The Navigator: At Your Bidding By Linton Weeks Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, April 2, 1998

(From the eBay web site)

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you will. Silent auctions are everywhere nowadays. They are put on by opera guilds, churches, synagogues, spousal-abuse havens, elementary schools, scout programs -- you name it. These well-intentioned groups hawk donated honey-baked hams, Longaberger baskets, weekend getaways, Gold's Gym fitness plans, evenings for two, sports passes, eye-glasses, dark molasses -- you name it. The charity soirees fall somewhere between high-brow yard sales and low-brow Sotheby's.

The problem is: Silent auctions work. They bring in the benjamins. In the past few years, they have become a mainstay of moneymaking for nonprofit organizations. And railing against them, without offering an alternative, is like spitting at ocean waves.

Here then is a new option: the online auction.

Sterne School, for instance, hooked up with a company called NonProfitAuction that runs online bidding. Sterne School is a 21-year-old San Francisco institution for students with specific disabilities such as dyslexia. NonProfitAuction, ironically a for-profit venture, was created in May 1997, and is partially funded by The Washington Post Co.

Last week, Sterne School staged its five-day Web-based auction. Donations from supporters of the school were divided into 11 categories, including art, jewelry, software and travel. There was the usual detritus -- denim jackets, ugly lithographs, academic software. But there were also a few cool things -- a trip to Provence, a helicopter ride and a birthday party for a dozen kids at the California Academy of Sciences. People from all over the world bid on the merchandise. Total take should be nearly $13,000, after all the counting's done. Proceeds went to the school. And how much to NonProfitAuction? "It varies," says Chris Tsakalakis, 30, general manager of the Sausalito-based company. "We take somewhere below 20 percent." In the case of Sterne School, it was 18 percent.

While raising money for Sterne School, the site was also overseeing a larger-scale auction to benefit the Cassidy Endowment for Education, a nonprofit organization that provides financial support and information to college students. Items donated included a pair of Robinson helicopters worth more than $400,000 and a couple of airplanes worth more than $200,000. That auction should bring in about $250,000, says Tsakalakis.

Past auctions have raised bucks for other charities such as Oxfam America and Operation America.

Regular old, garden variety for-profit online auctions of all sorts are becoming a favorite pastime of the young and the wired. My friend Mandell, who works at America Online, checks a site called eBay several times a day.

He's established an account through which he can buy and sell anything, like the Casbah of Algiers, the bazestan of Constantinople. Through eBay, Mandell sells sports cards, old computer equipment and other "junk we have just lying around the house." Recently he fobbed off a box of 100 floppy disks on someone. Someone else, in turn, fobbed off an old fax machine to Mandell for $50. "It turned out to be a pretty nice machine," Mandell says.

Through the San Jose-based company, he's also unearthed hard-to-find things, such as Kinder eggs, the chocolate-encased toys from Europe, and the similar Nestle's Magics that were voluntarily recalled last year. And he's made like-minded friends through eBay.

But the real miracle is that a school can hit up a bunch of folks who are seated quietly at their computers. No fuss, no muss, no gallivanting around gawking at geehaws and whimmydiddles. That's my idea of a silent auction.

Linton Weeks can be reached at weeksl@washpost.com

Click: People love dirt, but amazingly enough, some people are more interested in the actual grit in the garden than the salacious stuff in the papers. You can sift through it all at the Museum of Dirt, an archive of truly exotic and dull earth samples sent in by a network of collectors among whom you definitely don't want to get stuck at a party. Among the searchable soil submissions are clumps of sod allegedly taken from the Everglades, Vanna White's back yard, and the White House itself. Linda Tripp, eat your heart out. Museum of Dirt —Dan Pacheco panchecod@futureforecast.com

Surfing: Perturbations, pleasures and predicaments on the I-way

Time to Visit the 'Big House'
The next time your Net-savvy child starts to act up, forget that tired old "time out." Instead,

(From the Kid's Fun Zone web site)

have them look up the price of mischief at the Tennessee Department of Corrections "Kid's Fun Zone."

Among the many merry pages, children can find answers to frequently asked questions such as: "What is done with dead prisoners?" Kids can catch a glimpse of prison life through the drawings of the fourth-graders at Smyrna Elementary. They depict prisoners toiling away on the chain gang, convicts alone in their cells, and a death row inmate smiling while strapped to a table.

If you believe that discipline ought to be educational, then have your tiny terror work on one of several puzzle pages. He can learn to search for, unscramble and spell "inmate," "visitation," "escape," "lawyer," "chains," "bunk," and "cell."

And don't forget to check out the trivia page where kids can test themselves:

"The person in charge of the institution is called . . . (A) the Big Cheese (B) the Enforcer (C) a Warden."
-- Brian Krebs

Wish You Were Here
Can't wait to get to the surf? Here's the next best thing: up-to-the-second photos of what's going on at Rehoboth Beach. Rehobothcam, on top of Thrasher's, continually pans across the boardwalk and Rehoboth Avenue (so you can check the beach traffic). Neighboring Beachcam also covers the ocean and beach. Once you're really into these Webcams, try http://www.dcn.com for a listing of these services around the world.
-- Edward F. Mickolus