Bounty Up is a service to collect online donations for a project, like the wildly successful MyFreeImplants.com, but for the rest of us — I wish I was kiddin’ about that site’s success. The tagline on BountyUp is “Ask for what you want, let the crowd pay for it.” Like the tagline, I’m being tongue in cheek, BountyUp has actually been used for a lot of wonderful projects.

It’s awesome to see an article about BountyUp’s service in the Times Colonist. The TC is Vancouver Island’s only widely distributed paper and is owned by CanWest Global Communications.

There is at least a couple of egregious errors in Tom Mcmillan’s article. The first “crowd-surfing” being comical, the second “millions” being a reminder of BountyUp’s potential.

The article also shares some of the wonderful details of the BountyUp story so far including:

• “… donations to fund projects for Oak Bay science students, North Carolina choirs and Middle East social activists.”
• “Starting out, I really wanted to change the world,” McKenty said.

I think I was among the first Joshua shared the idea with, and the passion to change the world was an important part of the equation from the beginning. He has done a great job applying his Web 2.0 expertise on this service, while continuing to work on other projects.

Hopefully, this article reflects momentum for the service, and BountyUp will have much deserved success!

The term “fundraising” in Toni’s article title “Automattic fundraising” reminded me that it was time to donate the money you gave by clicking on the ads here in 2007.

In 2007 that was $475 USD from Google Adsense and nothing from anything else.

$100 was already donated to my uni friend Microserf Nicole Steinbok‘s Great Lake Walk to raise money for Canadian Cancer Society. My $100 donation actually became $400 for the Canadian Cancer Society as I let Nicole donate it in her name so that Microsoft would match her, and her Microserf husband Jeff Steinbok generously matched donations, which Microsoft also matched. I like to stretch my donation dollar. Nicole raised $6301 and walked 49 km!

Just now I donated the rest of the money, $400 to Sami Barker and Esquimalt High friends’ Helping build a playground for youth in San Pancho through GiveMeaning.

San Pancho is a small developing fishing village just north of PV. My Aunt, a resident of the village, has two young boys. She has a close connection with the school, and says the town would benefit from a playground at the elementary school. A group of twelve students from Esquimalt High are participating in a fundraising event to buy supplies. Under the direction of Mr. Ken Henderson, the students will visit the town in March where they will live with the locals, study spanish and hopefully get to help out with the playground’s construction

Thank you for your support