In recent months a new kind of social networking service emerged and quickly grew pretty popular in Europe, especially Germany.
The name is Flattr and its basically a micropayment site.

Within the system you can define a certain amount of money you want to spend monthly for appreciating your favorite site or favorite content. For example, if you’re going to spend 20 EUR a month in total and just start clicking the “flattr” buttons referring to those articles and sites the monthly allowance is simply divided by the amount of flattred things. In short it might be described as the “like” button from Facebook with the addition of getting a little money.

A popular website in Germany which is making use of flattr is the newspaper “tax”. Even such classic media is embracing such a young service is a good sign, I reckon.

If you’re blogging or contributing to society by creating (free) content of any sort it might be a nice and uncomplicated way to enable your user base to show appreciation by joining the Flattr service.