Dirtymicrobe versus Threadless

Do you want to make some money, and flex your artistic muscle at the same time? There are two similar sites that are allowing users to contribute content and make a pretty penny if it's good.

Two sites called dirtymicrobe.com and threadless.com pay users for contributing fresh new t shirt designs. The campaigns are described here:

http://dirtymicrobe.com/make_money
http://www.threadless.com/submit

The programs pay between $50 and $2000 (yikes!) for new t-shirt designs.

Plus, these are pretty cool sites to shop for christmas gifts . . .

I'm going to get to work on my t-shirt design now . . .

www.4info.net

So, have you guys ever used the google SMS search function? If not, here's an example - you send a text of 'Domino's 12345' to 46645, and it returns addresses and phone numbers of all Domino's pizza locations in the 12345 zip code. Free, and pretty slick in my opinion. A remote database query that returns content in seconds over sms for free.

So what if a company had a registered SMS number to call, set up an open platform for people to create their own search functions based upon reserved "tags"? And they also had a marketing plan to promote their brand and tagword functions, and the service was free for the users and the function contributors? . . . and they share ad revenue with the xml based function contributors? Damn that would be cool.

Wait, 4info.net has done just that. You sign up for an account, build an xml sms search function via their ajax based web interface, and you wait for the queries to roll in.

The way the site and content contributors make money is by injecting ads into the SMS responses, and then splitting the profits down the middle. And it's all xml based, so the content can be dynamic, encouraging users to hit your tag often, provided the content is desirable and functional.

An idea - it would be a great opportunity to tap into api's and make some profit based upon defined and branded functionality. Ehh, maybe a youtube.com api video search function that returns a url for smartphones with data service with realplayer loaded. You could download a video to your phone on an off the wall topic in a matter of a minute or so.

This is a great platform for encouraging good content and a loyal user base. Good luck guys!

www.like.com

This site is in alpha release, but it is fully functional, although somewhat limited in content at this point. It appears to me that like.com is an attempt to combine a fully dynamic ajax platform with hints of www.espgame.org logic and a shopping mashup. Doesn't look like this one is ad revenue driven, but more affiliate marketing revenue driven.

The functionality is cool, versatile and compelling. I don't really like the current content being that I am a dude (mostly women's items right now), but my wife has been poking around the site, and I can see her spending a lot of my gadget buying power money there.

Apparently they paid $100K for the domain, and have some CS PhD's behind the scenes, so I can see they positioning themselves to head in a fresh, new direction.

first post

So . . . . I had this idea to start posting content to a blog where I can track and communicate all of the new stuff I come across online in the form of gadgets, concepts, new web2.0 ajax sites . . . anything that I am going to tag on delicio.us, but want to expend upon and share with others. I am always sending "check this out" emails, basically because I like to annoy my freidns with new content they don't really care about . . . and posting to my forums and other forums and blogs, and it is getting a bit inefficient.

I am in search of a centralized place that pushes this content through xml and other can point their browser too for new updates. I am always stumbling across new stuff, and really want to expland beyond tagging the content and actually communicate me ideas related to the stumblings on the internet.


Anyway, hopefully you'll find something cool here, and check back for updates regularly - and please post your thoughts!!