Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde (and his new team) launched a couple of months ago their new “sharing & non-profit” project: Flattr, which despite being still in beta mode has quickly grabbed the tech-blog attention…
Although not much more outside Techcrunch or Wired to be honest. The (brilliant) idea is simple: you tip the content you like (artists, pages, projects, people…) how? by clicking the Flattr button embedded in their pages just like hitting the Digg or Facebook like button…. like this one:
Basically when you set up a Flattr account you pay (contribute) with a minimum 2€ fee / month (goes up to 100€): that’s the amount you’re willing to give out for funding or “flattering” content you like. When you find something you find interesting that has the Flattr button then you click and reward the creator of that content.
By the end of the month your monthly fee is equally split among the holders of the content you’ve “flattered”. If you haven’t flattered anything then your contribution will be given to charity.
As they put it: “Flattr can be used as a complement to accepting donations. Or to having advertising on your blog. Or to help getting small donations you never get for your open source software”. There are several other similar services like Rewrd or Kachingle, but if we need a universal artist-rewarding system then we can only support one at a time :S.
We really hope the idea keeps spreading as for now most of the projects to flatter are German or Swedish (the majority of the registered users), but this shall change on the very short term… here’s us for instance!
If you still have doubts about the project (as we haven’t been appealing & clear enough) you can always visit their faq… much easier than reading our many times incomprehensible articles ;)… and start Flattering!
