One of my favorite episodes of Columbo is called Double Exposure, where Columbo uses subliminal tricks to help nab a marketing genius who murders a client using subliminal advertising.

Subliminal advertising is considered a deceptive business practice by the Federal Trade Commission, but in a column in Parade, marketing guru Martin Lindstrom reports on five subliminal but legal tactics that marketers use to lure you in: If something feels heavy, you'll be more comfortable buying it. Certain kinds of music makes you more inclined to shop, and made-up traditions lend credibility to brands.

My favorite example of this is the world famous Samuel Adams brand of beer. I was having dinner with some friends a few weeks ago and two of them ordered Sam Adams beer. I asked them to guess when the company was founded. They guessed 1790 and 1820. The real answer: 1985! It's named after a famous founding father who sidelined in beer-making but has no other connection to him other than the name. But it's been a magnificently effective marketing tool.

One way to avoid falling victim to clever marketing tricks is to do as much shopping as possible where you can comparison shop easily and not be lured in by a store's scent or music. Of course this isn't such a good idea for clothing, but it might be the best way to buy electronics.

In September, we told you about a cool new comparison shopping tool for T-Mobile's Android G called ShopSavvy. The application lets users check the price of an item at local stores and online by simply taking a picture of the barcode. While consumers love the ability to instantly check the price of an item from anywhere, some stores aren't as fond of this technology. Since the launch of ShopSavvy at least one customer at Target has already been told that it is against store rules to price check an item.

In this particular case when the makers of ShopSavvy contacted the Target in question they were informed that there was no policy prohibiting customers from price checking an item. The manager blamed the mistake on an uninformed employee. I think the employee may have confused the shopper with an employee of a competing store who had come inside to record prices. This was something I ran into as an employee at Kmart years ago and that we did have a policy against.

How much time do we spend actually using the stuff we own? That kitchen knife -- 5 minutes a day? Those dress shoes -- two hours a week? The lawnmower -- a couple of hours a week, seven months of the year. The treadmill- never? The new trend to rent or share, rather than buy, products (see Hertz Connect, for example) is a good way for consumers to trim expenses. Unfortunately, it can be a disaster for retailers.

According to the New York Times, one industry reeling at the moment is publishing, in large part due to our newly developed practice of reselling books we have finished. Stores such as Half-price Books have abetted this, but the 500-lb gorilla of this industry is Amazon.com. Now, publishers have a much shorter window of opportunity in which to sell new books before they begin to show up in quantity on used book shelves and internet sites.

Take, for example, the paperback version of Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, which came out in late September with a cover price of $14. Already used copies are available on Amazon beginning at $5.65. Even with $3.99 shipping, the reader will save over $4. Del Rey, the publisher, won't see a nickel of this resale, and neither will Chabon.

So what? you may say. So this- publishers and book stores have to make enough money to justify the expense of producing and retailing a book, and with sales already weakened by the retail bust and competing entertainments, many are hanging on by their fingernails already. If the large publishing houses go under, avid readers will have to contend with the anarchy of self-published or small press offerings, and the difficult task of finding the a kernel of wheat in a mound of chaff will be made even harder.

This is another impetus for publishers to embrace the Kindle and like devices, where books can be sold in captive formats that include a barrier to redistribution, much as DVDs are sold today. I hate the thought that book stores might follow blacksmith and TV repair shops into oblivion, but everybody's got to eat, and paper just isn't all that tasty.

Bad ideas are as common in the internet world as Brittany Spears photographs, so to stand out in this company an idea has to be truly execrable. Swoopo.com rises (or sinks) to that level.

At first blush, the site resembles the typical auction site, where customers vie to snatch up bargains by competitive bidding. The difference with Swoopo, however, is that all items are put up by Swoopo, not individuals as on Ebay, and the bidder pays $.75 for each bid. Think about that for a moment.

Let's pretend that we are intent on bidding on the Samsung LN37A550 37" LCD HDTV currently on auction as I write this. While the site lists the retail value at $1,199.99, Amazon sells the set for $879.99. Suppose a dozen people start bidding. Of that dozen, at least a few are going to be caught up in the auction frenzy, as the price climbs slowly, but still tantalizingly cheap. By the time the set sells, one bidder might walk away with a bargain, but the other eleven will have nothing in return for the money they spent to bid.

The insidious part of the Swoopo model is that items could routinely sell for well beneath their market price, the difference funded by the money collected per bid. In essence, all the losers are helping to cover the cost of the winner's prize.

The only way Swoopo can hope to retain bidders is to provide bargains, and since in every auction all but one of the participant will end up out of pocket with nothing in return for the money they spent on bids, I can't imagine people hanging around long.

Thanks, Techdirt

Also read: Ebay changes turning off customers

We live in a golden age when it comes to personal finance. Nobody has any gold, but there are more resources than ever to maintain and keep track of your finances.

The latest that I've just started using is Credit Karma, which allows people to check their credit score for free -- and as often as they like. I have to think that this is going to really irritate some of the other organizations out there that make you pay to see your credit score. For instance, FreeCreditReport will let you get your credit score for free -- once -- but after that it bills you $14.95 a month unless you cancel your membership.

There is a price of sorts for joining Credit Karma -- as it makes clear when you read the terms. The company will share your credit score with marketing partners, in hopes that you might want to use some of the services and goods it's hawking. But if you can live with that -- and I can -- it's a pretty interesting web site. For instance, you can see exactly how you measure up against the rest of Americans' credit scores.

And, sure, that can be humbling if you've been hammered by the economy in recent years, but if you're bound and determined to raise your credit score, this seems like a pretty useful tool. And, of course, my big question -- that I only thought to look into after I signed up -- will checking your credit score nine times a day at Credit Karma bring down your credit score?

They say no, which seems logical enough. The folks at Credit Karma have the power to show or not show your credit score to creditors, and they won't. They know that if they were to do that, that would pretty much destroy anyone's reason for checking out their web site.

Geoff Williams is a freelance journalist and the author of C.C. Pyle's Amazing Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America (Rodale).

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been waging an ongoing war against small-time pirates for half a decade now. By initiating large numbers of lawsuits, even against people who have illegally downloaded 10, 20, 30 copyrighted songs, the RIAA had essentially terrorized scofflaws into spending money on the big labels.

All in all, about 35,000 people got sued, but the RIAA never won a single case. Most were settled for an average of $3,500 because small-time users couldn't afford the mountain of legal expenses that the RIAA would send tumbling upon them. Downloading copies of songs through file-sharing software is outside the law, even if you just happen to be "trying out" some music and, conveniently, never get around to buying your legal copy. Still, just before the Christmas break, the RIAA announced it would end its campaign against mom-and-pop pirates.

The practice of suing individual downloaders, many impoverished students, was intended to make the world aware of of the damage of illegal downloading, but it quickly backfired and became a public relations nightmare for the music industry. Take the mentally ill 19-year-old girl who lost an $8,000 judgment against her because she was too sick to show up at court. Or the 65-year-old Massachusetts grandmother accused of downloading hi-hop tunes. (The RIAA dropped that one, but not before Granny totally lost her street cred.)

But did the RIAA halt the lawsuits because they made the industry look petty and unreasonable or because it never scored in front of a judge? Neither. The lawsuits were simply costing more money than they were bringing in. That's right -- -this sue-the-little-guy policy ended up costing the ailing recording industry even more money.

Hate the big bad wolf, Microsoft? Tempted to dump the MS Suite and adopt open-source freeware instead? Then you might want to consider the words of Michael Meeks and his concern about the future of OpenOffice.

OpenOffice is a suite of programs that carry out the same tasks as the full Microsoft set of Office programs, including word processing, spreadsheets, databases, presentations and more. It has been created over the past 20 years by a bevy of volunteer programmers supported by Sun microsystems, and is openly distributed and free to everyone. Best of all, it runs on virtually any platform, including Windows, Apple, and Linux.

Sounds terrific, doesn't it? I've used it, and it is a great value. However, you might note the word 'volunteers' above. Without the impetus of the almighty dollar to drive continuity, keeping software up to date depends on the dedication of those volunteers. Meeks' detailed examination of the involvement of programmers in OpenOffice shows that this involvement has declined over time, to the point that he describes the project as now 'profoundly sick'. He concludes that the software package currently has only 24 active developers.

I'm not dissing OpenOffice by pointing out these findings, but I am cautioning you that freeware is only as good as those who willingly devote their time to keeping it current. So caveat emptor- if you're using freeware that isn't updated regularly, you might want to investigate alternatives.

Also read: WalletPop's freeware roundup

It's that wonderful time of year where my wife and I participate in our annual tradition of purchasing a new TV. It's not that we want to buy a new TV every year but for the last 3 years our almost 1 year old TV set has died. Thankfully we purchased the TVs at a small chain in the Midwest, Rex Electronics, which offers an incredibly cheap extended warranty. Normally I would caution against wasting your money on an extended warranty but I've found cheap extended warranties to be invaluable when it comes to off brand TVs.

If we hadn't opted for the 2 year warranty, which only cost $20, we would have easily spent over $2,000 on no name HDTVs over the past few years. Alternately, we could have spent the money on one name brand 1080P HDTV and had money left over for surround sound! Thankfully when our last TV died on Friday, we were able to pay a little extra and get a Samsung with excellent reviews, something I wish we had done from the start. As an added bonus, the picture is 10 times better than the Soyo it replaced.

This Christmas, it seems that shoppers just can't get into the competitive holiday spirit, the one that has lifted many a seller's year-end income and seems linked to "patriotism" and "the American dream," on eBay. In fact, according to Comscore, the online seller is reporting an unprecedented decrease in traffic; down 16% between Nov. 3 and Dec. 14 compared to the same period in 2007. One seller interviewed for this Wall Street Journal story noted a 30-40% decrease in his sales this season.

All fingers are pointing at changes made by new CEO John Donahoe -- changes which were made to turn eBay into a site more like WalMart.com or Amazon.com. I know! Donahoe decreased fixed-price listing fees and increased final-value fees, reducing profit for sellers who prefer the auction format. What's more, a change in search algorithm to include fixed-price listings has been confusing for me, and I consider myself something of an eBay wonk.

It's ended up hurting both buyers and sellers and -- it looks likely -- eBay itself. After so many years of explosive growth and opportunity, could eBay be on the decline? If so, what will replace it for consumers and sellers?

I was a lapsed Netflixer; after watching dozens of movies via Netflix's swap-three plan, my wife and I found that we were viewing the DVDs less and less often, so, in a fit of belt-tightening, we dropped the service. However, intrigued by the new "Watch Instantly" feature, last week I signed up for the service's two-week trial membership.

The "Watch Instantly " feature streams content to the web browser of your computer, which works remarkably well, as long as you have a high-bandwidth link. It remembers where you quit and returns you to that spot. I did, however, have several instances where the show I was watching was stopped, and I received an error message. Reloading, a matter of a minute or so, brought it back, and at the right point in the story.

This new feature is just what I'm looking for; on-demand programming without commercials for a reasonable fee. My main quibble is the very limited selection of videos currently available via this feature. Loads of old (read:cheap) television series and overexposed movies comprise much of the queue, so I'm still forced to watch The Wire by shuffling discs the old way.

A second option, for which I am not equipped, is to watch content via one of several networked devices, including the Xbox, TiVo, or the $99 Netflix Player. This would be much handier when watching with other people or streaming to your large-screen TV.

Unlimited "Watch Instantly" is included in the $8.99 monthly one-disc-at-a-time program, and if I can find enough content to keep myself entertained, I'll probably continue this subscription and drop some premium channels on my cable TV.

The world of adaptive technology has brought us stunning inventions such as carbon-fiber prostheses that exceed the performance of mere bone-and-muscle legs. Therefore I was taken by not surprised by the ingenuity of a new product, the Touch Sight, a camera for the blind.

The camera, invented by Chueh Lee of Samsung China, features a flexible Braille display screen which creates a three-dimensional representation of the picture seen through the camera lens. The camera is held to the user's forehead, and he/she uses sound to estimate the distance to the object being photographed.

As it takes a snapshot, the camera also records a three-second snippet of ambient sound, so as the photographer checks out the image taken, he/she can review the distance estimate and make adjustments as needed.

The Touch Sight was recently awarded a gold medal in the International Design Excellence Awards 2008. The camera has not yet reached the market, but I can see some great products spinning off from this tech. How about game controllers?

Online Scrabble players rejoice!

Hasbro has dropped a lawsuit it had filed against the Indian brothers who had created a similar game, called "Scrabulous," which enjoyed huge success on Facebook until it was removed this summer.

The brothers, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, from Calcutta, India, created the game because they couldn't find an online version of Scrabble that they liked. When Hasbro first filed suit this summer, Scrabulous was removed from Facebook and replaced with a Hasbro-sanctioned version of online Scrabble.

From Lemondrop: Trouble in Toyland

There's a new word to learn, and a new form of making and spending money: TwitPay.

Yes,Twitter continues its march toward world domination. The New York Times is reporting that TwitPay is a startup that was created so people can send each other small amounts of cash. As the Times blogger, Jenna Wortham, writes:

"To do this they include the recipients' username in their message. For example, posting the update "@johnsmith twitpay $10 for lunch" would deliver the cash to that Twitterer's Twitpay account. The company monitors the public stream of messages for the keyword 'twitpay' and facilitates the exchange. You replenish your Twitpay account using a site like PayPal. Once recipients have accumulated more than $10 in their accounts, the balance can be cashed out in the form of an Amazon gift card. For all transfers exceeding $1, Twitpay will take a flat cut of five cents."

It's a little confusing, but if you're intrigued, you can check it out for yourself.

Frankly, I'm just fascinated to see that somebody is trying to create a new business spun off of Twitter when Twitter itself has yet to make any serious revenue. Michael D. Ivey, TwitPay's CEO, envisions his new business as being a good place for people to pay each other back if, say, two co-workers went out to lunch, and one of them realized he hadn't brought his wallet along, and so the other picked up the tab. He also -- as he told the Times -- hopes that TwitPay will make it easier for people to donate money during a crisis like Hurricane Katrina. "Ideally, we want to enable social giving on Twitter."

While creating a company that can rake in millions doing it, of course.

Geoff Williams is a freelance journalist and the author of C.C. Pyle's Amazing Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America (Rodale). If anyone owes him money, or just wants to follow him on Twitter, he can be found at http://www.twitter.com/geoffw

Where I live in Detroit, there's a lot of grumbling about NAFTA, the free trade agreement that some see as the great evil that has made it increasingly difficult for working people to find good-paying jobs. But in this increasingly global world, it seems unlikely to me that we're ever going to return to a time when working on the line pays top dollar.

Bill George, author of best-selling leadership book, Finding Your True North: A Personal Guide, and a professor of management practice of Harvard Business School, spoke last week at his alma Mater Georgia Tech's winter commencement. In a column for Business Week, George expands on what he told the students. He says a manufacturing economy isn't returning to the U.S. -- too many people elsewhere in the world are willing to work for much less money than working people here need and want. So he says if we are to compete, we must do it with our brains, not our hands.

He offered the new graduates a plan for improving the economy by encouraging innovation. The concepts aren't radical, but they are do-able and worthy of consideration -- particularly at a time when government -- and people, in general -- seem short on innovative ideas.

We've all encountered them. At some time in our Internet lives, we've each landed in a safe, or even familiar, website, when suddenly a blaring warning message has appeared. We were then informed that our computer was being assaulted by any number of nasty viruses, spy ware programs, or Trojan uglies of some sort. Those who fell for the gambit then spent $39.95, or more, to download a "scareware" program which, they were told, would uncover all those predatory computer parasites, and then scrub the user's hard drive clean of all the dastardly little attackers. There's just one problem; The warnings were a hoax - and so were the useless downloads which were often purchased to fix them.

The good news is that the FTC has won an injunction to end the peddling of those useless black hole downloads. What's more, a federal court has frozen the assets of a group of businesses which are said to have been flourishing in the scareware trade. You might recognize some of the names from your Internet travels. They include: "WinFixer," "WinAntivirus," "WinAntispyware," "AntivirusXP" and "XP Antivirus 2008", among others.

The temporary court order is an intended precursor to a permanent ban against scareware, flimflam artists.
So, there's good news in the blogosphere, knowing that bogus hard drive cleaners have been shelved at last. However, we must all remember to always take adequate precautions to protect our precious computers: install, and keep updated, one of the many good quality protective software packages available for protection against computer viruses, would be hackers, and spyware.

I cannot overstress this; It's an Internet jungle out there.