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I am very much of the belief that it is far too early to make any statements about micropayments failing. The "free" content support network is collapsing at a staggering rate. Read the efront logs to understand fully the financial underpinnings of advertisement driven sites.

Again I, and I know there are many like me, am entirely willing to support sites (though not a voluntary "tip" jar because such concepts fade very quickly while everyone presumes everyone else tips. It's like the 15% standard tip for serving staff...most people are too much of weasles to follow it [and let's face it : If everyone DID tip that much that would be the job to have]) through a "micropayment" type system, though this is under the condition that there is almost no transaction fees, and _I_ am in control, not the content provider.

Disclaimer: Again when I say micropayments I am referring to small payments : Not necessarily per graphic or article. Could be a subscription based model.

Anyone who knows anyone with a Sega Dreamcast can tell you very quickly why Sega was brutalized on that system : Piracy. Of course with the DVD of the PS2 it's less likely (at least for the next short while) but if the games can be installed on a harddrive it will become prevelant.

Not that I wouldn't find this tactic incredibly annoying, but if you don't like it you don't have to buy one. These companies take multibillion dollar hits on these systems because the systems are subsidized by game sales. When piracy becomes so commonplace that Joe Average has a library of duped games they have to find alternatives.

yafla!

In your article "The Case Against Micropayments" you state the case against micropayments. Has anything in the intervening time changed your mind (i.e. the collapse of content), or do you believe that the fundamentals of micropayments are impossible to achieve? Does your problem with micropayments stem primarily with pay-per-view, or rather the concept of mandatorily user supported sites (i.e. extrapolating micropayments to include subscriptions or content packs)?

yafla!

A lot of people want that extra functionality. If you offer up a device and tell me that it's a contact database or time scheduler I'd laugh and point out the $30 Casio's that you can buy that achieve the same purpose and have for many years. If I am going to carry this thing it'd better be pretty full featured: Possibly an MP3 player, DEFINITELY capable of holding good maps (see PocketStreets and such. I can get a section of map in MapPoint and download it to a CE PDA), and preferably robust enough that it can be expanded to allow for versatile other functionality.

The Palm's-are-fast argument usually revolves around a Palm doing very little versus a CE device doing a lot. i.e a tiny grayscale screen versus a larger full-color display (obviously the latter represents enormously more data that has to be moved around). Simply comparing could be apples to oranges. Like the old saying about which is faster : A sports car or a dump truck. Then measure with 50 tonnes on each.

yafla!

Recently there was a discussion here regarding company loyalty, and a similar discussion was highlighted on last night's episode of CBC's MarketPlace. Of course the discussion was that it was "alarming" that many employees no longer feel loyalty to their employer, and it (I'm talking about the Marketplace episode) talked with managers who expressed their dismay over these unloyal young whippersnappers.

Then you see something like this regarding how 9 people working on software at O'Reilly will be "laid off" because the profitable, successful product that they were working on doesn't fit someone's grand scheme. In an instant you realize why loyalty is in the garbage can. To know that "lofty thinkers" sit around a meeting room table discussing the latest way to re-engineer themselves for the new-millenium, and other such tripe, and the end result could very well be the end of your job, puts a serious damper on any disposition towards loyalty.

yafla!

cya, Andrew...

Well, I for one can't stand them as my eyes have to work triple-time just to read the information that surrounds these monstrosities. For a person that has poor vision in the first place, having a huge red and yellow animated block in the middle of a white page, with the reader making a shabby attempt at reading the black text is a pretty bad move. I may not be a marketing exec, and I may not have a degree in advertising, but I think they will acctually lose revenue. Perhaps these e'zines should consider moving to a subscription service? Heck, I agree with Dennis W. Forbes on this one. Micropayments may be the answer to getting rid, or at least lessen the amount of, banner ads.

Ever get the feeling that you'll be laying on your deathbed about to kick off and suddenly they'll announce that they have cured every ailment and disease? It's great but it sort of sucks in a way.

yafla!

Here's a more direct link for those who don't want to follow the yafla link (which is a story on the ".COM stock collapse which is how that is relevant).

http://linuxtoday.com/stories/13512.html

Does anyone remember a while back when ESR got some shares in VA Linux for his contribution to the company and the open source movement? Did he sell his shares at the allowed time (I believe June of last year?)? Insider trading info seems to indicate that he hasn't, and if not that $32 million has dropped to about $600,000.

More details of it can be found at yafla. Note in particular the text on the link on "potential wealth disappear"

Cheers!

I've become incredibly wary of sending links to friends because of exactly what this article is talking about: Some of them encode individual information related to you. While most of them couple this with internal SessionIDs/cookies, and the unintended link follower gets nothing, some of them do as Slash does and plaintext includes it. I'm sure there's been plenty of people who have inadvertently set their login info to a friend when just trying to show them a new link.

Anyways I can't stand session unique URLs. You can't really bookmark them, and when they're somewhat properly designed you can't send them to a friend. So instead of saying "Here's the link to the blobbonator on sale" you have to direct them on how to navigate from the root to the item in question. Very lame.

Wow it's been a while since I've seen such a grossly inappropriate analogy. However even going with your misappropriated situation, every time I walk into a Canadian Tire here someone asks me if I'd like a Canadian Tire card. When I check out of Staples they ask me if I'd like one of their "feature items" (like pens and gum and crap). However lets ignore that.

The overwhelming majority of advertising is done on sites that themselves have no direct line of revenue. Your comparison to an entity where you actually are their direct line of revenue is a poor comparison. Slashdot doesn't get my money but by looking at the top I can see that ThinkGeek does hope they will, and under the pretense of perhaps getting some they're paying Andover/Slashdot. Pretty simple and straightforward. If they're not getting returns on their dollar they turn up the volume. It isn't surprizing.

Yet Another Five Letter Acronym?