ScratchBack,
Jim Kukral's labor of love, has launched into public beta.  Scratchback is a worthy alternative for
people looking to support their favorite blogs publicly in a way that doesn't
bring the scorn of Google.  With its nofollow foundation, the widget tip jar is aiming to bringing something unique to the blog widget marketplace: fun.

ScratchBack is a widget that sits in the sidebar (see over
to your right for an example).  The
beauty of the platform is its simplicity and transparency in operation. There's
not much to the process of either signing up as a blogger or tipping someone.  Payments are done through PayPal and users
can choose how involved they want to be in the process of approving new tips.

Kukral has built a great deal of flexibility and ability to customize colors, templates
and designs.  Not only is this good for
aesthetics, it also helps with conversions if the widget fits into the overall
blog theme.

Interestingly, ScratchBack does have affiliate marketing
options.  Specifically, the widget can
also be used to drop your affiliate links on anyone's site (that approves your
tip, of course).   Jim outlines some of
the possibilities of combining
an affiliate campaign with the widget on the ScratchBack blog.

I'd like to see some sort of a referral program built into
the post-beta version.  I'm not sure how
Jim could do this, but it would seem that a referral program would help to
virally spread the widget as well as give incentive for early adopter bloggers
to spread the word about ScratchBack. 

Overall, I'm glad to see Jim's final product after months of
work and development. A good deal of thought and care has been put into both
the back and frontends, and it shows. 
Jim's ambition to provide the ability for bloggers to make money while
having fun with their readers or friends is a noble one, and ScratchBack is a
welcome innovation to the already crowded blog widget space that seems to have
hit a rut of innovation lately.