For what it’s worth, I don’t see EmanciPay as a fourth party, but serving fourth parties, as well as first parties (customers). That’s because EmanciPay is a set of capabilities and methods, rather than the companies that (or other entities) that will intermediate.

But again, it’s still early.

I agree that journalists should be able to get paid somehow, I think that papers, newspapers, may not be the way to achieve that. I think of newspapers as the middlemen that used to connect journalists with readers. Now that said middlemen are not required, why try to save them?

I would love to see EmanciPay allowing me to donate/pay some money to the journalist/blogger directly after I’ve read an article wrote by him/her. A button or something that with just one click would make a micropayment to him/her in whatever amount I choose. The only intermediary would be EmanciPay (the fourth party) and not the newspaper (a third party).

Forget the AllThingsD crowd. Forget Radiohead too. We’re talking about creating mechanisms that don’t exist yet: ones that give the customer (or the user) two things: 1) an easy way to see how valuable otherwise free stuff is to them; and 2) an easy way to pay for it, if they want — on their terms, rather than just the seller’s. The precedents for this are few and partial. But I think there is inevitability to the idea. You can’t see it, however, if you frame the problem on the sell side. Or on what we’ve seen so far on the buy side.