On my recent trip to Cambodia I was blessed to spend 3 days exploring the ruins collectively known as Angkor Wat. We experienced sunrise and sunset, as well as the noonday heat, in this magnificent complex of temples, many built more than 900 years ago.
Relics of Past Splendor
These shrines were created with stones carried from far away; many were built without mortar, and all were built without modern technology. Yet the structures have withstood the ravages not only of time and weather, but also of mankind. Over the centuries temple figures sacred to one religion (Buddhism) have been removed or destroyed by followers of another religion (Hinduism), only to be replaced by the original worshipers (Buddhists). Just as destructive were souvenir hunters who have taken pieces from the carvings and sold them to collectors and museums. Lastly, bullet holes and bomb damage mar many of the temple walls — a legacy of the Khmer Rouge.
Like the pyramids in Egypt and the Mayan ruins in Central America, Angkor Wat is the relic of an ancient civilization that was far advanced for its time. Today many of the Angkor Wat temples are still in daily use. I saw monks and worshipers kneeling in the temples, burning incense and praying. Truly a profound experience.
Emblems of Today's Squalor
In contrast, on my last evening in Cambodia, I took a boat ride through a floating fishing village. This loose collection of 1,000 fishermen, their families and support community lives on boats and travels Tonle Sap Lake following the fish and the rainy season.
To reach the floating village we drove through the town of Siem Reap and several smaller villages. The further from Siem Reap we traveled, the more primitive living conditions became. Homes went from cinder-block and concrete structures to wooden houses to one-room bamboo shacks supported on spindly bamboo poles to protect them from flooding. I would have been afraid to roll over in my sleep in these houses, much less raise a family or ride out a monsoon here. Electricity disappeared and the only running water was the stream we were following to the lake. The only nod to the 21st century were televisions (running off of car batteries) prominently displayed in the glassless windows of a few of the shacks.
The floating village consisted of hundreds of boats, some no bigger than 20 feet by 6 feet. Entire families lived on each boat. The rear of each boat held a primitive outhouse. The lake here is not only a source of cooking and drinking water but the septic system and bathtub as well. Children bathed in the lake while old women cleaned fish or cooked noodles in water dipped from the same source. Here the ubiquitous televisions and the outboard motors, used to power the fishing boats onto the lake each evening, were the only lifestyle changes in the last 200 years.
People in the floating village, while comfortable or even well off by rural Cambodian standards, were light years below the living standards you and I enjoy. Yet 900 years ago their ancestors had designed and built the temple complex at Angkor Wat. That past civilization had also built and supported the social system necessary to maintain the population and carry out such a complicated undertaking. All of that seemed lost today.
The Lessons of Forgetfulness
What caused such an advanced civilization to revert to a shadow of its former self? And what lesson can we learn from this study in contrasts? To paraphrase George Santayana's famous line, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to forget it." Somehow the people of that floating village have forgotten the grandeur of Cambodia's past. They have lost touch with the creativity and spirit that made Angkor Wat possible. Instead of moving forward, they either stayed the same or moved backwards — and perhaps that amounts to the same thing. Once we cease to learn, to build, to create, to grow, we not only stop, but we allow the rest of the world to pass us by. This is the equivalent of moving backwards.
We must ask ourselves each day, "Am I moving forward or am I standing still?" In our lives and at our work we all know people who refuse to change with the times. To our computer savvy children watching us struggle to retrieve our email, we may look like slow-moving dinosaurs. We cannot afford the luxury of standing still. To do so allows the world to move past us. More importantly from a business standpoint, it allows our competition to move easily past us.
If we stop, catching up becomes even harder. One thing I know for sure, the CLNC® Pros never risk becoming relics of the past because they don't dare forget the value of continuing education and the necessity of their personal commitment to constant, never-ending improvement. I personally witnessed the power of such a strong commitment when I experienced the energy of the 650 CLNC®s who attended the 2002 NACLNC® Conference.
Do you risk becoming a relic of the past or a dinosaur whose fate is extinction? If you have any amount of doubt coursing through your veins,
commit today to education, growth and constant improvement, both personal and professional. And know that if up until now you've been a bit lax, you're never too old or too young to make this commitment to yourself. The lesson I learned in Cambodia is that I want to be the one who builds monuments for the future — not the one who wonders how the monuments of the past were built.
I am heartened to know there are at least 650 other CLNC®s who will be building monuments right there alongside me.
Begin Building Monuments Today,
Vickie L. Milazzo, RN, MSN, JD
The Angkor Wat complex of temples in Cambodia have withstood more than 900 years of wind, rain, jungle temperature extremes and the depredations of man.
In stark contrast to the magnificent ruins of Angkor Wat, Tonle Sap Lake is home to a ramshackle floating village where 1,000 fishermen and their families subsist on cramped boats.
BEST PRACTICES IN TECHNOLOGY
Winning the Domain Name Game
by Thomas M. Ziemba, BS, JD
Selecting the proper domain name is as important as picking your business address. After all, a domain name is your company's location both on the Internet and in the mind of your prospects.
A domain name is the address you type into your web browser to view a web page – Yahoo.com, eBay.com, LegalNurse.com. Domain name registrations are governed by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Although this international organization "directs" the Internet, ICANN doesn't have any real regulatory power.
Trademark Issues
When you register a domain name with ICANN, you agree to arbitration if another party believes your domain name infringes on its trademark. This arbitration process is optional – the other party may simply take you to court. Usually the threat of large litigation fees is enough to cause the infringing party to "cough up" the name.
You might innocently register a domain name that contains someone else's trademark. Strictly speaking that's legal – but you might not get to keep it. For example, if Susan Ford, CLNC® owns Ford Medical Consulting, she might decide to register "FordMC.com" as her domain name. But if Ford Motor Company happens to have "FordMC" registered as one of its trademarks, Susan could be in trouble. If Ford Motor Company asks her to give them the domain name containing their trademark, she may end up returning it to them through arbitration or through the court system.
Courts and arbitrators don't automatically grant transfer of a domain name. They consider many factors including:
How long you've been using the name – If Susan was using FordMC.com for years before Ford Motor Company bothered to ask for it, that might help her case.
The likelihood of confusion or blurring between your site and the trademark owner's site – If there's little danger that Ford Motor Company's customers will confuse that site with Susan's, she might get to keep her domain name.
Whether you registered the name in bad faith or "invited" the trademark owner to purchase the name from you – If Susan chose that name with the intention of trading off Ford's reputation or "selling" the name to them, that hurts her case.
How long the trademark has been in effect – Ford Motor Company (and their trademark) has been in business a lot longer than Susan has.
Once the name is awarded and transferred to the winning party, the losing party has to pick and register a new, non-infringing name. This involves registering the new name with all the directories and search engines, and changing advertising, stationery, etc. where the name is mentioned. This challenge alone illustrates the importance of selecting the right domain name from the beginning.
The Crowded Field of Domain Names
Originally all domain names fell within five top-level categories, based on the intended use of the domain. These top-level domains (TLDs) are identified by the extension appearing after the "dot" in the name:
.com – commercial sites
.org – organizations (originally only non-profits)
.net – networks
.edu – educational institutions
.gov – government sites
Unfortunately except for .edu and .gov domains, registration has not been regulated, and people have registered all sorts of domain names within the various TLDs. Trademark law still applies equally to each TLD, resulting in lots of business for trademark attorneys.
Believe it or not, most English words have been registered as domain names in one TLD or another. Companies are now starting to use Spanish words for domain names. In order to alleviate this congestion, ICANN introduced 10 more TLDs, 7 of which have limited uses:
.aero – air-transport industry
.biz – businesses
.coop – cooperatives
.info – unrestricted uses
.museum – guess what?
.name – registrations by individuals
.pro – accountants, lawyers and physicians
Most of these TLDs are available now, and you can register a domain name within these new TLDs. Of course, trademark law will also apply to these. The main beneficiaries of the new TLDs were the companies who charged fees to "pre-register" names in these TLDs and attorneys suing people who have registered infringing names.
In your Internet travels, you may have come across some TDLs not yet mentioned. Those are country codes. Examples of these include:
.ca – Canada
.md – Republic of Moldova (many doctors use this!)
.tv – Tuvalu
.uk – United Kingdom
.ws – Samoa (not website or world site as often advertised)
Picking the Right Domain Name
Remember, your domain name is your site's address and identity. It is your billboard in the forest of the Internet. It tells customers and visitors who you are. You want your domain name to be simple, descriptive and easy to remember. Here are some tips for selecting domain names:
Avoid hyphens, easily misspelled names or overly complicated names.
Make your domain name memorable. Pick one that goes with your business name, but not necessarily with your type of business (e.g., Amazon.com).
Describe your business simply and logically – possibly using your business name or your line of business (e.g., CLNCeducation.com).
Keep your name short so people can remember it long enough to type it into their browsers. Avoid complicated strings of words (e.g., southeastlouisianalegalnurseconsultants.com).
Short phrases are best (e.g., LegalNurse.com).
A good domain name will help with your branding. One neat trick is to capitalize certain letters in your domain name to make it easier to read and remember. The domain name itself is not case sensitive, so you don't capitalize when registering it, but you can add the capitalization in your advertising. Examples include:
CLNCeducation.com
LegalNurse.com
The Cost of Web Presence
Domains are easy and cheap to register. The cost is less than $35/year, and registration is valid for 10 years. You can register domain names at a number of sites, including:
At each of these sites you can check on the availability of particular names. You can also find out whether a name is registered and by whom. If your name is taken, you want to try to buy it or another name you like from its owner.
In addition to registering your domain name, you have to pay an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or other company to "host" your domain. For a monthly fee, ISPs or Web hosts will house your site on their computers and connect it to the Internet and to your customers. Many of these hosts provide shopping carts, credit card processing, statistics on site visitors, email and numerous other services at little or no extra charge. Hundreds of web hosts are out there – choose carefully.
You can have a website without owning your own domain name. Many ISPs (including AOL) give their customers a certain amount of "free" space to put up a website. Your domain name includes the ISP's domain name and identifies the location of your site on their server computer, so you may end up with a name like: http://members.aol.com/SueLNC/index.htm. This is one way to get started on the Internet – but it is not good for branding purposes.
Some ISPs will allow you to use their free hosting service with your own domain name. Just ask the domain name registering service to "point" that name to the address in your ISP-provided free space. Then, for example, when prospects click on http://www.SueLNC.com, they are automatically transferred through the magic of the Internet to http://members.aol.com/SueLNC/index.htm. This lets you take advantage of your ISP's free website space while creating your own independent identity on the Web.
Having your own website hosted under your domain name is preferable. This is especially important when a prospect prints a page from your "free" ISP space. The printed page will show a footer that reads http://members.aol.com/SueLNC/products.htm instead of http://www.SueLNC.com/products.htm, which can cause confusion. Advantages also include:
You're easier to find on the Internet.
Your branding becomes easier.
Your domain name becomes part of your email address (e.g., mail@LegalNurse.com).
If you are thinking of creating your own website, now or in the future, register your own domain name today. It's cheap and easy. Act now to prepare for your future.
Thomas M. Ziemba is general counsel and information systems manager for the Medical-Legal Consulting Institute, Inc.
