Begging on the web

For as long as people have been making money the hard way, there have been people trying to make some the easy way. Easy, as in, begging for it. In most countries beggars are largely only visible in crowded cities. In third world countries, they are visible outside of cities and on the web they’re visible everywhere!

Most of you should have heard of or visited The Million Dollar Homepage run by a student hoping to raise a million dollars to fund his education. There have been many other spin offs from this original idea.

As people have begun to realize that Internet users don’t feel a big pinch to donate $1 to someone else, having thousands of people do the same can raise quite a bit of cash.

That being said, we now have beggars on the Internet who have their grimy little digital paws and cups raised towards anyone and everyone asking money for such things as buying a new laptop. A case-in-point is this genius 19 year old from Texas hoping to become a switcher. Visit the site to read this sob story and reasoning behind asking visitors to donate money so that they can replace his old clunker of a laptop with a spanking new 20″ iMac.

Is this really innovative use of the Internet or just on-line panhandling?

Cheers

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