Where would you site a restaurant?

The group was asked to suggest the most important deciding point when choosing the site for a new restaurant. Most answered: Location. Perhaps they had been eating too often at those glittering centres. No, the questioner said, the most important factor is a starving crowd.

It is important to recognize the starving crowd if you want to be successful in business. (It's also important not simply to follow the herd blindly.)

Where is the starving crowd for your home-based Internet business? According to Peter Drucker, writer, management consultant and professor, it is in the information business. More precisely, in the education business.

Most were manual workers

Well into the 20th century, most workers were manual workers, he wrote in a Forbes Magazine article. Today, only about 20% of workers in developed countries do manual labor. Some 40% are knowledge workers. Workers, he says, have always had to gain skills, but skills change slowly. The work of a printer, the trade of his Dutch ancestors, changed little from the early 1500s to the early 1700s. No new skills needed to be learned, and that was the same in most industries.

For most of human history, Drucker says, skilled workers learned what they needed to know as apprentices by the time they were 18 or 19.

For the modern knowledge-based worker - the lawyer, the doctor, people in the various disciplines to do with computers - life is far different. Continuing education is the norm. Society and the workplace change much more rapidly today.

Jobs change rapidly, too. You may have been victimized by at least one layoff so far in your life. You certainly know people who have been. New jobs require new knowledge. In fact, even before finding a new job becomes a necessity, workers today are constantly retraining and preparing themselves for the eventuality they know will come several times in their lives. Gone are the days of getting work and remaining with the same company for 40 or 50 years.

Knowledge from the Internet

In increasing numbers, those people are turning to the Internet to advance their knowledge. No longer do they have to fight traffic and drag work-tired bodies off to night school. A few steps and a few clicks away, their personal computer gives them access to most of the world's knowledge and opinion. Schools have recognized that adult education can be taught far more effectively through computer access than inside bricks and mortar.

The use of computers means that education can have more of a one-on-one feel, because the student can go back over whatever he or she does not understand the first time. Study can be carried out at a pace appropriate to the individual.

Drucker, who has a reputation for detecting signs of future trends long before they happen, says education on the Web is a global market that is potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

The demand for webucation is huge

But this demand for education does not simply come from doctors, lawyers, accountants, other professionals and their associations. It exists at every level, and it is not restricted to knowledge that is work-related. Hobbyists, homemakers, gardeners, decorators, writers, almost every type of person you can think of is interested in learning more than they already know. For some, non-work related learning is simply a mental stimulation, for others it's a passionate interest, and for others, curiosity.

Whatever their reason, they create an opportunity for you and me to make money on the Internet from the comfort of our own homes. Each one of us is knowledgeable about something. We may not be experts, but we know more than the average person about something that others want to find out about.

Write an e-book about whatever it is you are passionate about. Start a newsletter. Or represent as an affiliate a company that deals in some way with your special interest. Find a way to be involved. If you believe you can do it, you are right. Join the Web education movement. It is a movement whose time is now.