3 kudos for a personal message to me may merit more attention than 30 for a piece of 'junk mail'. Conversely, if I like an article on stir-fry cookery, I might send a kudo, but I'd send 100 for a good MacareNeXT parody. Kudos are kool because they monetize gradually. They are not backed as a reserve currency in any traditional sense, requiring someone to back it with dollars or frequent flier miles. Or an advertising agency can put up an infomercial site and change dollars to kudos by handing out kudos to qualified leads.
Kudos are a scenario that motivates a new style of cryptographic micropayment protocol.
And the social impact could be enormous. So I think there's good work to be done in this arena. And thanks even if you demanded that this column be discontinued because I failed to kill myself after not being entirely right about the Internet's collapses in 1996. Starting work on my 1997 bonus, this week I would like to sketch some arguments for why you should really want to pay postage on each of your e-mails. Maybe, but the Internet has now taken off.