Clothe Stowe: The Bidding Frenzy Heats Up

The auction for the Clothe Stowe project opens at 12:00pm PT, here. It’s a dutch auction at eBay which I described here.

I have made a few small modifications, based on various recommendations:

  • I was thinking greedy, but I have dropped the starting bid to $1 per day. Who knows where it will end up.

  • It’s a ten day auction.

  • I pulled back a few days so I can were something else for weddings, thanksgiving, whatever. So there are only 222 days available, although the period is still May-Dec 2006. But I will only use those off days for weekends or personal stuff, not business or conferences. I tried to pull a few days out, and I changed the text to say so, but I forgot to actually decrease the quantity, so 240 days are still up for grabs!

  • Since I can’t control the number of days people are going to bid for I decided to drop the limitation, altogether. Some company wants to bid on 40 days, or 100 days, or all 222 240, go for it.

Memewatch: Valleyschwag

Since I announced auctioning off 240 days of T shirt wear (see this and that), I have been relentlessly needled by my entire social network. Mostly people think I’m whacked. David Hornik mentioned the Valleyschwag deal, where you can get schwag sent to you monthly for $14.95, without having to actually go to conferences or sleep on the moldy rug at a Bar Camp in Delhi to get the T shirt.

Also, at the Valleyschwag blog I learned that schwag has additional meanings in American street culture:

[from What the urban dictionary says]

Perhaps I’m naive, but I didn’t know that schwag means “…low grade marijuana. This type of marijuana is usually brown, seedy, dry.” My favorite is the usage:

adj- Ewww this schwag ass weed tastes horrible and it didnt get me very high. noun- I hate smoking schwag, but i cant get any dank right now so i guess i’ll have to.

According to the Urban Dictionary, schwag is also “A rock & roll band based in St. Louis, Missouri,” “a fat homely chick,” “an amazing band in London, ON,” “slang for penis,” “of reject status,” “cool or awesome cool and sweet skittles with sprinkles on top!,” and “Give away promo items procured through working an event. Often used in the stagehand world when working corporate or industrial gigs.”

I don’t think that paying the $14.95 will get you any of that kind of schwag.

Blogging is a Body Business :-)

A friend commented last week, while I was traipsing around the Bay Area, that I seemed to have a penchant for white T shirts with software company logos. And it’s true that I like them. It’s almost a uniform for me: blue jeans, white T shirt, my grey fleece sweater, cap on backwards (it’s not a beret), and various sorts of footware.

So, I had a brainstorm — partly because I don’t really have enough T shirts to actually wear them all the time, but also because it seems like a fun thing to do: I am going to invite Web 2.0 app developers to dress me for the year.

I promise to wear no shirts except logo’ed T shirts for May-Dec 2006, under the following conditions:

  1. Participating companies have to provide me at least the number of T shirts necessary for the agreement. If you want me to wear the shirts one day, one shirt is enough, but otherwise, its the number of days divided by two: 10 days, five shirts. Then I don’t have issues with cleaning when traveling.
  2. There are 8 months involved, so let’s round it off and call it 8 months * 30 days = 240 days.
  3. I don’t want to wear the same logo for 240 days, so the maximum days I will lease to a single vendor is 20 days.
  4. I promise to randomize, so that every vendor will have an equal chance at the big days — like walking around at Web 2.0, CTC 2006, DC 2.0, or OnHollywood — as well as an equal chance I will be sitting at my desk, writing all day.
  5. I will also create a side blog here at /Message, where I will post the weekly schedule of T shirts.
  6. A bonus: the highest bidder will get an additional prize. I will replace the picture of me over there in the right column with a new picture, wearing that company’s T shirt, starting on May Day.

So, email me at stowe DOT boyd AT gmail DOT com if you want to play. I will be setting this up as an auction at eBay in the next day or so, once the word trickles out.