Techcrunch has an interesting post about a new service called Payperpost. This service is a marketplace that will connect bloggers with advertisers that want to promote their products throught blog entries. This will obviously bring a lot more “noise” in the blogosphere which is already swamped by splogs and because of that there are quite a few reactions from bloggers. However, this is already happening, it’s just that until now there wasn’t a site or a company dedicated to it.

I just took a look at Payperpost.com and some first observations that will make this a failure in my opinion are:
1. They have to approve your post in order to get paid, that means that you could blog about something and not get paid at all.
2. There are no requirements for PR, traffic, age of blog etc That might lead a lot of people to create splogs just for using to promote payperpost’s advertisers.
3. The payout is extremely low 5-10$ per post? That’s a joke

Anyway this is something that has be happening and that will continue to happen in the future but to be honest I don’t see how payperpost could be succesful if they don’t change their business plan

According to this article Google will launch it’s new service, a payment system that most people currently call GBuy on June 28. GBuy looks to be a direct competitor to eBay, however until it is released no one can say for sure what kind of features it will have and how much similar to eBay it will be. To be honest I wouldn’t mind eBay getting a bit of competition, some serious competition I mean.

The article closes:

“Short term, GBuy is more negative for eBay than it is positive for Google,” Rohan said. “Longer-term, it could be a game-changer.”

BackupMyBlog isn’t exactly a Web2.0 site or application but I found the idea behind it really interesting. What it does is exactly what the name says, it backsup your blog. For experienced web site owners it’s a rather useless feature since backing up a database is not a hard thing to do, however let’s not forget that a lot of the bloggers don’t have the slightest idea what MySQL or PHPMyAdmin is so for them it might be a handy solution. BackupMyBlog is currently in beta and while in beta it is free, however there is a limit of 10MB.

Google has announced the release of the Google Calendar API. From the Google Code Blog.

Developers appreciate a nice web application, like the one that launched last week with Google Calendar. Even more, they appreciate a nice web application programming model that enables them to build applications, not just use them. Enter the Google Calendar data API.

The Google Calendar data API is based upon a common API model called GData. The GData model uses REST principles and Atom or RSS 2.0 syndicated feeds as the base resource model to expose data held by Google services (like Google Calendar).

Read the Rest of the Google Code Blog entry

Soduko is a puzzle game (and a quite addicting one if I may add) that like all other puzzle games is based on logic. There are plenty of sites that offer free soduko puzzles online using scripts that are written using PHP or Javascript. However these are so not Web2.0 . I was looking for a soduko script that was written using Ajax and I found a really cool one. The best thing about this script is that it doesn’t use numbers like most soduko games but a set of nine imagesfrom Flickr. You can specify what kind of images you want to use by selecting a tag or by selecting a Flickr user.
If you don’t know how soduko is played you can read the rules here and you can start playing soduko using this cool script here or if you prefer more traditional sodukos you can play at www.sodukopuzzles.net

So I was looking through my server logs and noticed a lot of referrers coming from “p202.ezboard.com/fheartsofgold7297frm106″ and a few variations of that. I didn’t however notice this forum referring traffic on my sitemeter counters, this probably meant someone was hot-linking an image from me.

I wanted to check it out though and see what they were using so I tried visiting the url, turns out you have to register with ezboard to view their forums, not my cup of tea, but ok sure.

So I quickly ran though the registration, it asked for more info than I preferred but no big deal, then I hit submit. Here is where things got really bad, they showed me some free offers, such us info from Nokia, or Cooking tips, I of course just wanted to register as quickly as possible so I checked NO to all four offers then hit submit. But wait, a javascript notice, “Please select “Yes” to at least one of the following offers to continue”… are you kidding me? Well whatever the curiosity was killing me I selected the Nokia newsletter, and hit submit. But wait, I need to give them my birthday city and zip… Well I’m Canadian, I made up a zip and picked a state sadly they checked and the zip didn’t match the state. After that I hit the little “X” to close their tab.

They could have had me as a user, a member, I could have offered value to their forums, imagine someone who was interested in a forum but had no real drive, they wouldn’t have gone nearly as far as me (probably not ever to the registration page).

I am literally appalled by how EzBoard has chosen to do business, it is, as far as I’m concerned a money grab for web1.0, but not effective at that. Besides the forced leads generated are probably worthless to advertisers (because of the forced nature). Me (or someone else) would be much more valuable to them as a customer than not. Thank god this kind of incompetence is not tolerated on web2.0.

Technorati Tags: 1.0, web1.0, web2.0, web 2.0, forums, bulletin boards, bad business, business, ezboard, statistics, nokia

Google has released their finance tools today and of course, it’s under beta (would you really trust a google product if it wasn’t under beta, its almost part of their brand now).

It is really nice looking and as are all google products quite clean. Two noteworthy features are the fact that when a quote search is done it also pulls up related blog posts and discussion.

And of course there is a whole bunch of “cool ajax” so take a look.

Business 2.0 is my favorite magazine (actually, the only one I subscribe to) and in this month’s issue they have an excellent article about “25 Startups Reinventing The Web”

Driven by ubiquitous broadband, cheap hardware, and open-source software, the Web is mutating into a radically different beast than it has been. And that is leading to the creation of entirely new kinds of companies, new business models, and oceans of new opportunity.

We are in the early stages of what might be better thought of as the Next Net. The Next Net will encompass all digital devices, from PC to cell phone to television. Its defining characteristics include the ability to interact instantaneously with any of the more than 1 billion Web users across the globe — not by, say, instant messaging, but by evolving instant-voice-messaging and instant-video-messaging apps that will make today’s e-mail and IM seem crude.

It’s a very good read at the least take a look at some of the companies on the list, they are doing some neat stuff.

web2.0, web2, web 2.0, ajax, business2, business2.0, business 2.0

Technorati Tags: web2.0, web2, web 2.0, ajax, business2, business2.0, business 2.0

Lucky for me that’s not something I need to go over because ZDnet posted an excellent article on the subject.

Personally I use Google, but my favorite is probably Net Vibes I just haven’t got around to changing. But really I’m not to into traditional homepages, I’m actually thinking of changing my homepage to Bloglines.

web2.0, web2, web 2.0, homepage, ajax, google, net vibes

Technorati Tags: web2.0, web2, web 2.0, homepage, ajax, google, net vibes

Wow, am I ever excited at what this could mean. Google Base is now also a payment platform. Google is currently only taking a cut from payment processing not listings. Hopefully this forces Ebay to take a good look at themselves and realize their fee structure is out of control.

As the number of Google services has increased, we’ve continued to build on our core payment features and migrate to a standard process for people to buy our services with a Google Account. Examples of this migration include enabling users to buy Google Video content, Google Earth licenses, and Google Store items with their Google Accounts. We also just began offering similar functionality on Google Base.

Looking ahead, we want to continue building payment services that meet the needs of Google users and advertisers. We expect to add payment functionality to Google services where our users need a way to buy online. For us, it’s all about bringing our users a better online experience whether they’re searching or buying.

Read Google’s Full Post