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It began with the death of Charles Carvin jr., the world's most colorful marketing man, in 1995. Charley's children and beloved wife Julia found comfort over the Internet after rushing together to mourn the loss of, and remember and honor a remarkable man. Julia, now a widow, had always stressed the importance of writing letters and staying in touch with her children, who had moved away. The family reunited at the funeral but was gone again within days. Not enough had been done. She was left alone except for the youngest of the six children, James, and her oldest son, Charles III, affectionally nicknamed "Chickie." Chickie had Down's syndrome. James and Chickie lived some fifteen miles away. Then a year later Chickie also died. The family gathered again and went away. The same dissatisfying sense of not doing enough to comfort an aging widow was experienced by all.
Fortunately, however, there was the Internet. The surviving sons sent email to each other and to their mother regularly. No one could ever have broken them of their bad habit of failing to write their mother. The Internet accomplished what no amount of nagging or persuasion could have done, and the widow, Julia Carvin, was comforted. That was how GhostSurfers began. The spirits of those we loved could be remembered on the Internet. They could remain a part of our hearts as we wrote about them, shared their photographs, old films, and stories about their lives, and considered what they might think or say were they still alive today. Their memories lived on in us and we continued to celebrate them.
Anyone who is able may occasionally visit a graveyard, but family from out of state rarely does. The dead tend to be forgotten. What really makes a ghost invisible is not that they are dead while their souls live on; it is the fact that they are forgotten and ignored. The good news is that nothing is invisible if it lives within a heart. In fact, we see far more clearly with the heart than we do with the eyes. The heart knows goodness and love. The eyes relish outward beauty and what can immediately satisfy. They cause covetousness and jealousy until we learn to shut them with our heart so we can see more clearly.
This is just one of many reasons that the idea came about that our ghosts ought to have halos. What GhostSurfers actually was was goodness and love being expressed through online communication. This was varied, of course, even mundane. It was the stuff of life, really anything there might be to talk about. The uniting thread was that it was among family and true friends and that it could be used for good.
The Internet is not just for family and friends though. It is a place of business. It is a place where people meet for many reasons. It is where Nigerian scams take place. It is where High Yield Investment Portfolios flourish as ponzi schemes. It is where pictures and videos we call pornography migrated, where prostitues find clients, where adultry and licentiousness take root while Viagra is sold. And all these played tricks on search engines like Yahoo and Google, MSN and AOL to have their web sites show up in the top results. Searching the web proved frustrating to many people.
People also argue on the Internet. They insult one another without restraint. They push their political and religious views. Children learn to make bombs and shoot zombies. Al Qaeda cells received their instructions there. A good fundamental purpose of web communication is seeking information, but even this was broken. Some answers were found. Many weren't. Often you had to pay to get their answer and even that could result in failure. It wasn't utterly meritless, but the whole of the Internet was heartless and evil, or a lie. How sad.
GhostSurfers was born of the knowledge that the Internet could be much better than any of that. Youngest son, James, devastated by the loss of his father and brother, but comforted by his belief that they lived on, had a dream. Charley appeared and spoke just two words: "total marketing." The meaning of the message was clear. The good that James and his family had experienced on the Internet was meant to be shared by all. James believed that this could happen, and in the months and years which followed mapped out a very detailed strategy for overcoming the negative side of the web with goodness and light.
It was not something that would be accomplished by preaching. There are few people who listen to preaching and there are only some things in life that can be controlled. The Internet is not one of those things. James' answer was ratings. The web couldn't be controlled, but it could be curbed. The better part of the web could rise to the top and be found if every search was rated by a network of people who cared, and the search engines ordered results by ratings.
What was needed was dominance in the search market by a tremendous network of web surfers - ghostsurfers, who would rate the web. That would work in theory, but there was a problem. No one was going to do any such thing for free. What incentive would be required to enlist the help of millions of people to provide ratings for web sites so that the search engines would show the best rated sites at the tops of searches? Where would the money come from to pay for it? Surprisingly, there was an answer - pay out a significant share of the revenue received by advertisers to the ghostsurfers based on the quality of their ratings work. Not only would that fix the Internet, it would provide opportunity for people to work from home. Carvin found ways to quantify the quality of the work ghostsurfers were performing by having them rate each other. Those who did the best work got paid the greatest portion of the ad revenues.
Rating the web meant rating every kind of web site - both commercial and personal, plus rating search results, judging whether search spiders were doing a perfect job. They weren't. Rating commercial web sites meant providing a service called "phantom shopping" or "phantom surfing" on behalf of advertisers. Rating advertisers not only created incentives for businesses to build better web sites, it created incentives for them to compete. They were accountable to web users because web users had a voice through ratings and blogs.
GhostSurfers focused on the positive side of this. In 1998 Carvin founded the Advanced Advertising Agents Awards Association (AAAAA Inc.) and the Internet Business Monitoring Bureau (IBMB) to rate businesses on the web and provide awards to businesses that excelled. The prestigious 5A Award would be given to businesses that were #1 for any category of business. Advertisers who promised much but delivered little, would slide to the bottom of the ratings, never to be found. Advertisers received awards if they performed well. Ghostsurfer members would receive rewards generated from the advertising revenues earned by the GhostSurfer search engine if they contributed thoughtfully.
Ghostsurfers was competing with Yahoo and later Google. The goal was to be the best search engine - and a second thing, something not tried yet, a community, a social network. When FaceBook began to thrive, Carvin's vision was finally realized in some ways, but FaceBook lacks what he first saw.
Carvin's idea was to improve the Internet, not just develop a better search engine and social network. He wanted to rate not just commercial web sites but also comments and dialogs in social networks, photographs, games, videos and all of the other stuff of life that is worth lifting up to be shared, including ratings themselves. Even deeper, he was interested in better communication. He was interested in family. He wanted to see love. He envisioned a social network where members could upload pictures and videos of their families to share with select friends and play games across the world like FaceBook does, but it was much greater. If members were to have conversations about politics or religion, their quality would be rated, so the conversations wouldn't deteriorate so often into matches of wit or insult. Neither were ratings about popularity as with "like" buttons or random social interactions, as on what became digg and now plus.
Privacy was also a very deep concern. Identity theft and abuse rose with the Internet's popularity at the turn of the Millennium. The GhostSurfers community was thus split into two parts - public and private based on the user's choice. One part of what it meant to be a "ghost" was revealing yourself selectively. A criterea based technology was designed and a patent applied for to enable better, more effective communication over the Internet and mobile phones, where privacy levels were always at the users control and the default was hidden. Such is ghostsurfing. It is about identity protection.
This was the original concept of GhostSurfers International - a worldwide network of people contributing to the betterment of the Internet and sharing in the advertising revenues of that social network. Carvin envisioned bringing this off the web, as well, in a way that would generate funds and volunteer hours to charities while having ghost parties.
What happened afterwards is where our history begins. In June of 2000 the web site went public. In less than three months GhostSurfers had over 100 million site visits and some 30,000 members. Members were receiving checks as GhostSurfers.com became one of the top 1000 most visited web sites in the world and hit the top 100 among women. (Source:WebTrends 2000)
The 2000 dot.com bubble burst created fear and panic among investors. As a result, GhostSurfers was never funded. It never failed. It was never given a chance. Ironically, more so today than ever, the vision of GhostSurfers as becoming both the first and the foremost social network, providing both responsible privacy use and a better Internet is well within grasp. Particularly with today's mobile technology and GPS systems, it is clear that the ghost hour is finally here. We now have the opportunity to become a leading social network, a leading search engine, and do everything we originally envisioned, and profit from the enterprise tremendously. It is our goal to become the world's greatest philanthropic organization, both rating and contributing to charities as we reward members for their giving.
Our ghosts have halos for a reason and these are no small statements. Click here for the rest of the story ... |
