Money for something

[mmcirvin]

Clever net pontificator Clay Shirky famously disbelieves in the viability of micropayments. Clever cartoonist Scott McCloud famously disagrees, and notices that part of the problem is the shifty definition of the term, which creates strawmen. Nobody seems to think that invisible penny-a-click pricing will ever work (I agree), but McCloud uses the term to refer to charging a quarter for a comic, too (and points out that this is the specific model preferred by BitPass, the system that Shirky is denigrating).

Slumbering Lungfish muses amusingly on the debate, and suggests that the real problem is the age-old one: everyone thinks he's an artist, and few will be successful at it. The Web makes the vanity publishing model cheap enough to be respectable (though not free, as McCloud stresses). But try to go beyond that, and unless you've got something special, you end up with "beer money and a clique".

I haven't been inclined lately to try to make money off my creative work. But that's just because of accidental things: I have a pretty good day job, and I'm pretty sure that I'm never going to be such a superstar from my extracurricular activities that the expense of it wipes me out. I suppose that either circumstance could change.