The 2012 election cycle is proving a big one for Google NetPAC, the company’s political action committee.

According to a year-end report filed with the Federal Election Commission, Google NetPAC raised $836,305 between July 1, 2011 and Dec. 31, 2011 — the first half of the 2012 election cycle. And so far it has donated $221,250 of it.

That’s more than a 50 percent increase over what Google NetPAC spent at the same point in the 2010 election cycle. Which is significant. Keep in mind, we’re a little over halfway through the current cycle, and the committee still has some $740,960 cash on hand to spend.

Among the donations made: $5,000 to Rep. Lamar Smith, the Texas congressman who concocted the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that Google so vehemently opposes.

An odd disbursement, considering that Google NetPAC’s stated goal is to “support federal officeholders and candidates who share Google’s goal of promoting the Internet as a free and open platform for communication and innovation, to the benefit of our users.”

Hopefully the committee’s contributions to SOPA opponents canceled it out.

Feature image credit: iStockphoto | penfold

The Web site — which publishes leaked, sensitive documents — said it is temporarily suspending all publishing operations so that it can devote its resources to battling Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc., eBay Inc.’s PayPal, Bank of America Corp. and other companies that have prohibited payments to the site since last December.

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The commercials, featuring Cuba Gooding Jr., Elizabeth Hurley and Timothy Hutton, are being compared to Kenneth Cole’s now infamous tweet, which used the Cairo hashtag to publicize its spring shoe collection.

It was Groupon’s commercial featuring Hutton that by far drew the most criticism. UPDATE: The company will shortly announce that it is pulling this ad in particular.

In the 30-second clip, Hutton says that while Tibetan culture is in jeopardy, “they still whip up an amazing fish curry, and since 200 of us bought at Groupon.com, we’re each getting $30 worth of Tibetan food for just $15…in Chicago.”

From what we’ve heard, the Chicago-based company doesn’t believe the commercials were misguided, but rather that it made a mistake by not directing folks to a Web site, where it was raising money for certain causes and matching up to $100,000 in donations. The site, SaveTheMoney.org, should have been mentioned in the commerciasl instead of expecting consumers to make the jump on their own from groupon.com to a link on the side of the page.

UPDATE 2: In a blog post today, CEO Andrew Mason tried to address the feedback. “We would never have run these ads if we thought they trivialized the causes–even if we didn’t take them as seriously as we do, what type of company would go out of their way to be so antagonistic?”

In a blog post written yesterday, Mason wrote that there’s also a connection between the commercials and the company’s roots.

Groupon was born out of the Point, a Web site that helps organize people to raise money or bring people together for a particular cause. Humor is also second nature, since its daily offers are often lighthearted and written by aspiring comedians.

However, this time, the humor of the commercials, which were directed by mockumentary expert Christopher Guest, was clearly lost.

In the other two ads, Cuba Gooding Jr. saves half on a whale-watching expedition, and Elizabeth Hurley compares deforestation in the Brazilian rain forest to a bikini wax. “Not all deforestation is bad,” she says.

A vast majority of comments on Facebook and Twitter called the ads “classless,” “disappointing” and “disgusting,” and accused Groupon of finding ”cultural genocide hilarious.” Many asked for an apology and are calling people to action by encouraging them to saying no to Groupon and yes to its competitor LivingSocial.

Finding a positive comment on Groupon’s Facebook page is rare. Although it shows that 123 people “like” the commercial, there are 137 comments, mostly negative.

Whether any damage has been done, it’s hard to say–much less quantify. Is Groupon worth less than it was the two days ago (or, heaven forbid, a couple of months ago, when Google was willing to pay $6 billion for the two-year-old company)?

Any publicity is good publicity, right?

Groupon’s Super Bowl ad, which cost $3 million alone to run and even more to produce, has continued to be viewed far after the game, getting passed along on Twitter and Facebook.

That makes it successful from at least one standpoint.

It’s also questionable as to how much of an audience it’s reaching–good or bad. Arguably, it’s still small. According to YouTube, it’s not one of the most-watched Super Bowl ads. Even the Tibetan commercial has only 41,451 views on YouTube, compared with Volkswagen’s promo, which featured a pint-size Darth Vader and received more than 16 million views.

LivingSocial, which had an ad right before kickoff, seems to be registering even less with users. In fact, its Twitter feed is more likely to mention Groupon’s commercial than its own.

However, Groupon is also not the only one using a bit of off-humor. LivingSocial’s tagline was: “LivingSocial changed my life. It could change yours, too.”

In the beginning, it features a bearded, gruff-looking man who says his addiction to getting 50 to 70 percent off started a year ago. At the end, he’s a cross-dresser wearing a red sequined dress with red pumps.

The release of funds follows a number of denial-of-service attacks earlier this week that were aimed at the document-leaking site’s providers. Most of the providers are now refusing to work with WikiLeaks after the U.S. government accused it of being in possession of documents that were provided in violation of U.S. law.

Yesterday, WikiLeak’s founder Julian Assange was arrested and denied bail in London. He’s accused of sexual misconduct in Sweden.

While PayPal is releasing the residual funds to WikiLeaks, it is not reinstating the ability for it to receive donations.

PayPal was caught up in a brief media storm this morning, after PayPal’s VP of Platform Osama Bedier gave the impression at LeWeb in Paris that PayPal had cut off access to WikiLeaks because of direct pressure by the U.S. government.

PayPal now wants to set the record straight, and says that it reviewed its policies regarding WikiLeaks after the U.S. Department of State publicized a letter stating that WikiLeaks may be in possession of documents that were provided in violation of U.S. law. The letter was published, and not sent to PayPal directly.

“PayPal was not contacted by any government organization in the U.S. or abroad. We restricted the account based on our Acceptable Use Policy review,” writes PayPal’s General Counsel John Muller. “Ultimately, our difficult decision was based on a belief that the WikiLeaks website was encouraging sources to release classified material, which is likely a violation of law by the source.”

Further, the company disclosed that twice before–in 2008 and 2009–PayPal reviewed and restricted the account associated with WikiLeaks “for reasons unrelated to our Acceptable Use Policy. As soon as proper information was received from the account holder, the restrictions were lifted.”

PayPal has been one of many providers that have been the victim of computer attacks, where servers were inundated with traffic. A spokesperson told us that it mostly affected the company’s blog site, and did not directly affect its payments services.

Other affected companies include MasterCard and Swiss bank PostFinance, The Wall Street Journal reports. No one is yet claiming responsibility for the attacks, but some say they are being organized by the ad hoc “Operation Payback.”

WikiLeaks portrayed PayPal as bowing to government pressure. Another company, DataCell, which describes itself as under Swiss and Icelandic control, says it is accepting donations on behalf of WikiLeaks. And the organization says there are other options for supporting the organization financially.

Like Amazon and EveryDNS before it, PayPal said that WikiLeaks had violated its Acceptable Use policy, which says the service “cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.”

In response to Amazon’s move, Daniel Ellsberg, the man known for leaking the Pentagon Papers and whose story has recently been retold in a 2009 documentary film “The Most Dangerous Man In America,” has called for a boycott of Amazon, saying he wants “no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China’s control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.” He further asks Amazon insiders who may have documentation of what political pressures were brought to bear to send what files they have to WikiLeaks.

Amazon maintains its decision was motivated by nothing more than a Terms of Service issue, and it’s “inaccurate” to consider its move a response to a government inquiry.

But even though you can use these services without leaving home, many of them still require you to go to a specific Web site — one you wouldn’t necessarily visit regularly. Sites like Gazelle.com and Venjuvo.com that pay cash for old electronics (or just recycle them) aren’t exactly online destinations.

Now one of those ways to unload your stuff involves a Web site you might visit many times a day. A site that has considerable sway in the social-networking world, where over 175 million active users go to share personal stories, photos and videos with hundreds of “friends.”

That’s right, I’m talking about Facebook. Tuesday, the social-networking giant announced its new Facebook Marketplace, Facebook.com/Marketplace, an integrated application powered by Oodle, known for its work with online classified ads. Marketplace uses colorful icons to represent four actions you can take in its app: Sell It; Sell for a Cause; Give it Away; and Ask for It.

Facebook Marketplace users can pick from 12 categories of listings, as well as buy or sell items for a favorite cause.

Oodle granted me early access to the Marketplace app before it became available Tuesday. A friend of mine and I were both set up with test accounts so that we could see one another’s fake Marketplace items and interact with one another within Marketplace; hundreds of Oodle employees also were testing this. (It was fun to see what people offer for sale when they’re just pretending, like one person who offered to sell everything on a colleague’s desk when he was out.)

Facebook’s original iteration of Marketplace started back in 2007, but was geared toward services like housing and jobs. The Oodle-powered Marketplace is merchandise-centric and includes more detailed organization, deeper integration with Facebook, and ways to buy or sell things to raise money for 1.7 million causes.

It still lacks a built-in electronic payment system, such as PayPal or Discover card, for exchanges between users or donations to causes. Instead, Marketplace encourages its users to exchange money however they choose, like traditional classified ads. And that could cause some obvious problems. For instance, if an item were sold for a cause, the seller could later donate the amount via credit card after closing a listing. But there’s no guarantee that the seller will actually do this. Oodle says it will listen to feedback from the Facebook audience and will try to integrate e-payments, if preferred.

Every posted item can include a location, description, category, photo and an explanation of why it’s in the Marketplace. Each item is reviewed by Oodle’s fraud-detection program, which looks for inappropriate content and suspicious activity, and a post could take up to 30 minutes to appear online after you submit it. My posts displayed almost instantly in the Marketplace newsfeed. Users also can opt to publish their posts to their Facebook profiles.

One example of Marketplace’s newly detailed organization comes in its browsing options. The old version of Marketplace had options to browse through jobs and housing, but not specific categories of items for sale. Now, users can browse through 12 categories of specific items including “Home & Garden,” “Baby & Kid Stuff,” “Tickets” and “Musical Instruments.” Items that don’t fit into these 12 categories are put into an “Everything Else” category.

Each item in Marketplace integrates with Facebook’s familiar format, like having its own online “wall” where questions and comments appear. If you’re looking for something in Marketplace by using the “Ask for It” option, you can recruit people to help you find the item by selecting from your list of friends, which works the same way people can suggest Facebook people to friends who might know them. Glancing at an item shows the seller’s profile photo, a link to all of the person’s listings and a brief history of his or her overall Marketplace activity, such as “3 listings in the last month.”

The integration of charitable causes into Marketplace gives supporters new ways to raise money for a favorite group like the World Wildlife Fund or Habitat for Humanity International. On the Marketplace home page, causes are displayed in a right-hand panel with a daily featured cause. This Featured Cause shows who else supports it and how many items you can buy or sell to support it.

Privacy is a natural concern in online marketplaces. By default, your posted listings are visible to any Facebook member in Marketplace. Users can opt to remain anonymous — they’re listed as “Facebook user is selling a bike,” for example. In that case, the only way someone can contact that person is by posting a comment and waiting for the seller to respond.

People who aren’t members of Facebook can see your listings by browsing and searching Marketplace, but they can’t post, comment or contact users. Unlike online marketplaces or services that can be used by anyone, Marketplace requires that users be members of the site to interact with sellers, which can be a downside. Plenty of people who aren’t on Facebook might not want to join the social-networking phenomenon just to offload the old couch gathering dust in the garage.

All user notifications — messages indicated in red at the bottom right of a Facebook page — will reflect friends’ activities in the Marketplace, unless you reset the notifications of the Facebook Marketplace app to not notify you. I suggest doing this, unless you really want to know about all your friends’ activities in Marketplace.

Four color-coded icons represent activities in Marketplace and are useful when reading lists of items at a glance: A green dollar sign represents Sell It and a red heart represents Sell for a Cause, for example. And details about each cause are integrated within Marketplace.

The Oodle-powered Facebook Marketplace is straightforward and well organized, and if you’re a Facebook user, its format will be familiar. If you’re not, and you’re looking for a way to sell or give items away for a charity or otherwise, Marketplace might encourage you to join the giant social network. But its payment program could be made a lot easier with electronic options.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com