When Paige Williams‘ feature story got killed by The New York Times, she was out $2,000 and couldn’t find another home for the piece. So she took the Radiohead approach: she published the story on her own website and added a donate button to recoup costs and possibly even eke out a paycheck for herself.

While I don’t see this as a good strategy for journalists to make money in the long run, it’s one that is sometimes successful — more in other fields, like music and web development. I’ve been noticing that more and more web developers have a “buy me a beer” button, asking for $5 if the user likes the product. There are web site plug ins that make it easy to add a “tip jar” to one’s site.

I wish that bands would add something like this to their site — a way for downloaders to ease their guilty consciouses. I don’t download musically illegally like I once did (I haven’t quite figured out this whole bit torrent thing, to be honest), but more often I grab music from friends’ computers, which really isn’t anything so different. I wish there were an easy way for me to throw bands a few bucks to say thank you.

Sometimes it takes a tiny technical innovation — something that makes it that much easier to give — that tips the scale. For instance, I am a longtime This American Life devotee, listening to the Podcast religiously on my phone. Ira Glass has been making a rational and impassioned plea for people to donate, even just $1 or $5 to cover the bandwidth costs for the podcast, on and off for a long time, especially since the economy tanked. I’ve thought about giving, and even made a mental note to go online and give when I got home. But it was only when they said that by sending a text with the word LIFE to a certain number would add $5 onto your phone bill that I actually did something. I know that a similar thing was possible for Oxfam — donate $10 just by texting — for Haiti earthquake disaster relief.