This evening I’ve been playing a bit with Flattr. Flattr gives you the opportunity to do micro-donations to blogs, articles or projects you like. When you do that, in return, you can also receive Flattrs.

Say you want to donate 5 euro each month to projects you care about. Paypal could be used if they have a donate button, but that’s kind of an annoying system to use for this type of donations.

Flattr makes donating easy. When you see a Flattr button next to an article you like, you can press it. It counts as one ‘click’.At the end of the month your 5 euro will be divided by all articles or projects you gave a click to. If you clicked 5 times on such a button, each will get 1 euro. When say 20 different people did that, the author could receive a nice, flattering, amount of money.

You can add a Flattr-button next to the blogs you write, sites you have or projects you run. That way you have a nice and easy way to receive donation, where the barrier for the donation is as low as it will get.

I really like that system. I find it fun to browse through the top lists to see what others find flattering. Sometimes I see why and Flattr them too. If I do, it gets on my facebook page automagically, which is quite nice, as it shows which pages or blogs I like and other people can look at them too. The top lists showed me some new blogs I’ve started to follow.

It’s silly to think you will get rich with the system, I see it just for fun and a simple way to express gratitude to some people or projects. Although that does not have much to do with actually money I guess. For me, maybe it will cover some of the domains I’m currently privately paying or the tickets to the cinema now and then. I guess it will be the same for the recipients of my ‘clicks’. Anyways, join it, it is fun!