Blogging and a Gift Economy for Appreciation or If I were Jeff Bezos...

Last updated: 6/16/2002; 10:20:37 AM

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Blogging and a Gift Economy for Appreciation or If I were Jeff Bezos...

Disclaimer 0: I am in no way claiming that this is original, innovative or anything else. It's just the first time that I have run into it.

I ran into an interesting thing in an article on Salon. The Salon article was talking about how teenage girls with webcams were soliciting online gifts using Amazon wish lists. While this was fairly disturbing (do you want your daughter / sister / cousin / niece / whatever) tantalizing anonymous men for Amazon stuff, it made me think about applying the same concept to blogs. Think about it. People are making great content on blogs every single day, sometimes every single hour. As the net gets more and more commercial and more and more advertising driven, I just don't read Salon or MSN or whatever. I read blogs instead. So the question becomes – how do we keep people making great blogs – that aren't affected by advertising? My solution: Add an Amazon wishlist to your blog. Here is my Amazon wishlist:

My Wish List

If I was Jeff Bezos at Amazon, not only would I promote this actively to the Blog community but I would also implement a "Partial Wish" feature so that different people could pitch in on a gift. Why? Well, when programming books cost $40, that's a big gift. I'd like to see it as low as $2 or $3. I'd do that in a second for a whole lot of blogs. And then the wish list owner could say "$20 more to go for this. I guess I'll just buy the rest". With email notification as well this becomes highly, highly viral. A lot of times I just don't think to go to Amazon.

You may be thinking "Amazon Tip Jar". My gut feeling is that gifts are different from cash. And gifts give you the opportunity to direct the blog content in ways you might like to see it go. For example, I am a fairly hardcore PHP geek. If someone gifted (that a real world) me with a PHP / MySQL Database book then I would know that he or she might want me to write about this. And I'd probably reward them with articles on that topic.

Disclaimer 1 : This is not, in any fashion, a solicitation. My "payment" for blogging is the wonderful interaction that I get from readers all over the world (Mike in Australia, Roger in England, Veer in India, Brent in Canada, etc). I just thought that other bloggers like Jeremiah might like this idea and I wanted to make it available.

Disclaimer 2 : Am I the only person out there who thinks that Amazon's new UI (well, new to me at least) is just not right? Way too busy for my taste.