LinkTiles: Missing Children now has it’s own website: RecentlyMissing.org and features the Missing Children Widget. The widget automatically displays the last 10 children missing in the US. Please be sure to to place our Missing Children Widget on your website today.
For Immediate Release
DEERFIELD BEACH, FL: May 25 is National Missing Children’s Day: a chance to honor, remember and reflect on the hundreds of children throughout the US who disappear each year. Some are found. Others, tragically, are never seen again.
Wayne Wirs, author of Fading Toward Enlightenment and founder of PeaceCause.org, now wants to use online “viral marketing” technology to help find those children. “The Internet is terribly underutilized for humanitarian issues,” the 45-year-old author and photographer said. “The explosive growth in social networking websites means that one person, telling their network of friends about a missing child, can literally reach hundreds of thousands of people within 24 hours.”
Wirs has recently created a website to do just that, LinkTiles: Missing Children ( http://LinkTiles.com/TheMissing ). Each day, the site is updated with the profiles of children who have gone missing in the last two months — over 160 children in the US, with over 40 in Illinois alone.
The website displays little “tiles” of the missing children. Placing the mouse over a tile immediately opens a mini-profile about the child with an appeal to send the auto-generated email to your network of friends, initiating an Internet “buzz” for the boy or girl. “When composing the children’s pages and emails,” Wirs said, “I felt it was critical to communicate the very real danger these children are in and to express the anguish their parents were experiencing.” Taking the idea of the “Have you seen this child?” milk cartons and flyers to a more advanced level, the site is poised to become a valuable tool in locating and rescuing missing children.
LinkTiles: Missing Children is part of a larger website, LinkTiles.com, which is set up as a resource to help people organize their web-based community presence and serve as mini-resumes for artists, models, writers, and other creative people. “Once I realized the power of this approach, to display a lot of information in a little graphic tile, I knew instantly that it could be used to find missing children,” says Wirs. “I doubt anything quite like this has been done before, but I suspect this is just the beginning of websites created expressly for combining the power of social networking, Internet word-of-mouth and compassionate humanitarian causes.”
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Wayne Wirs (rhymes with “ears”) is the photographer and author of the book, Fading Toward Enlightenment (ISBN: 0976358107 - http://fade2e.com ) - a photo essay about his personal quest for inner peace. He is also the founder of PeaceCause.org ( http://PeaceCause.org ), an Internet movement dedicated to the realization of large scale social peace through the strengthening of personal peace in individuals.
Wayne is also the founder of the website LinkTiles ( http://LinkTiles.com ), a resource designed to help people organize their web-based community presence and serve as mini-resumes for artists, models, writers, and other creative people.
Additionally, Wayne created an offshoot of LinkTiles dedicated to generating an Internet “buzz” for missing children - LinkTiles: Missing Children ( http://LinkTiles.com/TheMissing ). By combining the powers of social networking, Internet word-of-mouth and the public’s concern for missing children, Wayne hopes to help generate critical online publicity to help reunite these children with their families.
Wayne can be reached through any of the above websites or through his personal site, http://WayneWirs.com .
A camera-ready version of the above image can be found here. Warning: 6.2 meg .TIF image size. 4″ x 6″ 300 dpi.
LinkTiles: Missing Children ( http://LinkTiles.com/TheMissing ) uses Web 2.0 technologies and viral marketing techniques to help generate an Internet word-of-mouth ‘buzz’ about children missing throughout the United States.
LinkTiles.com ( http://LinkTiles.com ) helps the Independent Creative gain exposure, traffic and publicity with a set of free marketing tools and a centralized webpage that acts as a nexus to all their Web 2.0 sites.
A message from Wayne Wirs - Author of “Fading Toward Enlightenment”, Founder of PeaceCause, Founder of LinkTiles.
LinkTiles: Missing Children ( http://LinkTiles.com/TheMissing ) is now live. This has been a surprisingly difficult project for me, not just the coding, but the emotional aspect as well. Each day, I receive, in no particular order, multiple confusing and difficult-to-read bulletins of missing children. Yesterday I received one of a little four year old girl who, a few days before, had gone missing. An hour later I received an email informing me that her body had just been discovered. An Internet search of her name revealed nothing. [more]
My name is Wayne Wirs and I am the author of the book, Fading Toward Enlightenment (ISBN: 0976358107). For the last three months of 2005, I had been developing a version of LinkTiles with two business partners - two ex-girlfriends to be exact. The concept was simple: Provide tools for the indie artist, musician, writer or blogger to easily generate viral and word-of-mouth publicity. Having a background in software engineering, I was the technical partner and the two ex’s were in charge of the marketing. For the first two months all went smoothly and according to plan, but, as you’ve probably guessed, a business arrangement with two ex-girlfriends is a train wreck waiting to happen. In this case, I was the one tied to the tracks and they were both roaring down on me from opposite directions. Sounds kind of kinky, I know, but I assure you it felt more like an episode from “24″ than one from “Sex and the City”. C’est la vie. [more]
Once LinkTiles started to become successful, at least traffic-wise, and the majority of the coding was complete, I had time to contemplate the origins of LinkTiles. Even though each of the original three partners (myself and two ex-girlfriends) had exact copies of the software and carte blanche to do with it what we desired, I felt I had an unfair advantage. I was the one who wrote the code and could easily modify it to fit my needs. The other two would have to find, hire and train a programmer. We had learned from our experience that there was no way we could work together, so the idea of re-partnering was out of the question. I was at a loss as to how to resolve the guilt I felt. [more]
The morning after obtaining my new-found freedom from my ex-girlfriends/ex-business partners, I heard a news story about some young boy who had gone missing the night before out in Colorado. As is often the case of recurring tragedies, you somehow grow numb to them and the news story just skipped across my consciousness and dropped below the surface much like a stone on a lake. [more]
