Agreed on both accounts @jesta.

The promotion feature is nice because, like you state, it gives people the opportunity for the...erm, well-endowed to give "proper props" to a quality piece originating from a wee minnow.

I actually would prefer that there be infinite payout periods for every community member post, just like YouTube continues to pay for thumb-ups (I presume). I like the idea of future google searches on my focused # topics producing more income two, three, twenty years from now, even if the payout per up-vote has to be much lower to make this a possibility.

This way, it's possible to put out a mass of quality content over a period of time, say two years, and then turn that blog into a form of passive income (basically leaving it alone once the posts and their respective keywords have achieved a high enough google/page rank), much like many bloggers out there on the Internets have done and continue to do. This would bring more exciting strategy to how people blog, IMO.