I've read this book together with the two books about Effective Altruism bei Peter Singer (The Life You Can Save and The Most Good You Can Do), and I have to say these books have really changed my life. I know it sounds cheesy, but I've never read books that had such a lasting influence on me.
Those books provide just the right rational and scientific arguments and have shown me with how much cognitive dissonance I, as a supposed rational person, ran through my life.
There is a micro-payment service called Flattr [1] which does something like this. It was founded by Peter Sunde, one of the pirate bay founders.
It's actually quite successfull in the German web community especially for podcasters. There are German podcasters which earn about 1000 Euro per month via Flattr.