With big-name authors in tow, Amazon has announced some micro content for a micro price. This seems like good news for micropayments. There are many definitions of micropayments. To me it means an amount of money so trivial that the credit card transaction fees prohibit one from collecting much–or any–of the payment.

If the web can figure out how to get past the fee obstacle (ex: 30 cents plus 2.9% from Paypal), micropayments could be the kind of volume smaller publishers need to make some good dough.

How are Amazon and Danielle Steel going to make money for the little guy? They won’t. However, Amazon does seem willing to accept micro content from other publishers.

Once you are accepted into the Amazon Shorts program, you are free to contribute as many pieces as you wish. We are especially interested in getting new material from you on a regular basis.

Just that Amazon is mainstreaming the concept of paying a tiny amount of money for a small article seems good for micropayments. The fact that they seem to be pocketing the entire 49 cents is moot (and temporary, I’d gauge).

The first step for micropayments to work is for someone to just do it: sell an article for 50 cents and only make 15. Once the demand is there, we’ll see those transaction fees decrease. Amazon has done us all a favor by providing the arsenal of their huge marketplace.

I used to swear by my little paper planner. For what seems like eons, I haven’t been using it. My notepad has kept my todo list and I’ve lived with emails or memory for appointments. Strangely, I’ve continued to cart my planner between work and home every day.

This week I had more than one or two time-sensitive events to remember–beyond my brain’s threshold. Today at lunch, I brought my planner with the intention of transferring appointments from my notebook.

Glancing back to the last item on my todo list from early May, I saw this item, scrawled unusually in pen:

buy pencil lead

This has fueled my desire to finally switch to a computer-based calendar. There is no reason why I should stop “plannering” only for lack of pencil lead (which I greatly prefer to pen for the li’l planner that isn’t too forgiving of mistakes or changes).

Since my laptop is a Mac, I figure I’ll use iCal. I’d love to find out about online services that might either replace iCal or sync with it. In the meantime, it will be a remarkable accomplishment just to move away from paper.

What do you use to keep track of life?

I have a lot of ideas. I don’t have a lot of time. Many of my ideas are never executed, which becomes readily apparent every month or so when a domain, purchased in a fit of excitement, expires. The founder of CDBaby has a very short and to the point statement about ideas and execution that harkens back to my secrecy pondering.

AWFUL IDEA = -1
WEAK IDEA = 1
SO-SO IDEA = 5
GOOD IDEA = 10
GREAT IDEA = 15
BRILLIANT IDEA = 20

NO EXECUTION = $1
WEAK EXECUTION = $1000
SO-SO- EXECUTION = $10,000
GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000
GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000
BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000

In short, ideas alone are worth less than the amount of cash you have in your wallet. The author gives some multipliers and a brilliant idea with no execution ends up being worth $20.

Even more interesting to me is the good living that one person can make with middle-of-the-road ideas and execution. Not that I strive for mediocrity, but a hundred grand isn’t chump change.

“There are five houses in a row in different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a Walleye Pike.”

Who owns the fish?

There are fifteen hints that help you narrow down to the one possibility. I’m no logic genius and this took me about forty-five minutes, so I tend to question the idea that only one in fifty people can solve this puzzle. So, give it a try!

I can’t decide whether this image is a brilliant boiling down of what the web can be for business or if it is purely apocalyptical. At the very least, it makes it’s point clear, like a political cartoon.

To me, the overly-obvious labels in political cartoons are funnier than the jokes themselves. The combination of clear-cut rhetoric with often passive-aggressive commentary presents a dichotomy that, like this image, is at once smart and contrived, simple and complex.