Yesterday, I met with Jay, Josh and Kenyatta. We were talking about standards for videobloggers, and how we can set good standards now, before the likes of Apple, MSN or XXX try to control the space. Jay said: “how can we get people paid with standards?” (Getting some $$ is a big thing for videobloggers, with hosting costs and all.) Josh was explaining an idea with an RSS namespace. I said “rel=donate”. It just made sense. Josh proposed we changed it to rel=”payment”, which made even more sense. Jay posted a video.

I implemented it for Mefeedia this morning – still testing but it works. Post a post with a video and a rel=”payment” link, and it’ll show a nice “Like this video? Support this videoblogger” link.

Why might this work? producing video is (perhaps) more work than text. Videobloggers love to be paid. As for the standard: it’s supersimple. Only the aggregators need to support it, not the creation software. And it degrades perfectly. Share and enjoy :) Standards are about implementation, not definition. We’ll see.