You are famous. I am not sure if you realized that until this week when TIME Magazine put you on the cover (literally on the cover - it only took 6,965,000 pieces of Mylar). You are the Person of the Year. You contribute to YouTube, you blog about your life on MySpace, you post your vacation pictures on Flickr.

Why do you do that? You could answer that question by posting your own dissertation on wikipedia. To save you the time I can answer it for you: You frequent those sites to view content created by other people, and post on those sites to add your voice to the conversation either just for close friends or the world at large. Narcissus may have been enamored with himself, but the rest of us are more enamored with, well, the rest of us. Stated more eloquently, Metcalf’s law claims that the value of the network is equal to the square of the number of users of the network. Clearly the first person to buy a telephone saw his purchase became much more valuable when the second person bought a telephone and so on. Talking to yourself is overrated.

After all, the world of You is really the world of Us online. UsTube, OurSpace, don’t have the same ring to them? That’s what they are though, a worldwide virtual kibbutz that makes the internet more valuable. The internet today reminds me of Steve Wozniak’s US festival from the early 80’s, the marriage of music, computers, television and people has finally been realized. The Woz thought of it first, and named it more appropriately than TIME has today. The power of collective thought is much greater than the actions of any one person online. Web 2.0 has made online collaboration easy for the masses and has had the same profound effects as Woz’s decision to display pictures as well as letters on the Apple II - “I threw in high-res. It was only two chips. I didn’t know if people would use it.” Given the right tools You online became Us online, and we have all benefited because of it.

So grab a copy of TIME this week and take a long look at the mylar staring you in the face. For only with a paper copy of TIME will you be alone. If you read the article online you will just end up collaborating with the rest of us.

If you wanted to fly from Atlanta to Ohio for the holidays - and who wouldn’t want to enjoy December in Cleveland - you would probably find yourself using a site such as Expedia or an airline’s own site to find prices and book your flight. Most travelers have come to know that prices for flights change regularly and that certain rules like a weekend stay or 14 days advance notice can be followed to get good deals. Though not entirely consumer friendly, we understand that airlines have to fill up their planes and yield management is critical to their business model as fragile as it is. The one thing we count on as consumers is that two people searching the same site at the same time will get the same price.

What if this was not true? Even worse, what if the Byzantine world of airline pricing models was made even more obtuse and applied to everyday items on the web? Would we, or perhaps more importantly should we, deal with such an annoyance? Increasingly shopping websites have started implementing complex pricing models based on more dimensions than you can shake an Excel pivot table at. What if a customer geolocated as being in Georgia was given a higher price for a sweet tea maker during the dog days of August than a customer in Ohio would on the same website? Would either customer feel comfortable knowing that vagaries such as location, the existence or lack of website cookies, and whether your internet connection is broadband or dialup would affect the price they are shown for a particular item?

As retailers search for the next step of sophistication for their ecommerce sites, many are setting their sites on sophisticated, real time pricing models to extract additional revenue from their customers. While I am not one to bemoan the use of mathematical models to increase revenue, I would caution these retailers about the fundamental value of fairness and predictability when it comes to pricing. In my travels overseas I have become accustomed to haggling in markets to get the best price for an item, while in the USA however I am used to seeing a price marked on an item and paying it. The excitement of haggling in an outdoor shopping bazaar in Mumbai (It will always be Bombay to me) is not the experience most shoppers would want on mainstream ecommerce sites. Worse yet the new technologies being implemented attempt to be transparent to the shopper, so not only are you presented with a different price than someone else for the same item, you are also prevented from asking for a lower price.

The hunt for increased profit margins is understandable in ecommerce as profit margins for online vendors can be elusive in the land of free shipping promotions and rising keyword prices. This situation needs to be addressed by right sizing ad spending and increasing operational efficiencies. It should not be addressed by the growing opaqueness of pricing models. Consumers want and deserve a reasonable clarity in the prices they are shown on any one particular site. If the current trend towards mathematical pricing obfuscation continues then shoppers will only become less loyal to the sites they purchase from, ultimately causing an increase in costly lead generation efforts to combat customer churn. Ecommerce retailers in for the long haul should focus on merchandising, operational efficiencies and customer retention efforts rather than discrete math. As Einstein said “Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

As we sit down at our desks this Monday after digesting a weekends worth of Thanksgiving meals and leftovers, many of us will find ourselves going online to shop in the cyber equivalent of “Black Friday,” which has traditionally been the busiest shopping day of the Christmas season. For retailers, both online and off, the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are the most important, if not the most wonderful, time of the year. Shopping is as intertwined with Thanksgiving as Football - speaking of which, how about that Tony Romo? The reality of the importance this time of year has for retailers was underscored during the Great Depression when Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving a week earlier so retailers would have more time to sell their products before Christmas. The new tradition took hold and is the reason Thanksgiving is celebrated during the third Thursday of November each year.

Cyber Monday is the new way consumers and retailers have found to ease the holiday rush and allow time strapped shoppers the ability to spend themselves to the limit in the comfort and security of their office cubicle. Retailers have realized over recent years that time has become the new luxury for shoppers and that offering convenience is the way to better business. Online shopping is, or at least should be, about convenience. The key elements of convenience being:

• Checking the availability of a product without driving to a store
• Performing price comparisons quickly and easily
• Finding out about popular (or even unusual) products for each type of person on your gift list
• Having presents delivered to distant friends and family
• Reminders of past gifts and easy repeat purchases - I had to work that one in there, its really cool - check it out.

The benefits of shopping online are clear to consumers; for retailers it has been a mixed bag. Pure online retailers like Amazon have captured large amounts of revenue but have not yet realized significant profit, while traditional retailers like Walmart have fought back with redesigned websites but have faced their own issues providing a satisfactory experience to their online customers. While the news headlines will likely state that online shopping has grown by some impressive percentage this holiday season, the experience online has only recently begun fulfilling its promise of convenience to consumers and has yet to expand its value proposition beyond that. In coming holiday seasons expect to see more elements of social networking mixed into the online shopping experience. Online shopping is not a zero sum game with offline shopping. By offering unprecedented convenience, fine tuned suggestive selling, and creating a new virtual, social, and entertaining element to the online shopping experiences retailers will be rewarded with incremental increased spending by shoppers - to the benefit of retailers and gift recipients alike.