Something I do, and I expect many others do, is to store a number of Jiffy bags which I receive after purchasing something online. Whilst this does take up space, it has several benefits.

Jiffy bags are pretty durable and can easily be reused.

Why bother paying for a Jiffy bag, increasing P&P charges, when you already have a perfectly good (albeit used) one? Whilst a Jiffy bag probably only costs about 15p if you buy them in bulk, I suspect my local Post Office sell them for significantally more. If you pass this onto the customer, it will attract more customers and make your postage costs look fairer which will benefit you detailed seller ratings.

Another benefit is that it saves you time. You don’t have to bin the Jiffy bags, nor do you have to spend a while looking for somewhere which sells them.

The other key benefit is that it is reusing something, preventing waste. Whilst this probably doesn’t help you directly, it could make you appear more environmentally-friendly and it obviously helps the environment.

The only downside is that you have to tape the seal on the end of the Jiffy bag stuck and you have to peel off the original label or stick something over it.

This is a bit of a common sense lifehack, but it’s one I have being using for quite a while and I thought I should share it in case you’re not!

This lifehack probably isn’t any good for businesses, as it would make you appear unprofessional but I can’t think of any disadvantages for the individual!

Cuil is a new search engine which the mainstream media seem to have an interest in. Personally, I fail to see why.

Cuil was established by former Googleplex employees, and the site appears to strive to be Google’s rival. Cuil claims to be the World’s largest search engine, with over 120 billion pages being indexed, but Google refutes this saying their index is bigger whilst refusing to give out details.

The search engine is, quite simply, a search engine but has several nice features such as:

• Suggestions when entering search terms
• Displaying results in columns, as opposed to a list. This is a little confusing!
• Categories (DMOZ based, I expect)
• Pictures from pages accompanying results
• Other related search terms being provided
• A nice black finish
• A really complex way of determining which link ranks where, which doesn’t use a ’superficial’ method like PageRank
• It doesn’t store searches

Cuil is a very capable search engine, which delivered quite a lot of relevant results I have never seen on Google before. However, it is quite different (interface-wise) and this will put many users - including me - off. The columns take far too much adjustment.

I also feel that Cuil simply ’steals’ features off other search engines, like A9, Ask and Yahoo, and puts them together in one place.

Cuil is going to be successful for a fear months, but suffer when its hype dies down.

As Jeff says: ‘Bottom line is that Cuil is interesting and will definitely be worth following, but it certainly is no real danger [to Google] as of now’.

LinkLift is a company who act as an intermediary for selling text links on your website, taking a 30% commission on any sales (which isn’t that bad). The idea of the site is very similar to its competitors, such as Text Link Ads.

So what makes LinkLift different, you may ask? LinkLift is specifically geared towards a European market (the tagline on LinkLift.com is ‘Der Marktplatz für Textlinks’!), having separate websites for German, French, Italian, Spanish, British and (interestingly) Polish publishers and advertisers.

I think this is an interesting idea, because despite the fact have TLA have a .co.uk category, I imagine it is still hard for advertisers to find publishers in a certain country if it isn’t tagged correctly.

LinkLift, like TLA, requires me to install dynamic code on my website (making the site impractical for Blogger users, sadly!).

‘Blog in isolation’ published 25 reasons why we should use Disqus, the hot blog commenting community and management system of 20,000 blogs, which also isn’t short of funding. I, personally, don’t think it’s so ‘hot’ and I have a number of issues with the service.

Disqus looks nice, with threaded comments, shared profiles and email updates, but it hosts and manages your comments on an external site.

1. It will slow my site down

   Remotely hosting my commenting means that for them to be viewed, I have to download them from another website and call them from a remote database. This, surely, reduces performance and increases pageload time.

2. I don’t want to entrust my comments with someone else. They could get lost.

   If Disqus were to go bankrupt, what guarntees would I have that my comments would not be lost?

3. Many things Disqus provide have already been provided elsewhere.

   Shared profiles: TypeKey. Gravatars: Gravatars. Threaded comments: This plugin. Editable comments: This plugin.

4. Data protection.

   IANAL but surely it can’t be good to subject users to another privacy policy with servers in another jurisdiction. Who would be liable for any breaches in data protection?

5. Disqus is not open source.

   There is an API, but it isn’t open source. Is it ever wise to use a system of which you cannot see the technical basis?

6. It isn’t easy to migrate to and from.

   If I wanted to leave, I would have to find a way of transferring my comments. Disqus doesn’t complement your current comment system, like coComment does, but replaces it.

7. Disqus is a company. They want to make money. They could serve ads on your sites.

   Disqus have the technical capacity to serve adverts on your site, as they could put them in comments or send them along with the comments to be displayed. You’d have to trust them.

8. It is a fad which will probably fade out, meaning more work for you as you migrate back.

   Do you remember that fantastic coComment service we all used to use? Its Alexa rank says you don’t.

Three years ago, I remember people were still frequently discussing micropayments. Micropayments are, as you may gather, very small payments which are too small to even justify costs such as credit card processing.

Several companies have tried to implement micropayments as a system for online paid content, as opposed to subscription-driven methods, but most of these ulimately fail.

In 1998, Jakob Nielsen predicted that micropayments were they way forward, as opposed to advertising or subscriptions, in his essay ‘The Case for Micropayments‘ but he obviously made a misjudgment and the advent of broadband internet saw many of his arguments (such as removing the need for advertising would speed websites up significantally, which would actually save businesses money) become significantally weeker.

In 2002, he came to the realisation that ‘we are not going to get true micropayments’ but we may get ’services that rely on user payments’ with bigger payments. His latter prediction was partially right, as the likes of online music sites successfully utilise payments of up to about £1 fairly successfully, but £1 is much bigger than what a micropayment is.

Nearly three years after Jakob’s essay, a wiser chap called Clay Shirky published ‘The Case Against Micropayments’ which stated that ‘the short answer for why micropayments fail’ was ‘users hate them’ as it leads to anxiety and hesitation. Shirky was right, as they didn’t take off and still have not taken off.

Micropayments are not economical to administer. If each page online cost 1 cent to view, how much of that cent would be spent on administration? Like any payment system, you require staff, hardware, a processing system and perhaps most important time and effort. Would a small site’s webmaster be willing to put the system into place, making his website slower as it would have to call an external site, if he were to only earn about $0.0025 per page? I think not.

Another point: do users or businesses want to pay? I wouldn’t. I can easily read 5 small web pages a minute, and I would hate to be paying 5 cents a minute or $3 an hour. I think relevant advertising is the best form of monetisation as it gives users a choice whilst still giving them access, is economic for webmasters and advertisers, and it can help the user.

Micropayments don’t work and in my opinion nor does any paid content. 99% of the time, there’s a free alternative to any paid content. I hate it, though, when I can’t get access to some content - and sometimes paying isn’t even an option - such as journals hosted on JSTOR.