Yearly Archives: 2009

Reviews

Using Contenture to handle micropayments

Back in April, I wrote about micropayments, and why I thought they were an equitable way to reward web publishers for their time and effort. I shared my thoughts on ad revenues, which, for most people, are minimal and not enough to live on, unless you are one of the relatively few websites that gets massive amounts of traffic.

In that same article, I also talked about how I thought micropayments should work, via a standard, instant way to charge readers a few cents per article, through protocols that were integrated into each browser. Instead of charging fees for each transaction, which would be impractical for such small amounts, micropayment processing centers would charge for bundles of transactions which exceed a set limit.

Fast forward a few months, and ZDNet publishes an interview with Barry Diller, one of the early Internet millionaires, where he talks about the very same thing: the need to go beyond falling ad revenues by charging small amounts for useful information. That article was hotly debated on FriendFeed, which is where I found out about it. Among the comments, I found one pointing me to Contenture, a newly launched micropayment system (it saw the light of day on 5/26).

contenture

Contenture’s method of handling micropayments is different from what I envisioned, in that it involves a monthly subscription. Here’s how they say it works:

“… a fully automated system that requires no user interaction. Users simply pay a set fee to Contenture on a monthly basis, and that money is automatically distributed to the sites they visit. How much each site gets from each user is determined by how often that user visits that web site, relative to all of the other Contenture sites they visit. Users get their seamless experience, and the site actually makes money. Everybody wins.”

So what’s involved on my end? I installed Contenture’s WordPress plugin and pasted in an extra line of code to customize the ad hiding behavior. Others might need to paste a Javascript snippet in their footer, which is basically what the plugin does for you.

On your end (the reader), the code will check to see if you’re a Contenture user, and will automatically distribute your subscription fee to the websites that you visit, based on how often you visit each site. As an immediate benefit, all ads on my site are hidden from you. They’ll load as the page loads, but they blink out of view and the ad space collapses unto itself as soon as the page finishes loading. It’s pretty cool.

Other benefits I might be able to offer you in the future are the ability to view exclusive content, or perhaps to even close off the archives to those who aren’t Contenture users, although I’m not too keen on that, since Google won’t be able to index me properly any more if I do it. At any rate, the ability to offer more benefits is built in, and that’s nice.

Contenture’s model is opt-in (also called freemium) and so it has some limitations, in that I don’t get paid for everyone that accesses my content. My micropayment model, the one I envisioned and the one Barry Diller and others are talking about, is standardized across platforms and browsers and works for everyone, all the time. Eventually, I think we’ll get there, but Contenture has made a good start of it, and they did it now, which is why I signed up with them.

To let site visitors know they can support my site, I placed a small link in the header, as you can see below. I also have a link in the footer, also shown below.

header-screenshot

footer-screenshot

I look forward to seeing Contenture’s user base grow, so I can tell whether I’ve made the right choice. I want to keep writing and publishing online for a long time to come, but the only feasible way for me to do that is if I get rewarded properly for my efforts. I believe micropayments are the way to do it. It’s affordable for the readers, and it scales up nicely for me, the web publisher. Time will tell exactly which micropayment method will work best, and you can be sure I’ll continue to monitor the options available out there.

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Lists

Condensed Knowledge – June 14, 2009

This is a summary of articles I read and found interesting during this past week. The list is shared from among my feed subscriptions:

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Thoughts

Countering the effect of gravity

In 2005, I wrote an article entitled “Gravitational propulsion-levitation vehicle“, where I detailed an idea of mine that I’ve had since 1997 or so, of a vehicle that could harness the gravitation field of the Earth and use it to move on the ground or in the air.

Now, in 2009, I see that my twelve-year old idea was first investigated, albeit in a more limited way, back in 1992, by a Russian scientist named Evgeny Podkletnov. Furthermore, in 2003, an Austrian scientist named Martin Tajmar developed Podkletnov’s research and found a measurable reduction in gravitational pull with the help of a spinning superconductor.

You see, that’s where our ideas are related — in using spinning discs that would generate their own gravitational fields. Back when I started thinking about this stuff, in 1997, I had no idea about Podkletnov or Tajmar. It was just me, a guy who took two college physics classes, trying to figure out how this might work. But I think it’s very interesting that people in different regions of this world, some whose life is physics and some who only have a basic understanding of the subject, are thinking along the same lines when it comes to countering the effect of gravity. It’s the sort of thing that encourages my belief that we’ll get this figured out somehow, that a vehicle powered by gravity isn’t just sci-fi stuff.

I’m not alone in thinking this way. Since I wrote the original article, I’ve gotten contacted by a number of people, some who sounded kooky, and some who sounded like they were serious. I still haven’t written back to any of them, since I’ve had no new spark of inspiration that would make me believe I could contribute anything useful beyond what I already said. But I’m glad to see that we’re possibly on the right track.

My thanks to New Scientist for publishing “Seven things that don’t make sense about gravity” — a very interesting series of mini-articles that brought me up to date with the research done on gravity so far.

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Lists

Condensed Knowledge – June 7, 2009

This is a summary of articles I read and found interesting during this past week. The list is shared from among my feed subscriptions:

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Thoughts

Child rape survivor saves young girls in Zimbabwe

So happy to hear about the good work Betty Makoni is doing in Zimbabwe. She’s put together a support network for rape victims.

Child rape survivor saves ‘virgin myth’ victims – CNN.com

Witch doctors (so-called traditional healers) have spread the rumor that a man can be cured of AIDS if he rapes a virgin. So you have all these HIV-infected men with no scruples and no morals whatsoever who are raping young and younger girls — even babies. Unfortunately Zimbabwe’s culture makes it very difficult to get support after rapes occur, but this woman, Betty Makoni, has organized a country-wide network of support for the poor girls.

I say the filthy men who do this sort of thing, and the witch doctors who spread the unconscionable advice, ought to be rounded up and raped by prison gangs. Either that or they should be castrated, without anesthesia. Let the punishment fit the crime.

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