Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Charities in need of help

I just ran across this article in the local paper today. Apparently charities are running into financial trouble due to the downturn in the economy. So, if you can afford it, don't forget to donate to your local charities - especially now!

UPDATE: Came across this other snippet about the charity crunch. Somewhat interesting is the search engine hosting the link. It's a clever idea - you register a charity you want to donate to and then use their ad-funded search engine (called Goodsearch) and they donate a portion of their ad revenues to the charity you selected. Goodsearch LLC is not a non-profit themselves, but they do donate 50% of their ad revenue to the charities their users specify, so I suppose it's better than Google, which keeps 100% of their ad revenue (as far as I know). It might be worth a look.

The one sour point for me is Goodsearch LLC has apparently applied for a patent on this idea. I really dislike the concept of patenting a business process. My personal opinion is patents should be reserved for actual physical inventions. But hey, this is how the law is right now, so you can't blame them for taking advantage of it - just like Amazon's dubious patent on "one click shopping". Yes, Amazon really does have a patent on that. Our patent system needs work...