Intellectual Philanthropy Copyright 2000 by Ed Howdershelt http://abintrapress.tripod.com    Are you a starving college student or are you otherwise unable to afford to donate much time or money to your favorite causes or charity efforts?    Would you be willing to write some informative or entertaining articles and let the proceeds from viewings of your articles go to help other people or animals?    There are websites on the internet that will pay you a few cents for every viewing of your work. That doesn't sound like much until you realize how many people are on the internet and will be on the net in the future.    How many of those people may read your work on a high-traffic website?    To give you some idea, my own posted scribblings pulled in $1378.60 in their first five months of viewings on one site, which works out to about 3400 individual readings.    The basic requirements are that you be an individual, that you be 18 or older, and that you not post porn or other objectionable material or spam to get readers.    One outfit's 'not being individuals' clause shorted-out my grand little idea about setting up accounts for the Dawn Center (a local domestic abuse shelter) and for Furperson Retreat (a local no-kill cat shelter), so read their agreements carefully. There's always another place to put things.    I can simply refer to my author-info page for the number of viewings that articles dedicated to those agencies have received, multiply those numbers times the payment rate, and send the agencies that much as a cut of my earnings.    You don't need any website-design or page-construction knowledge.    All you have to do is write your article and save it as a plain text or doc file, go to the website, and click on the 'contribute' button on the page to send up your work.    You'll then be directed to 'browse' to select the file you've created from its location on your computer. Once you've entered the file name, hit the 'submit' button, admire the results, and then go write another one.    The websites are often advertiser-sponsored, which means that a small banner ad will be placed at the top of each page. The ads are for everything from soft drinks to blue jeans to automobiles and toys.    It would be reasonable to let the agencies you wish to support know about your works on their behalf. It would probably also be a good idea to check with them first if you intend to mention them, and let them preview and approve any works you intend to send up that might involve them directly, and be sure to let them know where to go to view the works after you send them up.    Your articles or other works will remain your property. You may edit or change them or pull them down at any time, and the website has many suggestions for finding readers that do not include spamming people with email.    Because advertising will never disappear -- and because it is just about everywhere you look -- it seems to me that ad-sponsored sites should be able to provide their service indefinitely. That would appear to define such a website as a sort of perpetual money machine for individual authors. Indexes to my other articles and ebooks may be found on my websites: Abintra Press! and