Gonna get me a big camera
I came across this site while I was searching for royalty-free stock photos on the Web. It’s an interesting marriage of micropayments and eMarketplace/eCommunity. I haven’t looked into it seriously — my camera’s resolution is not good enough to take pictures to make them useful for anybody. But when I get a new camera, I’ll be looking up this site to look to cash in!
Speaking of marriage of micropayments and eCommunity… I used to be really into Epinions. I really thought that I could make some money if I wrote a fair amount of good, honest reviews that people would find helpful. Well that never happened, and I lost interest after a while. I stopped paying attention to the site, and my general impression is that most people did, too. I speculate that the following factors had something to do with it: 1) overemphasis on merchandising (users have to get past all the crap about ‘comparison shopping’ before they get to the actual reviews), 2) too many product categories (there are a lot of product categories that don’t have any reviews at all, contributing to the impression that the site is not all that useful — plus it’s impossible to stay competitive with other ‘review’ sites if you’re not focused), 3) and poor IA that potentially buried well-written reviews underneath badly-written ones (they corrected this now, but back then the reviews were sorted by date — even if you wrote a masterpiece, one month later it was buried to the bottom of the page, giving your review practically no exposure). The way they corrected #3 is good (the default sort is based on how the reviewer him/herself is rated, then you have option to sort by date or product rating), but you still have to scroll all the way down, past all the merchandising info, to see the list of reviews.
