CREAMaid Update

Undeterred by my previous failure to cash-in on the CREAMaid bandwagon, I recently posted about my "strongest competitive video game memory". This time I received the following congratulatory response:

Congratulations!

Your post "Glory Days!"

has been invited to appear on the Conversation:
"TeamCompete asks: "What is your Strongest Competitve Video Game memory?""
Your post will be syndicated to the widgets included
inside each of the participating posts.

I received this and a follow-up e-mail regarding the status of my royalty payment the same day. Having checked my Paypal account, I can now confirm the legitimacy of the CREAMaid service. Blog on.

Glory Days!

I love video games. My favorite would have to be Sid Meier's classic, Civilization. In college my friends and I would play Civ III in multi-player mode in marathon sessions, some lasting more that 36 hours. It was insane. Fortunately for me, though, the tales of how these games transpired mattered more than who actually won.
Since graduation, our gaming group has spread out across three continents but we still manage game or two each year, albeit only for only a few hours nowadays. So, what has gaming taught me: Don't live to game. Game to live.

CREAMaid Update

Bellow is an e-mail I just received from CREAMaid in regards to my review of Newgie:

Dear TheBlatantAdvertiser,

We're sorry to notify you that your post "Introducing Newgie" has not been selected to appear on the Conversation "Try Newgie, the news gathering service"

Here are what the Conversation starter suggested as the possible reasons for not selecting your post :

* Not regularly kept blog

However, you can still earn $2 referral fee each time a visitor of your site participates through your post's widget and gets selected.

Thank you for using CREAMaid, and please try again later.

Regards,

CREAMaid

Although I'm disappointed that my post failed to make the grade, I rest comfortably knowing that I did my best.

The e-mail also begs two questions: first, who and what are the responsibilities of the "Conversation starter"; and, second, what constitiutes a "regularly kept blog". Should I ever discover the answers to these queries you shall be first to know.

Introducing Newgie

Newgie is the novel creation of Jason Windebank and Jacob Rheuban who decided to fill a niche market for news junkies. This web-based news aggregator scores selected articles based on the reputation of the reporting agency and then adds or subtracts points based on user views, recommendations, and forwards. While user-driven rankings are nothing new – one need only think of Digg – Newgie is taking a more dynamic approach to generating ranks: Rather than relying on user votes, Newgie’s in-house ranking engine continuously monitors the activity surrounding a story and automatically adjusts its score.

Though the site’s layout is spartan – surprisingly void of web 2.0 graphical overkill – it provides an intuitive platform upon which to submit stories, subscribe to feeds, and manage user-defined categories. Additionally, custom Newgie RSS feeds can be created for users of external RSS readers.

Newgie frontpage view

Newgie category view

Newgie’s ranking system is an interesting idea but one which relies on the active participation of its users within the Newgie community. The question now revolves around the site’s ability to generate sufficient mass to make it a viable option to other socially driven "news" aggregators.

Though still in Beta, Newgie definitely warrants a look.

CREAMaid

Dave Taylor shares his experience with CREAMaid, another paid blogging service, which compensates bloggers for participating in "Conversations" about sponsored products. Unfortunately, the number of available Conversations has not grown in some time, leaving me to wonder just how successful these blogging for dollars start-ups will be.