I just picked up the latest twist on micropayments from locke61dv…. My problem with requiring micropayments before showing content to the user is that it places information behind “walled gardens” and leaves it inaccessible to those who cannot pay. Besides, it just creates annoyances and headaches… it’s very frustrating if you can’t look at your favorite web page because you have to feed the meter again. Ultimately you’ll probably just go visit some other web page that doesn’t require the effort.
indieKarma isn’t so much about micropayments as microdonations. The content is there, free to read and enjoy… it just displays an ad banner inviting you to join the indieKarma network, an ad which disappears once you join this microdonations collective. From then on every time you visit a web page that is part of the network, they get 1 cent from you. This is probably less objectionable than Google ads, really, if they can make the ad banner less annoying. Right now it’s very annoying and pops up on every web page on your domain name if you put it in your website template. Once they tone down the annoyance level I’ll be happy to put it on one or two of my new sites which are under development.
In the meantime, go sign up now! The first 5,000 users get $1.00 free to use with the service.
In other news, I thought my computer was breaking this weekend, b/c audio was only coming out of one speaker… but it was a false alarm. It turned out that somehow I had just panned my speakers all of the way to the left in System Preferences. How do preferences change themselves like that? I don’t remember doing that and I can’t imagine why I would do that.
At any rate, in my panic over possibly having to leave my laptop at the Apple store for repairs, I bought an MP3tunes subscription, so that I could back up my music. MP3tunes is a music locker service which allows you to back up your entire digital music collection to a website, with unlimited space, and then allows you to stream remotely, sync your computers with the website, etc. If you know your internet history, the last time Michael Robertson tried to start a music locker service at mp3.com, he got sued into oblivion… here’s to hoping this one doesn’t run into legal trouble. Interestingly DVD Jon is employed by MP3tunes, so that company has more than one troublemaker under its roof.
But a digital music collection locker is such a good idea! Maybe this is something that already exists and I don’t know about, but: I really wish I could back up my hard-drive online. I dropped the $100 or so on an external hard-drive that’s big enough for my needs, but bad things can still happen to that hard-drive and if i want to be guaranteed to have my data with me even if my laptop breaks, I have to stick it in my luggage when I travel and put it at even more risk. It would be nice to use a fast Internet connection to upload and download everything. Of course, if you’re backing up your hard drive to make repairs, and the problems you’re repairing turn out to be a virus…I guess it would be sort of like a big zipped file, something that would stay to itself until downloaded? But if this were a big popular service, you can bet people would come up with code to get around this. Oh man, that would be bad…a virus that corrupts your hard drive and then uploads all your data so the corruption can spread. Or, it could even shunt your data to somewhere that doesn’t have enough room. And with all the people with porn on their computers…scary! I wish it were faster, easier, safer, and cheaper to move data from computer to another, but don’t we all.
It’s only on every page if you put it in your template… It looks like there’s already ways to tweak it to make it less annoying.
I don’t think I do anything that gets enough traffic for it to be worth signing up…but if I did, this looks like a pretty awesome idea.
Sign up as an “internet user” then, and be one of the people giving me lots of traffic 😉
That was me commanding you to sign up, by the way 😉
Hm…is it working? indieKarma supposedly has a script on Apathy Must Die, but the little ad never came up when I went there. Oh well, I’m a member now, so I can drop by and give you pennies when you’ve been a good boy. :p
I wonder… does anyone know if Firefox’s Adblock plugin can block indieKarma ads? That could reduce its effectiveness / lessen the annoyance factor.
*does research*
Yep. Adblock doesn’t seem to be able to get rid of the banner while you’re at the site, but if you block the indieKarma script and refresh you’ll never see it again.
I’ve turned them back on… I turned them off because it was annoying. I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s annoying or not until I start posting there again ^_^
Were you by any chance successful in bagging some of Jimbo’s audio…?