Since we’re participating this year in One Web Day (which takes place on Monday September 22nd), I thought I should spend a little bit of time discussing the project and its aims.

One Web Day was started in 2006 by Susan Crawford, a professor of law specializing in Internet issues at the University of Michigan. Using Earth Day as her inspiration, she decided that this now-vital part of the infrastructure of our daily lives needed an event focused on both supporting and celebrating it as well as advocating for its protection.

Crawford explains, “Peoples’ lives now are as dependent on the Internet as they are on the basics like roads, energy supplies and running water. We can no longer take that for granted and we must advocate for the Internet politically, and support its vitality personally.”

On the day itself, there will be both online and offline events taking place all over the world, with large events taking place in New York, Washington, San Francisco, Chicago and Cleveland, as well as in various international cities. A number of Internet superstars are supporting the event, including Lawrence Lessig (Creative Commons), John Perry Barlow (EFF), Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Joichi Ito, Doc Searls and David Weinberger.

This year’s theme is participatory democracy, not surprising considering it’s an election year in the U.S. In my next blog entry, I’m going to focus on some Canadians who are using the internet to encourage participation in our political process, to spread good deeds, to enable fundraising for charities and to extend access to technology to children of lower-income families.

How can you participate? Check out the ideas on the One Web Day site. If you plan on doing something in your city or on your site, we’d love to hear about it. Post a comment below.

Just a quick note for those following the Tucows Corporate blog via the RSS feed:

This feed will now provide news releases and posts related to Tucows Inc. OpenSRS Resellers (and those interested in hearing more about our Reseller Services) are invited to visit our brand new Reseller Blog at http://opensrs.com/blog/ You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for the Reseller Blog at http://opensrs.com/blog/feed/

The Little Geeks Foundation has an event coming up in the Toronto area in a couple of weeks and so we thought we’d bring this worthwhile cause to your attention.

Little Geeks works to enhance the lives of children by providing computers to the underprivileged families within the community. They hope to expand across Canada, and beyond in the future.

On June 12th, the Foundation will, thanks to the generous donations of individual and corporate sponsors, hold a special event here in Toronto to give refurbished computers, complete with Windows XP and Microsoft Office to one hundred families of underprivileged children–completely free of charge.

Thanks to our sales engineer Neville Thomas who brought this to our attention. He adds that you can visit the Little Geeks website if you are interested in volunteering as a “big geek” to repair or deliver computers to these kids and their families.

For those outside the Toronto area, there are similar organizations around that are more than happy to take older computers, clean them up and get them out into the homes of those who might not otherwise be able to afford one.

The Inside Ride event we told you about a few weeks back was an absolute blast and we wanted to pass along a quick post thanking everyone for making it so wildly successful.

Between the staff at Tucows, and our friends down the street at ILoveRewards.com who also came out for the Ride, we raised over $19,000 for the Coast to Coast Against Cancer Foundation. The extreme level of commitment to the cause was illustrated by Danny Rego, one of our application developers, who willingly had his head and beard shaved, (by Elliot, no less), in exchange for $1,000 in donations.

By the way, that’s Ken Schafer, VP Product Management and Marketing, Elliot Noss, President and CEO (on the bike) and Michael Cooperman, CFO, from left to right in the photo.

There are a bunch more pictures posted both at Picasa and on Flickr for those who want to have a look.

Ross Rader reports that the Foundation is in awe with what was accomplished and they are incredibly thankful for the generous donation.

Ross also passes along his thanks to everyone who either participated, donated or both.
He’s on his way to the airport on Friday and will be heading out on his epic 19-day ride across Canada beginning on Monday, June 2.

You can follow the progress of Ross and the rest of the riders at his blog. We’ll keep you posted here as well.

Tucows is very happy to provide key technical infrastructure for the ride, including email, domains, and web hosting.

For the cyclists in the Toronto area, you’ll be able to join the cross-Canada riders as they pass through Toronto for either a 20k or 100k route. More details can be found at the Sears National Kids Cancer Ride website.

Ross also reminded me that donations are still very welcome. There are tons of kids out there battling cancer that would be quite pleased with any contribution.

Yesterday a large webhosting company, Dreamhost, told the world that, while they would continue to provide email, their email service was not that great and suggested their customers should probably use Google’s Gmail instead.

They provided some fascinating data about email and support costs. My two favorite nuggets:

“Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn‚Äôt add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into ‚Äúsimple‚Äù old email.”

and:

“If a web server with maybe 750 customer sites on it were to go down for even as long as five hours, we‚Äôd probably get two angry messages about it. But if email goes down for the same number of customers for just five minutes we‚Äôll have already received 50!”

And they are clear as to their view of quality:

“(email is) something the big free email providers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google can do better.”

This post was picked up on Slashdot where the discussion, not surprisingly, swung back and forth between “I am a sysadmin managing 20 domains and use Google Apps and Gmail and love it” and, “You should always run your own mail server for privacy purposes and, well, its just plain fun.”

Both the original Dreamhost blog post and the resulting Slashdot discussion completely missed the point. Luckily the comments on the Dreamhost blog did not. They were very clear.

Overwhelmingly commenters said that they often came to Dreamhost for hosted email, they did not trust or want to use Gmail for their business email and many of them would immediately leave if Dreamhost discontinued offering email.

Every service provider should be required to read the Dreamhost blog post and, more importantly, the comments.

Whether geeks like it or not, the vast majority of people want and need simple, reliable email that is easy to use AND they want a supplier who will help them use it. That means providing phone support as well as resources to make things simpler. Support data provides golden information for i) how a service can be improved and ii) what your customer’s needs and wants are. Guess what? People are willing to pay for this.

Contrast the Dreamhost view with that of Rackspace. Faced with, I suspect, the same or similar data, Rackspace responded by going out and buying Webmail.us.

It is amazing to me that because most service providers have chosen to give away email they take that as an existence proof that people do not or will not pay for a quality email experience. People will pay over $80/month for a single cup of coffee per day. People paid Geek Squad over $1 billion last year to “set up” their wireless routers. Every geek knows how hard (or not) that is! My ten-year-old son does just that for my mother-in-law. With regards to email specifically, RIM, the Blackberry people, have a market cap of over $75b JUST FROM PROVIDING A PORTION of peoples email needs!

People, especially small businesses, use email more than anything else on the Internet—much more than they use or need web hosting. Service providers are in the business of making the Internet easier and more effective—whether they like it or not.

Geeks who run service providers may find Gmail great. Human beings, not so much.

Teams are being formed, challenges have been made and accepted. On May 22, 2008, The Inside Ride happens at Tucows Head Office in Toronto’s Liberty Village.

What is The Inside Ride?

It’s “Canada‚Äôs first indoor cycling challenge and fundraising event dedicated to raising monies in support of families and children with cancer.” The fundraising event works like this:

A whole bunch of state-of-the-art stationary racing bike trainers will be set up at Tucows. Then, teams of six riders will ride for 10 minutes, flat out, to see how much mileage they can cover. The individuals and teams with the highest distance, the most team spirit, and of course, the most money raised win rewards.

Get Involved

Are you in the Toronto area? We’d love to have you down to the Tucows offices to take part. Show us what your company is made of, and help us raise money for the Coast to Coast Against Cancer Foundation.

And if you’re not close by, any donations to the cause are more than welcome.

In either case, contact Sherry Azim for more information. More information is available from The Inside Ride website.

Sears National Kids Cancer Ride

This event in support of Coast to Coast Against Cancer meshes very nicely with another cycling-related charity ride for Coast to Coast Against Cancer of more epic proportions. Ross Rader, who heads up our retail division, will be climbing onto his bike in just 24 days for a 19-day, 7,600 km trans-Canada ride from Vancouver to Halifax. Ross has been training incredibly hard over the last while and he’ll join a select group of riders for the cross-country trip.

Some quick math tells you that with 7,600 km (4,700 miles) to cover in 19 days, the riders will have to average 400 km (250 miles) per day.

Show your support for Ross through a donation to the Sears National Kids Cancer Ride

The real winners are the various charities from coast to coast in Canada dedicated to providing emotional, physical and medical support to children and teenagers living with, and beyond, cancer.

Ross pointed me to this video featuring Andy Brooks, an 18-year-old, blind cancer survivor who is taking part in the full cross-country ride himself:

Tomorrow is the night for the Toronto Girl Geek Dinner. As of this writing, there were seven spots left. If you’re into networking with a bunch of women who are passionate about technology, head on over to the wiki and sign up. I’m looking forward to seeing some of my girl geek buddies for the first time this year and hearing about what they’re up to so far in 2008. The featured speaker tomorrow night is Malgosia Green, co-founder of Savvica, an online teaching and learning company. Malgosia will share her perspective on entrepreneurship and using web tools to further goals in education and training.

Editor’s note: Heather is a Customer Communications Representative at Tucows. Her many responsibilities include handling customer and emergency communications, drafting incident reports and taking care of special technical communications. If you’re a Tucows customer, Heather plays an integral role in keeping you informed about the status of Tucows various services.

Last week, I was given the opportunity to visit Q9, one of Tucows‚Äô data centres. Every day I write about our products and service in status updates, maintenance windows and customer reports. Tucows infrastructure hardware — including our servers, routers, storage device and data centres — have become so familiar in my day-to-day tasks that I find myself thinking about them like actual live staff members.

Seeing the strength of the Tucows network, from the fibre drop to the servers, is a rare treat. Tours of Q9 are infrequent for security and logistical reasons. Access to the site is strictly controlled with only highly technical staff members granted security clearance to the data centre and our cages. Our Network Operations Centre (NOC) and Operations teams at Tucows headquarters conduct monitoring with a number of sophisticated remote systems. We also have staff who stay onsite at each of our data centres to coordinate with multiple sites and the team back at headquarters.

Q9′s data centre is built with the highest caliber of technical security: bullet resistant glass and biometric entrances with access cards are among the authentication and verification steps that must be complete before entering the areas of the cages. Q9 has strict protocols for site usage and visits. Surveillance includes cameras covering every angle and extensive onsite and offsite monitoring. There are mantraps that use biometrics to protect access to designated areas. The chamber has a biometric fingerprint unit that (whether imagined or not) felt like a current went through me when I touched it for validation scanning. Let’s face it: my inner geek loved the chance to see the hardware of the layer 3!

Our cage is large, with rows and racks of servers, massive storage devices, routers and cables. We use the best of the best equipment, including NetApp, for storage devices. Being a trained Library and Information Technician, I was extremely impressed with the labeling of every device with Dewy-Decimal-like meticulousness. Every machine has redundant power backups for testing and security. The hum and beeps of all the machines represent millions of domains, mailboxes, products and services.

Customers depend on security, reliability, accuracy and professionalism. Every day at work our teams ensure that every aspect, from security to equipment organization to functionality to maintenance, is seamlessly conducted. Q9 helps us out with multiple service points, generators and a contract of 100% service availability. When the blackout struck the Eastern Seaboard circuits in August 2003, Q9 remained online with their downtown NOC fully redundant and emergency plans enacted. Last year we moved to Q9 because of the reliable and consistent service it enables Tucows to pass onto its customers.

Tucows employees love the Internet. We are passionate about our work and almost daily there are internal challenges to see who has the best new tech toy or website reference. The abstract part about working in the Internet industry is that unless you are logged into the physical devices or visiting the data centre cages, you reside in the top layer and your own imagination. Now when I write about our devices I will have a much better visual of some of our infrastructure. Unlike a former coworker, I did not hug the machines! Instead, I just smiled and secretly waved.

The Washington Post ran a story Wednesday by Paul Farhi titled, “How Do You Tell a Web Name From a Typo,” in which Tucows is mentioned amongst some other Internet companies with odd names. Certainly the Tucows name is unique, but it’s more than just a misspelling (Joost), or an English word with select vowels stripped out (Flickr), or a non-english word that translates into what the company is all about (Mahalo).

The Tucows name can be traced back all the way to the early days of the commercial Internet. Back in 1993, Scott Swedorski started Tucows in Flint, Michigan, as a website where users could download Windows 3.1 software that allowed the operating system to access the Internet. Tucows was an acronym for The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software – T.U.C.O.W.S. It seemed only natural to incorporate cows into the logo back then and we continue that tradition to this day.

Over the 14 years since Tucows was founded, the business has expanded to provide service providers (like ISPs and hosting companies)¬† everything from wholesale Internet services like domain names and hosted email, to SSL digital certificates and a software billing solution for ISP’s and Hosting companies called Platypus (a unique name in itself). The Tucows download site lives on to this day providing a place where Internet users can find and download the latest and greatest in freeware and shareware software.

In his article, Farhi calls out Yahoo! and Google (among others) as separate from the goofy name trend:

“Google and Yahoo are creative names — short (hence, easy to type into a browser), quirky and suggestive. Google: something very large, almost infinite, like a googolplex. Yahoo: a simple person, or an expression of joy. Ditto the sounds of Facebook and YouTube, which conjure something personal without getting silly about it.”

I’d like to suggest that with an Internet heritage that is even richer than those two companies (Yahoo! wasn’t founded until 1994, Google came much later in 1998), that Tucows should be regarded as a trend setter. And to suggest that the Tucows name is nothing more than a silly play on words diminishes that rich heritage that can be traced back to the very beginnings of the World Wide Web as we’ve come to know and enjoy it.

So to Paul Farhi, thanks again for the mention and we’d be more than happy to send you a couple of Tucows squishycows. Drop us a line on the blog, or via email (jkoole at tucows.com).

Photo by Sarah McGee. For more of Sarah’s photos visit her Flickr photostream. Thanks, Sarah!

With a company name like Tucows, you really can’t escape cows ‚Äì from black and white cowskin lettering on our software download site back in the early days, to giving away a live cow at a trade show (seriously, it happened), to squishycows, we’ve certainly embraced our bovine heritage.

The humble squishycow has become quite popular of late. We give out hundreds and hundreds of them, complete with a little tag asking that the new owner take some photos and post them on the photo sharing website Flickr with the tag “squishycow“. Last time we checked, there were over 500 photos of our squishy friend.

Squishycow drinks coffee and had a run-in with a sheep. She’s gone swimming, taken a flight, seen a NASCAR race and gone to the beach. She’s visited Paris, London and Niagara Falls. Squishycow has learned to program and got an iPhone.

Thanks to all who take the time to make some really beautiful images featuring the squishycow. We’re going to start featuring some of the best of the pictures on the blog over the next little while. To have your photo considered, simply add it to our Flickr group “Squishycows in the wild“