A mass trend has hit the Internet, it sneaked in so subtly it almost went unnoticed.

The problem: The Internet is truly free, there is little or nothing you can’t get for free. Do you write standard fill-in-the-blanks legal documents? I can download them from docstoc. Do you write your own music? I can download via piratebay. Do you create websites? I can get a free one with Microsoft…

This has been damaging for so many industries, but now they’re actually playing the system and making a mint… how?

Solution: Microcharging.

iTunes are fully aware that MP3’s can be downloaded for free, albeit illegally. They came in with low low costs for singles and even less if you buy the whole album. MP3s can be downloaded for 79p! 10 years ago, I could buy a single for around £4 so that’s a big improvement. Who wouldn’t pay 79p to stay on the right side of the law for a track they liked?

Facebook charge for little graphic images, and little adverts. The majority of these cost around $1… it’s pocket money… of course who are the target market?

Digital photo printing generally costs 10-50p per print. 10-50p and the wait for delivery is well worth not having to fiddle with the printer, top up the ink and sort out paper jams, what a bargain.

Nintendo Wii. You can purchase wii points in blocks of 1000 for £7.50. For that you can download games which are now available for free online. Of course you can’t put them on your wii without a small cover charge.

In the US, mobile users pay to receive an SMS message. Twitter are cashing on to this with their mobile alerts (and a cushy deal with the networks. Which is why they stopped in the UK, here the billing is the other way round losing twitter money)

The list goes on.

Do you have something that doesn’t decrease when sold? eBooks, help-sheets, anonymous questionnaire data? These are great places to start as they require little or no action from you per sale.

Naturally this system works on volume, but with the right product(s), 1000 downloads at £1 each… I won’t insult intelligence by showing you the answer… you get the picture. If run through Paypal, your users won’t even have to hunt for their wallets (assuming they have an account)

Is microcharging the missing link in social networking sites? Is it the missing link to Twitter’s fortunes? How else could we use microcharging as individuals or a collective?

I’m going to help others share this information, it’s not secretive, yet so few know about it.

Assuming you have an office, or a student computer, you want to kit it out with some useful software. It can be costly, your options are: Buy the software outright (costing thousands), Obtain illegal copies of the software (Illegal and often very awkward), or find an alternative.

What would you do?

Let me suggest the alternatives and the answer should be obvious:

Software comparisons

Microsoft Office 2007
(Containing: Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, Publisher and Access)

Openoffice Any version
(Containing: Write, Math, Draw, Impress, Calc and Base)

Both have the same basic functions, word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and database software. Open office is missing it’s version of outlook, but you can use Thunderbird and Lightening.

Openoffice can open and save Microsoft Office documents and most other formats with ease. Microsoft Office can open MS Office documents but not most of Openoffice’s formats.

Microsoft office offer updates for a few years after sale, once this time is over, you need to pay for an upgrade.

Openoffice offer updates and upgrades for life, all included in the cost.

Microsoft office 2003 costs £280 through Amazon
Openoffice costs nothing… ever…

Antivirus

I’ll keep this one simple as I’ve covered this on another blog. My personal experiences are as follows

Norton

£17.99 through Amazon. Seems to have a habit of slowing down PCs. It has also let through the odd virus on my machine. The first thing I, and my IT professional friends and colleagues remove when they arrive at a call-out. You do need a good antivirus, but I wouldn’t recommend this one.

McAffee

£9.99 from Amazon. Works much faster than Norton, but I have had the odd virus get through it’s scanning process.

AVG

Free from Grisoft. (Free for personal non-commercial, around £25 for commercial) If this is going on your home computer, download the free one. If on work, unfortunately you do technically need to pay, however you get your money’s worth. Easy to setup and then just ignore. It runs itself, updates itself and doesn’t slow down computers very much at all. (Except during a scan, but this can be stopped) It’s very good at preventing virus attacks and has never let a virus onto my computer! My other article about virus scanning is here.

For web based solutions, see Joomla, Wordpress (this blog uses it), osCommerce.

For other ideas for software replacements, do a web search for the software name followed by the words ‘open-source’.

You should see some great recommendations from people using this same method of obtaining free software legally.

If you are UK based and really don’t know where to start, speak to Alan Lord at The Open Learning Centre for training and advice. The cost for one of his seminars is around the cost of one virus scanner. Don’t buy it, use AVG and use the money you saved to get some more great information from the Open Learning Centre. Say I sent you