I’m trying out a new service I found earlier today. It’s called ScratchBack, and it looks promising. You’ve probably seen sites that solicit tips through PayPal. Sure, it benefits the site and it’s owners, but what about all the people who donate? Wouldn’t it be more fun if they got something out of it as well? If someone’s nice enough to give you a few dollars, then shouldn’t you give them a shout-out?
That’s the premise behind ScratchBack. You put a JavaScript widget on your website, which has room for a few links (five, ten, whatever). Then people who like your website and want to give you a small tip can just click the link on the widget and send you a couple dollars through PayPal. After putting some dough in your tip-jar, the generous reader can then have a link to his or her website shown in the widget. The links have nofollow attributes on them, so there are no worries about Google penalties, but the tipper gets a little publicity.
It gets even more fun then that. The widget shows 5-20 text links (or images if you prefer), and by default the most recently added link is shown at the top. As more people tip you, their links bump older links down the list. If you don’t like this default behavior, then you can set the widget to just show links for a preset amount of time (a day, a week, a month). Personally, I like the “AutoBump” mode better. If you don’t get many tippers, then the links stay on longer too.
You can set the tip amount when you create a “TopSpots” widget, and it can be pretty much any value you want. I set mine (it’s in the sidebar to the right) to the minimum of one dollar.
Want to get in my TopSpots? After all, we all know how little the U.S. Dollar is worth. 
