RealTravel has come a long way since we first mentioned them in our Web 2.0 conference roundup last October. They now have very deep travel content - mostly written by users, and some from a recent partnership with Frommer’s. The site has an active community of tens of thousands of frequent travelers who talk about their experiences and freely give their recommendations via blogs, forums, photos, etc.

Tomorrow RealTravel will annouce its new My Trip Plan tool, which can be found in the main navigation area. Travel content on the site includes an “add to My Trip Plan” button. Clicking this basically cuts and pastes the information into the My Trip Plan area along with a link to the original content, and this information can then be shared with others for discussion.

TripHub and Yahoo, among others, also offer good trip planning tools. RealTravel’s new My Trip Planner actually falls short of those existing tools in terms of pure organizational features. However, the depth of content available from other travelers gives RealTravel a different kind of advantage. And while RealTravel can create better planning tools over time, it will be hard for competitors to compete with RealTravel’s active traveling and content-creating community.

All the content on RealTravel (except the Frommer’s Guide content) is drawn directly from user posts and photos that are categorized by location and type. Editors, with the help of some automated classification, and choose the cream of the crop to be featured on the site. Readers can also affect the ranking of posts by voting on them or implicity when they add the content to their trip plan. All this content populates the site’s info on trip ideas, photos, blogs, dining reviews, sight reviews, useful links, and hotel reviews.

The blogging platform performs like any other blog (RSS included) except you catagorize by location and type (if it’s a review or not) before you write up the entry. You can’t drop drop images directly in a post, but instead associate some photos with it via an image gallery. You can print these photos out later using Qoop. Readers can comment on posts or leave questions in RealTravel’s location specific forums.

RealTravel has accomplished all of this in just one year, and with only $1 million in angel funding. They are a poster-child for the way to run a lean web service, and I suspect a bigger round of financing, or acquisition, will come in the near future.

Two new services that are similar to the controversial PayPerPost have announced their launch in the last few days: ReviewMe and CreamAid. PayPerPost, a marketplace for advertisers to pay bloggers to write about products (with our without disclosure), recently gained additional attention when they announced a $3 million round of venture financing.

The PayPerPost model brings up memories of payola in the music industry, something the FCC and state attorney generals are still trying to eliminate or control. Given the distributed and unlicensed nature of the blogosphere, controlling payoffs to bloggers will be exponentially more difficult.

Our position on these pay-to-shill services is clear: they are a natural result of the growth in size and influence of the blogosphere, but they undermine the credibility of the entire ecosystem and mislead readers.

ReviewMe is backed by Text Link Ads, a long time TechCrunch sponsor. It has not launched yet but was announced earlier today. Like PayPerPost, ReviewMe is a marketplace that allows advertisers to pay bloggers to write about their products. There are some significant differences in the business model, though. Where advertisers on PayPerPost set a single fee that is paid to all bloggers regardless of their size, ReviewMe uses an algorithm based on Alexa, Technorati and other statistics to determine the importance of a blog and charges a different fee for each blog based on the calculation. To their credit, ReviewMe requires bloggers to disclose that they are being paid for the post, and advertisers cannot require a positive post (PayPerPost makes disclosure optional and advertisers can require positive posts).

While we applaud the fact that ReviewMe requires disclosure and prohibits advertisers from requiring a positive post, we still think the very act of paying bloggers to write about a product is a very bad idea. Frankly, we’re not happy that one of our sponsors has launched this type of service, and we’ve notified them that we will not allow promotion of ReviewMe through TechCrunch.

CreamAid launched earlier this week. The service is similar to PayPerPost but requires bloggers to include a Flash widget in the post that links to CreamAid and also shows other blog posts that have discussed the product. There does not seem to be a requirement that bloggers write positively about a product, but there are few details on the site. Part of the goal of CreamAid seems to be to build a social network around paid posts using this widget.

My hope is that PayPerPost quickly requires disclosure by bloggers and eliminates the ability for advertisers to require positive reviews. It’s clear that simply stating we don’t like these services isn’t going to make them go away. VCs are now involved and PayPerPost has a large number of bloggers on their payroll that are willing to attack anyone that says it’s a bad idea. Given the very low likelihood of government involvement similar to the effort to eliminate payola in the radio industry, I’m not really sure what can be done to reverse the trend. In the end, individual bloggers will have to establish and maintain their own credibility.

A couple of months ago I heard about a new startup that requests users to disclose detailed salary information about themselves, and in return they get information on what others are making. It seemed like a great way to get good user generated information at no cost, and there are lots of ways to make money by reselling the aggregate data to third parties. The problem was that the site, wageexchange, was a complete letdown. It is little more than a web form that spits back data at the user. There’s no analysis or ability to dig deep into trends, etc. Until it got a lot better, we passed on profiling it.

But the idea stuck in my head, and when I got a call from Seattle-based PayScale I was happy to learn that this company had been doing exactly what wageexchange promised. This isn’t a new company - John Cook at the Seattle PI has written about them, as have other local Seattle writers. But it’s very useful for people searching for a job or trying to negotiate a raise, and I’m not sure we need a new startup to improve on the service.

Users go through a process of disclosing detailed information about their job function and compensation, and add it to what PayScale says is the “world’s largest database of salary information” (300,000 new profiles are added each month). The user can then access detailed salary information in the database, including custom reports based on salary, bonus, commission, hourly rates, health and vacation benefits.

The basic service is free, and Payscale generates revenue by upselling users to premium accounts and selling access to aggregate data to third parties.

This is a useful service that gives significant value back to the user for spending time adding content to their database. Payscale has raised $10.6 million in venture capital over two rounds. Investors include Trinity Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Fluke Venture Partners and Buerk Dale Victor.

We were contacted today by the founder of the soon to launch social network for gay men BigJock.com. It lead us to take a look around the gay male online social networking space and write the following overview of some of the current market leaders.

Niche social networks are likely a viable business because they allow specialized functionality and a subjective community feel as opposed to general interest sites that defer to either the lowest common denominator or the 15-25 year old demographic. Many people want to participate in social networks, but many people prefer networks set up for people they can relate to. That makes sense to me. From the proudly professional to the happily hedonistic, there may be something on this list for everyone - or at least everyone who’s a gay man.

As you can see by the following short profiles, these sites targeting a demographic with two traits in common (gay men) are all very different. Just as there’s a wide diversity of gay men in the world, there may well be ample room for a variety of gay male social networking sites - presuming they are able to build sufficient critical mass for monetization and financial viability.

I won’t pretend to speak for gay men and I’m sure there are some sites I’m missing, but these appear to be the most talked about gay male social networking sites online. You can take or leave my reviews of them. Maybe they’ll be a look inside a niche market for some of our readers and maybe they’ll be links of love for others. I tried to note the ones where the guys were particularly hot.

Jake

Jake calls itself the world’s largest gay professional community. It’s very British. The company reports almost 30,000 members sending two million messages to each other over the past year and attending exclusive real world events together. Unlike others that discourage independent commercial activity, this site encourages users to advertise their own businesses and directly monetize their involvement with the site.

There’s a professional but stylish look and feel to Jake. Users are encouraged to use their real names and free accounts offer only two photos - one for yourself and one for your company’s logo for example.

Paid accounts are £10 per month. Paid members can access the dating section of the site, get more storage in their internal mailboxes, get priority invitations to real world events and bring guests, gain access to “business briefings” and a number of other things.

ManJam

ManJam is probably the most widely discussed of all of these social networking sites. It calls itself “a unique social network” but in fact it’s just one of many similarly branded copycat sites from JuxMedia Ltd. ManJam offers listings for rooms and houses for rent or to live in rent-free. There are listings from all around the world. There are job and business listings, many of which are in the Middle East. There are personal profile listings with text and video comments enabled for members. Free membership gets users access to rental listing details, IM, video and audio messaging. There is also a mobile component to ManJam. Profiles on this site support transgendered identities.

Premium members get entries in any of the categories moved up to the top of their respective listings. Paid accounts are $20 per month, $42 per quarter or $90 per year. This site looks solid enough and usability is decent, though I did get one 404. It doesn’t have the upper class affects of Jake.com but ManJam is hardly for low baggers either. If hot unclothed chests are what you are looking for then ManJam may be where you want to go.

Ohlalaguys

Ohlalalguys is a rebranded version of JuxMedia’s ManJam with even worse site navigation added. See also Bentlads, another one of these sites.

Lovetastic

Lovetastic is explicitely not for men looking to hook up with hunks of burning love. “Finally, gay personals that treat you like a person,” the site says. Lovetastic says its goal is to bring together husbands. It used to be called Scene404 and the old landing page is pretty cute, in a dorky kind of way.

Free account holders can post profiles, browse the site and receive messages. Paid accounts, starting at $6 per month, enable users to send messages and chat.

Lovetastic’s interface is the cleanest, simplest and easiest on the eyes of any of these sites. In some ways it’s got more class than any of them. There are randomly generated interview questions for profiles and nude or shirtless pictures are prohibited. The site is ad free. If this is the site for you, you’ll likely know as soon as you visit it.

Connexion

Connexion is LGBT online networking with a .org suffix. In addition to dating and events organizing the site focuses on low level political activity and news. There’s an RSS feed for news from the site. The site is a little awkward but not highly sexualized. Transgendered identity is supported on this site but not gender queer identities outside of those based on the Male/Female binary.

There aren’t paid memberships available for this nonprofit site but there are a handful of very unobtrusive ads. If you’re looking for news and political discussion in your LGBT social networking check out Connexion.

OutEverywhere

OutEverywhere is a paid service for men and women in select countries around the world. It is very text intensive, site navigation is unbearable. This site has an emphasis on promoting real world events and venues. I couldn’t handle looking at it very much but there is a tag cloud if you scroll way down on the front page! Memberships are £19.95 for 6 months with a 28 free trial period.

DList

DList looks like it was designed by someone from Gawker - in fact I’m sure it was. It’s a pretty straightforward social networking site with a good feature set. User blogs, topical site blogs to read, a music player on profile pages. It’s ad supported without premium accounts.

Without seeing more of what the community is like on DList, I imagine this site will be succeed if it can keep its costs down. It’s got all the basics taken care of and is attractive.

BigJock

The site that inspired this post, BigJock, will launch its full featured version on early next month. The version that’s already up looks very nice though. It will include all the basics plus a Hot or Not picture rating component. The site will be free and ad supported. You can sign up now for an account and enter to win an iPod. BigJock has a long way to go before it can compete with the heavyweights above, but anything is possible and there are clearly niche approaches underway throughout the gay male social networking market. And that monkey logo is not to be missed.

Google and Zoho aren’t the only companies making waves in the online office race. New startups are launching regularly that emulate one or more products in Microsoft’s Office suite.

Preezo just threw their hat in the ring with their soon-to-be-released PowerPoint clone. We’ve tracked a number of these products, including Zoho, Empressr, Thumbstacks. We’ve also tracked a few companies that just handle putting the presentation online after creation with a desktop application - our favorite is Slideshare, which lets users upload PowerPoint presentations to a YouTube like service.

Preezo clones the PowerPoint interface very well (see screen shot below), and assigns a permanent URL to the presentation. Presentations can also be embedded into other websites. At this point though it’s more of a demo than a working product. Only a few users have been let in to test it, there is no import feature to upload PowerPoint files and there are no tools to create animations or drawings. These are all features that are being built, but there’s no release schedule.

What’s most impressive about Preezo is that it’s the creation of a single developer, Jason Roberts. Given the number of established competitors in the market already, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jason quickly join a bigger company. If that’s the case, Jason just built himself one hell of a resume.

Sign up on the Preezo home page to be notified of launch. Or, perhaps more likely, get news of Jason’s future employment on the Preezo blog.