Get Paid to Upload Your Pics or Videos

I've blogged before about sites that pay you for submitting videos, although at the time I didn't include Revver. And now there's another one -- Break.com. And I'm not talking about pocket change.

While Revver pays you a percentage of the ad revenue your video generates, Break.com pays a flat (and reasonably generous) rate. $400 for a video. $2000 for a short film. And they even pay for pictures -- $25 for a pic and $50 if you submit a pic that gets chosen as their "Girl of the Day" (the site was previously called big-boys.com -- go figure).

As you might imagine, they don't throw around that kind of money on just anything that gets uploaded. They look through their submissions and pay for the ones they think are good enough to be featured on their home page.

If you've got a bit of talent (or a bit of luck) why not give it a try? Who knows, you might make a nice chunk of change.

AGLOCO -- Own the Internet

I've just finished the signup process for the reincarnated AllAdvantage, AGLOCO. Not surprisingly (at least if you were around in the AA days), the Viewbar is still being tested, but they've launched the program so people can sign up and start building their downlines. Hopefully the AGLOCO Viewbar won't end up being vaporware like so many others were back in the day.

Techdirt has a good article on the re-birth, as well as an excellent explanation of what went wrong the first time around.

The problem was that the plan couldn't make money. Couldn't, not didn't. They had to pay out so much, and the value to the advertisers was minimal, since the people signing up just wanted the money and didn't care about the ads. In other words, it wasn't well targeted, it was junk that people put up with for money -- meaning the amount advertisers are willing to is low and gets lower and lower as they realize how little they get out of it.

One of the commenters says the only reason AA failed was because the bottom fell out of the online advertising market when the bubble popped. There may be some truth to that, but I think it had a lot more to do with advertisers realizing they were getting very little bang for their buck. Which not only explains the failure of companies like AllAdvantage, but also the current situation with most incentivized advertising programs.

Join AGLOCO Today! LOL

Free E-Books at Paperback Writer Blog

Back in August, Lynn at the Paperback Writer blog issued her E-Book Challenge, encouraging other authors to write a new short story, novel, etc. and release it as a free e-book. She ended up with over 50 submissions, and you can download 'em and read 'em for free.

There are horror stories, mysteries and crime novels, fantasy, romance, sci-fi, and even "erotic paranormal romance", whatever that might be.

I haven't read any of them (I'm working hard to read a stack of books sitting on the corner of my desk before Xmas, when I'll get a stack of new ones) but I'm sure there are some good ones in whatever genres you prefer.

Free Software

Giveaway of the Day is a site that offers one new FREE software title every day. These titles aren't freeware, shareware, demo versions or anything like that. They're full versions of software that you'd normally have to pay money for. What's the catch? The freebies are only available for 24 hours, and they must be installed on the same day they're downloaded.

FTC Targeting Use of Cookies

Businessweek has an interesting article about a possible U.S. government (Federal Trade Commission) investigation into the use of cookies in behaviourally targeted advertising. Complaints have been filed with the FTC asking that companies be required to disclose the fact that tracking cookies are being used, and also requiring web surfers to "opt in" for them.

Businessweek: Taking Aim at Targeted Advertising

I think that's a great idea. Personally, I like tracking cookies, and I like targeted advertising. If there are going to be ads on the web pages I'm visiting, I'd like them to be as targeted as possible so that I'm seeing ads for things I'm interested in. But I'd also like to have a bit of control over how and when I'm targeted, and who's getting access to the information being collected about me. That's one of the reasons I got involved in incentivized advertising in the first place.

I suspect there are a lot of other people out there who feel the same way I do. We're happy to let the technology do its thing so that we see more relevant ads, but we also want the option of having our privacy respected. I don't see any reason why we can't have both.

WTO Yes Men Announce Compassionate Slavery Plan

OK I know this is a bit off-topic for this blog, but after seeing this story starting to pop up all over the blogosphere, I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon.

At a Wharton Business School conference on business in Africa, World Trade Organization representative Hanniford Schmidt announced the creation of a WTO initiative for "full private stewardry of labor" for the parts of Africa that have been hardest hit by the 500 years of Africa's free trade with the West.

The initiative will require Western companies doing business in some parts of Africa to own their workers outright. Schmidt recounted how private stewardship has been successfully applied to transport, power, water, traditional knowledge, and even the human genome. The WTO's "full private stewardry" program will extend these successes to (re)privatize humans themselves.

"Full, untrammelled stewardry is the best available solution to African poverty, and the inevitable result of free-market theory," Schmidt told more than 150 attendees. Schmidt acknowledged that the stewardry program was similar in many ways to slavery, but explained that just as "compassionate conservatism" has polished the rough edges on labor relations in industrialized countries, full stewardry, or "compassionate slavery," could be a similar boon to developing ones.

Sounds pretty unbelievable, doesn't it?

It should. There's no Hanniford Schmidt, the Gatt.org website isn't run by the WTO, and those people at the Wharton Business School conference were just punk'd by The Yes Men.

Andy and Mike do this sort of thing a lot, and it's not surprising that the conference attendees didn't seem too alarmed that the WTO wanted to create a market for buying and selling Africans. It seems no matter how outrageous their presentations are (setting up a market to sell votes to the candidate willing to pay the most for them, a market in human rights violations to allow countries that want to abuse people to buy “Justice Vouchers” from those who don’t, etc.), their audiences have no problems as long as their ideas adhere to the fundamentals of free market capitalism.

It appears that a lot of the bloggers posting about this don't realise it's a joke. Oops!

More Free Stuff

Speaking of free stuff, here's a little round-up of freebies I've come across recently:

Free Mini Relaxation Music Players (Windows only) -- if you like those relaxation CDs with the sounds of raindrops and frogs and whispering winds and all that sort of thing (I love 'em!), then these little apps that let you mix your own music are pretty cool.

Free book -- Getting Real -- no, it's not Dr. Phil. It's a book written by the people at 37signals about how to create your own start-up company. The book is specifically about starting a company based on a web application or other type of software, but a lot of the stuff they talk about (the importance of creating a small company that is lean and flexible, passionate, personal, friendly, honest, etc.) are valuable to anybody thinking about starting a small business. The paperback is $29, the PDF is $19, the web version is absolutely FREE.

Free fonts -- Dafont has a lot of great free fonts, and even though a lot of them aren't suited to professional-quality text documents, they're great for web images, photo captions, and all sorts of other things. Smeltery also has a lot of free fonts. And Vitaly Friedman has two lists of high-quality free fonts here and here.

Free Photoshop plugins -- over 100 free Photoshop plugins, most of them are Windows-only, but a few are available in Mac versions as well. If you don't have Photoshop, you might try a few free alternatives, GIMP (Windows, Unix, Mac) or Paint.NET (Windows, requires .NET Framework, available free from Microsoft).

Free music -- Russian music site AllOfMP3.com is now giving music away at no charge (which makes sense I guess, since they got spanked by Visa). The deal is that it only plays on their "Music for the Masses" player, and also they're not paying royalties to the artists, record companies and whoever else wants a chunk of money (they get away with it because apparently they're not breaking any laws in Russia).

Free Books -- Swap 'Em!

A couple of months ago I blogged about Zunafish, a website where you can sign up and trade stuff -- CDs, books, DVDs, games, etc. -- with other people all over the world. It turns out there are quite a few of these kinds of sites, some specifically for books and others more like Zunafish, letting you trade other things.

PaperBackSwap.com -- you got it, they deal strictly in books, and they're US-only. But unlike Zunafish, they don't charge anything.

Title Trader -- books, DVDs, VHS, CDs, games and more. And it's free. And it's international; they automatically filter out items offered by people who don't want to mail them to your country.

BookMooch -- all books, all the time. It's free, it's international, and they've even got a toolbar. Have you got your own toolbar?

Swap a CD -- from the people who brought your PaperBackSwap. Same idea, but with CDs. Oh, and it's not free. They charge $0.49 per swap.

I don't buy a huge number of DVDs and CDs, and the ones I buy I usually want to hang on to. The same is true for books, but not as much. I'd probably be very happy to trade away at least 10% of the books on my shelves right now. I think I might have to give one (or more) of these services a try.

Get Paid to Surf -- The Re-birth of AllAdvantage

Get Paid to Surf!

Yes, apparently, it's back.

AllAdvantage 2.0. OK, actually it's called AGLOCO, but the guys behind it were also founders of AllAdvantage back in the good old days. According to Liz Gannes post at GigaOM, the viewbar will be back, and members will be able to earn an hourly rate as well as for recruiting a downline up to four levels deep.

AGLOCO is still in pre-launch, but apparently the recruiting/spamming has already begun.

Payments for October 2006

eBay $278.83
Total $278.83

Yearly Total 1239.71

I've had a lot of things going on in "real life" last month, so I had to focus my online activities to those which provided the most income. And without a doubt, that's eBay. I was a bit worried after last month's results ($50 profit from $200 in sales), but with a few changes, this month was much better ($278 from $619 in sales).

Obviously some of the increase might've had nothing to do with anything we did, but I think some of our changes helped. For one thing, we ran more auctions. Instead of relying on people finding our eBay Store items through search results, we made sure always had a few items in the auction listings. We also changed the eBay categories we listed our auctions in, which also seemed to help.

This month I'm going to try listing in even more new categories to see if that helps bring our products to the attention of people who might not see them if they're in other categories. And I'm thinking I might also try running some shorter auctions (3- or even 1-day) with a significantly lower starting price than our 7-day auctions. If we pick up a few regular customers by tempting them with the change to get their first item at 40 or 50% off our eBay Store price, the initially smaller margins will be worth it.

I'll See You in Court!

There's a pretty good write-up at SlashDot explaining how to sue somebody in small claims court. In this particular instance it's about suing organisations who call you and play pre-recorded messages (some people get a lot of these around election time, apparently), but I think it's an interesting read for anybody who's been ripped off and has wondered whether small claims court is the way to go.

DSL Without Phone Service?

US-based readers might be interested in reading about Cutting the Cord, getting rid of your landline phone service but keeping your DSL service. It's called "dry-loop" DSL, and apparently the FCC requires the phone companies to provide it if you request/demand it, but they don't require them to make it easy.

Most companies seem to charge a little extra for the new DSL connection, but you're no longer paying for the phone service. So if you've got a good cellphone or VOIP deal, it's probably worth crunching the numbers to find out if a dry-loop service would work out better for you. Then hassle the phone company enough to make them do it.

I'd be a happy camper if we end up with this sort of thing here in Australia. I would've ditched my landline a long time ago if not for the DSL.