a referring link on Macromedia's site. They have long since stopped supporting Extreme 3d, but they do supply 3 links to the 3 people who bought a copy. http://www.macromedia.com/support/e3d/ts/documents/tn3298-e3dwebsites.html -- The Management