Five Dollar Friday

There will be a website up soon devoted just to Five Dollar Friday, but in the meantime go here for an explanation and list of my own former recipients. Also check out #5DF on Twitter to see who else is donating to whom.

Today I'm giving money to Wikileaks.org. I'd been intrigued and interested in Wikileaks since they started, and should have given them money long before now. I've been finally motivated to finally do it by their Iraq video, now watched over six million times on youtube:

I'd love to know who else is giving money and why, so please mention it on twitter or tell me in comments. For example, Tess Lynch explains here why she's donating to Mills Baker:

What does Mills do for the rest of us, who are all making content for a place (thing? Concept?) that didn't even really exist when I was a kid? He shows us that TL;DR shouldn't be a consideration when we have a lot to say and are willing to explain ourselves well. He's an example of a person who uses the web not for cats and bacon, which are dear to my heart and never to be discounted, but for creating essays that borrow from others and give meticulous credit, that reference the article or the author or the blogger that gave him a jumping-off point for an idea; he annotates and you click on a biography of Nabokov or Sarah Belfort's A++ Tumblr, and you end up spending a great deal of your evening following the breadcrumbs of Mills' thoughts. Isn't that what you'd like the internet to be like? What a wonderful present it can be, what great fodder for conversations you'd never had before, and how generous to share, so considerately, an idea that goes beyond himself and his own concerns. Mills has ideas, opinions, questions, and often they relate only tangentially to himself, which is of course the mark of a person who sees the world as endlessly amusing, befuddling, and beautiful.

—Jonathan Schwarz