Lambros is not alone in his distaste for Karyn. For all of Karyn's fans, she also has thousands of enemies; people who send her hate mail and lambaste her on Web sites; those who fought to get her removed from eBay, and who point to her as the poster child for all that is wrong with dot-com-era self-entitlement. Karyn says she doesn't let this anger bother her: "They are probably jealous they didn't think of it," she explains. "Seeing someone get success out of something that seems funny, like, 'I was the biggest screwup, and I'm getting success out of it?' That upsets people."

Jealousy may be a factor, but outrage fuels many, if not most, of her detractors. "What really burns us is how she got into debt: all these nice things," says Scott Dolce, proprietor of the anti-Karyn site SaveKarynnot.com. "I wish I could go blow a lot of money on stuff, but never in a million years would I ask other people to pay it off." Instead, his site points its visitors to charities that benefit a wider swath of the population -- the March of Dimes, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army.

Yet, it is the opaque nature of these larger charities that has motivated many donors to spend money on Karyn and Jennifer. The need to know the specific impact of charitable dollars became a huge issue after Sept. 11, when donors to the Red Cross felt swindled somehow when they couldn't find proof that their money was being given to 9/11 widows and not the average impoverished American. Donors to Karyn watch her debt diminish; donors to Jennifer feel connected to their victim of choice. Witness Karyn's boxes of communiqués from donors, full of intimate confessions from total strangers who clearly felt some kind of personal connection to her.

This is a particularly Webby form of giving; not merely because technology like PayPal and e-mail make it easy to find and give to the needy online, but because the Net has primed its regular users to be open to connecting with strangers. "I think there is a sense of community online that makes you more inclined to believe the best of people, and be willing to help someone out," said Lynette Webb, the London media planner who donated to Karyn. "The whole spirit of newsgroups is based on that. Also the file-sharing community." (It's also rather naive, considering how easily the whole thing could be a hoax; but few people seem to worry about this.)

At least one new charity has decided to capitalize on the strange dynamic of Net giving: Modest Needs, a nonprofit organization launched in May by Keith Taylor, a philanthropy-minded professor from Middle Tennessee State University, has collected some $83,000 via PayPal that Taylor, in turn, distributes to individuals who need help. If you need, say, $300 to help you through a one-time crunch or an emergency -- unexpected medical bills, car accidents, school book purchases -- Taylor will assess your request and dispense cash from the general fund; of the 9,395 requests he's received, he's been able to fund 294 of the most "legitimate." (Credit card debt, incidentally, does not qualify.)

"Modest Needs is not about some corporation, building some hospital," says Taylor. "All those things are good things, but when you look at requests that are actually funded, those are individuals whose lives were changed for a small amount of money. That's solidarity."

And instant gratification all around.

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It seems unlikely that the cult of giving that Karyn inspired is going to last long. The sites that sprung up in her wake are not bringing in nearly as much cash. And although Karyn plans to "pass the buck" once she pays off her debt -- handing her site off to another person who is trying to raise money -- the momentum is already dissipating, and donations have dropped dramatically in the last few weeks.

The Web, so quickly jaded, is already moving on. "It certainly is a new type of benevolence, but unfortunately for any imitators, things on the Web get old really fast," says Ralph Pickering. "But who knows? Maybe it'll become a new sort of addiction, like eBay is to many people. Or maybe we'll find homeless people handing out business cards with their PayPal account details."

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