Kachingle - a new model for citizen generated content

The advantage to this model? Advertisers no longer dominate culture. Advertising money has had a particularly pernicious and chilling effect upon the expression of free ideas, has established role models and expectations of behavior that are often unhealthy and in many cases downright destructive, and has all too often been the catalyst for disruptive bubbles in certain sectors of business and entertainment. Advertising won't (and shouldn't) disappear completely, but its possible that the emerging crowd-sourcing of payment systems may very at least provide some balance to the economy.

It's also very possible that getting rid of the newspapers may even spur the creation of new newspapers. Local newspapers, supported by a community subscription base, may be the best mechanism for the funding and distribution of local news, especially if such newspapers could be distributed as a PDF or similar format to high speed printers in the places where people most congregate - coffee shops, grocery stores, libraries and so forth. Add a netbook and you can select the particular articles (from headlines or tags) that you want to populate the content in the "paper", and members of the community can in turn contribute their own content as they deem desirable to the underlying database of stories. - Kurt Cagle

NVDL: This guy is really interesting.

clipped from broadcast.oreilly.com For instance, services like Kachingle are turning the micropayments model on its head: people "donate" money to the site to support blogs that they want to help. Kachingle then distributes this money to those sites that are visited, based upon usage. This model opens up some interesting possibilities, not least of which because it does the hard work of tracking and disbursing micropayments rather than placing the onus on either reader or author. Payment is given in proportion to usage, so that the reader feels that his money is being spent specifically on content that he finds useful or entertaining, in essence providing many of the benefits of the subscription model by applying it not to distribution but to content creation.