Full disclosure: I own a 13-year-old company that has used PayPal since 2001 and use them thousands of times per month. My company has never had a beef with PayPal, but I feel acutely for those who have been wronged. PayPal is not technically a monopoly but they’re the most trusted name in online payment. Lose your account with them and you may well lose your online business. Me personally? I love PayPal and have literally never had a problem with them in something close to a million transactions.

But back to the slap. What should PayPal do when their fraud heuristics give the ol’ Spidey sense a tingle? Remember, thousands of PayPal accounts get opened every day, many of them bad guys working under new names.

Let’s try a thought experiment and imagine how you’d handle certain situations if you were PayPal. What if someone opened up a new account,  published a PDF file (or “digital information product”) that cost $39.95, sold a ton of them, then withdrew all the money as it came in and refused to honor refund requests. Not nearly as strange as it seems. This sort of thing happens all the time with people like Seth Godin who have big lists of followers. So imagine a Seth Godin type who publishes his first book and sells a jillion.

Change the circumstances a little. What if the product turned out to be plagiarized or just atrocious and didn’t follow through on any of the promises made in its sales copy?

What if you were PayPal and that happened again? And again and again and again? What if you consistently ended up on the hook to the credit card companies because you allowed this kind of fraud to continue?

You’d probably start at least making users wait a while before they withdrew money. Now what if that didn’t stop the fraud? What if you found that the only way to stop a good chunk of fraud was to lose business deliberately by employing the brute force technique of freezing or closing out the accounts of anyone who had the same profile as a ripoff artist?

Yes, you’d be throwing away business. But you’re PayPal, and you answer to Wall Street. At some point it becomes more prudent to be aggressive about “precrime” so you don’t lose your existing customers.

If I were publicly held like PayPal (more precisely, like its parent company eBay) , I’d probably slap those businesses too. It is the only way I could think of to manage fraud on a large scale without plunging an otherwise healthy PayPal into vats of red ink.

This is not to say PayPal doesn’t just do idiotic things, like deep-sixing a clearly legitimate charity drive by the good people at Regretsy, who had a longstanding relationship.

I had the exact idea of PayPal before there was a PayPal. I didn’t follow through because I could never figure out a satisfactory way to deal with fraud in a way that would be fair to the good guys. It looks like they never did either. I hate to say it, new guys, but if I were PayPal I’d slap you too.

Or is there another way to handle this seemingly impossible situation? Give me a shout if you think you have the answer.

There’ a new option in the Google Template Gallery called Press release template, Google Docs version. Use it as a starting point for your press release because, unlike other templates in the gallery, it uses heading tags properly for maximum SEO juice. It also looks good in print thanks to judicious use of formatting. Here’s how to find it.

• From the Google Docs File menu, click the Create New button, then choose From template…
• Search for the template called Press release template, Google Docs version (preview found at https://docs.google.com/previewtemplate?id=0ARw-SgzIBldIZGR4OGM3ZHhfNTQxOTkzcjJxZmI&mode=public )
• Replace the contact information, headlines, and article text with your own matieral.
• Click the logo, then Change Image to replace the logo with your own (or simply click Remove Image for a minimalistic look).

Google Docs aren’t just word processor documents. They can be published in a variety of ways with incredible ease. Generating a PDF for publication to document sharing sites such as Scribd, Slideshare, and Docstoc, is this simple:

Creating a PDF File of Your Press Release

• From the Google File menu, choose Download as, then PDF.
• Give the output file a keyword-rich name (I’m not sure it matters, but why leave these things to chance?) and save it to your local machine.

You can do the same thing to create an HTML file.

• Publish this PDF file to document sharing sites like Scribd, docstoc, and SlideShare.
• Add the PDF file to the Media section of your site.

Publishing Your Press Release on Google

You can publish your press release on Google in just a few mouse clicks.

• While editing or viewing your press on Google Docs page click the Share button, then choose Publish to the Web…
• You probably want any changes to the document propagated to the Web instantly, so leave Automatically republish when changes are made checked.
• Click the Start publishing button.
• A warning asks Are you sure you want to publish this document? Kind of them. Remove any drunken or naked pictures of yourself from the press release, then click OK.
• The document is published and you’re given its Web address, which will look something like http://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1OQiATcRIAFrn01S7GrJj19IiQoLT-dLAWXcuvBQ-34M, thus making it somewhat hard to memorize. But that’s okay-it’s indexed on Google!

It’s that easy. Legacy media can still print the PDF format of your press release. Now bookmark it on sites like Onlywire. Visit EasyOnMe.com/google-docs for additional templates as they become available.

When I typed "I want to buy" into Google, it offered me choices like Monkey, Live Ostrich, and Island

If you think you know what people want to buy online, you’re probably wrong. Here’s what happened when I typed “I want to buy” into Google.

Here’s an example of a presentation I just created using 280Slides:

280Slides is different all the rest because despite its beta status, it is the first in-browser app that feels every bit as slick as a desktop app from one of the big guys. It doesn’t have PowerPoint’s massive, industrial-strength feature set. What it does include, however, is what most of us need 95% of the time we make presentations, plus a few extras. My favorite features are:

• Unbeatably simple integration with SlideShare.net, allowing you to publish your presentation to a high-ranked site in seconds
• Awesome text editing
• Ability to insert pictures and videos into a presentation
• Even has Speaker’s notes
• Supports the Google Chrome browser
• Saves to PowerPoint, PDF, and OpenDocument (the one thing that didn’t seem to work in the beta)

This is the most mature early beta of a product I have ever encountered. They hit the sweet spot between size of feature set and ease of learning. Only Apple manages to do the same thing the first time out, and only in their iPhone and desktop apps, certainly now browser apps.

Browser apps can’t save files to your computer. It’s a security risk. 280Slides gets around this problem by silently saving files to its own server. I don’t know what the maximum you can store is, but my PowerPoint decks are usually pretty small. Its publish to SlideShare.net feature has the simples signup process ever. It’s the same dialog as used to log in, so if you don’t have an account it just asks you for the password a second time (the confirmation step) and creates the account on the fly.

Though many would prefer this not to be case, most slide decks are just bullet points. In an upcoming post I will defend this widely reviled convention, but for the moment let’s just accept reality. This means if you’re going to create slides, editing the text on them should feel comfortable to users of desktop apps. If you’re not a programmer, you may not appreciate how big a challenge that is. Browser apps have to be small, because they load every time you visit the web page. WYSIWIG text handling is very hard to get right under any circumstance, but doing it well in a browser has thus far eluded every major developer I know of. I didn’t blame them.

Another area where web apps understandably lag is Undo. It’s not as nasty to implement as text editing, but it’s not pretty, either. 280Slides

In my view 280Slides is the first browser app to get so close to the supremely elegant handling of text boxes characterized by PowerPoint and Pages that you don’t miss the desktop apps. Creating a good presentation is hard and you don’t want to feel like you’re fighting the software just to jot down a few bullet points. 280Slides make it a dream.

I haven’t been this excited about a web app since Google Docs hit the scene. I can’t wait for 280Slides to finish the few features it hasn’t baked in yet, so I can try creating PDF and PowerPoint presentations. Highly recommended.