That’s the aim of PayPerPost, a new service launched today. From the site:

You’ve been writing about Web sites, products, services and companies you love for years and you have yet to benefit from all the sales and traffic you have helped generate. That’s about to change. With PayPerPost™ advertisers are willing to pay you to post on topics. Search through a list of topics, make a blog posting, get your content approved, and get paid. It’s that simple.

Pete Cashmore at Mashable takes a different line:

PayPerPost is a great new way to lose your credibility as a blogger - the service will pay you to write reviews of new products and services. Advertisers post “opportunities” on the site - they can specify whether the post should have pictures, and even request a positive review. That last part really crosses the line, and it’s sure to destroy any credibility you have as a writer.

I agree with Pete in some ways - if blogs want to be trusted, they must have the same high editorial standards as any newspaper. This is a great way to lower those standards, and from what I can understand of the service, it borders on deception, as there is no requirement under the ToS to disclose. All the ToS say is that ‘no blog postings may be placed on blogs published specifically for the purpose of publishing our opportunities and receiving remuneration through the Service, whether or not the page content is relevant.’ That is a ridiculous statement, as they are charging advertisers for the posts on the premise that they would not otherwise have been published. That term contradicts that idea, and is obviously intending only so that the service can claim it does not encourage deception.

However, there is a good idea behind this. It’s just they’ve got the implementation wrong. The blogger should not be writing the post. The blogger should sell the right to an advertiser for that advertiser to write a ‘pitch’ to the blog’s readers, clearly declared and obviously written as such. A smart advertiser would advertise only on blogs that he/she read, and would write a post designed to engage the blog’s readers. If Mashable (or any other blog) had a clearly labelled ‘pitch’ for a product, written by that product team, about once a month, I would read it without hesitation. The problem is that with this PayPerPost it appears that there is some deception or at least editorial compromisation going on. Maybe I’ll set up such a system in the future. I bet I’d get flamed by the blogosphere though!

Obviously, I haven’t been posting to Gizbuzz recently. This isn’t because I’ve given up, but I am working pretty much flat out at the moment, getting back home late at night.

Things have been so busy I have been forced to use an RSS reader. I usually don’t, because of information overload and the fact that I prefer reading content of a site designed for it than a generic design. Google Reader has served me well, the trick being to only subscribe to a small number of feeds (about 10), and not to high volume feeds, such as Digg or Techmeme.

I’m very busy next week too, so over the weekend I’ll schedule some posts to be published over the week, and hopefully get round to writing brief updates on the news items. Please stick with Gizbuzz!

Google have released yet another product - Google Checkout, which looks set to be their PayPal-killer.

The basic idea is to allow people to buy products on Checkout-supported sites, and then have Google process the transaction leaving the users with only one username and password to type in and the merchant with an easy e-commerce solution.

Watch the official Google Checkout video here.

Google are once again trying to get a hold of your mobile life. They’ve extended their current mobile services to a range of new European languages in an attempt to try and further get people to use Google services, wherever they are.

Among the mobile services now available in the new languages are Google’s Personalised Homepage and Gmail Mobile services.

Whether you want to use Google on your mobile or not, it must be very convienient having access to all your information wherever you are. Provided that your phone supports XHTML…

This is the first in my series of explainer posts. Ajax is the talk of the Web 2.0 world at the moment; it’s seen by many as the ‘must have’ feature of any web service, and is described by others as an over-hyped, over-used technology. But what is it? Well, it stands for Asynchrous Javascript and XML, and is essentially a way in which a website can update what you see on it without you having to refresh the page. That makes it perfect for rich web applications - websites which are aiming to act as much like traditional desktop applications as possible.

A great example of the use of Ajax, compared to traditional techniques would be Gmail and Hotmail. Gmail makes great use of Ajax, meaning that if someone sends you an email while you are looking at your inbox, it appears in your inbox without you refreshing the page. Or if you archive a message, it disappears from your inbox without refreshing. This allows you to work much faster, because you don’t have to wait after every action, as you did in earlier webmail services, like Hotmail. In Hotmail, every time you change a view you have to refresh the page. The next version of Hotmail (currently in beta version) is Windows Live Mail, and that uses lots of Ajax to create an experience as much like a conventional program such as Outlook as possible. Ajax is important because it is one of the major fuels of Web 2.0. Without Ajax, no-one would use services like Writely, because it would be so inefficient, and the experience so inferior to using a program such as Microsoft Word.

For further specific information about how Ajax works, see Wikipedia. For examples of Ajax websites, just read Techcrunch, or have a look at this use of Ajax to power a remote desktop.

If you can’t wait until tomorrow (morning for US users, probably late afternoon for UK users) to see the new digg, the latest Diggnation episode was a recording of Kevin Rose’s demo of Digg V3 in San Francisco. Grab it here. Digg V3 looks as though it will be great, not only covering wider topic areas but also having a whole load of extra features. Well worth a look.

In the last post in the Windows Vista In-Depth series, I’m going to take a look at how stable Windows Vista Beta 2 is (remembering of course its Beta status) and look at how compatible it is with hardware and older Windows software.

Hardware

I was actually pleasantly surprised by the amount of hardware Windows Vista could automatically detect. What I did have to find drivers for manually was my sound card (Realtek AC’97), my monitor (CTX VL950) and my printer (Lexmark Z45).

The sound card drivers were easily fixed by installing the same drivers I used for XP, off my motherboard’s CD. These installed without problem and after a restart, I had sound. So, from this, it seems most drivers that work with XP, also work with Vista.

However, the next problem was my monitor. I’ve got a CRT monitor, so driving it at 60Hz makes it ridiculously flickery. Usually, I’d just download the monitor drivers for Windows XP from the CTX website. These unfortuantely, failed to install in Vista. Having said that, I did find a workaround for the refresh rate issue.

Finally, to my printer. Normally XP doesn’t have drivers for this as well, so I proceeded to install the drivers for XP. Unfortunately, Vista failed to install them properly and I couldn’t really work out what it was doing. I tried again, again and again but still, it just told me it couldn’t. Shame. No printing, then.

Software

The amount of software for Windows is truly staggering. And naturally, being one of Windows’ unique selling points (remember the Windows ads - “with a world of software and devices that run on Windows…”). I’ve tried a few software packages and games on Vista, and here’s what I think.

Most software that I’ve tried works with Vista. For example, when installing the iTunes + QuickTime bundle from Apple, the experience is just the same as XP.

Other software, however, doesn’t like installing so much. I tried some games and game demos. Most of them ran with a little persuasion, but a few failed saying that they couldn’t find DirectX 9 files. Windows Vista (with Aero) uses DirectX 10, and there have been many changes in the DirectX architecture for Vista. This means that when games look for the DirectX 9 dll files, they can’t find them, and so they think you don’t have DirectX installed and prompt you to install it. Of course, installing it fails because it detects you have a newer version… I’m sure they’ll fix something eventually.

Flash Player 8 for Mozilla/Firefox, for example, tries to install, but it silently fails. But the really cool thing is that Windows detects that the install has failed and offers to run it again ‘with recommended settings’. This basically means it puts it in compatibility mode (we’ve seen this from XP) for Windows XP SP2.

I like the fact that this happens so transparently, but I’m not sure whether Windows just guesses what settings to use, or whether it only works for applications where Microsoft have specifically worked out how to fix it.

Which brings me to the next point. There’s a new Control Panel applet in Vista called Solutions to Problems. It’s going to be a real lifesaver when Vista comes out. Basically, the idea is that when Microsoft (or anyone else) fix a compatibility problem for a piece of software in Vista, the patch/fix is distributed through Solutions to Problems.

So if Application X is broken in Vista, and the creators of Application X work out how to make it work on Vista, they submit the patch to Microsoft. Anyone having problems with Application X will check the Solutions to Problems page, download and install the patch automatically and suddenly everything will work.

Well, that’s the theory. I think it’s a good idea, but how useful it will be in practice we will only know once Vista gets released and apps start breaking.

Stability

For a beta operating system, Vista Beta 2 is surprisingly stable. Yes, things crash, particularly Windows Explorer, but Explorer crashes in XP as well.

Occasionally I experienced some graphical problems, but this is more likely to be the fault of the NVIDIA Vista drivers than Vista’s fault itself.

Other than that I’ve only had a few crashes, so points to Microsoft for actually making Beta 2 fairly stable.

Conclusion

There are some issues still with Vista at the moment, there’s no doubting that. It’s not like we’re strangers to compatibility problems, every new release of Windows breaks things that used to work. Only time will tell how much Vista will break and how easy it will be to fix.

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First we hear about the ‘helpful’ pre-installation of Google products onto new Dell computer, and now Google have announced that they will be bundling their Google toolbar with downloads of the Shockwave player for Internet Explorer. This is acceptable, as the toolbar will be an option, but I am still not a fan of practices such as these.

The Google blog post on this subject is ridiculous.

We’re excited to partner with Adobe to make these features available to their users, and look forward to finding other ways to work together.

Downloaders of the Adobe shockwave player are perfectly capable of downloading the Google toolbar themselves if they choose to. Such bundling deals are not helpful for Adobe because, whilst providing some money, they annoy those installing the player and have a negative affect on Adobe’s brand and they are not good for Google because of the vast sums of money they must pay. A sensible and sustainable approach would be to continue to offer great functionality over and above the core functionality of IE, and for it to be so well known that everyone downloads it anyway. They could even advertise it on the Google homepage.

Well, Peter has moved his web development blog, and it can now be found here. It’s moved over from Blogger to Wordpress, and is sporting a great theme but more importantly, its great content. Its content is completely different from that of Gizbuzz, if you go over and read it you’ll pick up some interesting little titbits from around the web. It’s well worth a read.

Peter’s Web Development Blog

Microsoft have made an official press release along with Creative Commons that they will make a free tool available for Office 2003 that allows people to easily publish their work under the Creative Commons licences.

If you haven’t heard of it, Creative Commons (CC) offer freely available licences so that people can publish their content - blogs, pictures, whatever - and allow other people to use their work. There are a number of licences available, which allow you to choose whether to allow your work to other people for commercial purposes or not and so on. All licences mean that you get credit for the original work. It’s a bit like open source, but for content rather than source code.

It’s a growing trend to publish blogs under CC licences, and Flickr supports having CC licences for uploaded work as well. It’s really good to see that Microsoft seem to be embracing CC, and understand its growing popularity. CC is great because it gives you a pool of freely available resources that you can adapt upon or use to make your own content.

“We’re delighted to work with Creative Commons to bring fresh and collaborative thinking on copyright licensing to authors and artists of all kinds…” Craig Mundie of Microsoft

Interesting. I think it’s a good step, because if it means more people choose to open their content to other people, then everyone can benefit. Apart from a few notable exceptions like Blogger and Flickr, for example, not many companies have actually included automatic licensing for CC content in their products. Microsoft have, this time, beaten a lot of people to it.

Download the Creative Commons plugin here.

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