Check this: Brother, can you spare a dime for my Gucci bills? Karyn Bosnak was some broke, perky mar­ketroid who over­spent her­self into $20K of credit card debt and then essen­tially begged he way back to sol­vency. Most of the donors were Net-savvy dot-com refugees like her­self hop­ing for a lit­tle karmic action from their small act of kindness.

So here’s my spiel. I’m look­ing to go back to Iraq. If peo­ple donate to me (I’ve set up a Pay­Pal account for y’all to do so. But­tons are on the right under the “links” box.) I’ll go and report back with pic­tures and Web reports. Rather than bail­ing out some 20-something who got her­self into a mess through con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion, you’ll be sup­port­ing inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and an adven­ture. Plus, you’ll be get­ting some­thing more than a warm and fuzzy feel­ing out of it: you-are-there reports and pic­tures that will be emailed to you first before being pub­lished anywhere.

As an early bonus, here are the pho­tos from my first trip in July.

So there you have it. I’m ask­ing for spon­sor­ship from my friends and col­leagues to throw in a buck or two (or what­ever you want to donate.) It will be fun, and it’s for a good cause. Thanks very, very much. Be sure and drop me an email so I can put you on the dis­tri­b­u­tion list and add you to my list of con­trib­u­tors. (If you don’t want to be listed, just let me know.)