13/9/2007 - 19 Ways To Make Social Sites Pay

Revver (link): One of the first sites to offer an ad revenue split for content creators. Revver will display an ad after your clip, and split the revenue 50/50. This has proven popular with YouTube users looking to cash in - the official LonelyGirl15 site uses Revver to help monetize those popular clips.

Break.com (link): Realizing that they’re losing ground in the fast-paced world of online video, Break.com recently offered $400 per video and up to $2000 for animated shorts. The catch? You need to get your video on the homepage to qualify.

Metacafe (link): Metacafe launched Producer Rewards back in October, with a payment model based around the number of views your clip receives. You get $100 for 20,000 views, $1000 for 200,000 views and $10,000 for 2 million views. The offer is proving popular, with the top user earning more than $25,000.

Google Video (link): Google Video does pay certain users, but it’s highly unlikely you’ll qualify. They struck a deal with Eepybird to share revenue on their latest Diet Coke and Mentos video. However, the Sponsored Videos program is only open to a few select uploaders, and you need to submit an inquiry with Google to make it happen.

Eefoof (link): As mentioned previously on Mashable, Eefoof pays you to submit videos (not necessarily your own) and drive as much traffic to them as possible. You get a cut of the ad revenue. The site is clunky to say the least, but we’ll forgive them for one simple reason: co-founder Kevin Flynn was the co-creator of Peanut Butter Jelly Time, one the biggest Internet fads.

Flixya (link): Flixya is a slicker version of Eefoof, and pays users to repost clips from YouTube, Metacafe, Daily Motion, Google Video, MySpace Video and other sites that offer embedded Flash players. They put ads all around these clips and ask you to drive traffic to them - you then get 50% of the ad revenue.

Guba (link): This video site began paying users in August. Unlike the other sites, this is more like an affiliate scheme: you get $25 for every 100 new signups that are referred from your site via an embedded player or via a link in an email.

Cash for Photos

Scoopt, ScoopLive and CellJournalist (link 1 2 3): All these sites offer to buy your newsworthy photographs, sell them to media companies and send you a cut of the revenue. Scoopt is receiving the most buzz.

SpyMedia (link): This Scoopt rival also sells your photos, and offers “bounties” when you supply photos that media companies are looking for. What’s more, they supply a widget to promote your photos on your blog or social networking profile.

Cash for Writing

BlogBurst (link): Want to get paid for blogging? Blogburst syndicates blog posts to news sites like the Washington Post. The top 100 users get paid between $50 and $1,500 per quarter.

PayPerPost (link): Although controversial among bloggers, PayPerPost pays you to blog on certain topics suggested by advertisers. In some cases, you don’t even need to disclose that you’re being paid. The amount depends on the popularity of your blog, but it can be in the hundreds of dollars per post. ReviewMe is a rival site that does a similar thing, although some consider it to be slightly more ethical. Likewise, CREAMaid has a similar idea.

ScooptWords (link): A spin-off from Scoopt, this service offers a button to place in your blog sidebar. Media companies - like a magazine editor - can click on it to buy your posts right away.

Other Money Earners

VitaminT: Not yet covered on Mashable, VitaminT is a site that offers $3 for submitting a useful tip. Readers can subscribe to these tips via email.

ChaCha (link): ChaCha is trying to improve search by providing an on-demand service with paid experts. Users request information from these guides via IM, and they get paid between $5 and $10 per hour for their efforts.

FavoriteThingz and MyPickList (link 1 2): Both of these services from Sprout Commerce pay you to pimp products on your blog or social networking profile. Post a list of your FavoriteThingz on your MySpace page, for instance, and you’ll get paid an affiliate commission when visitors click through and buy a product.

MyNumo (link): Although only mentioned briefly on Mashable, MyNumo is a marketplace for mobile phone content - sell your own videos, ringtones and wallpaper and earn 20% of the revenue.

Netscape.com (link): This clone of the social news site Digg famously tried to gain traction by offering to pay the most powerful users on rival social bookmarking sites. The top 50 users on these sites get paid $1,000/month for submitting at least 150 stories to Netscape.com. For some, that’s a full time job.

From mashable.com

20/8/2007 - Spotback

14/8/2007 - Spotplex.com

Spotplex is the only online content aggregation service that dynamically provides an instant, impartial ranking of popular Web content. With Spotplex, Internet users are not required to change their behavior to generate content rankings. By eliminating tagging and voting, Spotplex more accurately reflects what people read most today.

Based on an algorithm-based measuring system that analyzes readers' behavior in real time, Spotplex's popular content rankings come from actual impressions, or "reads". This impartial process gives every blogger a better opportunity to be heard. Spotplex also uses a relative popularity measure by which article reads are measured relative to a site's overall traffic, rather than by volume alone. This evens the playing field so all blogs can compete equally in the Spotplex rankings, regardless of readership size or subject matter.

For consumers, Spotplex provides a 24x7 resource for diverse content of unlimited subject scope - from mainstream to niche interests. Site features such as user comments and sharing capabilities turn Spotplex into an interactive community. Graphical tools by each post give consumers additional insight into article and blog traffic.

By inserting a single line of HTML code into their sites, bloggers can instantly track the number of article reads, which is dynamically updated on the Spotplex site. This provides accurate insight into blog rankings, driving traffic to sites with great content regardless of size or subject matter. Spotplex also offers bloggers downloadable widgets to instantly analyze viewer traffic and to list other popular articles on their site, increasing reader retention over time.

29/7/2007 - Spurl.net

Just like search has gradually replaced hierarchical directories as the way to find information on the Web in general, search is also becoming the standard way for users to interact with individual web sites.

Spurl offers several tools that web site owners can use to meet these new demands:

• Site search: Powerful, quality search results for individual web sites that can be integrated seemlessly with minimum effort.
• Language tools
  • Spell checking: A web service that checks words or phrases against a dictionary and suggests alternate spelling if the words are not recognized. Currently available in Icelandic and English.
  • Inflections and word forms: A web service that knows different inflections and other word forms of complex languages. Currently available in Icelandic only.
• Term recognition In addition to "plain" site search results, Spurl's term recognition solution can be used to link to special results for recognized words or phrases, such as answers from a FAQ or information from a product catalog.
  • Semantic analysis: Scans through large blocks of text for recognized words and phrases. Can e.g. be used to link to related search phrases or content specific ads.

14/7/2007 - About Ma.gnolia

What is Ma.gnolia? To understand Ma.gnolia completely, let us tell you a story. It’s a story we like to call “And on the First Day, There was Search.”

Really, on the first day there was just one web page. Then there were two, and a link was made between them. Before long, there were lots of web pages, with many many links between them, and suddenly we needed specialized web sites to help us find other web sites. And the term ‘search engine’ became part of our new web vocabulary. What a change those search engines made.

Things are different now. Even the best search engines can’t always be sure of what you want to find in the thousands of pages it finds on every search. And with so many pages, searching has been getting tough. Websites can be misleading about how good they are or what content they really hold. But we can’t blame the poor search engine for this. It’s just software. But what if a person could look at every page on the internet and make sure it showed up only in the right searches? Sounds beauty, but wouldn’t we all have to pay hundreds of dollars a month just to search?

But that’s exactly what Ma.gnolia does. At Ma.gnolia, members save websites as bookmarks, just like in their browser. Except with a twist: they also “tag” them, assigning labels that make them easy to find again. So when you search for something, you use words that people choose and look only at websites that people think are worth saving. Suddenly you have access to a human-organized bookmark collection that numbers in the millions, but is as easy to use as a search engine.

With Ma.gnolia, that’s really all the work you have to do. Finding by tags makes organizing bookmarks a thing of the past. Since it’s a website, your Ma.gnolia bookmark collection can be reached by you and your friends from anywhere, any time. And don’t worry about web pages disappearing from your searches or even the web, as we make a saved copy of each page you bookmark where websites allow us to.

If searching was the first day of the web, people helping each other find what they want must be the second. Give Ma.gnolia a try to see what we mean when we say Found is the New Search.