Seeing might actually be the biggest problem in proving the point. Microsoft is very tight lipped about the experiment itself and the preview page that was up until earlier today mentioned a ten minute demonstration from a sales person on a 2 Gigabyte Intel Core Duo 2.2 Ghz HP computer.

Now that the website is up and running users can view short clips, really short ones from normal people who participated in the experiment. The website holds little information but at least a user breakdown. About 84% of the users are Windows XP users, 22% Apple OS users, 14% use other Microsoft Windows operating systems and 1% Linux. It seems that some users are accustomed to more than one operating system.

Some videos show that one person is actually demonstrating features of the “Mojave” operating system to the users, for example photo stitching that takes pictures and creates a panorama out of those photos.

That’s probably a very good way of getting the “wow” effect from people first by showing them nice features on fast hardware and then again by telling them that they did see Vista and not a super duper new Microsoft operating system.

It does however fail to cover important aspects of Vista criticism like that it is running extremely slow on older hardware even if the computer was purchased with Windows Vista or incompatibilities that still exist.

Here are a few sites and forums that have categories for website sales: Digitalpoint, Namepros and Sitepoint. I’m sure you can find dozens more easily.

The first thing that you can do is to check on various markets. Which sites and topics sell well, which do not. If you have a blog or website compare the traffic level and revenue with your own. Check all the advertisers and try to get into their advertising program as well to earn more money with your website.

But that is not the main advice and tip of this article. Buyers post all sorts of information when selling websites. Traffic level, earnings, visitors, search engine rankings, advertising schemes, number of pages, how many users have signed up for the newsletter and much more.

And here is what you can do with that information. Check Google and other search engines for the main keywords, see if those keywords spill out lots of websites writing about the same topic. If you only find blog posts for example you might have hit a gold mine.

Instead of buying that website for several thousand Dollars you build a website around the main keywords and theme. The main benefits should be clear.

1. You know the main keywords and can research additional ones that bring in additional users
2. You know that there are not many competing websites and that you can get a top 10 position easily with some SEO (onsite and offsite)
3. You know which traffic levels and earnings you can expect from that website, even if it would only rank 2nd or 3rd on the main keywords
4.Instead of paying hundreds or thousands of Dollars you only pay for a domain name, some hours of your time and some basic SEO (links)

This leads to the Advice to the buyer of a website. There will be others who will try to get some piece of the cake by building a website that looks similar to yours. This means that it very well can be that your traffic levels and or revenue will drop if you do not continue to work on the website.

A website with strong keyword links is much safer than one that only has a dozens of links and still takes the top spot in Google because of zero competing websites.

That’s it. A quick post, all thought up and written in about 10 minutes. Opinions ?

We all remember that AOL released similar data last year using a weak method to anonymize the data. It was possible to identify certain users that were conducting specific searches. The exact nature of the data that is being sold to the marketing companies is not known yet. Experts estimate that the ISPs receive about $0.40 per month per user which totals to $4.80 per year.

An ISP with 10000 users would gain $48000 per year for the data that they sell. Enough money to forget about the privacy rights of their customers. The question remains: how can you find out if your ISP is selling clickstream data ? You could try and call them and ask them directly but the guys from the hotlines probably do not even know what clickstream data is. A better way would be to call a representative or a official data protection officer.

The only possible way to counter this would be to use encryption, specifically encrypted vpns that make it impossible for the ISP to log what their users are doing.