ReadWriteWeb

The refusal by PayPal, Moneybookers, Mastercard, and Visa to process payments to WikiLeaks was clearly an effort to sever the organization's access to online financial resources. But there remains one way to donate online to WikiLeaks, via the Swedish startup Flattr.

Flattr is a social micropayment service that takes the concept behind the Digg or Facebook "Like" button and backs it with real money. In the company's words, "Flattr was founded to help people share money, not just content." Registered Flattr users pay a €2 minimum fee per month, and then mark their support for content by clicking the Flattr button. At the end of the month, that user fee is divided between all the content that's been flattered.

Habbo Hotel, one of the world's largest virtual communities, turned 10 today. Starting as "Mobile Disco," an interactive chat for a friend's band, it has become a leading teen community and social game site.

In 1999 Sampo Karjalainen and Aapo Kyrölä started Mobile Disco in their native Finland. The next year, as it grew in popularity, they ginned up what has since become a popular element of online environments, the micro-payment model, and launched Habbo Hotel. Since then 172 million folks have churned out a character, grabbed a room, thrown up decorations, chatted, played games and whatever else it is kids get up to these days.

By now, South by Southwest is wrapping up and the legions of nerds and geeks that partied heartily over the last two weeks are slowly crawling back to their homes with their SXSW hangovers. Here at ReadWriteStart, we've kept on truckin' through that time, so here is this week's Weekly Wrapup. This week we discuss whether tracking pageviews is still worth it, how micropayments and subscriptions could be the future of startup business models, which mobile platform is best for small business development, and how credibility is your best friend.

Back in early February, while aboard a red-eye to New York, Dave McClure wrote a long, humorous, rambling, profanity-laden rant of a blog post that focused on startup business models. While it makes for an entertaining read, McClure's post is also very insightful and makes a solid case for why startups should shift from advertising models and instead build their new businesses on subscriptions and micropayments. Earlier this month I had the chance to visit the headquarters of ZooLoo, a startup that witnessed this very shift first-hand with their own business model.

Mobile payments provider Zong has just announced a partnership with online gaming community Outspark. Zong will power Outspark's mobile payment processing services by allowing users to purchase SparkCash (the gaming company's currency) to buy goods in games like Fiesta, Secret of the Solstice, Wind Slayer and Project Powder.

Similar to Boku, Echovox's Zong offers publishers and app developers the opportunity to deliver fee-based mobile content to its users. Charges are then reflected on monthly cell phone bills. Given Outspark's current claim to more than 5 million users, this is a benchmark deal for Zong.

Online magazine Salon.com today opened up its new hosted blog network, Open Salon, which not only allows its readers (or anybody else for that matter) to create their own blogs, but also has a built-in tipping mechanism to reward writers for their best content. As a blog host, Open Salon's feature set is similar to that of Wordpress.com or Blogger, but the differentiating feature for Open Salon is clearly the 'Tippem' tip jar which is prominently featured on every page.