One of the folks helping to raise money for the Katrina relief effort is the site Boobs 4 Bourbon Street (it’s been slashdotted and is down right now, but check back later). People are donating pictures of their bare breasts (with the website shown in the photo itself, to insure they were taken with full knowledge and consent of how they’d be used), and anyone who donates $5 or more to one of the main relief charities gets an account and password to view them.
From the site:
Click on any of the charities in the right-hand column, go to their donation page, and make an online donation for $5 or more. (Please note: Habitat For Humanity’s minimum online donation amount is $10. If you try to make a smaller donation in their form, you’ll get a fairly nondescript error message.) Then, once they send you a confirmation email, forward it to us, at verify@boobs4bourbonst.com. At this point, one of our volunteers will see your email, then create an account with which you can access the gallery, and email you with your login information. The username will be the email address that you emailed us from. The password will be randomly-generated. Write it down or print it out or save the email.
To quote my friend Adam, this has got to be the least efficient way to use the Internet to get pictures of boobs since Archie, but hey — it’s for charity, and when I checked a couple days ago they’d already raised $3000.
I also note (so you won’t think this post is entirely about boobs) that they’ve got an interesting trade economy going here, where they’re providing a service (in this case light-porn) not for cash but for proof that cash was paid to someone else. It’d be great to build up the infrastructure to make this kind of thing easier, much as Software Ransom sites have done for pooling commissions for software (are you listening, PayPal?).