metalinguistic musings and other related ramblings

I’ve recently joined flattr (that’s the icon on the right you can see ), and just last week I read about some students from NYU who got almost 200.000$ in funding through kickstarter to write an open source facebook clone. Something is definitely buzzing in the micropayment world.

When you look at kickstarter and flattr, they are attacking the same problem, funding, at different angles. Kickstarter tries to get all the funding up front, while flattr is more of a tip jar model for something already produced. So in a way, they are complementary. I would argue that they both work best if the content is placed into the public one way or another. And that is where I think there is a huge potential.

Something like flattr creates an alternative to paywalls and an alternative to ads. And that is something I would very much like to see.

Being small and agile has many advances, but sometimes people confuse it with being fragile. Although one could argue that betting on a single-vendors proprietary solution would be a more fragile business proposition. Anyway, to make people feel safer buying web systems developed in Django and Python based on Open Source, we have had a finger in the creation of the Django Alliance. The web site complements Django People with a focus on companies rather than on single individuals.