Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Internet Program: Tips, tips and more tips

Can the Internet be any more tip oriented?

Lifehacker.com wants your tips--send them a link to sites that help you streamline your life. FamilyZip.com wants tips on local businesses (**coughreviewdisguisedastipcough**).

The FBI is in on the tip thing: submit a crime tip at https://tips.fbi.gov/. Ideal Bite helps you take a bite out of life--in a green way, as you tip the world eco-friendily.

Tips, tips and, of course, more tips.

Is this Web 2.0's way of distancing itself from the word "review" or "opinion" and capitalizing on the new jargon of the new mini-bubble? "Tip" sounds so simple, so light, and it carries a connotation of money. I'm going to give you a tip; I'm going to give you information that makes your life richer.

Or am I extracting a tip from you to make my site more widespread on the tubes, for more organic search results and better rankings long-term, by capitalizing on that whole "25% of Google-indexed information is user-generated" model? Free content. User-generated content. No $10 SEO article purchases. No contracting with Bangalore for $.001 a word keyword articles to drive traffic. No stress wondering where the freelance articles are, no excuses from late writers.

Get the Internet users who post on Perez and TMZ and Sybermoms and Mothering and Fark to come to your site and write your site for you.

Technology is driving the tip thing. It's beyond easy for sites to create interfaces and databases that allow users to input information that users think is valuable, and for end users to extract the information that they find valuable.

It's GIGO but garbage goes in, the garbage that comes out is custom-requested garbage, and anything that's never requested sits in the middle like a Salvation Army donation reject bin. Too expensive for disposal, not useful enough for distribution.

FamilyZip gives some revenue sharing, so you can even monetize your tips now. Give us a tip and we'll give you--a tip? 60% revenue sharing is better than the 15% waitresses receive, although at least when you wait tables (and I did it for 6 years) you have a user consuming a product with a defined value, and that 15% comes from a concrete number that you know early in the transaction.

60% of ad revenue for your tip may add up to $100 in 2027. But here's a tip: you would have to write many, many tips. The tip model works only when people want to share information, but again--what drives them to share?

Figure that out and send it to me as a tip. That's Web 3.0 right there.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Internet Program: SharedReviews.com

Now here's a novel idea: get paid to write reviews! Where have I heard that before? Hmmmm.....


Shared Reviews
is offering a fairly low $2 per review, up to 75 reviews right now. Therefore, you max out at $150. However, a review takes about two minutes to write. 750 characters is required for the review, which is two medium-sized paragraphs in teeny-tiny font.

Long-term, the site seems like Epinions. Web 2.0 seems to be recycling Web 1.0, and I'm not certain that's a good idea. Shared Reviews claims to use the reviews to enhance advertising for web companies, but I'm wondering how. Will they use it with graphics? As placed blog posts? Advertorial content?

In the meantime, dust off those Epinions skillz and get on teh Internets with teh tubes and start writing. Why not? A little more PayPal can't hurt.