Thank you so much to Lee, for pointing, and Clay, for writing. And both of your for thinking forward. I'm at this moment in the middle of one of those moments of decision:

Do I reboot, as Software Update is telling me I need to do, and risk losing this great link, or do I begin to dash off all of the thoughts this fine article brings to me and risk losing both the satisfaction of completing a totally un-published but highly critical event like updating my system AND neglecting all of the other things I set out to do early this morning (before other events overtake) from my world-reaching, publishing-enabled, work station?

I'll compromise and toss out a few quotes that will get me started when I do get back here.

Begins his reasoning on why micropayments, very small payments made to the creator of pieces of content...like posts to a weblog, aren't working: other sources of similar, freely available content...weblogs,

The failure of BitPass is not terribly interesting in itself. What is interesting is the way the failure of micropayments, both past and future, illustrates the depth and importance of putting publishing tools in the hands of individuals. In the face of a force this large, user-pays schemes can't simply be restored through minor tinkering with payment systems, because they don't address the cause of that change -- a huge increase the power and reach of the individual creator.

And then he introduces us to the idea of mental transactions costs via Nick Szabo,

"micropayment believers imagine that such tiny amounts of money can be extracted from the user that they will not notice, while the overall volume will cause these payments to add up to something significant for the recipient. But of course the users do notice, because they are being asked to buy something. Mental transaction costs create a minimum level of inconvenience that cannot be removed simply by lowering the dollar cost of goods.

Worse, beneath a certain threshold, mental transaction costs actually rise, a phenomenon is especially significant for information goods. It's easy to think a newspaper is worth a dollar, but is each article worth half a penny? Is each word worth a thousandth of a penny? A newspaper, exposed to the logic of micropayments, becomes impossible to value. "

And I'll bold this part of my thought because it sooooo totally hits home with me and what's on my brain quite a bit lately, but I think it's more complex that Clay let's on to here...but he's really got the target in his sights (or sites...hehe),

"creators are not publishers, and putting the power to publish directly into their hands does not make them publishers. It makes them artists with printing presses. This matters because creative people crave attention in a way publishers do not. Prior to the internet, this didn't make much difference. The expense of publishing and distributing printed material is too great for it to be given away freely and in unlimited quantities -- even vanity press books come with a price tag. Now, however, a single individual can serve an audience in the hundreds of thousands, as a hobby, with nary a publisher in sight.

This disrupts the old equation of "fame and fortune." For an author to be famous, many people had to have read, and therefore paid for, his or her books. Fortune was a side-effect of attaining fame. Now, with the power to publish directly in their hands, many creative people face a dilemma they've never had before: fame vs fortune."

I think that to be able to speak your mind, in whatever medium you choose (and there are new mediums being enabled by technology every day), have acknowledgement from those you admire and respect (and maybe even find a few more of those kind of people in the process), and to live a full and fullfiling life in this capitalistic society (the fortune part) is the Thing. So I think that that 'full and fulfilling' part is what's missing from Clay's statement above. And I don't necessarily think that a combination of Fame and Fortune results in Fulfilling. It's the expression of the creativity that brings that. Oops...I'm taking this too far...must reboot...almost.

And here is one of the 'Bing' moments that I will be expanding on when I get a chance,

"In the 90s, as the threat the Web posed to traditional publishers became obvious, it was widely believed that people would still pay for filtering. As the sheer volume of free content increased, the thinking went, finding the good stuff, even if it was free, would be worth paying for because it would be so hard to find."

They will still pay for filtering, in my opinion. Pay for use of services that allow them to filter on the fly (by cell phone and other PDA devices). Pay for services providing this real-time, self-filtering service of creative output that can be sampled (read streamed...radio, internet), selected, and SAVED (key...owning of creative work by individual). And maybe they'll also pay for filtering performed by other creative people who they feel may see aspects and angles of the creative output that link it to their lives...something that creative people and highly skilled critics...creative in their own way...do well.

Clay does a great job in explaining the economics of content and how the Internet impacts this (or doesn't), although I'm not sure it totally relates to non-textual content (or something else I need to think about a little more),

" The economics of content creation are in fact fairly simple. The two critical questions are "Does the support come from the reader, or from an advertiser, patron, or the creator?" and "Is the support mandatory or voluntary?"

The internet adds no new possibilities. Instead, it simply shifts both answers strongly to the right. It makes all user-supported schemes harder, and all subsidized schemes easier. It likewise makes collecting fees harder, and soliciting donations easier. And these effects are multiplicative. The internet makes collecting mandatory user fees much harder, and makes voluntarily subsidy much easier."

And he goes on to say what he thinks the workable model for web content is going to be,

"Because information is hard to value in advance, for-fee content will almost invariably be sold on a subscription basis, rather than per piece, to smooth out the variability in value. Individual bits of content that are even moderately close in quality to what is available free, but wrapped in the mental transaction costs of micropayments, are doomed to be both obscure and unprofitable."

And my concept here is that the subscription is to the filtering service, a service that enables the customer to select, on-the-fly, that creative output that appeals to them and that they want to SAVE for their own collection. Additional services abound once customers select the content they desire: package that SAVED content into formats that allow for flexible retrieval (re-streaming), archival (download to portables, email a CD / DVD of favorites on-demand / when appropriate).

One vision I have always had, since I started weblogging, was one of providing a personal context for my children and my friends on the events of the day and my thoughts in it. That vision not only includes my own personal context, but the source(s) of that context, so that those loved ones are able to make their own decisions on both the source and my view of it. In short, create an archive of my value-add AND the source of it. If the NY Times created a service that allowed me combine my thoughts (via my weblog) with the story(s) I read that influenced and prompted my thoughts and writing AND to archive that in a format that I could share with others for years to come (the CD / DVD thing I was talking about above), I would subscribe to it in a minute. There are other sources that impact me that I would even be more likely to hand over more than a micropayment to!

Thanks again to Clay for a thoughtful article!

Time to reboot...
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- See Also:  Information Technology * NPR * Weblogging