"With a flat rate fee you can flatter people"

Flattr is a new micropayment system - this viddo explains it, but basically:

I pay a set fee per month - say £5
People that create stuff can put a Flattr button next to it, like a 'share this' or Digg button
Each time I see something I like I click on that person's Flattr button, like I would with the other buttons
At the end of the month my £5 is divided by the number of times I've clicked the button, and that amount given to each of the creators.
I can also see that they could use the data to show the most liked things in a day, week, month, and fastest movers and so on.



I really like this. I think that lots of people would willingly pay small amounts for online content if it were easy to do so. There will always be freeloaders, but there will also be people who pay if it is easy to do so. Oh - and it's been created by Peter Sunde, one of the creators of the Pirate Bay.

Via Metafilter, my favourite newspaper