Welcome to the Jungle

In the days of yore, when the net was young, it was like an idyllic wilderness. Wherever you washed up, you had a good chance of it being populated by fellow enterprising frontiersmen (and not women, let's be honest). People that you could look in the eye, and shake by the hand. People you may not agree with, but could respect for being kindred spirits. Ok, that's mostly crap. It was full of tech nerds and social maladjusts looking for porn.

The point is that times have changed. The internet has become civilized. No more is it the bastion of the young male waiting for whole minutes at a time for his carefully crafted witty commentary to successfully post to the firefly (and I don't mean the show...other old timers surely remember spending many hours perusing the latest chatertainment available on The Fly) chatroom. Instead, the internet is now a place for your mom to post a brownie recipe. A place for your grandmother to read steamy Rockford Files fanfic. A place for your dad to research his bizarre dream of being a professional amateur Crappie fisherman.

While the verdant fields and sparkling lakes of the net may be gone forever, the jungle remains. It has become a kind of urban jungle (ruthlessly over-extending the analogy!). The kind of place where strange people will sell you sparkling things. Where ladies of lapsed virtue will offer delights that you never knew existed but can't lust without. As a seasoned internet vet, I know well enough to avoid this kind of thing. After all, it could be dangerous. It could be a scam. Unethical Romanians (not to pick on Romania, but when my identity was actually stolen, it was by Romanians) could be poised in the wings, just waiting to abscond with my identity!

And I was perfectly content to do so. I liked my safe browsing along the approved and secure tubes of the internet. However, when Sarz was pitching this blog idea to me, it caused me to hearken back to the old days. I realized what I had become. I'd gone from crushing along to the Metal of the internet to softly bopping my head to the internet equivalent of Soft and Easy Jazz.

Well, no more! Time to pack my bags, grab the elephant gun, and load up for bear. Time to explore the world of Snake Oil and Health Tonic that is the 'Make Money Doing Nothing' section of the internet. As Sarz says in her post, we're gonna run the gamut. We're giving our our precious email addresses all over the internet. We're field testing any page that passes our stringent 'Well, it looks ok' testing of legitimacy. Do they pay? When? How much, how often? Are they filling my inbox with spam? Am I getting loaded with malware, spyware, viruses, poison, xrays, cancer, doublecancer, or herpes? Can I really stare at lolcats while heaven showers me with free pennies?

Stick around and you'll find out. What's more, should we manage to find any good stuff in this river of dross, we'll pass the word along.