(Screencap: Indiegogo)

Back in April, Colorado-based revenge porn proprietor Craig Brittain promised that he would shutter his online nudes hub Is Anybody Down, feigning remorse about posting naked photos without women's consent and even changing his Twitter bio to something so emo it'd make Taking Back Sunday proud. But shortly after declaring his intent to shut down the site, Mr. Brittain registered obamanudes.com and transferred all of Is Anybody Down's archives there. When visitors go to isanybodydown.com, they're greeted with a message: "Is Anybody Down is OVER! Obama Nudes has begun. http://obamanudes.com/"

Now, Mr. Brittain has devised a new scheme to flout the desires of victims who want him to take down their intimate photos. He and Is Anybody Down co-owner Chance Trahan have launched an Indiegogo campaign with a goal of $200,000, claiming that if they hit their goal they will officially shut down both sites. And they've named their campaign after revenge porn victim Holly Jacobs' victim resource hub, End Revenge Porn.

In the campaign description, Mr. Brittain explains that a series of mistakes he made in his youth led him to have an arrest record, and that coupled with his depression have kept him from holding a legitimate job. Because of this, he has been forced to host your naked photos without your consent in order to make money to pay for food and rent.

According to the campaign:

We don't really want to keep these pictures or profiles up. We have no real interest in them. We had hoped that by this point in time, we would've made enough money to purchase a real business and cover our bills, but we haven't been able to do so. We thought that our plan would work, that we'd make money and sell off the website and by now we would have houses and decent lives, even if only for a short time...

But, you can help those people. If we are able to raise $200,000, we will shut down all of our websites and auction off the domain names. We will never run any other websites like obamanudes.com.

Mr. Brittain's Is Anybody Down has been the subject of local news team investigations, which revealed that he may have posed as women on Craigslist to obtain nude photos. He also claims to have a partnership with an independent organization called Takedown Hammer, run by New York attorney David Blade III. For $250, revenge porn victims can pay "David Blade" to have their photos removed from Is Anybody Down. However, no such attorney exists in the New York State Unified Court System’s attorney database, and emails sent from Mr. Brittain appear to have come from the same I.P. as those sent by the Takedown Hammer. This has caused some, like attorney Marc Randazza, to label Mr. Brittain's operation as scam.

The Indiegogo campaign takes this notion a bit further: instead of asking victims for money to rid the web of their pictures, Misters Brittain and Trahan are instead asking the entire Internet for money to "end revenge porn." The money, of course, will go towards their own personal well-being. And it's a flexible funding campaign, which means they don't have to hit their $200,000 to keep the money.

The Indiegogo campaign could theoretically break some of Indiegogo's terms of use, including the rule that states that campaigners may not offer, sell or distribute "Items infringing or violating others’ Intellectual Property Rights, privacy rights or proprietary rights or wrongfully disclosing confidential information."

We've reached out to both Mr. Brittain and Indiegogo and will update when we hear back.

But hey, $50 will get you a t-shirt.

Update: Since reaching out to them, Indiegogo has pulled the campaign from its site. They haven't responded to us with comment.

(Photo: Indiegogo)

In November of last year, Gawker reported that the notorious gross-out site "Goatse.cx," which showed an old man splaying open his anus for all to see, was being transitioned from a nostalgia-laden '90s meme to an actual email service. The site's new owner, an Australian IT consultant who goes by the moniker Jonathan, planned to offer Goatse vanity email addresses for $5 a pop.

After the post hit Gawker and other sites, interest in Goatse emails skyrocketed, and Jonathan created a $10,000 Indiegogo campaign as a clever way to collect the $50 he decided to charge for each account. The campaign has already surpassed its goal, with seven days of funding still to go. Users can sign up to get a Goatse email address by using Goatse search to find their desired username, then forwarding proof of their Indiegogo donation along with their preferred user name to Jonathan and team.

So far, almost 300 people have paid the $50 for an @goatse.cx address, and three paid $140 to have their image displayed on goatse.cx in the Goatse Hall of Fame. Internet notoriety at its finest.

(h/t Boing Boing)

Mr. Vinh. (Photo: Tumblr.com)

Shopping Site Goes Shopping Back in 2011, Khoi Vinh, the former design director for The New York Times’s website, attempted to launch an iPad collage maker called Mixel that even Taylor Swift would love. The interface was kind of clunky, and the company soon pivoted to a smoother iPhone product, which became fairly successful. And now Mixel has been acquired by the custom product giant Etsy.

No, you won't be creating any collages of your twee collectables any time soon. According to AllThingsD, The Mixel team is being acquired for its stellar mobile talents. Mr. Vinh and his cofounder Scott Ostler, along with employees Akiva Leffert and Roy Stanfield, will all make the move to Etsy's Brooklyn offices. Mixel will be shutting down the social side of its app, but will leave up its collage-making tool. In an email to Betabeat, Etsy CTO Kellan Elliot-McCrea explains, “We expect our mobile traffic to surpass desktop traffic by the end of 2014." 

Not Even Punking You Kanye West's favorite Pinterest-like site, The Fancy, just expanded its subscription box service, originally a monthly plan that gives you $60 of curated goods for $30. Now everyone, not just the minds at Fancy, can choose a bunch of items to send out to their adoring fans. Fancy gets to split the profits with you, of course. The first partner is Ashton Kutcher with his A+ Box, which includes brain-shaped ice cubes and mustache-shaped Band-Aids.

Iowa Now Trendiest State Dwolla, the fast-growing money transfer app, reached a pretty big milestone this week. The company announced its partnership with the Iowa state government to help modernize the state's tax system. Starting soon, businesses will be able to use Dwolla to pay the cigarette stamp tax, which accounts for about $100 million of Iowa's revenue each year. In a blog post, the company seems to be looking to the future already: "And while you may not be able to pay your taxes using Dwolla today, you are going to start seeing our logo pop up here and there as the state looks to modernize the payment experiences and do better business for the 21st century taxpayer and economy (e.g. mobile payments, low-cost transfers, and real-time notifications, etc.)."

Norman Mailer Badge Foursquare recently partnered up with Voice Media Group, the company that was spun off from Village Voice Media, now without the icky Backpage.com. The Voice's Places event data will now be syndicated on Foursquare and the company's highly popular "Best Of" will be integrated into the service as well.

Let's All Go to the Lobby: Dogfish Accelerator, the first accelerator program for film producers, launched this week. Started by a former TechStars associate, James Belfer, the accelerator puts film teams in a three-month intensive training and networking program and gives them $18,000 in seed funding, along with free office space. But why wouldn't you just try a Kickstarter and go to Sundance?

Award Tour See.Me, the social network for artists, is currently running a bunch of contests for its 600,000 users. There's $125,000 in grants and awards up for grabs. The site has just announced that founding Tribe Called Quest member Q-Tip is going to serve as a judge for its music competition. In a press release sent to Betabeat, William Etundi, founder and CEO of See.Me, said, "Our simple goal is support creative people with recognition, shows and grants and we are super excited to bring Q-Tip into that process.”

Fund My Relationship Coming Soon If you've ever wanted your neighbors to pick your next significant other, then you should try ChainDate. The site is billing itself as the world's first site that uses crowdsourcing to find you a match. Every user gets "Wingpeople," users who like the same type of person that you do. The site matches you up with people that these similar-minded users thought were cute too. Sounds a bit competitive.

Nothing Really Matters The mobile analytics firm Adeven claims that over 435,000 new apps will be added to the iOS app store in 2013. That's too many apps to fit on your tiny phone, but don't worry, you won't even notice most of them. The firm also reports that 60 perecent of apps are "zombie apps," or apps that go completely undiscovered by iPhone users. A Zombie App Survival Guide is surely forthcoming.

Stuff Michelle Obama Likes  Whole Kids Foundation, PACT and Indiegogo are teaming up to help build urban sustainable gardens across the country. Leaders raise $2,500 on Indiegogo pages and Whole Kids Foundation will provide additional help like gardening materials. Crowdfunding kind of saves the day again.

Help Out, Y'all LuckyAnt, the crowfunding platform for small businesses, is hosting a very large crowdfunding campaign for 9 South Street Seaport businesses to help them out in the enduring disaster of hurricane Sandy. There's 19 days left in the project to rebuild historic Front Street and over $10,000 has already been raised.

Wake Up, Loser If waking up to the blaring sound of beeping or shocking radio static isn't for you, then you should download Mood O'Clock. It's the first emotional alarm app for Android, which lets you choose what kind of mood you want to wake up to. Depending on what you choose, the app will play you a corresponding morning soundtrack. We need a setting to help us wake up feeling like a brogrammer for those special Saturdays.

Kickstarter's cofounders

Kickstarted The crowdfunding king released its annual highlights for 2012 this week. And the startups is going about as gangbusters as well, an oversubscribed, blockbuster Kickstarter campaign. In 2012, 2,241,475 people pledged almost $320 million and successfully funded a little over 18,000 projects. That works out to about $606 per minute. Monetization is so much easier when it's baked into your platform, isn't it?

Indie No More Kickstarter competitor Indiegogo also released data for 2012. Campaigns raised 20 percent more in last year than they did in 2011 and successful campaigns took an average of 11 days preparing for their launch.

On the tech side, 64 percent of core campaigns incorporated video in their campaigns. The lesson, though, is keep those videos short: campaigns with videos under five minutes were 25 percent more likely to reach their fundraising goal. The average length was three minutes and 27 seconds. "This Is Forty" could learn a few lessons from these fundseekers.

Closing the Gap Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott launched a new software development competition for programs to help middle school students excel in math. The Gap App Challenge invites developers to submit applications, games or other programs that focus on middle school math and can be used by students, teachers or parents. Submissions will be accepted through April 10, 2013, and will be reviewed by two panels: one comprised of public school principals and teachers, and the second comprised of Department of Education officials and experts in technology, media and design. The criteria include idea originality, potential impact and feasibility. No Angry Birds need apply.

More Girls Are Coding Girls Who Code, the do-gooding non-profit that encourages and trains teenage girls to pursue careers in technology and engineering, announced they’re growing their team. Founder Reshma Saujani sent around an update about new corporate, academic and foundation partners and expanding programming to reach hundreds of girls through the first ever Girls Who Code clubs. Good luck not humming Beyonce for the rest of the day.

Digital Libraries, Dour News A new report released today by the Center for an Urban Future shows that New York City’s public libraries are serving a record number of people even as more New Yorkers are turning to e-books and other digital resources. But while the report finds that libraries have become an increasingly critical, it also notes that the libraries are open fewer hours than most other large urban library systems--too many branches across the five boroughs are in bad shape and the libraries face growing threats in today’s digital age. A mixed bag of news for bookworms everywhere.

Haute Hackture Apparently, you can now hack your way to Fashion Week. The Hearts Corporation has partnered with AngelHack Events to bring you the inaugural Hearst Fashion Hackathon. Prizes include access to exclusive VIP Fashion Week shows and events, use of your hack in NYFW events, thousands in cash prizes, and mentorship from Hearst Corporation to help take your app to the next level. Le geek c'est chic, we guess.

Escape to South Beach Time Warner Cable is currently running a sweepstakes where five people will win a trip for two to Miami in late February to enjoy the Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival. Presented by FOOD & WINE, the festival is surely a nice way to escape the winter doldrums, if you are so lucky.  All a person needs to do is enter is fill out the free form found on Time Warner Cable’s facebook page by the January 21 deadline date. It's a nice try, but we'd still rather you try to come up with a more reasonable service window than: sit around your house all day.

(Photo: Indiegogo)

Sandy's gone but techie do-gooders are still coming out of the woodwork with new relief efforts. The latest: Popular photography blog Humans of New York is devoting the next ten days to chronicling the hurricane and its impact. It's pretty much impossible to see the images without wanting to help. And so the site is also partnering with Tumblr to raise money for the afflicted, with an Indiegogo fundraiser.

The campaign, which went live last night, is already at $92,000 raised--well on the way to the $100,000 overall goal. It's amazing how far 6,700 Tumblr notes can get you.

To help out HONY's efforts, Tumblr is donating swag for donors, as well as pushing traffic toward the Humans of New York announcement with a friendly reblog.

Indiegogo tells us that, within twelve hours, the pot was already up to $86,000, with donations from 1,300 people in 130 countries. The average contribution is $63 (enough to score a Humans of New York print). All the money goes to the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation.

All told, Indiegogo fundraisers have netted $340,000 for hurricane relief efforts. That's a lot of dough.

Nikola Tesla, circa 1895. (Photo: Marc Seifer Archives)

For all the modern-day desire to emulate Steve Jobs, the heroic nerd isn't a new American trope. As long ago as the Gilded Age, scientist Nikola Tesla was a celebrity. He lived at the Waldorf Astoria and was close friends with Mark Twain.

But he was neither entertainer nor robber baron. Rather, as the inventor of an effective alternating current system of power generation, he’d helped usher in a new, electrified era. His ambitious visions of the future (and complete lack of a filter) made great copy, meaning newspaper reporters were always eager to put him in print.

In 1901, at the height of his fame, Tesla built a laboratory in the rural farmland of Shoreham, Long Island. Dubbed Wardenclyffe, the facility was designed by Stanford White and meant to be the site of his greatest achievement yet: Intercontinental transmission of wireless radio signals. But it wasn’t to be. “Wardenclyffe was a landmark as magnificent in concept and execution as America’s Golden Age of electrical engineering ever produced,” writes Margaret Cheney in her 1981 biography Tesla: Man Out of Time—“magnificent and doomed.”

Today, raccoons roam the graffiti-covered interior, which has been gradually stripped of all valuable piping and wiring. The soaring interior has been subdivided into warren-like enclosures, arched windows boarded over. The tower that formerly loomed overhead is long gone. Until very recently, it was a Superfund site, polluted with silver and cadmium.

Wardenclyffe today. (Photo: flicr.com/nikisublime)

While Marconi made it into the history books for his wireless innovations, and Edison is remembered as the great inventor of the lightbulb and popularizer of electricity, Tesla fell out of favor. By 1916, he was bankrupt. (That made the papers, too.) He died at the New Yorker Hotel in January 1943, reportedly with only a snow-white pigeon as a companion. For ages, he was remembered largely as a Doctor Strange-like figure, lurking in the shadows of scientific respectability.

For 17 years, a retired teacher named Jane Alcorn has been trying to turn this moldering near-ruin into a science museum. She even organized a nonprofit and extracted the promise of an $850,000 matching grant from the state of New York, but couldn’t quite scrape together the $1.6 million required to buy the property. But now the internet, that hive of fandoms, has spawned a new generation of enthusiasts ready to right the wrong of Tesla’s neglect. A fund-raising campaign on Indiegogo, spearheaded by Matthew Inman, creator of the popular web comic The Oatmeal, drew more than 30,000 donations, and the Tesla Science Center now has $1.25 million and counting in cash to go toward the effort.

Born in 1856, an ethnic Serb in what’s now Croatia, Tesla cobbled together an advanced education in engineering despite limited financial resources and struck out for America in 1884. Upon arrival, he proceeded, letter of introduction in hand, to the early R&D shop run by Thomas Edison.

The understaffed Edison hired Tesla on the spot, but the relationship soon soured: the American supposedly promised his hardworking employee a substantial bonus to redesign the company’s energy-generating dynamos, but when Tesla went to collect his prize, Edison reneged.

The tale is a nice setup for the “War of Currents” that followed. As America embraced electricity, two technologies wrestled for dominance: Edison’s direct current system, which was first to market, and Tesla’s more efficient alternating current system, commercialized by competitor Westinghouse Electric. The latter would emerge victorious, despite downright slanderous attempts by Edison to brand it as dangerous, including using AC to electrocute the Luna Park Zoo’s troublesome elephant Topsy, on Coney Island.

To free up capital for the battle, Tesla released Westinghouse from a lucrative contract for the use of his patents—a step that would contribute greatly to his later poverty.

Wardenclyffe in its heyday. (Photo: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

But by 1901, he’d had already moved on to bigger, wilder ideas. At Wardenclyffe, he hoped to establish a facility for wireless communications on a transcontinental scale—hence the enormous tower that loomed over the building. (In the end, Marconi would get much of the glory, though by building on Tesla’s patents.) Perhaps even more ambitious were his ideas for the wireless transmission of power, a technology that’s only just now, a century later, creeping into the marketplace.

However, it was something more mundane that brought down Wardenclyffe: cash flow problems. Even if the science had worked—and the Gilded Age had seen enough marvels that it might have seemed doable—Tesla’s primary investor, J.P. Morgan, didn’t become one of the wealthiest men in America by giving things away. The money dried up, and the project failed. The property was repossessed; the tower was knocked down (though the concrete and granite foundation remains). The building and land were sold to film manufacturer Peerless Photo, later acquired by the Belgian multinational Agfa Graphics, which owns the property today.

But Tesla wasn't completely forgotten. Many a curious autodidact would stumble onto the man’s legacy. Marc Seifer, author of the Tesla biography Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, described discovering Tesla in the 1970s, while researching another man: “I said to myself, ‘This is ridiculous. If someone had invented all this stuff, I would’ve heard his name before,’” he remembered to The Observer.

Jane Alcorn, however, didn’t set out to rescue Tesla from obscurity. Rather, she simply wanted to find a new home for the small science museum housed in the local high school.

“I had been aware of a Tesla’s laboratory in a very peripheral way,” she explained. She knew Wardenclyffe, which was already empty, had originally been home to a scientist, but she didn’t know much about him. “Maybe that would be nice—to have a science museum in a scientist’s laboratory,” she thought.

In the meantime, more enthusiasts were emerging. The scientist appeared as a minor but pivotal character in the 2006 fantasy movie The Prestige, portrayed by a grave-faced David Bowie. A fictionalized version of his Houston Street lab (which burned down sometime in the late 1800s) appeared in the 2010 Nicholas Cage movie The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

So as Ms. Alcorn worked toward securing the site, visitors from Japan, Istanbul, Europe and elsewhere would call her up and ask to have someone meet them outside Wardenclyffe, in hopes of learning new details. “This has been in the past—and will continue to be—almost a site of pilgrimage,” said Ms. Alcorn.

That’s where Matthew Inman came in, alerting his hundreds of thousands of fans to the cause. Suddenly it was less a dry matter of historical preservation than a mission to do right by an unjustly forgotten underdog.

Mr. Inman first became aware of Nikola Tesla from a site called Badass of the Week and was struck by that typical disbelief that he didn’t already know about the man. “As I was reading the article I was kind of thinking, ‘Oh wow, that’s really impressive. Oh wow, he did—oh my God, holy shit, he did all of those things?’”

Impressed, Mr. Inman wrote a comic that was included in his first book, 5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth (And Other Useful Guides). But it wasn’t until he began selling T-shirts that read “Tesla >Edison” that he realized the depth of devotion to this supposedly forgotten hero. “These things just started selling like crazy,” he explained. That’s when he decided to completely rewrite the original comic and turn it into a paean.

Mr. Inman knew he didn’t have the technical background to do justice to Mr. Tesla’s feats of engineering. Instead, he decided to focus on “the spirit of what he did, in terms of—the guy was a huge nerd,” he said.

The final product: “Why Nikola Tesla Is the Greatest Geek Who Ever Lived.” Within a week, the comic had over 500,000 Facebook likes, and Mr. Inman found himself the unofficial king of internet Tesla fandom. When he heard about the fundraising attempts, he stepped forward, offering up his hordes of eager Oatmeal readers. It took just days for the campaign to blow past its goal of $850,000. The project will require millions more in donations before the museum opens its doors, but such a day suddenly looks possible.

For years Mr. Inman has referred to him as an unsung hero, but between the funds raised and the press attention, “I almost feel like the dude is pretty well sung at this point,” he admitted.

The question is, why now? One plank of Ms. Alcorn’s plan for the site hints at the currents propelling this renaissance: Besides classrooms and interactive exhibits, she’d like to include a hacker space. “If you had an invention in mind but you didn’t have a place to create your prototype, and you didn’t have the equipment, machinery or space to work on it, we could have a space with equipment you might not have at home that you could use to create your prototype.”

Between his world-altering ambitions and his loner image, Nikola Tesla engages our infatuation with innovators and entrepreneurs. We’re in a cultural moment when shirtless photos of Mark Zuckerberg pop up on TMZ, even as he extols the “hacker way” in SEC filings, and Google cofounder Sergey Brin appears at Fashion Week wearing Google Glasses. Everyone has his own idea for an earth-shattering tech startup.

And Tesla is the perfect embodiment of the ever-optimistic idealist, holding fast to his disruptive convictions. “Even when everything was against him and he was broke, even when he was a little old man in his 80s, he was always working on something,” explained playwright Jeffrey Stanley, author of the semi-autobiographical Tesla’s Letters, which premiered Off Broadway in 1999.

Tesla in his lab with Mark Twain. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons

That goes a long way toward explaining his popularity with the tech crowd: Google cofounder Larry Page likes to cite him as an inspiration; Paypal founder Elon Musk, in what looks like a self-aware admission of his own grand ambitions, named his electric car startup Tesla Motors.

Edison, on the other hand, represents a corporate approach that lacks the cultural cachet it once held. In fact, according to Leonard DeGraaf, an archivist at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in New Jersey, Edison’s greatest legacy may be that he made inventors seem like a solid bet. “He makes invention safe for people to invest in, as an activity that they can throw money at,” because he proved he could deliver, Mr. DeGraaf explained. A valuable contribution to the history of American business—but one that, fair or no, reeks of mass-production in an era that fetishizes the creative and the artisanal. Besides, it’s so much sexier to take a chance on Space X, Mr. Musk’s great hope for colonizing Mars, than to invest in a practical, revenue-generating snoozefest like Paypal.

That said, the bigger bets are a lot more likely to leave you alone in the end, with just pigeons for company.

(Photo: Indiegogo)

A few weeks ago, Betabeat wrote about an Indiegogo campaign started by Whitney Port, star of The Hills and The City. Ms. Port began the campaign to raise $50,000 so that she could show her fashion line, Whitney Eve, at New York Fashion Week Spring 2013.

But today, when we went to check up on the campaign's progress, the funding goal had mysteriously dropped by $40,000. Now, Ms. Port is only soliciting $10,000.

Betabeat has learned that Indiegogo agreed to change the fundraising goal for Ms. Port's campaign. She is an Indiegogo partner, which is why both parties agreed to lower the goal.

“The goal was lowered as we got other cooperate beauty sponsors and didn’t want to continue to raise funds we didn’t need from the fans," a publicist for Ms. Port told Betabeat.

For some background: Indiegogo offers two funding options when users opt to create a campaign. There's the "flexible funding" option, where users get to keep however much money they raise, regardless of if they ever meet their goal. The catch here is that Indiegogo retains a 9 percent fee for all money raised during a flexible funding campaign if creators don't meet their goal (vs. 4 percent if they do). On the flipside, a fixed funding campaign--which is what Ms. Port is running--has a stated goal, and the project creator only gets funding if that goal is reached. For successful fixed funding campaigns, Indiegogo retains 4 percent of funds raised.

Four percent of $10,000 is only $400, so it's highly unlikely that Indiegogo would bend its own rules just for a couple hundos. But the incident raises some important questions about crowdfunding and the difference between the experiences of corporate and average users. So far, Indiegogo's most high profile campaign was for Karen Klein, the bullied bus monitor. The Oatmeal, a renowned web comic creator, also ran a wildly successful campaign on the site. But for the most part, campaigns on Indiegogo are created by regular, every day people without connections to Hollywood.

Will Indiegogo begin to allow other users, who aren't celebrities or "partners," to change their fixed fundraising goals if projects aren't taking off the way they'd hoped?

(Photo: Indiegogo)

"How Much Would You Pay To See A Photo Of Ryan Lochte’s Alleged Penis?" begs a headline on the irreverent sports blog, Deadspin. The post, which went up a little over an hour ago, is illustrated by a photo of Gawker Media employees clustered around a computer screen looking (and laughing) at an alleged photo of Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte's penis.

The pic, which is "a neck-down bathroom-mirror self-portrait, in which the tip of the penis almost but not quite reaches into the sink basin," was provided by a source, who is demanding a fee. Deadspin has decided to start a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo, probably because Kickstarter doesn't consider dickpics "art" (subjective!).

Unable to decide just how valuable a photo of Ryan Lochte's penis might be--both in cold hard cash and cold hard pageviews--the editors of Deadspin put the question to a crowdfunding test:

Do you want to see Ryan Lochte's alleged penis? Rather than bidding on some hypothetical market value of the photograph, let's establish a real market value. Call it Cockstarter: Our offer price will be whatever you collectively pledge to the cause, plus a contribution from our own budget. Based on your pledges, we will make a final determination on the photo by next week.

We decided to reach out to ff Venture Capital partner and Indiegogo investor David Teten to gauge his opinion on this important story.

"The adult content industry is suffering because of a surplus of free content," Mr. Teten told Betabeat via gChat. "That implies the market value of this photo is near-zero; creating an equivalent photo in Photoshop would take 1 minute."

"That said, I think the management team at Fitocracy should support this Indiegogo project, and perhaps hire Ryan Lochte," he added.

Additional reporting provided by Nitasha Tiku.

(Photo: Indiegogo)

Though Indiegogo has largely been the go-to campaign site for non-artistic endeavors and bullied bus monitors, it turns out that there actually are some projects that the site will not allow. Forbes reports that a group of 20-somethings called Defense Distributed collaborated on a campaign called the Wiki Weapon Project to develop open source blueprints for a gun that can be made with a 3D printer.

According to the Indiegogo campaign, accessible now only through Google cache:

The WikiWep project is to produce a CAD file for distribution and sharing across the internet. This CAD file will be a schematic for a modest, 3D printable plastic firearm. In a world where 3D printing becomes more ubiquitous and economical, defense systems and opposition to tyranny may be but a click away... Let's pull the world toward this future together.

The property, in more glamorous days.

For decades, Nicola Tesla was the quintessential forgotten hero, largely neglected as everyone sung the praises of Thomas Edison. But we seem to have reached some sort of nostalgic tipping point, because suddenly the internet is falling all over itself to build a monument to the man.

Why? Betabeat talked to the instigator behind the movement, The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman, and he explained it pretty simply:  "I thought, It's a travesty. There should be a Tesla museum."

A longtime Tesla fanboy, Mr. Inman has previously expressed his devotion with a comic titled, "Why Nikola Tesla Was the Greatest Geek Who Ever Lived" (and could have been subtitled, "And Why Thomas Edison Was the Devil in Human Form"). Many of Tesla's newfound admirers, he says, were brought into the fold by that very comic, to the point that, "I sort of felt like I was this unofficial leader of Tesla fandom," he told Betabeat.

And so yesterday, he launched an Indiegogo campaign to help a small nonprofit scrape up the cash to buy one of Mr. Tesla's old laboratories, with the intention of eventually building a museum.

As of this very minute, the campaign has raised $443,955, more than halfway to its $850,000 goal. Would-be Martian Elon Musk--who, it must be noted, named his electric car startup after the inventor--has even pledged to make a donation. Fans' enthusiasm temporarily crashed the site earlier this afternoon.

The lab in question, grandly dubbed Wardenclyffe, is now a dilapidated property in Shoreham, N.Y. But once it was home to Mr. Tesla's perhaps most mad science-like experiment, his ill-fated attempt at free wireless energy transmission (something his investors weren't actually too keen on). The property was eventually sold to a photographic film manufacturer, and by the late 20th century, it was a Superfund site.

Asked about his decision to support the project, Mr. Inman cited both his hymn to Tesla and the runaway success of "Operation Bearlove Good, Cancer Bad," his revenge-inspired fundraiser for the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society.

"When I heard about this Wardenclyffe project, to save Nicola Tesla's old lab, I thought, I kind of had a practice round in with the Bearlove campaign, the one where I got sued, and combine that with my Tesla comics and all the stuff I have for Tesla on my site, I thought I'd be the perfect person to give this campaign a swift kick in the butt."

It was actually Reddit (naturally) that alerted him to the existence of the effort to buy the property. "I was getting some tweets, but I didn't know how realistic it was until there was a Reddit post sort of saying, hey, someone should get a hold of The Oatmeal, I know he's a Tesla fan, he might be able to help. That's what started it," he told Betabeat.

Between being based in Seattle and the fact the property is privately owned, he hasn't actually seen the site yet. Nor has he met the folks behind the Tesla Science Center. "We've been talking over phone and email for the last two weeks, but that's pretty much been the extent of it," he told Betabeat.

"This all came about really quickly, and we agreed to rush this whole idea because there's another offer on the table to buy the land, and so what I heard about this, it seemed like there was a sense of urgency," he added.

America's conspicuous lack of a museum devoted to Nikola Tesla seems to genuinely peeve Mr. Inman: "Tesla was Serbian, but he stated many times that he considered himself an American. He was a citizen. He felt American in his beliefs and a majority of his career was spent in New York City," he said.

He added, "Edison's got tons of museums and monuments, and I feel that Tesla's achievements were much more impressive and revolutionary than Edison's were." That's up for debate, but Mr. Inman's point is well taken.

The Indiegogo campaign is merely to purchase the property before someone else (like the developer said to be currently in the bidding) can. Turning the site into a fully functional science museum is probably "more of a six-to-seven-figure cost, like somewhere between $7 million and $10 million," but Mr. Inman does have a plan. He'd like to draw in a corporate sponsor like General Electric or J.P. Morgan, or perhaps a Tesla-loving tech entrepreneur, like Larry Page.

While the campaign hasn't even been up for a full day and it's already halfway to its fundraising goal, Mr. Inman would prefer not to count his chickens. "I noticed with my last campaign and Kickstarter that you'll have this huge surge right in the beginning, and then they'll just kind of die off. So I'm trying not to give this tone of 'mission accomplished' to anybody yet, because I feel like we're still getting there."

However, if they pull it off, he's excited to make the trip to the East Coast. "I will be the first person on the property, probably having a barbecue or camping," he said. Well, in that case, let's hope they did a good job of remediating all that cadmium contamination.