I personally feel that meetup groups and forums like this one and the facebook group should operate their own personal counters. On the facebook group, which uses
www.students4paul.com, we can easily see who has donated, and we frequently have rallies, trying to drive up our student contributions.
Threads on the facebook forums frequently say things like "I'll donate $100 if 4 other people pledge to donate $100 as well" and they are answered, *quickly*.
The fact that you can see every donation and read every name is in no small part to thank for the $26,000+ that they have raised so far. Perhaps what we could do is start up a web project where we allow for each meetup group or forum to start their own counter, and then on the front page display the total for all the groups. I'll run that idea by the guy who started Students4Paul and see if he's interested.
My principal theory is that the more personal donation meters will allow for easier rallies and in turn, more donations. By contrast, Obama's less personal counter seems to say "Wow, there's a lot of support, I think I've given enough. He's doing fine."