Big cyber-spender

by Michelle Chihara

For the past five months or so, every dollar that Bruce Weinberg has spent, he has spent online -- minus one bike-tire purchase made in a crisis. Weinberg, an assistant professor at Boston University's School of Management, has been sticking to a strict vow of cyber-purity since last September. Although the experiment was slated to end this month, his online diary chronicling the exercise has caught the eye of a publisher, so Weinberg is toying with the idea of extending the project. Either way, he plans to pass his insights on to the business world.

With everything from shampoo to vintage Rolls-Royces available on the Web, online-only shopping has had just one drawback for Weinberg: not being able to pick up that extra dozen eggs for his (pregnant) wife on his way home from work. Otherwise, he says, "I feel empowered. There's so much information online."

And he isn't just a consumer anymore. "I sold something on eBay, and now . . . I've got my own domain name," he says. "And I think that would apply for other people. On eBay, you can read through this sequence in people's write-ups: first they were just buyers, then they were occasional sellers, then heavy sellers." Anyone, he notes, can "become a kind of affiliate for big stores" by selling corporate products through a personal home page and earning a small percentage of each transaction. "You can just create a link -- it's really, really easy," he says.

In his breathless enthusiasm, Weinberg sounds remarkably like the first wave of Internet gurus. But the people who first spoke in rapt terms about the Internet were aging hippies who hoped for social change through networked activism. A far cry from the networked evolution we see today: user to superconsumer to corporate affiliate. But these days, "intimacy" is a corporate buzzword, and talk of revolution belongs in business school.

Weinberg's online diary can be viewed at http://people.bu.edu/celtics/.