a free (for now) catalog of books, software, etc.

[Donald Tveter <drt -at- MCS -dot- COM>]

                   The People's Marketplace

The World Wide Web has made possible another new way for individuals and
businesses to market the products they produce.  Its quite
straightforward to make available a hypertext based catalog on the net
for people to browse through.  Given only a limited amount of space in
the file you can still link to text on your own system where you can
have the largest, most informative ad that will fit within your file
space quota and it can include sound, video and still pictures.

There are really no limits to what can be advertised this way, a book
you've written, softare you've produced, home made quilts, hand carved
wooden duck decoys, etc.  except for my catalogs I am not allowing
material that contributes to moral decline.  If this upsets you remember
you are free to start your own catalog.  Also these catalogs are
designed for marketing goods and services that are in a continuous
supply over a year or so.  So ads to sell individual items like a
computer or a set of old textbooks will be rejected.

This plan is a new development and I don't have much to advertise yet.
At this point I want to especially encourage software and technical book</a>
ads.  For instance not long ago when I went looking for a simple
graphics viewer for my PC all I had to go on was a listing at
oak.oakland.edu with one line per entry, not enough to get an idea of
what the software can do.  With the People's Marketplace you in effect
get an ad as large as you want.

I'm sure that this approach to advertising will eventually become the
standard when everyone is connected to the net however for now I don't
believe you will sell very many copies of your product using this method
of advertising.  To increase your sales I must increase traffic through
this page but to increase traffic I have to increase the number of
entries listed.  So please tell everyone you can about this service.
But to get the process started if you can send me a small ad of 512
bytes or less I will include it in an appropriate file.  Please tell me
what category you think is appropriate.  Remember when you include one
or more www or ftp links you in effect get an unlimited size ad.  When I
get enough entries (perhaps on the order of a 1000 or more) I plan to
charge for ads whatever the market will bear, perhaps $1 to $5/month for
a minimum of probably one year but for now this service is free.  There
will be adequate warning given here of when this change will take place
and ads entered when this service was free will be simply deleted unless
you choose to pay for the ad.

The People's Marketplace is available at:

http://www.mcs.com/~drt/peoplesmp/intro.html

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                        Don Tveter drt -at- mcs -dot- com
http://www.mcs.com/~drt/home.html     ftp://ftp.mcs.com/mcsnet.users/drt
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