If you happen to be a major company that produces a popular development framework, operating system, or even just a popular application, your product is likely a bigger business than what you see on your quarterly statements. In the computer world, where everything complicated is voodoo to those without the knowledge and those with the knowledge are constantly craving a new edge, all manner of books, tapes, videos, and other instructional sets are all the rage.

Whether it’s the latest release of .NET, a new version of Ubuntu, or a new version of Adobe Photoshop fresh off the press, the information industry is gigantic and there are people making easy money simply by knowing how to use your products.

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AC/DC just recently dropped a new album called ‘Black Ice’ that quickly soared to one of the best selling albums of 2008 with nearly 800,000 copies sold already. Even AC/DC themselves are surprised by the numbers they are seeing this early in the albums life. What does this mean for the rest of the industry?

It means that if you put out a good album, people will buy it.

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I saw this on slashdot the other day. Very good essay by Lawrence Lessig. Discusses why the copyright wars are ultimately detrimental to our society. If you haven’t read this yet do yourself a favor and do it now. Read more for full text.

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The web is a big place, a scary place, and a malicious place. Beyond that, its a cesspool of information about anyone, anything, and any place. Information about you is just a Google away, and there is all kinds of stuff you didn’t even know was there. If your name ever appeared in the news, or your schools newspaper, or your neighbor wrote a nasty rant about you on a forum… it’s all there and people can find it.

Maybe some of these things are out of your control. If someone posts your name on a website, in a lot of cases there isn’t much you can do about it. However, save yourself with aspects that are in your control. I’ll bet that 8 out of 10 people are members of some kind of social networking site (Facebook, MySpace, etc) and have some form of personal information on there. A small percentage of those people have A LOT of information on there (their hobbies, their friends, their job, their websites, their pictures, their videos… everything).

For the percentage of people willing to share it all, go nuts, but make sure you only share it with people you WANT to share it with.

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I might get castrated here by about 5,000 men and women attempting to profit from what I am about to neg down, but I don’t care. There comes a time when the internet needs to know the truth, and this is definitly that time.

Making money on the internet is much harder than you would think. Granted, I have not been in the business much at all, but I was lured by the “lol easy to make teh monies in 5 easy steps” type of games and decided to give it a try. It’s not do simple as they would like you to believe.

Here are a couple of things to beware of before you embark on a journey towards web monetization.

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At a meeting in Paris Thursday, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will vote on two key proposals.

The first would allow domains that do not use Latin characters, meaning domain names using Chinese, Arabic or Cyrillic letters. The other proposal would allow domains to use nearly any letter or number combination, up to 64 characters.

If ICANN approves the proposals, the world of .com and .org and country names like .jp or .fr would be opened to a much wider choice, such as .hotel or .sex.

Just the thought of .sex has bloggers predicting an auction frenzy, as almost any word in any language could become a domain name extension.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/25/domain.names/index.html

Touchdown. Now ill be able to register www.hot.sex!