Buddy, can you spare some Paypal change...?

With a PayPal account and a Web site, PimpThisBum.com is proving that the homeless would be more successful panhandling if they could accept credit cards instead of just cash.

With a reported $50,000 in pledges and donations, a homeless man named Timothy Dale Edwards in Houston is a kind of public experiment in how the Internet can raise more money for the homeless than a team of panhandlers at a busy intersection. All because of having to use a credit card instead of small change. A similar theory was proven in a 2000 study in the Netherlands, which showed that people were more likely to pay more for something while using a credit card than they would with cash.

However you look at it, the idea of giving a homeless man a Web site to raise money, as a Houston father and son did, is a clever way to help. Here's a Fox news story from its Houston affiliate: