I have sent an explanation and an apology to Dennis and we have communicated privately via e-mail. I thought the issue was resolved. But, for anyone else reading along, here are the highlights.
1) I have limited time and money to devote to the site. We tried to do something cool with the article index. Indexing two sites took Scott two weeks off and on. At that rate, it would have taken about 25 weeks to get every site indexed, so my call was to go to press with the current index to get a reaction.
2) There really was no intentional bias against anyone internationally, I simply picked two sites that I knew had a lot of articles. If you are going to do two, then I think I selected the right two. Scott tried to get me to do six, but it was my choice to go to press with the two. Anyone who reads Woody's Office Watch noticed that I had bought the top ad there for October 23rd and I wanted to get SOMETHING new up before those ads hit. You will notice that Scott managed to slip a few other sites in there anyway (look for the "other" icon). I have no clue if these are U.S. or International sites.
3. My apologies to Dennis for not responding to his posts of 10/24 immediately. I didn't see his posts. It is not an excuse, but projects were due, the book was due, and I had everyone here working full speed to get projects done on time. I
do appreciate his post because it has a lot of good ideas. It gives us a place to start when we have time to do more.
4. My apologies to Scott. I gave Scott a 10/22 deadline and I know that he worked late many nights in order to get 485 sites indexed. I think the index came out pretty cool and in case no one else has said it, I want to publicly say thanks to Scott for doing the hard work.
5. I also know Scott well enough to know that if he feels attacked, he doesn't necessarily jump up to defend himself. He just takes it. Anne and Scott are close and my suspicion is that Scott was feeling hurt between the combination of (a) me not saying "Hey Scott, nice job on the index", and (b) what he saw as an "attack" on the index as being biased. I do appreciate Dennis's apology from November 1 - and I do believe that he had no intention of attacking Scott about the index.
6) So, we now have Scott feeling hurt, and Anne being the only one to know it. As we can see from the post from 10/31, Anne will jump in to defend when she sees fit. After six months of working with Anne, I know she has strong opinions and is not afraid to voice them. (She certainly isn't afraid to tell me when I get something wrong). I happen to agree with the substance (not the tone) of the first eight of Anne's points. I don't agree with the 9th point - I'll be happy to give anyone an explanation for anything that is going on here.
7) When Anne made her post, I still was not even aware of the thread, so she is not my "hit-man". I can answer my own e-mail.
8) I have privately apologized to Dennis for Anne's post, and to anyone else who was offended, I offer an apology to you as well. I am sorry.
9) Now we are up to my Nov 1st post. I was somewhat taken aback by the theory that I was intentionally slighting UK sites. I would buy the theory that I was slighting sites from down under, given the recent blatant advertising on this board by Zac.
However, I had never heard of Williams, Raffensperger and Baker before Nov 1st. Heck, if I was snubbing those sites, then I was snubbing Lacher, Davidson, Pope, Bella, Haughton, Gaarder, Lamarche, Blood, Moosman, Cummings, Bruin, Longre, Hunt, Nonesly, Raheb, Neuwirth, Herber, Rubin, Mehta, Troy, Flanagan, and dozens of others. I have no clue who in that list is in the UK, who is in the US, who is elsewhere. I can assure you, none of them were excluded because of their geographic location. In my opinion, we all belong to one worldwide community.
So, I apologize for my reaction. You are right, Jack, I don't intend to **** anybody off, but the notion that I excluded someone because of the geographic location is wrong.
9) Thanks to everyone who hangs out here. It is an awesome community. Constructive criticism is always welcomed and most often acted upon.
Be sure to check back tomorrow, when I will be writing an apology for not listing any Zimbabwean Sites in my list of snubbed sites from item #8.
Bill Jelen
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MrExcel.com Consulting
This message was edited by MrExcel on 2002-11-02 16:24 
