Webupon

Just before this article were written, I did both the search on what some Triond author think about Bukisa and the research on how both site actually work. So far I find that both site have their own advantages and disadvantages. The purpose of this article is not to state which one between the two is better but more about what is the impression I got from both sites.

Triond is better at handling pictures

I would say Triond online editor is very good at handling picture. It can download pictures from both internet source and your own desktop. Bukisa online editor on the other hand however is not as good handling images. There is no way in their online editor to upload images. The web practice something web-programmers know as leeching

Leeching is a practice of showing contents in one own website using the bandwidth of other web-hosting. Leeching could be legal or illegal depending on the policy of the website hosting the content. For example, when you embed YouTube video in your content in Triond, you are practically leeching the bandwidth of YouTube webhosting for your commercial purpose. However it is widely known that YouTube share their embed html code in each of their video. This is a clear sign YouTube permit other website to leech videos from their web-hosting.

YouTube however, place links to their website inside the content it provided. After you finished watching a video, you will be offered to watch other videos. If visitors want to see those videos as well, they will be taken from your website to YouTube. In this case YouTube doesn’t lose anything by letting Triond to leech video content from YouTube. Triond can let their authors to use YouTube video to enhance the quality of their article, while YouTube increase the number of their potential customer.

Leeching however could be considered illegal or at least unethical if you do that to website that never express in any way that they permit visitors to show their images in other websites. Some webmasters even take some measure to make it impossible to leech from their website. In such case it is wise to directly ask the webmaster if it is alright for you show their images in your website.

The other solution for this is to upload your image to Flickr or Blogspot. However on both of those sites, gif animations will not work. In my case, I simply put the gif animation in my own website and let Bukisa show them from there. If you don’t mind to invest a little bit on your endeavor, paid web hosting service could be as cheap as $3 per months. If you are going to leech it is a wise thing to leech only from your own websites.

In Triond however, that is not really an issue. Even if you use web images, Triond stored those images in their own hosting service. With the exception of YouTube videos, Triond is practically free from leeching.

Bukisa is better at handling html

Once you are getting good at writing html codes, you will find that simple plain text plus images is somehow lacking something. With html document, I could make virtually any kind of content I can imagine. Just for an example, I can enhance the readability of  a technical explanation by using the html tag.  This particular html tag enable me to use colors to separate different part of a complex sentence.

The other html tags like <sub> and <sup> for example also make it easy for me to write mathematical expression such as exponential, polynomial and set. This is essential for me if I need to include such mathematical expressions in my articles. For Triond however, you will have to do such formatting job in either Microsoft Word or Open Office and post your article as such document.

However, adding this kind of improvement for Triond online editor is not really hard. Triond  already put two very useful things for us in the Dashboard in the recent months. As a web programmer myself, I can assure that enabling the font color, superscript and subscript in Triond online editor is going to be far easier than that. However, until Triond make such improvement, I will have no choice other than submitting mathematic and programming how-to contents only to Bukisa.

Bukisa automatically approves content, in Triond we have to wait for a while

The fact that we have to wait for a while in Triond until our content published make it impossible to write several link-related articles in one go. If what we wrote is related to other contents in our pending list, we have to wait until all those articles have been approved before we can make them interlinked.

Approving contents right away however is going to pose serious problem for the publisher. If you don’t check the contents in regular basis, your website could easily be spammed. I have experienced this one in my own blogsite recently. I can tell you that becoming the target of spam is not a pleasant experience, especially if you don’t have access to your database admin page to delete all the spam in one go.

Bukisa have referral program

This could have both positive and negative effect. Unlike some people believe, their business model is not the same with pyramid scheme. With their business model, they won’t go bankrupt even if they decide to pay until the infinite-tier of referrer. This is because they use something mathematician call as geometric sequence with absolute common ratio less than one. As long as the absolute common ratio is less tha one, the sum result of infinite geometric sequence is going to be finite even if the number of the sequence is infinite.

However, their business model is somehow prone to abuse. I would say that this is because they didn’t plan their affiliate model really well. Under the system Bukisa employ at the time this article was written, it is indeed possible for a single user to get more money by signing up with more than one account and publish articles only on the lowest account. This practice is called stacking. The practice of stacking is going to considerably decrease the network income of an upline in said referal system. So you better hope that either all your downlines are as honest as an angle or they really need your promotion power to convince them not to do stacking.

If you want to make multi-tier referral program, you will have to base the percentage an affiliate recieve on their achievement and merit for the system. For my own website for example, I based the percentage an affiliate receive on their Group Sales Volume. In my system, you are not going to get a lot of profit if you have only one downline with big Group Sales Volume. That is not to say that you are not going to profit at all if you only have one downline, but it is not going to be much and it is going to come mostly from your Personal Sales Volume.  You have to get two or three downlines with considerable Group Sales Volume to reap the full benefit of a multi-tier affiliate system.

For a writing network, I would advise that the percentage an affiliate receive should be based on the number of articles with one or more “I Like It” they already wrote. A simpler system could also be based on something similar to Group Sales Volume.

Conclusion

I believe that being honest is important and knowledge is an imporant requirement of being honest. How are you going to tell people the truth if you don’t know about it? As always, I am going to wait and see how things are going to be with Triond and Bukisa.

Triond is an established and professional writing network and most of us had recieved what Triond promised albeit not really much. Bukisa is comparatively young and inexperienced compared to Triond. But in the end, what really important is one own willingness to learn, to experiment, to observe and to invest.

My other articles:

How Not to Become an Insurance Salesperon?
SEO Alternative: Market Your Keyword
Earning Money by Answering Mathematics Questions
The Importance of Having Friends in Triond