The best way to prepare for the exam is to study the review questions for each module and refer back to the readings if you need to refresh your understanding of a topic. Also, review the case studies that were assigned for each module. You can also review topics by listening to the podcasts.

I will be readily available online during the exam time period to monitor progress and to deal with any technical issues that might arise.

Alternate Exam Time

If for some reason you are unable to take the exam at the scheduled time, there is one alternative time offered: Sunday, December 10, from 7:00-9:00 p.m., via WebAssign.

Anyone who chooses to, may take the exam at the alternate time. However, if you start the exam on December 10, you must complete it then. No one will be allowed to retake the exam on December 12. Do not start the exam unless you are ready to finish it.

The exam questions on each date will be different, but both exams will share a similar format. There is no advantage to taking the exam one day or the other beyond what best fits your own work schedule. The alternate time is offered because a fair number of students have another exam to take on Tuesday evening.

Please contact me by email with any questions you may have. And be sure to check the forum again later in the week for any informational updates regarding the exam.

Good luck with the completion of your studies!

After listening to the weekly podcast, please complete the following assignments for the coming week:

– Spyware by Aaron Hackworth

– Pew Internet Report: Spyware by Susannah Fox

– The CAN-SPAM Act: Requirements for Commercial Emailers

– Code of Online Business Practices by BBBOnLine

About the Final Exam

The final exam will be held on Tuesday, December 12 between 7:00-9:00 PM and conducted online via WebAssign. The exam will cover all 15 modules. One part of the exam will consist of multiple choice questions. Another part will consist of one or two essay questions. Both parts of the exam will be limited by time.

The best way to prepare for the exam is to study the review questions for each module and refer back to the readings if you need to refresh your understanding of a topic. Also, review the case studies that were assigned for each module. You can also review topics by listening to the podcasts.

If, for any reason, you are unable to take the exam at the scheduled time, please inform me before December 5. Permission to complete the exam at another time will be granted only in accordance with university guidelines.

Please read the following articles:

– Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality by Edward W. Felten

– Law and Borders: The Rise of Law in Cyberspace by David R. Johnson and David G. Post

– Who Will Control the Internet? by Kenneth Neil Cukier

Review the case study on ICANN.

Have a great Thanksgiving holiday!

(1) After listening to the podcasts on Copyright, Trademark and Patents, please read the following items:

– “What is Intellectual Property?” by WIPO

– “What Every Business Should Know About Copyright” by Perkins and Coie

– “Fair Use” by the US Copyright Office

– “The Importance of Trademarks” by Perkins and Coie

– “What is a Business-Method Patent?” by Russ Weinzimmer

(2) Review the case study on the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

(3) View the guest lecture: Intellectual Property Protection for Computer Software and Business Methods by Gregory Hunt.

(1) After listening to the weekly podcast, please read:

– The New Vulnerability: Data Security and Personal Information by Daniel Solove

– Fair Information Practices in the Electronic Marketplace by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (pp. 1-39)

– Most People Are Privacy Pragmatists by Humphrey Taylor

– New Rule Will Protect Privacy of Children Online [b]and[/b] How to Comply by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission

(2) Please review the case study on DoubleClick and read about the company’s advertising network, DART, and the Boomerang service.

(3) Watch one of the following guest lectures:

– Privacy in an On Demand World by Harriet Pearson

– Privacy Management by Calvin Powers.

(4) Listen to the following special National Public Radio series on privacy:

– Conversations About Privacy: Is Anything Actually Private?

– Governing for Enterprise Security: How Much Security Is Enough?

– Insider Threat Study

– 2005 E-Crime Watch Survey (pages 1-32)

– Cybersecurity Today and Tomorrow by the National Research Council (read chapter 1)

– Secrets to the Best Passwords

– Security of the Internet (recommended reading for students who need to improve there understanding of basic concepts of Internet security).

You have the opportunity to view two of the world’s leading experts talk about network and software security as a supplement to this week’s lecture:

– Exploiting Software by Gary McGraw

– Viruses, Worms and Distributed Denial of Service by Avi Rubin

You might find the accompanying “Expert Interviews” with McGraw and Rubin interesting as well.

(1) Listen to the weekly podcast on Trust.

(2) Read the following:

– Consumer Fraud in the United States: An FTC Survey by Keith B. Anderson (read only the Executive Summary).

– Economics of Trust in the Information Economy by Gerardo Guerra.

– Leap of Faith: Using the Internet Despite the Dangers by Consumer Reports.

– Why Some Companies Are Trusted and Others Are Not: A Harris Poll by Humphrey Taylor

(3) Review the case study on Truste. Also, reflect back on the previous week’s case study on eBay. Think about how eBay fosters trust among buys and sellers, and the degree to which they succeed (or fail) and under what circumstances.

(4) In the forum, discuss your experiences as a consumer in the digital world, and if you can recall a situation when you trusted another party only to regret it later. Looking back, is there anything that might have given you a clue that your trust was unwarranted? How has the experience affected your behavior in other situations?

– The Internet’s Role in the Modern Purchase Process by DoubleClick.

– Best Practices in Multi-Channel Integration by J.C. Williams Group.

– Managing Channels of Distribution in the Age of E-Commerce by Kevin L. Webb.

The video guest lecture is “E-Commerce and Distribution Channels” by Bruce Merrifield.

Please do the following:

– Read “Managing Online Auctions” by Edieal Pinker, Abraham Seidmann and Yaniv Vakrat.

– Review the case study on eBay.

– Listen to the podcast on Auctions and eBay.

(1) Review Digital Automata and read the following:

– The Vision of Autonomic Computing by Kephart and Chess

– Patterns for e-Commerce Agent Architectures by Weiss

– The Semantic Web by Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila

– Electronic Commerce Recommender Applications by Schafer, Konstan and Riedl

(2) Listen to the podcast on Digital Automata. You may also want to watch the video lecture by John Riedl, who is one of the early developers of recommender systems.

(3) Try the following “Learning by doing” exercise with Netflix

If you are not already a customer, establish a free trial account with Netflix, the online DVD rental service. Please read the complete details about the free trial program. If you are already a Netflix customer, you might try a free trial with one of the competing services to draw a comparison. REMEMBER: when the trial period is over, Netflix will begin monthly billing. So you must cancel the subscription within the allotted time period, unless you want to continue using the service. Mark your calendar!

Once you have started the free trial, familiarize yourself with the company’s web site and make your movie selections.

As you use Netflix, you will gain a hands-on understanding of how the recommendation process works. Think about the benefits and limitations of the system. Are the recommendations helpful? Do the recommendations improve with time? Does the system expose you to movie selections that you might not otherwise have considered? What could be done to improve the system? If you have used Netflix for awhile, do you find the recommendation system plays a significant role in making your movie selections?

Given your experience with iTunes, how does the recommendation system compare between the two services? Do you find one better or more useful than the other?

Here is the solution:

Go to > Content Optimization > Content Performance > Content Drilldown. Locate the /cgi-bin directory. Select the appropriate time period from the calendar.

(1) number of page views for the week = 5,457

(2) average time per page view = 00:01:22 (or 82 seconds)

(3) total number of seconds viewing pages = 447,474

(4) divide by 60 to covert to minutes = 7,458

(5) divide by 60 to covert to hours = 124

(6) divide by the number of participants (40) = 3.1 hours per person for the week, on average.

The estimate could be higher or lower than the actual average amount of time due to a number of factors, including:

(1) In addition to forum participants, there are “lurkers” who just stop by to read without actually participating. So the number of people viewing pages is larger than 40 and one could dig deeper in the data to estimate the ratio of participants to lurkers. It is also true that participants will spend more time then lurkers, so the 4 hour estimate is probably not too far off.

(2) another consideration is how the time per pageview is calculated. Time is determined by the movement of the user from one page to another. If a user opens a page and then does nothing for 30 minutes or more, then the clock defaults to 10 seconds for the pageview — even though the user may have been reading the page for much longer. So the timing mechanism may in fact significantly underestimate pageview time.

There may be other considerations, as well.

(1) Read the articles:

– “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson (also listen to the radio interview with Anderson in the section “On the Airwaves”)

– “The Construction of Marketplace Architecture” by Francois Bar.

(2) Watch the talk by Scot Wingo. Scot is an NCSU alum and successful entrepreneur. Scot’s present company is ChannelAdvisor and he discusses many of the topics we have talked about in recent weeks. The talk is about 28 minutes long.

(3) Review the case study on Dell Computer. I recommend, if you have time, to watch the informative talk “A Conversation with Michael Dell”, an informal Q&A session that was held at MIT. At about 20 minutes in, he begins talking specifically about the Dell business model.

(4) Participate in the discussion on Digital Markets.

(5) Complete the “learning by doing” exercise to be posted shortly.

Once the iTunes software application is installed, use it to visit the iTunes Music Store and familiarize yourself with how the store is organized. When you are ready, budget a few dollars and experiment with purchasing some songs (also, Apple provides a free new song every Tuesday, just look in the center of the iTunes home page).

If you are new to iTunes, spend an hour acquiring hands-on experience with iTunes’ features and interface. Make sure you can understand the business model and the attraction of legal music downloads for consumers of music. Then consider the following questions:

(1) Regarding your use of iTunes:

– How did you decide what music to purchase? What does iTunes do to enable and encourage the search and selection process?
– Did customer reviews play a role in your selection?
– Did the list of “top artist downloads” influence your selection?
– Did a friend influence your selection of music?
– How did your selection of music differ from what you might have purchased off-line?
– What is an “iMix” and why is it important to the iTunes consumer experience?
– Beyond music, what other kinds of content are being affected by iTunes?
– Most music on iTunes can be purchased for $0.99 per song. What are the benefits and limitations of the Apple’s pricing strategy? What effect does it have on consumer behavior?

(2) Regarding the emergence of legal digital music downloads:

– How does iTunes change the established music industry in terms of the the creation, recording, distribution and marketing of music?
– How does iTunes change how we can “consume” and listen to music?
– How, ultimately, will the emergence of digital music downloads alter the value chain in the music industry?
– How does Apple position iTunes as part of it’s overall business model for digital music?
– What other business models are there for digital music and how do they compare with iTunes?

Be sure to read the iTunes case study

(1) After a thorough reading of the Business Models web page and listening to my podcast, please review the following items in “Things to read”:

– Digital 2.0: Powering a Creative Economy at the World Economic Forum.

– What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software by Tim O’Reilly

(2) review the following case study: iTunes. Look for the “Learning by doing” exercise for iTunes to be posted.

(3) Watch the following videos:

– Users, Not Money: the Google Business Model by Marissa Mayer.

– How Does Google Actually Make Money? by Larry Page.

– “Innovating at Amazon” interview with Jeff Bezos.

(4) There is a second WebAssign exercise using Google Analytics. It is due to be completed before Friday.

As of last week (Week 3), on average students have made 15 contributions to the forum and most students have participate each week (you can review your own record by selecting the profile icon in one of your posts and look for the link “view recent posts). If you find yourself significant below the average, you may be in jeopardy of doing poorly when it comes time to evaluate performance. Quantity of posts is not the primary metric for evaluation. But students must allow themselves the opportunity to participate in the discussion enough times and in a meaningful manner to end up at the favorable end of the grade distribution.

What makes for a good forum post is a mixture of things that demonstrate you have cultivated an informed view of the subject matter. Of course, not every forum post is a gem. It’s meant to be a discussion. But somewhere in that discussion there needs to be substance.

Offering up observations about your personal experience in not enough. Good discussions occur when participants are tie experience closely to a reading assignment. Relating one’s experience is not necessarily adding value to the conversation unless it furthers the discussion in a tangible way toward a meaningful observation, in light of the knowledge you are acquiring. Go beyond relating experience to make a meaningful contribution to the discussions.

Here are examples of a few good threads from last week’s discussion:

Karat’s web personalization started by Greg).

What makes craigslist work?, started by Rohan.

There were other good discussion threads, as well. Generally, the discussions have been improving each week and becoming more focused. When threads go off-topic, duplicate topics already started in other threads, or get ahead of the reading schedule can be a problem. Do your best to enter the discussion early in the weekly cycle and shy aways from coming to the conversation for the first time at 10:30 on Tuesday evenings.

(1) If this subject is new to you, start with the brief readings in the “Tutorial” section, which will give you the basics of web log data. Then read:

– e-Metrics: Business Metrics For The New Economy by Matt Cutler and Jim Sterne

– Measuring Web Traffic by Andrei Malacinski

– Evolve Into a Data Driven Organization by Jason Burby

(2) Links are provided to several commercial tools on the Web Analytics module page. Please take a look at as many as you have time for, and especially for Google Analytics.

(3) The “learning by doing” exercise will involve using Google Analytics, a web-based service that we use to measure site usage for digitalenterprise.org. Look for my next post on this exercise.

Thankfully, we can learn a great deal by simply using a site like Amazon.com, with a careful eye to how it functions.

In this exercise, you will go to Amazon.com and click through the selection and purchase of a book (or other item). A reading list has been created for our course, which offers several book titles in each of the discussion topic modules we cover. Follow the link below to the Amazon.com page with the lists and choose one topic category. Within the selected category, examine each of the half-dozen or so books listed and select for purchase the one you find most interesting.

Professor Rappa’s Amazon.com Listmania Lists

(Of course, Amazon.com sells many things other than books and so this exercise can be completed just as easily by purchasing another item you may need. If you are not in a position to buy something online right now, you can perform the exercise up to the point of purchase without actually buying the product–something many people do all the time for different reasons.)

At each step along the way you should look carefully at the web page and take notes (or screen shots, if you prefer) and answer for yourself the following questions:

(1) What objective do you want to accomplish as the customer, and what does Amazon.com do to aid you in accomplishing it?

(2) What objective does Amazon.com what to accomplish, how does it achieve its objective, and how well does it succeed in your case?

(3) Is there any step in which you are unable to accomplish your next objective? Is there anything that Amazon has overlooked in the process?

(4) How does Amazon use information about you or the decisions you make to aid you in accomplishing its objectives or yours?

(5) In making your product selection, what does Amazon.com do to help (or hinder) your ability to succeed in this part of the process?

(6) Once you made your selection, what did Amazon.com do to help (or hinder) your ability to succeed to completing the transaction?

(7) Once your completed the transaction, what did Amazon.com do to help (or hinder) your ability to perform any post-purchase activities?

(8) Overall, how would you characterize the Amazon.com business process?

If you are already a customer of Amazon.com, you might want to clear your browser cookie cache before starting. This will prevent Amazon.com from recognizing you as a return customer until after you log in (which can be delayed until you are ready to consummate the purchase).

This is an optional, but recommended exercise. If you have another book in mind, or a reason to purchase something else from Amazon, then by all means you can use that instead for completing the exercise. If you wish to perform the exercise on another retail site, that is fine too. Please note, completion of the exercise necessitates making a credit card purchase, but the amount spent can be very modest (as you will see), especially in light of how much you can learn by doing it. You may also choose to do the exercise and omit the last step (actual purchase), if you are unwilling or unable to use a credit card online.

Note: It is very important for you to understand that the exercise is purely an educational opportunity. It is not an endorsement of Amazon.com, it’s policies or practices. I think we can learn from Amazon.com both positive and negative practices. You should also understand that I do not have a personal financial stake in Amazon.com, nor do I receive any benefit from purchases made from my Amazon.com book list. The exercise could easily be completed using any other major online retailer. Amazon.com is recommended only because we are studying the company as part of the course.

(1) Please read the following items in the “Things to Read” section:

– Personalizing the User Experience on ibm.com by Clare-Marie Karat, et al.

– Customer Effective Websites by Jodie Dalgleish

– Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability by Jakob Nielsen

– The Need for Web Design Standards by Jakob Nielsen

– Introduction to Web Accessibility by W3C

(2) This week there are two case studies to review, which represent extreme ends of the spectrum. Amazon.com has probably spent more than any other company on understanding the design and architecture of digital business processes, while craigslist shows us a more down-to-earth formula for success.

(3) Watch the interesting talk at MIT by Amazon.com CEO, Jeff Bezos: “The Earth’s Most Customer Centric Company: Differentiating with Technology.”

(4) See also the “learning by doing” exercise.

FORUM DISCUSSION FEEDBACK

The forum discussion is generally proceeding well, though a few students should carefully assess the situation and redouble their efforts to participate. Over the the first two weeks, the number of posts per student ranges from a high of 20 to a low of 2. The average number of contributions during the period is between 8 and 9. Although the quality of contributions matters most, a below average level of participation is generally not a successful learning strategy. By contributing more, a student has more of an opportunity to demonstrate a solid understanding of the subject each week.

You can assess your own situation by viewing your forum profile and selecting the link to your post history.

In this week’s module Navigating the Web, we examine the in’s-and-out’s of finding things (and being found) on the Internet. As you might expect, we will take a close look at Google, now the epicenter of search, as a counterpoint to last week’s look at the search pioneer, Yahoo.

Here are the things you need to do in the coming week before class:

(1) Read the following items in the “Things to Read” section of Navigating the Web:

* The Google Legacy: Google Technology by Stephen Arnold

* Search Engine Users by Deborah Fallows

* Buying Your Way In: Search Engine Advertising Chart by Danny Sullivan

* How Much Information? by Lyman and Varian (read only the Executive Summary).

* Recommended reading: Into the Mind of the Searcher by Gord Hotchkiss.

The following short articles provide some basic information, which I recommend for those with no prior study of search engines:

* How Search Engines Work and How Search Engines Rank Web Pages by Danny Sullivan

(2) Review the Google case study and learn everything you possibly can about its business and how companies can use Google’s rapidly expanding advertising services.

(3) As usual, contribute to the forum discussion on Navigation and complete the Week 2 review exercise in WebAssign.

(4) Check back daily for additional instructor notices, including this week’s “learning by doing” exercise on Google.

Follow-up on Week 1:

If you have not already done so, be sure to complete the learning by doing exercise on Flickr and then read my follow-up on more things you can do to learn about how the service works.

Generally speaking, I am pleased with the results of Week 1. Posts in the forum have been good overall. When you can, spend some time to read what your classmates have been discussing, and think about how you can make contributions that add value. Reading what your peers have said is the best way to gauge your own performance.

In this task you will join a photo sharing service, Flickr (if you are not already a member), upload a photo of yourself and assign me as one of your contacts. I will then assign you to a photo group for students in Digital Enterprise in the current semester. Once in the group you can share the photo of yourself with the group and annotate it with your name and information about yourself.

Steps:

(1) Visit Flickr and creating an account. Membership is free.

(2) Once you are a member, go to the “People” menu and select “People Search”. Then search for me (Michael Rappa). You should find me easily at the top of the results. Click on my photo to add me as a contact. Then follow the link to add me as a contact. On the subsequent page, select “Mark as a Friend? and submit OK.

(3) As a member with me on your contact list, I can then add you to the Digital Enterprise class photo group. Once you receive the invitation from me to join the group, you can join the group and upload your photo.*

(4) After uploading your photo annotate it with a “note” including your name and hometown. Apply other notes as you wish to describe the photo, as needed.

(5) “Tag” your photo with the word “digitalenterprise” and any other tags you wish.

(6) After you receive my invitation, you can add your photo to the Digital Enterprise photo pool. Select your photo menu link “Organize”, on the right select the “your groups” tab and click on the yellow star icon to expand. In the center, select the link to “load your photos”. Then drag the photo you wish to the group.

(7) Come back in a few days and meet your classmates!

When you are done with the task, you can learn more by reading the Flickr Case Study.

*If you do not have a digital photo of yourself and are unable to obtain one quickly, you can substitute the NC State University mascots, Mr. Wuf or Ms. Wuf.

Here are the things that need to be done in the coming week:

* If you have not already done so, log into WebAssign and complete the “student survey”. Note, only registered students have access to WebAssign. So if you are not yet registered, please be patient. Registration usually takes 24 hours to update in WebAssign. Contact me if you experience any problems.

* Read the the following items in the “Things to Read” section of the first module: Introduction: Being Digital.

— “We Are the Web” by Kevin Kelly

— “The Mainstreaming of Online Life” by Lee Rainie and John Horrigan

* After you finish your reading assignments, complete the review exercise in WebAssign before the deadline 11 pm next Monday.

* Review the case study on Yahoo! to familiarize yourself with Yahoo!’s history and current business.

* Review the case study on Flickr to familiarize yourself with the company and its services.

* If you have not already done so, register in the Forum. Use a “public name” that will allow me to recognize who you are and your email of record with NCSU. Read the forum guidelines carefully.

* Once you have completed the readings, join the forum discussion on the Introduction.

* If you have not already done so, read About the Course and Administrivia.

* Familiarize yourself with the Weekly Timetable and keep to the deadlines.

* Complete the “Learning by Doing” exercise for Flickr, which will be described in my next posted message.

Have a great week and be sure to contact me with any questions!

Once you have started the free trial, familiarize yourself with the company’s web site and make your movie selections. Get going on this now and in few weeks I will give you specific questions to consider as part of this exercise. Until then, enjoy watching the movies (it will be Spring break soon enough)!

Once the iTunes software application is installed, use it to visit the iTunes Music Store and familiarize yourself with how the store is organized. When you are ready, budget a few dollars and experiment with purchasing some songs (also, Apple provides a free new song every Tuesday, just look in the center of the iTunes home page).

If you are new to iTunes, spend an hour acquiring hands-on experience with iTunes’ features and interface. Make sure you can understand the business model and the attraction of legal music downloads for consumers of music. Then consider the following questions:

(1) Regarding your use of iTunes:

– How did you decide what music to purchase? What does iTunes do to enable and encourage the search and selection process?
– Did customer reviews play a role in your selection?
– Did the list of “top artist downloads” influence your selection?
– Did a friend influence your selection of music?
– How did your selection of music differ from what you might have purchased off-line?
– What is an “iMix” and why is it important to the iTunes consumer experience?
– Beyond music, what other kinds of content are being affected by iTunes?
– Most music on iTunes can be purchased for $0.99 per song. What are the benefits and limitations of the Apple’s pricing strategy? What effect does it have on consumer behavior?

(2) Regarding the emergence of legal digital music downloads:

– How does iTunes change the established music industry in terms of the the creation, recording, distribution and marketing of music?
– How does iTunes change how we can “consume” and listen to music?
– How, ultimately, will the emergence of digital music downloads alter the value chain in the music industry?
– How does Apple position iTunes as part of it’s overall business model for digital music?
– What other business models are there for digital music and how do they compare with iTunes?

Be sure to read the iTunes case study

To do this exercise, you will access my Google Analytics account to view the reports for digitalenterprise.org. You access the account using your Google Gmail login simply by visiting the address above. (If you have not sent me your Gmail address, please do so I can grant access.)

If you do not already have a Gmail account, contact me and I will send an invitation.

Or if you prefer, you can create a generic Google account by going to Google Accounts, enter your current email address and choose a password. Once you’ve finished registering, you’ll receive a verification email. Clicking the link in that email will complete the account creation process. Once you have a working Google Account, send my the email address for the account and I will grant access to Google Analytics.

When you login to Google Analytics you will see a menu with various types of analysis. Note the default view is for the last seven days of data. You will need to change the calendar to look at specific periods of time. Mostly we will focus on the month of January, 2006.

By Friday there will be a review exercise in WebAssign on Google Analytics. Download the exercise and make a printed copy. Then see if you can answer each question by looking through the analysis of our web site in Google Analytics. The exercise is not time-limited. When you are done answering the questions with Urchin, you can return to WebAssign and log in again to fill in the answers and then submit the assignment.

Please feel welcome to share comments and questions in the Web Analytics section of the forum.

After you review the case study, try your hand at the following Google services:

(1) Create a Gmail account. Gmail is currently in beta and new accounts are by invitation only. So if you do not yet have an account (or a friend with one), contact me and I will have an invitation sent to you. Use Gmail and get familiar with how it works and why the service is important to Google’s business strategy. We will return to a discussion of Gmail later in the semester.

(2) Create Google Alerts for topics of interest to you. Select a term or phrase (in quotes) just like you would when searching Google. Then choose which index (news, web, or groups), the frequency of alerts, and send the alerts to your Gmail account. Be careful. I suggest limiting the Alert to news items (a much smaller index) and choosing keywords that are sufficiently narrow. You can experiment simply by searching the keyword on Google News to see how many links are returned. You want it to great alerts that yield a reasonable small number of links that accurately reflects want you are looking for. Set the Alert to run daily. When you are done experimenting, you can delete the Alert.

(3) Familiarize yourself with Froogle by searching for a product and then carefully reviewing the results. You might try something easy like a digital camera. Think about what Froogle offers consumers and whether or not it is a useful service. Also, think about what it means for the businesses which are selling the product you searched for. Make note of how many businesses are selling the product on Froogle. What is the spread from low to high prices listed? What may explain any variation you see? If you wanted to purchase the item, how would you choose which retailer to buy it from?

(4) View the Google Adwords demo and learn how to advertise using the service.

(5) OPTIONAL, but highly recommended: If you really want to learn how Google Adwords works, then do the following exercise.

Begin by deciding what you want to advertise. If you are looking for a new job, you can advertise yourself. Start by placing your resume online (I suggest you do so as a PDF or HTML document). If you do not have the ability to do this, send me your resume, and I will do it for you. Or you can advertise something other than yourself, like a business, school, club, or other organization in which you are a member.

Step 1. Start by setting up a Google Adwords account. (This requires a credit card.)

Step 2. Once you have an account, create a “keyword-targeted” campaign, and select language and customer location for the campaign.

Step 3. Create a headline and description for your advertisement. The display URL could be a shorten version of the actual destination URL where your resume resides.

Step 4. Choose keywords that you describe your skills (if you are advertising yourself) or your organization, which people might search for using Google.

Step 5. THIS IS IMPORTANT: Limit how much you spend on the experiment to a very small amount by doing the following:

(a) set the daily limit on how much to spend to $1.00

(b) set the CPC (cost-per-click) at $0.05 or $0.10 (i.e., 5 or 10 click-throughs per day)

Step 6. Review and save the campaign.

Step 7: THIS IS IMPORTANT: follow the link “edit the campaign setting” and set the “end date” to end the campaign within 5 days. By doing this, the cost of the experiment will be limited to the $5 set-up fee and a maximum of $5 for the 5 days of click-throughs, for a total of $10. The total may be less if the daily click-through rate does not reach the limit set.

Step 8: Monitor your campaign over the subsequent days to see what kind of click-through rate you are getting on your keywords and adjust the campaign, if necessary.

When you are done with the experiment, close your account unless you plan to use it again in the future.

Be sure to read *everything* about how the program works before you conduct this experiment.

REMEMBER: Do this exercise only after you understand how the AdWords program works.