Of course, in order to be truly effective, there needs to be a lot of people opening Flattr accounts, and lots of content online for them to Flattr.

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People divulge a lot of personal information online, create entire online identities, in the process leaving rows and rows of digital footprints.

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Armstrong says a lot of the strong content people are still not focused on online yet.

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"A lot of companies just throw a catalog online and hope people buy stuff in cyberspace, " says Stan Dolberg, software strategies director at Forrester Research.

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In fact, understanding how consumers respond to an online ad is a lot harder than simply tallying up the number of people who click on it.

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Now we all share, we recommend people to each other, people put contracts online, and by sharing stuff we can get around a lot of problems.

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He also gets a lot of sales form word of mouth, referrals and from people who read about his company somewhere else online or in a magazine.

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"I made some big mistakes, and I know I let a lot of people down, but I also learned some tough lessons, " he said in a video posted online.

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Mr. Stricker added that Google shares these new companies' mission of providing more authoritative answers to questions for which there may not be a lot of content online currently, citing its real-time search services and a product called Knol, which allows people to upload information about topics on which they are experts, as examples.

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