One red paper clip

Just now (1:00 PM Helsinki time) I was reading a quite interesting article about how a person would like to own a house just by trading one red paperclip. I guess you would be thinking what an absurd idea but before forming any strong opinions just go to this blog http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/ through which he is trying to do that trading .It is amazing how far he has gone ,by consecutive trading of one red paperclip , he has now for one year a House in Phoenix (US).

There was another story which also looked absurd to me when I first heard about it 6 to 8 months back .The idea was that person was selling each pixel in home page for 1$ .i.e. If I would like to put my name BANUPRASAD on his home page then I would have to pay number of pixels it takes to write my name * 1$ (if it takes 100 pixels then it would be 100$).In this way he was planning to sell 1 million pixels on his home page and make 1million $.Which he aptly named as million dollar home page. At first when I heard about this my question was why would somebody pay even single penny to put add on a personal homepage which serves no unique content to attract visitors. But as the time showed the entire million pixels is now sold out. And the person is proud owner of million dollars.

These 2 examples are not only unique but demonstrates 2 things

1) How web as platform is empowering any common man with some idea to make money without having to invest anything. (I.e. lead to thousands of ideas being tried out)

2) Second important thing is changing social behavior aspect (i.e. people would like to experiment and be part of something different ) this change can be seen in different accepts like how reality TV is becoming popular compared to professional artist involved and developed content .How user generated content like blogs etc are heart of next generation web (check out my first posting ).How so much software is being developed in open source community without any financial gains (some doing to be part of community, some doing to express their technical skills in peer community).