The following is a paid review by ReviewMe

Yesterday, via Paul Stamatiou’s blog a read a review about a spamless email service, but it wasn’t until I read it a second time that I noticed he got paid to review it.

The service used was called ReviewMe, made by the great folks at Text Link Ads. ReviewMe takes a great approach to encourage communication between bloggers and others while giving the bloggers a bit of incentive.

ReviewMe is a collection of bloggers and advertisers. The bloggers are looking for a bit of spare change (like myself) and the advertisers just want to have their service/product reviewed by a blogger to encourage exposure or awareness. The blogger is paid based on the ranking of their blog and how much the advertisers are willing to shell out.

ReviewMe is going to (at least from what I can see) become a great way for bloggers to come up with original, popular, interesting content and still get a “reward” for their time or interaction and a great way for those who are wanting more exposure for a certain service or product to get the word out via a different medium than traditional advertising.

Granted some people may see this service as a way for bloggers to “sell out” I think it’s an amazing concept and a great solution to a simple problem - lacking content in many blogs. I enjoy ReviewMe, and if you’re an up and coming blogger or just a beginner I’d recommend you create an account.

One thing I forgot to mention, you do NOT have to always give a positive review - you are paid based on the fact you DID the review, not the opinion you have, which adds so much more to it.

Technorati Tags: Review, paid review, ReviewMe, me, money, ads, text link ads, paid

Social bookmarks, communities, web 2.0 stuff, all this is nice but when it comes to choosing a community there’s one main site out there, MySpace, a lot of teens and even some adults have profiles there (myself included) and they think that it’s one of the best social communities out there.

Well there are other choices and one that I believe is on par but may not be seen as such is flickr. Now when you read that you’ll probably say to yourself, “flickr is a photo site, why would it be like MySpace?”. Herein is where it’s not that obvious, what can you do on MySpace? View profiles, view friends, view pictures, send messages and post comments pretty much is all it’s used for. Let’s compare a few things, starting with what you see when you view yourself on MySpace and flickr:

MySpace

flickr

Which looks better to you and less ad infested?

Now onto viewing your friends/contacts, let’s take a look again:

MySpace

flickr

Once again, which is more pleasing to look at? Just looking at the flickr contacts gives you they’re alias, they’re real name (if applicable), and their location, way more than MySpace gives you, that just gives you their diplay name kinda boring.

Now, in the MySpace contacts you can click on their name and picture and it takes you to their profile, where you’d have to click again to see all (12 pfft) pictures at most they posted of theirself and maybe a pet. But with flickr you can either go to their profile (I’ll cover next), or see all their photos which have no limit and no specific subject and most people post pictures of themselves on flickr.

Next let me cover profiles, this is a big one, now most idiotic MySpace users (the picture below is not one of them, just an example) make these horrible themes with falling objects blinking .gif backgrounds and horrible bright colors that make you want to have a seizure. On flickr everything is unified and nobody stands out from anybody else (this isn’t communism ;)), but instead you can put what you want people to see in a nice, readable page. Take the examples below:

MySpace

flickr

Now Caitlyn’s profile (on MySpace) is a better one than most of the ones I’ve seen, not meaning to pick on her especially.

Next thing that a lot of MySpace users do is send messages to one another. Now while both are very simple and easy to do, you still with MySpace get the ads and the awkward color scheme (the darkish blue with white and some red), examples:

MySpace

flickr

Pictures. MySpace users (majority) all have 12 slots of their pictures of whatever they want, mostly people put pictures of themselves and occasionally pets, friends, family, etc. With flickr though you have an unlimited (except for bandwidth) amount of photos you can put up, ranging from pictures of a car to a photo of aunt dawn, your choice. Plus with flickr you can have your photos organized into “sets” which could be things like family, friends, etc whatever you want, and the way the photos are presented flickr clearly takes the cake:

MySpace

flickr

Final thing for me, comments - these are big on MySpace that people post bulletins begging for them on pictures and their profiles, it sometimes gets annoying.

I’m not even going to highlight MySpace on this one because I believe the way flickr does it wins no matter what.

Now, to wrap everything up, my personal opinion is that flickr is just as good of a community for users as MySpace is, and the only reason I stay on MySpace is that most of my friends around here don’t know anything else.

Based on everything I’ve highlighted I’d have to say flickr comes out on top for me as one of the best community type sites.