The world's first Internet employee?

3:40 PM Saturday, April 29, 2006

[The next big thing, or maybe not.]

A few days ago I blundered into something which may be a major change in the way people can earn a living on the Internet. (Well, I didn't exactly blunder— I read a post on Emily Chang's blog eHub (see this note about her site) which referred me to a brand new site called Monthly Dollar. The creator of the site, who calls himself (herself?) Frodo, apparently launched it on April 21. Frodo claims he (she?) is the first person in history to be employed by the Internet itself, as distinct from being self-employed, or employed by a company of some kind. He asks that his "bosses" (I am one of them now) sign up via Pay-Pal to provide him (her?) with a dollar per month. The more "bosses" he (she?) gets, the higher his (her?) salary, which, at the very instant I'm writing this was $62 a month, enough to pay for a high-speed Internet connection and all its burdensome taxes, one would hope.)

So: what do I get for my dollar a month? Frodo promises that there will be private access to business-related information on his (her?) weblog, accessible only to the "bosses". What I really get, however, is a really cheap way to be an early adopter of a technological innovation that may turn into something big. If not, I'm out twelve bucks a year. That's what I pay just for certified mail fees for my April tax payments. When the first Newton came out, or the first iPod, or the first shares of Google stock (none of which I paid for) or an early America Online account (which I did pay for), there was no way I could have become involved for a buck a month. What can I expect for the future of Monthly Dollar? Frodo claims a lot of hits and a meteoric rise on the Alexa weblog traffic service, so there's a lot of interest there. I'm sure that we "bosses" can find something useful for Frodo to do, given his (her?) creativity. If not, we can always cancel our scheduled future monthly dollars.

So, who is this Frodo character, anyhow? A marketing honcho? Someone who was just fired? A twelve-year-old kid? He (she?) claims "I work with the net so much that I decided to make it official." Technorati reported that monthlydollar.com had 19 links at the time of this writing, including a favorable mention by the fascinating bizblogger Shel Israel, who has 955 links to his site, Naked Conversations. A Google search of "frodo" turned up the Tolkien character, of course, and an investment blogger with no link to monthlydollar.com. A whois search turned up an anonymous domain front called Domains by Proxy with an Arizona address. Frodo's monthlydollar private blog pages have not materialized yet, unless there is a link that I couldn't find. Is this no more an an advertising gimmick, an attempt to sell me a link for a buck a month? Or could this merely be a scam, a stunt, a 21st Century reiteration of P. T. Barnum's dictum that a sucker is born every minute. Even if that is true, Frodo, whoever he (she?) might be, has proven that 62 suckers at a buck apiece are worth at least as much as one sucker bilked for $62.

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