Tim Bray's main point here is that the practice of charging subscriptions for every single web resource won't scale. After all, how many $5 subscriptions can we sustain before this becomes an issue? Ten? Twenty? How many $15 subscriptions? He suggests this: " a standardized little popup saying 'Ten cents to read this', with several options: Yes or no on this piece, and Always-yes or Always-no for this publication." Which is (ahem) what I proposed fifteen years ago. With pictures. Bray cites Ted Nelson in Literary Machines in 1981, but I imagine he didn't provide code.
Today: 6 Total: 83 [Direct link] [Share]
