Saturday, March 29, 2008

why $0.00 or FREE is the Future of Business

Interesting video by Chris Anderson on why $0.00 is the Future of Business where he talks about Google, Yahoo and other companies and how things tend to Free.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free

The concept of Free economics is an interesting one, as is explained by this blogpost at Longtail, see http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2006/11/the_rise_of_fre.html

"Made you look" tag and Starting out on ECT 456 at DePaul

Starting out on a Knowledge management course at DePaul this month. You will see more frequent entries here as I plan on using this is as the required class blog, which is worth 30% of the grade. I am supposed to write 500 to a 1000 words a week, far cry from the 1000 words a day for a PhD student. But I digress.

I would like to continue on my quest to "flush out the Goons" using Knowledge management and Data mining and other tools possibly of the collaborative kind. Nothing is free in the perspective of energy and matter as we all know, yet then why do we (Including myself) fall for these SCAMS of larger this and longer that and more of this?

It appears we as humans, in doing business, NEED to force others to buy our product. To COERCE them into buying our product, we "make them look", then bait them with "EXAGGERATED" qualifications for the product. In short we SCAM. Since most of us are greedy and do not read the fine print, we fall for the scam.

If we catalog all the scams on the Internet, have it grow through collaboration, then generate an adsense/adword type of tag based on the "Collaborated SCAM Catalog" to generate flags on such false advertising, the users will hopefully grow wiser. Through Data mining, I believe it is possible to identify a TAG CLOUD that can help us achieve this automated Flagging. So the premise is simple, bring TRANSPARENCY to claims of a products, be it a political campaign, campaign finance, free computers, free homes and a whole slew of similar products that target the greed of the havenot's or shall I say those who don't have as much but would like more, particularly if it is free.

The most powerful "Made you look" in advertisements is the word "FREE", free computer, free ipod, free desktop, ofcourse of late free home. One approach here would be to identify similar words or phrases and words connected to the primary "Made you Look" subset to an "n" hierarchy. Profiling words and pharses in other words.

Next week, I plan on focussing on the "Made you Look Subset" in a little detail, giving it a structure perhaps.

Saturday, March 01, 2008

Man on a Mission - Flush out the Goons

They say you have to write a 1000 words a day if you are on a PhD track. I am going to try something different. One blog entry a day all geared toward my mission: "Flush out the Con's on the internet".

Eventually tie this into data mining, semantic web and let it autogenerate. So what is this all about:

The other day I was on ebay looking for an iTouch and came accross multiple entries for 0.99 cents. good deal, I said, how can I get one. This ended up being a pyramid scheme where you have to order one product offering and then you have to get 13 referrals. If the referrals all make an order, then you get your iTouch. It got me thinking how many more of these CON's are out there and is it possible to identify them so others benefit?.

So.......

The Flushing Internet CON's was born:

Here is the first one:

http://www.desktopcomputer4free.com/:

They require you to make a purchase, once you do they require you to have 13 referrals and each of the 13 have to purchase an offer!!.

Watch out for advertisments on ebay that tell you how easy this is.

Tomorrow's post: member incentive programs.

TAGS