The Good Guy: AGLOCO

Companies like gather.com and mypoints.com (and myriads of others) boast that they have great communities that pay the members points. The points can be redeemed for merchandise. But the problem is that you do not know how much the merchant paid for the merchandise or how much your points are actually worth. The likely story is that you and the community work for pennies per hour while the dot.com gets rich. The community does all the work for less than minimum wage, while the guys who own the website/community get rich. That's where the good guy comes in -- and that good guy is AGLOCO.

AGLOCO is a member owned community that gives 90% of its profits back to the members. AGLOCO's philosophy is "We also feel that the early users who told friends about YouTube or MySpace or even Google probably deserved something too, but no referral system was available to record their work."



Supporters claim it's a good way for individuals to take advantage of the immense revenues that are being raised through web-based advertising—which they say have been concentrated among a few key players such as Google and Yahoo.

"The idea is, we're not going to use your search engine unless you pay us to do it," said David Martin, a former vice president of business intelligence for AllAdvantage. "It's almost like a union [for Internet users]."

Oliver Brock, the former chief technology officer of AllAdvantage and currently an assistant professor of robotics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said he too supports AGLOCO.

"The basic business idea behind it, which only a few people [understand]" is the "model of an infomediary," he said. "That is, someone who [stands] between the consumers and producers.” That model can work today, he added.