A guinea pig cages is less comfortable when the floor is lined with laptops.
Of course, this is just an assertion (I've never tried it). And who am I to say what a guinea pig really likes ?
if I find an authoritive source, I'll come back here and quote it.
There's a state called flow that you can get into and you lose yourself in something and you focus on it far better. In that mental state you get the task in hand done faster.
You might take 20 mins to settle into that state.
But if every 15 mins the phone rings, you never will.
You can't be in flow with many tasks at once.
Not everyone NEEDS to get a task done that requires a level of concentration. Many commenters have described scenarios where productivity is not really that important.
But when real productivity is what you need, multi tasking is not going to let you complete any one task in the optimal way.
But some people have simply never experienced flow and have no idea what it means. With multi tasking, they probably never will.
If someone made a touchscreen phone (lets call it the xPhone) which came with a set of development tools that would allow the developer of an iPhone app to effortlessly port their app to the xPhone provided the hardware capablities were sufficient, the xPhone could have a bulging app store almost overnight. I'm surprised this isn't anyone's technical strategy for erasing the lead Apple have.
(Of course, there'd be a native app devt environment too, but the "import app from iPhone source" would be prominent).
Or do developers agree when they submit an app to the app store to not develop it for other platforms ?
There are bloggers that I would definitely define as journalists. However, if I started a blog tomorrow I would not really call myself a journalist. If I stick something on a blog/website and refuse to name my source do I in theory qualify for shield protection ? (Assuming it is not embarrassing to the govt).
Do I have to have a significant preexisting readership ?
Or does my publication have to ?
If when I uploaded a file I had to jump through hoops declaring I had the rights to do so, no-one downstream could be held liable. The file sharing site could claim they shared it in good faith, and all downloaders could also say they had reason to believe it was safe.
There would only be one single act of piracy to go after and the RIAA would only get to claim damages for a single event.
Their idiotic existence would come down to chasing a TOR protected uploader for the rest of their miserable lives.
It would be more relevant if a large team (perhaps a CROWD?!) of doctors that all had the information a personal doctor would have on a patient
I think that's broadly the idea behind a large clinical trial, isn't it ? As opposed to the previous method of a Doctor taking clinical decisions based on his own experience.
Any one patient is an anomaly, but taken as a huge mass they allow you to infer an overall benefit.
Of course, the problem is that this still won't say if the drug would cure YOU specifically.
It's not just the daft laws - it's the daft police
We have a recent daft news story in UK.
Two female police officers had an arrangement whereby (as they worked different shifts) they would look after each others children when off duty.
However, because
- it was more than 2 hrs per day
- they are not related
- they are doing it for "reward" (albeit in this case not financial)
they must legally be registered child carers to do this.
So they got a visit from the people responsible for prosecuting non registered child carers.
What galls me is not that the law was drafted without spotting and excluding this scenario, but that the people with a finite (probably oeverstretched) budget for dealing with violations decided that this case ranked above all the others in today's in tray and decided to pursue it.
Similarly with the story above, maybe this old lady is breaking the letter of the law but can't the cops see instantly that this is a wasted trip and choose not to arrest her.
The fact that law enforcement are increasingly unthinkingly "just following orders" is far more worrying to me than the incidence of poorly drafted laws. Just read history from 60 years back...
In the UK we have restrictions on how much paracetamol (acetomeniphen ? in the US - Tylenol, anyway) can be bought at once to prevent the appalling after effects of half hearted teenage "cry for help" overdoses (liver failure and death inside a week).
But it's a pain in the behind if you want to stock up for a family holiday. And some stores combine tylenol and advil under this rule which makes no clinical sense whatsoever.
It probably never saved anyone's life but at least noone gets arrested for visiting 2 different pharmacies.
I read eBooks a lot, on a circa 1999 Handspring Visor Platinum with 128MB Flash expansion . (about $20 on eBay + the expansion pack).
I always have a book to read if I have my PDA with me. It remembers where I am up to with several books at a time. I can search, bookmark. I can read plain old PDF's or DRM eBooks that I bought from the eReader.com site.
I can even autoscroll so I don't need to keep moving my hand to press an end of page button.
And I would definitely take it to a beach because I can pick up a replacement so cheap. (I have a few on the shelf in case)
I read at night by backlight without keeping my partner awake with a bedside lamp.
I get access to a huge no of Gutenberg books (for some I pay a couple of bucks but I am happy to pay that as someone has added value by getting them into Palm eBook format and delivered them to my device).
Ebooks are not new. The Kindle is an integrated ecosystem like the iPod/iTunes.
If someone decided to make a device that was aimed at schools it could be better / cheaper for that application (wifi but no mobile, autolockout if not periodically authorised by school so not worth nicking, non volatile storage, rugged, able to use conventional batteries so if student turns up with it flat they don't lose ages)
Problem here is one idea (eBooks) being denigrated because of problems with a specific (non matched) device.
The eBook ecosystem as it applies to a school is what is important. The device (be it a tablet, netwbook or dedicated reader) is probably not where most work is required.
Honestly, I feel that if Apple is so scared that it can't compete head on with Palm, then Apple isn't concerned with really innovating any more.
I think "competing head on" is what Palm would be doing if they gopt off their butts and developed their own (better) musinc managemwent software.
At the moment Palm are competing head on in much the same way as Lily Allen with her mix tapes - try and take the work of someone else and profit without adding theior own value.
As a poster said earlier, Apple are doing what you espouse. Making up for the low value of the content sale by adding value.
I think for you to disagree that a syncable Pre might swing a buyer away from an iPod, while asserting that a non Syncable Pre makes you less likely to buy an apple iPod at some future time (out of pique, presumably) is a case of you stretching reason to fit your principle. One outcome is economically obvious and immediate while the other is some vague assertion about behaviour of a subset of people who think how you do.
Are you claiming that you WANT to use iTunes but your prospective pre purchase won't let you ? If so, how will your future refusal to buy any apple product get you any nearer the goal of wanting to use iTunes ?
(For the record, I'm no fan of Apple. I have about 10 Palm devices in my house and nothing from Apple. But they do what they do [ie make money] well. Better than Palm. I just think Palm need to show a bit more leadership and a bit less "me too" in this developing music market. A killer app for buying DRM free MP3's from Amazon, for example. Perhaps a completely cloud based version of something like iTunes software that allows me to get to a mirror of my whole collection via wifi in Starbucks, for example. This would use very little per user cloud storage as most of the content would already be stored by the vendor anyway.
And if the connection was too slow for downloading, I'd be able to stream from my collection at any time on my whichever of my devices. Like a great big Sonos in the sky. And as this cloud app is a loss leader to help me compete with Apple I would NOT initially open it up to iPod users.)
If the industry obsesses with "first weekend takings" then the movie world won't change.
The way John Cusack's "War Inc" was launched (organically, with hardly any marketing budget) allowed a lot more word of mouth and less overhyped media reviews. I bet few people who saw it were disappointed because they were effectively going on crowdsourced recommendations, from people like them.
But my sister has spent her like making movies and I'd have to agree with the poster who said "it's tough enough getting paid as it is". Try asking your bank manager for a mortgage when your source of income is a movie that you haven't figured out how to charge for yet. Of course, an alternative business model doesn't mean that a canny investor won't put the money up to get it made. Just that it is unlikely an investor will put up the money and then sit back quietly while the arty types muse over whether to charge for the movie.
Bear in mind also that Radiohead have the luxury of a full bank account when they offer ""pay what you want". So I suspect does Sally Potter.
But it's not like the music industry. The capital outlay for a band to go straight to MP3 with a recording is nothing like what is required to make a decent movie.
We can all think of extremely low budget "Blair Witch" type examples (God knows my sister has made a few) but generally people don't want to watch too many of those.
And there are a lot more people involved in making a movie than an album, some of whom are simply contractors who want pay, not equity in some "maybe" down the line venture.
Imagine a silicon valley startup asking the minimum wage cleaners if they mind being paid only in stock options. Not everyone shares the director's belief in the project...
Re: It is absurd to say that Microsoft did anything wrong
I think it is naive to suggest that MS knew nothing about i4i before this hit them.
They have people paid to trawl patents for precisely these scenarios.
And whether I think they did anything wrong is beside the point. The law (however flawed) has decided that they did, and hence seeks to punish them.
It would take lots of software developers and a huge ammount of money to duplicate the functionality of most software packages
Not all innovative software huge bloatware. Some cool iPhone apps, for example, could be copied by a talented programmer in under a week.
I was arguing theoretically against the extreme position (often taken in this blog) that all protection (copyright, trademark, patent) is bad and that we could have innovation without any of them existing. I think if there was NO protection of any sort against your hard work being ripped off, people would be reluctant to fund innovation up front.
But clearly the system we have in place has many flaws.
Assuming IP protection DOES exist, I don't think unwittingly infringement should be viewed as an offence, nor should it lead to payments for redress. But once you've been told you are infringing, then you are doing it knowingly.
If you respond to a "cease and desist" letter with "prove it" then it is reasonable to bear the plaintiffs costs of proving it if you subsequently are shown to be wrong.
If I innovate to fill hole in the software market and then someone buys one of my distribution CD's, copies it, and sells it under their company name, and I had no legal redress, there would never be any point in me writing any commercial software for a mass market.
So surely some IP protection is essential for innovation to work.
(I know, Mr Masnick would suggest I connect with my users by selling them T shirts and making personal appearances. ).
But if someone looked at my product and it's neat features and basically rewrote it from scratch with identical looking UI and same outward performance & features, I'd probably want some protection for that as well. or else why innovate in the first place.
If I tried to patent the way I'd added a neat "print preview" option before printing, however, I'd expect the patent judge to throw it out as obvious.
My main beef with this whole case is that the whole area of XML for WP documents is a huge pile of obviousness. But if the patent is granted, that's all water under the bridge now.
If MS have infringed, then the punishment has to be a deterrent. To deter these guys means a hefty price tag.
I don't buy this "how does banning Word help customers ?" It's like saying "how does fining Pfizer more than £2B for repeatedly marketing off label help sick people". The answer is that in the long term they might stop doing it, and sick people will not be deceived as much.
If you have a legal system that defines this as a crime, then you have to punish and deter, and MS have shown that fines they can clearly afford act as no deterrent.
I used to have my email forwarded through "bigfoot" (email address for life).
It was free, they had millions of users. They were no doubt burning VC money. Then, when I couldn't live without it, they started charging. Guess I'm one of the 0.? % that chose to stay with them (until they hiked prices so far and I thought they were taking the mickey, but that was 2 years later).
You only need to monetise a fraction of a huge web audience to pull in revenue.
But as your have been saying, if the SAME THING is available free elsewhere people will desert you.
They should be building something unique FIRST, an experience no other site offers, with a friction free registration gateway that is free, THEN thinking about monetising it later. Maybe by ads, maybe subscription, maybe pay per view. There are only some many times that a given headline can be read by everyone in the world before it is not news any more. That large but finite number is what they need to win market share of.
But like bigfoot, they have to make you need it before they dare to charge for it. And so far the individual sites of the "old" news media are offering me less value than my favourite aggregator.
I'll stay with a site I really like if/when they ask for a small sum of money (maybe if they promise to remove slow loading ads or popups into the bargain), but they have to make me really like it FIRST.
The classic pre bubble internet business plan was to build traffic then monetise. But this is no good with fickle traffic. The model should be to build MEMBERSHIP then monetise.
M&S have a posh food shop in a part of town. A known UK brand.
People go there to buy food.
Someone else spots this and builds a competing food shop in the same part of town.
M&S object, saying "they came here looking for M&S and now you're trying to lure away our customers".
Isn't that what L'Oreal are basically saying when someone advertises competing products next to the L'Oreal keyword ?
I had a job interview at the Rolls Royce car factory as a teenager and they had to warn us that half built cars creeping round the factory roads were a silent hazard.
This Prius problsm ain't new !
lets say I'm on jury service and I find out that we're trying someone for some kind of crime I don't really know much about. Lets say it is insider trading.
I would presumably be fulfilling my civic duty to have some idea what was going on and hence to read up on what insider trading is.
Maybe I would read about past cases, even study what the law says. This much is presumably a good thing for me to do.
But google being google, I'd be bound to end up seeing some mention of the current case.
In the UK things are often "sub judice" meaning that after charges are brought but before the trial they often cannot be reported on. The police know that by leaking to the papers they will get the bad guy off, so by and large it works.
But information wants to be free.
So presumably in the case we're discussing, "jury selection" would have ruled out all but hermits who don't read or watch the news ?
You are always repeating the line that micropayment will lose in a free market where an alternative is available for free.
But I've never seen you reply to or even acknowledge the point that a crowdsourced ratings system COULD add value for a busy reader.
You said in the debate
The micropayment idea is a punt. It's putting up a tollbooth on a 50-lane highway where the other 49 lanes have no tollbooth, and there's no specific benefit for paying the toll.
A better analogy is that you can drive for free or pay extra to have a sat nav on the journey which saves you precious time by helping you get where you want to go faster. But it's still the same car, each mile driven costs the same, and you still access all the same roads .
As I recall, Hertz used to sting me $8 for "Neverlost" and there were times when I didn't know my way and time was too precious and I went for it.
There are people who will pay several dollars for a cab when if they knew all the public transit timetables backwards they could do the same journey for a fraction of the cost. But you know what ? Their time matters and they couldn't be bothered to figure it all out.
Same with news. You're not necessarily selling content, but highly rated content that this particular reader likes, without him/her having to waste time looking for it.
Exactly like (for example) my Economist subscription. This gets me a good summary of a lot of things I want to know about over Saturday morning coffee and it would take me hours to dig it all up on the web (though I fully accept that I could could no doubt locate all the information for free).
Of course, it's not the micropayment that is adding value. It is the act of rating and aggregating all the news I like that adds value. Micropayment is how they get paid for that value.
And if google built such a system, it could offer all that I described.
On the post: New Advertising Strategy For Newspapers? They Make Great Umbrellas
Other uses for newspapers
Of course, this is just an assertion (I've never tried it). And who am I to say what a guinea pig really likes ?
if I find an authoritive source, I'll come back here and quote it.
On the post: Is The Inefficiency Of Multitasking A Bug Or A Feature?
Flow
You might take 20 mins to settle into that state.
But if every 15 mins the phone rings, you never will.
You can't be in flow with many tasks at once.
Not everyone NEEDS to get a task done that requires a level of concentration. Many commenters have described scenarios where productivity is not really that important.
But when real productivity is what you need, multi tasking is not going to let you complete any one task in the optimal way.
But some people have simply never experienced flow and have no idea what it means. With multi tasking, they probably never will.
On the post: The iPhone Is Not The End Of Innovation
It's the apps, stupid
(Of course, there'd be a native app devt environment too, but the "import app from iPhone source" would be prominent).
Or do developers agree when they submit an app to the app store to not develop it for other platforms ?
On the post: Obama Administration: Shield Law Should Only Protect Journalists If We Don't Care About The Story
So what is a journalist ?
Do I have to have a significant preexisting readership ?
Or does my publication have to ?
On the post: Congress Moving Forward On 'P2P' Warning Law
I can see a bright side to this.
There would only be one single act of piracy to go after and the RIAA would only get to claim damages for a single event.
Their idiotic existence would come down to chasing a TOR protected uploader for the rest of their miserable lives.
On the post: The Myth Of Crowdsourcing... Or Misunderstanding Crowdsourcing?
Re: Fun time.
It's a bit better than that. Or Amazon certainly is. Haven't used netflix since I left the USA in 2005.
("people who liked that also liked...").
On the post: The Myth Of Crowdsourcing... Or Misunderstanding Crowdsourcing?
Re: Re:
I think that's broadly the idea behind a large clinical trial, isn't it ? As opposed to the previous method of a Doctor taking clinical decisions based on his own experience.
Any one patient is an anomaly, but taken as a huge mass they allow you to infer an overall benefit.
Of course, the problem is that this still won't say if the drug would cure YOU specifically.
On the post: The Rule Of Law Over The Rule Of Reason
It's not just the daft laws - it's the daft police
On the post: Kindle Flunking Out Of Princeton?
eBook readers - why buy a Kindle ?
I always have a book to read if I have my PDA with me. It remembers where I am up to with several books at a time. I can search, bookmark. I can read plain old PDF's or DRM eBooks that I bought from the eReader.com site.
I can even autoscroll so I don't need to keep moving my hand to press an end of page button.
And I would definitely take it to a beach because I can pick up a replacement so cheap. (I have a few on the shelf in case)
I read at night by backlight without keeping my partner awake with a bedside lamp.
I get access to a huge no of Gutenberg books (for some I pay a couple of bucks but I am happy to pay that as someone has added value by getting them into Palm eBook format and delivered them to my device).
Ebooks are not new. The Kindle is an integrated ecosystem like the iPod/iTunes.
If someone decided to make a device that was aimed at schools it could be better / cheaper for that application (wifi but no mobile, autolockout if not periodically authorised by school so not worth nicking, non volatile storage, rugged, able to use conventional batteries so if student turns up with it flat they don't lose ages)
Problem here is one idea (eBooks) being denigrated because of problems with a specific (non matched) device.
The eBook ecosystem as it applies to a school is what is important. The device (be it a tablet, netwbook or dedicated reader) is probably not where most work is required.
On the post: Why Apple Should Let Other Devices Connect To iTunes
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Um, what?
Honestly, I feel that if Apple is so scared that it can't compete head on with Palm, then Apple isn't concerned with really innovating any more.
I think "competing head on" is what Palm would be doing if they gopt off their butts and developed their own (better) musinc managemwent software.
At the moment Palm are competing head on in much the same way as Lily Allen with her mix tapes - try and take the work of someone else and profit without adding theior own value.
As a poster said earlier, Apple are doing what you espouse. Making up for the low value of the content sale by adding value.
I think for you to disagree that a syncable Pre might swing a buyer away from an iPod, while asserting that a non Syncable Pre makes you less likely to buy an apple iPod at some future time (out of pique, presumably) is a case of you stretching reason to fit your principle. One outcome is economically obvious and immediate while the other is some vague assertion about behaviour of a subset of people who think how you do.
Are you claiming that you WANT to use iTunes but your prospective pre purchase won't let you ? If so, how will your future refusal to buy any apple product get you any nearer the goal of wanting to use iTunes ?
(For the record, I'm no fan of Apple. I have about 10 Palm devices in my house and nothing from Apple. But they do what they do [ie make money] well. Better than Palm. I just think Palm need to show a bit more leadership and a bit less "me too" in this developing music market. A killer app for buying DRM free MP3's from Amazon, for example. Perhaps a completely cloud based version of something like iTunes software that allows me to get to a mirror of my whole collection via wifi in Starbucks, for example. This would use very little per user cloud storage as most of the content would already be stored by the vendor anyway.
And if the connection was too slow for downloading, I'd be able to stream from my collection at any time on my whichever of my devices. Like a great big Sonos in the sky. And as this cloud app is a loss leader to help me compete with Apple I would NOT initially open it up to iPod users.)
On the post: Filmmaker Discusses Creative Marketing, Freeing Up Movies, Embracing New Business Models
"Colin" did not costs $70 to produce
You are presumably talking about actual stuff the chap had to go out and spend money on.
And yes, the odd unusual movie might be a hit, but noone wants to watch nothing but low budget flicks all the time.
On the post: Filmmaker Discusses Creative Marketing, Freeing Up Movies, Embracing New Business Models
Mindset change needed
The way John Cusack's "War Inc" was launched (organically, with hardly any marketing budget) allowed a lot more word of mouth and less overhyped media reviews. I bet few people who saw it were disappointed because they were effectively going on crowdsourced recommendations, from people like them.
But my sister has spent her like making movies and I'd have to agree with the poster who said "it's tough enough getting paid as it is". Try asking your bank manager for a mortgage when your source of income is a movie that you haven't figured out how to charge for yet. Of course, an alternative business model doesn't mean that a canny investor won't put the money up to get it made. Just that it is unlikely an investor will put up the money and then sit back quietly while the arty types muse over whether to charge for the movie.
Bear in mind also that Radiohead have the luxury of a full bank account when they offer ""pay what you want". So I suspect does Sally Potter.
But it's not like the music industry. The capital outlay for a band to go straight to MP3 with a recording is nothing like what is required to make a decent movie.
We can all think of extremely low budget "Blair Witch" type examples (God knows my sister has made a few) but generally people don't want to watch too many of those.
And there are a lot more people involved in making a movie than an album, some of whom are simply contractors who want pay, not equity in some "maybe" down the line venture.
Imagine a silicon valley startup asking the minimum wage cleaners if they mind being paid only in stock options. Not everyone shares the director's belief in the project...
On the post: Netflix $1 Million Award Shows The Value Of Collaboration... But Kicks Up New Privacy Questions
Re: Re:
yes Mike, but conversely, just because the winners happened to collaborate does not prove the collaboration helped them win.
On the post: Canadian Law Professors Insist Banning The Sale Of Word Is Good For Society & Innovation
Re: It is absurd to say that Microsoft did anything wrong
On the post: Canadian Law Professors Insist Banning The Sale Of Word Is Good For Society & Innovation
So all IP protection is bad ?
So surely some IP protection is essential for innovation to work.
(I know, Mr Masnick would suggest I connect with my users by selling them T shirts and making personal appearances. ).
But if someone looked at my product and it's neat features and basically rewrote it from scratch with identical looking UI and same outward performance & features, I'd probably want some protection for that as well. or else why innovate in the first place.
If I tried to patent the way I'd added a neat "print preview" option before printing, however, I'd expect the patent judge to throw it out as obvious.
My main beef with this whole case is that the whole area of XML for WP documents is a huge pile of obviousness. But if the patent is granted, that's all water under the bridge now.
If MS have infringed, then the punishment has to be a deterrent. To deter these guys means a hefty price tag.
I don't buy this "how does banning Word help customers ?" It's like saying "how does fining Pfizer more than £2B for repeatedly marketing off label help sick people". The answer is that in the long term they might stop doing it, and sick people will not be deceived as much.
If you have a legal system that defines this as a crime, then you have to punish and deter, and MS have shown that fines they can clearly afford act as no deterrent.
On the post: New Study Reveals (Duh) Very Few People Will Pay For News Online
Typical web business model
It was free, they had millions of users. They were no doubt burning VC money. Then, when I couldn't live without it, they started charging. Guess I'm one of the 0.? % that chose to stay with them (until they hiked prices so far and I thought they were taking the mickey, but that was 2 years later).
You only need to monetise a fraction of a huge web audience to pull in revenue.
But as your have been saying, if the SAME THING is available free elsewhere people will desert you.
They should be building something unique FIRST, an experience no other site offers, with a friction free registration gateway that is free, THEN thinking about monetising it later. Maybe by ads, maybe subscription, maybe pay per view. There are only some many times that a given headline can be read by everyone in the world before it is not news any more. That large but finite number is what they need to win market share of.
But like bigfoot, they have to make you need it before they dare to charge for it. And so far the individual sites of the "old" news media are offering me less value than my favourite aggregator.
I'll stay with a site I really like if/when they ask for a small sum of money (maybe if they promise to remove slow loading ads or popups into the bargain), but they have to make me really like it FIRST.
The classic pre bubble internet business plan was to build traffic then monetise. But this is no good with fickle traffic. The model should be to build MEMBERSHIP then monetise.
On the post: EU Court Of Justice Says Selling Ads On Trademarked Keywords Is Not Trademark Infringement
An analogy
People go there to buy food.
Someone else spots this and builds a competing food shop in the same part of town.
M&S object, saying "they came here looking for M&S and now you're trying to lure away our customers".
Isn't that what L'Oreal are basically saying when someone advertises competing products next to the L'Oreal keyword ?
On the post: Nissan To Add Futuristic Sound Effects To Its Electric Car To Keep It From Hitting Unaware Pedestrians
RR used to have this problem too.
This Prius problsm ain't new !
On the post: Googling Juror Leads To Verdict Being Overturned
So what CAN I google ?
I would presumably be fulfilling my civic duty to have some idea what was going on and hence to read up on what insider trading is.
Maybe I would read about past cases, even study what the law says. This much is presumably a good thing for me to do.
But google being google, I'd be bound to end up seeing some mention of the current case.
In the UK things are often "sub judice" meaning that after charges are brought but before the trial they often cannot be reported on. The police know that by leaking to the papers they will get the bad guy off, so by and large it works.
But information wants to be free.
So presumably in the case we're discussing, "jury selection" would have ruled out all but hermits who don't read or watch the news ?
On the post: My Debate With The NY Times' David Carr Over Journalism Business Models
Micropayment can add value
But I've never seen you reply to or even acknowledge the point that a crowdsourced ratings system COULD add value for a busy reader.
You said in the debate
The micropayment idea is a punt. It's putting up a tollbooth on a 50-lane highway where the other 49 lanes have no tollbooth, and there's no specific benefit for paying the toll.
A better analogy is that you can drive for free or pay extra to have a sat nav on the journey which saves you precious time by helping you get where you want to go faster. But it's still the same car, each mile driven costs the same, and you still access all the same roads .
As I recall, Hertz used to sting me $8 for "Neverlost" and there were times when I didn't know my way and time was too precious and I went for it.
There are people who will pay several dollars for a cab when if they knew all the public transit timetables backwards they could do the same journey for a fraction of the cost. But you know what ? Their time matters and they couldn't be bothered to figure it all out.
Same with news. You're not necessarily selling content, but highly rated content that this particular reader likes, without him/her having to waste time looking for it.
Exactly like (for example) my Economist subscription. This gets me a good summary of a lot of things I want to know about over Saturday morning coffee and it would take me hours to dig it all up on the web (though I fully accept that I could could no doubt locate all the information for free).
Of course, it's not the micropayment that is adding value. It is the act of rating and aggregating all the news I like that adds value. Micropayment is how they get paid for that value.
And if google built such a system, it could offer all that I described.
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