Crazy online sites & Einstein!

Every mundane task of our daily lives has its presence in Internet nowadays. Online stores for all those super malls, movie review sites for the reviews in our morning news papers, online magazines of nearly every print magazine out there, the list goes on and on. This is good, in the sense, any one can come up with a good idea or try to emulate the real world task solution in the online world to earn; Talk about entrepreneurship possibilities!

One crazy online-ification of a common real world activity is the bunch of confession sites that have popped up in the recent years. These sites carry thousands and thousands of confessions (petty ones to the really sick ones, sometimes with lurid descriptions) by real people. The idea of providing an online space for public confession sounds like a good idea. But, the problem starts when you start reading others confessions, because 90% of them are related to carnal activities or activities that create an yuck feeling deep down in your stomach. The lurid descriptions can rival Playboy or Hustler anytime!

These sites offer the confessions categorized in to a neat list of containers. For example, look the left pane in one site:

How nice of the site owners to provide us with a “Top rated” and “Most read” lists I guess, the top rated list items are determined by the number of “I like it” clicks by the readers, but the question is why would anyone read another person’s confession and say “I like it“? Do they like the confession content or the fact that the other person was bold enough to come online and confess?? These sites just cater to the voyeuristic basic instinct in each one of us.

One other effective online idea is the cyber begging. I am not referring to those sites setup for collecting donations for some natural calamity or something, but these are for covering personal expenditures. Some interesting links:

• Yahoo directory has a section under “Societies and Culture” for E-Pan handling
• Tom Locke sent a snail mail to 100 companies asking for some freebies. Results are listed in his site.

According to Wired, this trend of e-pan handling is dwindling, which may be true. But, that’s what people said about spam too.

Bottomline: you don’t have to be an Einstein to make a quick buck in the internet!