Author Archives: Steffen

I’m sitting in the dining room of my parents; parents-visit-time ;-). It’s the post-party of the birthday of my mother – happy birthday mom! My brother and me just found a fix for the 3 pixel bug in Internet Explorer … Continued

Simpy and Raw Sugar, two competitors of the social bookmarks service del.icio.us, now pay the users for their bookmarks. Here’s my analysis.

Simpy simply (hey, nice word twist) allows you to add Google Ads on your user page. This way, if your links are popular, you may get money. Raw Sugar on the other hand pays the top-ten users, i.e. those ten who have the most traffic on their user pages, from $25 to $500.

Simpy

The way I’m using del.icio.us is most of the time just searching for something clicking on the link and that’s it. Or I’m RSS subscribed to popular/new for some specific tag. This way most of the time I never even see a specific user name. Which means that I think that the user pages won’t get much traffic – not enough for making the ads really pay out. But the solution is a low-risk for Simpy – at least what money concerns. And: Everybody can potentially make money every month.

Raw Sugar

Raw Sugar on the other hand give out their money for the top-ten users. This way the users compete – no matter if they are competing on 1.000 or 10.000 hits/month. That’s kind of fair. Until you reach a higher hit rate of course, where Adsense can make more sense – but my guess is that the hits aren’t that much. The problem here: Only ten guys get money each month.

But there is huge advantage: everything is transparent and the competition gives an extra motivation – have a look at the list for yourself. Top-1 currently is a russian guy who posts daily warez/muzic on his web page (I won’t give you the link here – check it out for yourself ;-)). And now we know that he’s making at least $500/month, hehe. But he’s the only one in the top-ten doing – well, that kind of stuff…

Conclusion

Long story short – I like the Raw Sugar idea much more. They will definitely get higher quality links with their payment – which they then can sell to Google, et al.. And they’ve introduced a whole new “service”: the top-ten itself is a cool idea – people love to compete. I’m sure that the links of Simpy will also get better. But that’s it. I guess both will add the other ones idea, i.e. Simpy a payed top-ten and Raw Sugar Adsense – if Simpy ‘s got the money and Raw Sugar won’t get broke 😉

Also check out the TechCrunch posting on that issue.

[tags]simpy, raw sugar, del.icio.us, adsense, google adsense[/tags]

Well, it´s all about tagging, isn´t it? I mean Flickr and so on… Giving keywords to pictures… but hey, why? Oh, here´s an example what is possible with all these tags. A game. And a really cool one as well! It´s kind of a quiz show for hundreds of people. Or maybe thousands… no matter. It feels like “Dalli Dalli”, some famous german show from the 80s – reduced to yeah, tagged pictures, ;-). Try to guess what the keyword of a series of pictures is – and ascend in the highscore at the Flickr Game.

[tags]flickr, flickr game, tags, tag, tagging, tagged images, tagged pictures[/tags]

rusi.is-a-geek.org moved to ruzee.com. The server didn’t change at all – it’s still the little Epia board of before. I just got a Custom Domain from DynDNS. The old domain will be redirected to the new one – there shouldn’t … Continued

Today, Google opened Google Talk, their instant messaging and VoIP infrastructure/tool based on XMPP, the protocol of Jabber, to the public! This means, that every user of the Jabber network can now send instant messages to users of Google Talk and vice versa. Since I am a Jabber user, hosting my own Jabber server at rusi.is-a-geek.org, my server now directly communicates with the Google servers for full interworking. If you use Google Talk, I’d be happy if you send me an instant message to jabber@rusi.is-a-geek.org – I really wanna find out, if it works.

But that’s just one part of the story. This news also means that, with an appropriate already in-progress plugin for my Jabber server and yet to come VoIP clients using libjingle we’ll get a completely free, open (as opposed to Skype), easy to use (as opposed to SIP) self-hostable fully distributed VoIP infrastructure (well, where Google charges for calls to plain old telephones – let’s just kick out those!).

[tags]google, talk, open, jabber, xmpp, libjingle, skype, sip[/tags]

I’ve decided to give my [tag]Wordpress[/tag] [tag]theme[/tag] – well, the [tag]RusiTheme[/tag] – to the public. Hey, nothing more to say about it. Enjoy it! [tags]download, free[/tags]

I’ve added a page that describes how to be informed about updates of my blog (and other blogs as well, of course ;-)). If checking your bookmarks manually in order to find out that my site has changed is still … Continued