Comics writer and artist Scott McCloud has been advocating micropayments for Web content for a few years now, as well as pioneering the Web as a medium for comics in general. Now he's actually put up a comic, The Right Number, with the installments on sale for twenty-five cents each. I'll be interested to see how this plays out; I find the idea of micropayments intriguing, but there are a lot of kinks to be ironed out. For instance, McCloud is using something called BitPass as his system for accepting payments, and thus anyone wanting to actually pay him for his work has to have a BitPass account. But I already have a PayPal account, and I really don't want to open up all manner of new accounts with different online-payment services just to get different things, so it seems to me that online-payment services need to be like banks in the real world, accepting one another's payments neatly and painlessly. (I haven't delved too deeply into this, so it may well be that BitPass accepts PayPal after all, but that's not the impression I got.)
One downside of online life is this mega-proliferation of UserIDs and passwords and whatnot. I'm starting to feel like my bathroom door is going to ask me to sign in with my user e-mail and password before I can go in there to take my shower.
(UPDATE: Apparently, you can use your PayPal account to buy a "prepaid card" for use with BitPass. But wouldn't you still have to sign up for BitPass just to get through?)
The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
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