Time to take stock of what’s FREE and what works. I found a site, which ten’s of thousands are using to host their sites and blogs for free. Mind you, you have to know a thing or two about a thing or two in order to use 10GB. The site offers the following:
Downtime is zip! Just another FREE resource that may work well for some.
Here’s moneymaking idea number 2,504. (I have about that many in my head, at any rate. They keep me up at night.) This one is good if you need some cash, but it will not make you rich, and unless you are a very fast writer, you won’t even make $10 an hour. Still, it’s good to have a variety of strategies at your disposal if things get tight.
Here’s what you do.
2. Write 10-20 articles about the topic. Articles should be between 300-500 words.
3. Make sure that all of your work is completely original. Potential buyers will most likely check it with Copyscape.
4. Give your work a very affordable (cheap) price and advertise it on a forum that has a content thread, like Digital Point.
5. Be careful about who you let buy your work. Make sure they have a good feedback rating so that you don’t get chargebacks on PayPal!
I would (and may) do this if I just feel like writing about a topic for the heck of it. If the topic involves research, it wouldn’t be worth my time. But…if you’re bored, and feel like writing about different species of butterflies or whatever, why not?
Of course, you could always take that information and turn it into an ebook, or an Adsense site…
Photo: JJ and Special K
Note: This photo is the opposite of what I am talking about here…
I’ve been wondering about the value of porn lately, especially after finding out about RedTube.com, which I am not going to link to here, because it is so very, very NSFW, and I don’t want to be responsible for any headlines in someone’s local paper.
Anyway, I was looking at that site, which is like a porno YouTube, and I realized that I could create my very own adult site just by typing in a fetish and then embedding the videos that come up with their convenient embedding code. There are thousands of videos on there, and they are all completely free to look at. Some of them are 20 minutes long. No, I did not look at ALL of them. And no, I will not be creating my own adult site. Just in case you’re wondering.
So porn is free to look at and free to share. What does this mean for the people making the porn sites? Less money? I would think so. Who would pay for “new pics” and video when this is available?
What does it mean for the actors in the videos? I’m quite sure they get paid little to nothing. Which leads me to the question of WHY THE HELL WOULD ANYONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND put their nibbles and bits (and their face) on the internet for everyone to see? I mean, talk about a career killer. Also, personally, I would really hate to be in the local grocery store and find out that people were talking about how I style my pubic hair. People think that the Internet is totally anonymous, but it doesn’t always turn out that way, does it?
I think we can agree that porn itself has become devalued. By my logic, this means that participating in porn devalues people more than it did before. At least before, you could rationalize that people did it for the money. If someone is doing it for free, they are either doing it for the kicks (and those are some mighty risky thrills there) or they don’t care who sees them doing what with who. This bugs me. Don’t the thrill seekers realize that this is a little more high stakes than the Mile High Club?
Of course, if the person’s face is not showing, it is not as risky. If you look at who’s face shows, it is more often than not the woman’s. Why is this? What does it say about the respect that woman has for herself?
Of course, the really big issue I have with this new era of online porn is that it is so darn accessible. I wish online communities would police themselves better. Even requiring a credit card charge of one cent would keep out lots of underage folks.
Photo: Paulo Fehlauer
I have a story that I am ashamed to tell.
My computer is located in the family room, and my nine year old is always supervised on it. He is only allowed to go to specific sites that have been preapproved. Anyway, one morning, he woke me up and asked if he could play on the computer. I mumbled “yes” and turned over and went back to sleep for an hour.
The next week, I realized that the Google search bar had been used to search for “naked girls”. My son was eight at the time. Believe me, naked girls aren’t what they used to be. I was appalled, and I wanted to hit myself upside the head for letting him on it for even a moment unsupervised. I hadn’t thought that at age eight, I needed to worry about my son being curious about these things. Even worse, it turns out that a friend of his had told him how to find the pictures.
Net nanny software is not a cure-all, and it is fantasy to think that most children are supervised on the computer. They aren’t. I can say that my child won’t be unsupervised again, but that’s not the point. What do we do about kid’s ideas about sex becoming warped at such a young age? Personally, I want the government out of my computer, but it certainly doesn’t seem like self-policing on the part of parents or Internet porn sites is taking place. So what to do? It’s a problem I don’t see going away.
I hate that some of my students, who have problems seeing the beauty that the future could hold for them, may be the people in free porn videos someday.
I dunno. This one has me stumped.
The Consumerist has a nightmarish story about a guy who desperately tried to sell his laptop on eBay, only to be foiled by Nigerian spammers several times. Did he receive any help from the company? Would it be a story if he had? I don’t know about you guys, but I really miss the old days of selling and buying on eBay. Now I just need to wait for Craigslist to make its way to the boonies.
Disclaimer: Don’t read the story unless you just feel like getting angry for the pure fun of it.
