May 2000: The other day, I was reading an article on MAY PLANETARY ALIGNMENT By Dorene A. Carrel mailto:bf220@scn.org a Seattle-area astrologer who provides consultations for natal, relationship and relocation charts. In her article, Dorene cites astrological reasons, due to these current planetary alignments, for changes in our banking and monetary systems and goes on to say that perhaps bartering may become wave of future.

I was stunned by *coincidence* with information I had researched some years before for one of my teeth-cutting articles in my new career as a journalist after spending 20 odd years in management accountancy and business administration.

We are seeing this all happening now, every day on WWW, even though I didn't know I meant Internet when I wrote original article. We barter daily for freebies, reciprocal links and more in order to promote our online businesses. There are many of us trying to eke a living in this way against a backdrop of rising unemployment and a lack of other support systems. And it ain't always easy!

Read on, I know it will sound like doom, gloom and bleakness. It isn't: I hope that in fact it will give you motivation, inspiration and confidence in what you are doing. I think Internet is *right* place to be. Follow all advice you'll read to keep persevering in your efforts and don't falter when going gets tough. The only way you can fail is to give up.

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In much same way as we are headed for enormous environmental changes, so we are headed for economic changes on a scale that none of us has witnessed before or will again.

Since mid 16th century, world's economies have suffered regular depressions and it is now recognised that there is a 60 year debt cycle. It doesn't take much to realise that since last, The Great Depression, fell in 1930's, that we in '90's are therefore slap-bang in another.

However, there is also another cycle that is even more impacting. That is a 500 year cycle, which we are due to undergo around year 2000. No-one has yet discovered any scientific reason for this cycle, but it certainly exists. In fact, it is already underway and it is combination of these two economic cycles that is why there will be such an enormous revolution in world economic structure as we know it.

We only have to look back into history to see what happened at previous 500 year intervals, to see proof and measure likely impact of what we will witness. History does repeat itself. It was between 50 BC and 50 AD that Christian religion began and Roman Republic was replaced by an Empire. Around 500 AD, Roman Empire collapsed. At 1000 AD, Dark Ages ended to begin Middle Ages.

I have learned that in age of Internet time, where decision-making processes are considered obsolete if they take more than 3 days and everything needs to be done yesterday, companies are spending millions of dollars on Internet ad buys without consideration towards fraud.

While we would all like to close our eyes and wish that any online business will deal with is respectable and would not deceive us we must realize what is actually occurring behind scenes. In an economy where business valuations can gain millions of dollars in a short time based on trafficking analysis an unscrupulous businessman may be tempted to inflate his site's statistics for personal gain. Even though many Internet sites have their web trafficking numbers audited by third party vendors there are numerous sites on Internet that police their own numbers. We are simply to trust these sites, on their good faith, that they will not deceive us.

Since Internet is a wild land with no rules many sagacious and forward-thinking individuals are pushing for standards. Not just standards of a programming language but standards that can be applied to most facets of e-business. While we are all waiting for these standards however, we should be responsible consumers and questions where are ad dollars are going.

I know of one large Internet company that was spending several hundred thousand dollars per month for online advertising and was not even aware that almost a quarter of their ad buy was going to unaudited websites. These websites could have inflated their numbers or demographics to justify a higher CPM and there is no way to verify it!