Monday, March 31, 2008

And what do I hear for The Velvet Blog?

This is how it happens.

A guy starts a clever blog in January and calls it Stuff White People Like. The site contains a list of cultural totems, including gifted children, marathons and writers’ workshops, that a certain type of moneyed and liberal American might be expected to like.

“The No. 1 reason why white people like not having a TV,” reads the explanation under entry No. 28, Not Having a TV, “is so that they can tell you that they don’t have a TV.”

Readers discover stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com, like it and forward links to their friends, who forward them to lots more friends. Newspaper columnists mention it, stealing — er, quoting — some of the better jokes. By the end of February, the NPR program “Talk of the Nation” runs a report on it, debating whether the site is racist or satire.

And then on March 20 Random House announces that it has purchased the rights to a book by the blog’s founder, Christian Lander, an Internet copy writer. The price, according to a source familiar with the deal but not authorized to discuss the total, was about $300,000, a sum that many in the publishing and blogging communities believe is an astronomical amount for a book spawned from a blog, written by a previously unpublished author.
--The New York Times

A hundred bucks? Fifty? A cup of coffee? A shiny Susan B. Anthony dollar?

6 comments:

CG said...

how about gratitude?
mmmmmmmm, tasty, lucrative gratitude.

Anonymous said...

i had a couple of those gold looking dollars and i really like those things and if george bush would just tear up all the dollar bills that are useless anyway then people would start using the gold looking coin dollars and i would send you one of the ones that i have but i lost them

Anonymous said...

I've got some gummy bears. There's a little lint on them from my pocket.

sgreerpitt said...

there's one Hershey's kiss left on my desk -- oops no, it's gone. Sorry.

Dave said...

I'd contribute; but, I went to Biloxi over the weekend and had too much fun.

I'm willing to contribute stories of what one should not do in the way of spending money so as to be able to support a quality blog.

fermicat said...

Some pocket lint and a dime?