Some of you may be interested in this:
http://www.stickk.com/
Basically you put money up - and if you don't meet your goals, you set it up so that a friend, charity or anti-charity gets the money instead! (By anti-charity - the idea is that your money will go to an organization that you think is awful, thus adding motivation to meet your goals - for instance if you strongly support gay marriage you might set it up so that your money goes to an anti-gay marriage group - giving you further motivation to meet your goals).
My friends who do Applied Behavioral Analysis shared the site with me. There is definitely a lot of research suggesting that this kind of motivation can actually be quite useful in changing behavior.