For the privilege of glimpsing into the private zoo of a second-rate TV star, I have just paid 75 cents, and I've become the 119th person to do so. Actually, I haven't paid anything, because I am still in the five-minute free trial period at Keen.com, a site where anyone can offer themselves up as a self-appointed authority on virtually any topic, and ask to be paid for it.

"The fact that the person is an expert or not an expert is really irrelevant," explains Keen.com CEO Karl Jacob. "It's just that the other person knows a little more than you do." Some of the topics that the 40,000 "Keenspeakers" -- Combs among them -- peddle advice and insights on include "self help for premature ejaculation," "value of old, historic newspapers, 1650 through 1999" and the utterly cryptic "OJ Simpson ... not a jew."

If you're wondering if you can pick the brain of the clever CEO who raised $67 million to fund this smorgasbord, the answer is -- yes, of course. You can reach CEO Karl Jacob on Keen.com. Alas, so far, he's had no callers. But three people have called a one-minute canned recording titled "How to start your own business!!!" the listing for which sounds a lot like spam: "I will send you a list of reports I have for free and you pick the report that you want!" No need to feel unpopular, though. A woman calling herself "Sister Mary," who advertises her services in the "business planning" category as: "Psychic, doyou want to know about your bizz?" hasn't received any calls either.

Keen.com has enjoyed gobs of positive press coverage since it launched in November, not the least of it because the company has raised a total of $67 million from name venture capital firms like Benchmark Capital, Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures and Integral Capital Partners, as well as institutional investors like eBay, Microsoft and Inktomi. It even made Fortune magazine's "Cool Companies 2000" list.

All this fawning coverage waxes on about what you could do with Keen.com -- get new recipes, tips for fixing your computer, help with your business plan. And the site itself describes what's offered there this way: "People who can answer questions on topics ranging from computers to personal advice to taxes can make money by creating a description of their knowledge and setting a per minute fee." "Personal advice" is perhaps purposefully vague, but neither the site nor its innumerable chroniclers bother to mention what members of this "live answer community" seem to be actually doing with it -- namely divining the future with the help of psychics, finding phone sex partners, checking horoscopes and listening to tape recorded messages of TV celebs talking about themselves. Sixty-seven million bucks for this?

I first learned about the seemingly boundless wisdom for sale that is Keen.com from an ad looming from the side of a San Francisco bus, where a smiling, clean-cut man and woman chat amiably on the phone alongside the site's URL and the slogan "your live answer community."

Not another expert advice site, I thought. Surely, you've heard by now about the dozens of dot-coms that have cropped up in the last year or so all aspiring to do for the information trapped in your noggin what eBay did for the junk piled in your garage -- unload it on someone else, for a price. There's Exp.com and @skme.com, ExpertCentral and InfoRocket -- the list of interchangeable sounding names goes on and on.

One of the great things about the Net, since the early Usenet days, of course, is that relative strangers devote a remarkable amount of energy to answering each other's questions about virtually anything, and they do it free of charge. But these expert sites contend, with some reason, that it's too hard and too inefficient for most people to find credible information this way, and pledge to make the whole process easier, providing advice either by e-mail, chat or sometimes over the phone.

Some, like Exp.com, emphasize business services and stress their rigorous verification of experts' credentials. Others, like Askme.com, offer free advice but plan to make money as sellers of "peer-to-peer" infrastructure services to other sites. On Keen.com, you can find an "HR Pro," with verified credentials -- and a "Registered Nurse" with no credentials listed. Seemingly, you or I could declare ourselves nuclear physicists and offer answers about subjects we've studied in Cold War potboilers.

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