Life, Edited

We all talk about living with less, but Graham Hill is getting really serious about it. At this past week's PopTech2010 conference in Maine, the Treehugger founder launched Life Edited, a new project that -- over the next year -- will turn his 420-square-foot New York apartment into a crowdsourcing experiment on how to live smarter with less.

"It's about maximizing our enjoyment of small space," Hill told PopTech conferees over the weekend. "It's about reducing our stuff footprint." It's also about finding a way to live happily with far less of everything -- from friends to waste to media to furniture to clothing -- but all with more design. "I believe the skill of the century is editing -- cutting back on space, possessions, media, friends -- because it gives you a lot of mental clarity, a lot more space and a lot more financial flexibility. Less is more."

Hill is asking designers to help him renovate his new Manhattan apartment into "a transformable space furnished only with essentials and digitized media." [Think access to stuff versus ownership of stuff.] Hill said he was inspired during a recent move, when he discovered how much of what he had was useless. The design competition, cosponsored by Green Depot, Cisco Systems, Resource Furniture and others, will award $10,000 for the winning design. For more details, here's Hill:

What can you live without?

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: istock.com)

Digital Content: 'Free' No More?

Here's a new type of social media startup -- Flattr, out of Sweden. It's in private beta at the moment but it's already starting to cause social innovators and entrepreneurs to sit up and take notice. [Micah Sifry, the cofounder and executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, posted a short piece on it today on his techPresident blog and says he finds Flattr "intriguing."]

He's right. Flattr is a new micro-payment system that would make it possible for people to get paid for what they produce online -- directly from the people who consume it. "When you create, there's no good way right now to get money for that content, and when you find something you like, there's no good way to show love for it," Flattr's founders say. "The problem is universal for bloggers and their readers, musicians and their listeners, photographers, film creators, programmers and so on."

And it doesn't end there. "Before Flattr," the founders say on their site, "the only reasonable way to donate was to use Paypal or other systems to send money to people. The threshold for this has been quite high. People just ignore sending donations if it isn't for a really important cause. Sending a small sum has always been a pain in the ****. Who would ever log in to a payment system just to donate one Euro? And 10 Euros was just too high (a price to pay) for just one blog entry we liked..."

Flattr founders say they've solved the problem. Here's how it works: Once you register on the site, you're asked to put a small sum of money into an account there, which you then use to pay all of the people (or causes) you choose to "flattr" each month. The site lets you both send and receive payments. The idea? You can "flattr" people and they can "flattr" you back. (You can pay people for their content -- if you like it a lot -- and they can pay you for yours.)

Says Sifry: "This strikes me as very smart social engineering since it tackles the most obvious obstacle -- our propensity to want to get paid, more than pay others, right from the start. In effect, Flattr sets up a worldwide poker game and you have to ante up to play."

For more on Flattr, here's the video. The site's motto, translated into English from Swedish, says: "Many small streams will form a large river." What do you think?

Could this new "social micro-payment" idea help to bridge the so-called 'social action gap' (between talk and action) for many causes? Could it help to close the 'payment gap' for creators of online content and spark new levels of entrepreneurial activity? Let us hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Simon Oxley for istock.com)