Websites that make money from YOUR updates

Never thought this was possible? Well, there are websites out there that make money when YOU write a blog update! Or even when you tweet to your own followers. How's that possible? Well - all they need to do is aggregate your data on their webpages and then have advertisements bring them the money. Typically, such a website will be owned by someone you want yourself to be associated with. Alternatively, they might also have some sort of an incentive for you to stay and have your content published through them. The system is definitely not illegal. In fact, it might be a great idea for you to make money from the internet - just think of something that can leverage the power of the masses. It could be something like a website that pulls data from other websites. Remember though, that one should always give credit to the source you're getting your data from. It's just plain ethics :)

Here's the first website, from Guy Kawasaki, that makes money for him when people write their blogs. Alltop is a great idea, and it solves a real problem - giving people one place where they can find all the top blogs and websites that cover a certain aspect of online publishing. What's more, it has become a rage with bloggers to have their content listed with Alltop. How Guy did it is just plain clever.

What's more, AllTop is also emerging as a one-stop for people to research on various topics that they cover (40 of the top searched topics on the internet). There's a whole section for people who're interested in blogging. You can see entries from your competition, all at one place.

And here's another website - TwitterTops, that attempts to do on twitter what Guy did with blogs and websites. The idea may be smaller, but the central theme is the same - to bring top tweeps together. In its current avatar, the websites appears to only collate TwitterTops from various geographies. Hopefully they'll be able to eventually amass tweeps based on their expertise as well. After all, just being the top twitter user in a particular country or city doesn't mean as much as being a twitter authority on a subject! The TwitterTops management needs to wake up and take notice!

Of course - you can also argue that all the top bloggers are eventually making money off of other people's hard work - TechCrunch does not itself make all the great web services they talk about. Popular Science doesn't invent all they write about. But at least these guys write about stuff! AllTop and TwitterTops promise not to write about stuff - they are only going to show the world what YOU have thought of! If only I could think of the next similar idea that could fly :)

Thanks to the social networks that make discovering such websites easy!