August 8, 2007
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Helium
I recently signed up for an account at this interesting website: http://www.helium.com/
It’s a fascinating site. The basic idea is to collect polished articles written by random users and rate them in accordance to user opinion and then pay the writers a portion of the ad revenue in accordance with the popularity of their writing. The articles on the site seem to cover a vast array of topics from the silly to the profound. There are even a lot of creative writing works on this site. The quality of the articles also varies pretty radically and although articles that are higher quality do float up to the top you can still see a lot of bad articles pretty prominently. There’s no review and improvement process nor any accuracy check. I’m also not fond of the referral system whereby you earn more money for getting other people to write articles for the site, that makes it feel almost like a pyramid scheme.
Overall it’s a neat variation on the peer based web sites proliferating and better than most such sites it is at least gives something back to the people whose content the site depends. You obviously can’t make any real money through this site, but it can be an interesting way to find interesting things to blow time writing about and get a little feedback about it.
Are there other similar sites out there?
