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

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.

Gather is another bogging site and they just got an influx of funding.

With the rate that new services are coming out it’s not a question of if you product good or cool, but is it good or cool enough to give users incentive to use or switch to you.

Gather.com has taken the approach of rewarding users

Being part of such a community is reward enough. But you’ll also get Gather Points(TM) just for participating online. Inviting new users and submitting outstanding content will earn you points.

I’ve always liked this idea but lets be honest any user that can be rewarded to any substantial degree would probably just publish on their own.

I would say this could even hurt them, because it changes things from an intrinsic (doing it for fun) to extrinsic motivation (doing it for rewards). People may then if they find out they can’t earn much leave because they lose motivation. It’s sort of the same principle as when hockey players no longer enjoy the game (or enjoy it less) once it becomes their job.

Just as a side note does anybody remember the free web host tera-share? They offered their users money for the page views on their freely hosted sites, I believe the company eventually went under.