With Google releasing 100,000 invites to test the beta version of the much-hyped Wave, one enterprising blogger decided to capitalize on all the buzz surrounding the new messaging and collaboration tool by selling his invite on eBay.

Hagan Blount, a 30-year-old food blogger based in Baltimore, had been listening to the chatter about Wave and hatched the idea to auction his invite on eBay. "I figured there's a whole lot of buzz. I wonder how many hits this would get?" he said.

Of course, Mr. Blount hadn't yet received his invite, but he said that a software developer friend of his who did not wish to be identified had promised to procure one for him. Mr. Blount commenced the auction on Tuesday night, and by the time he had woken up at 6 a.m. Wednesday, the day that Google would be releasing Wave invites, his auction had already received 12,000 hits.

As the day wore on, he received about 33 bids for the Google Wave invite, with the winning bid reaching $157. One eBay user tried to set up two accounts and entered a bid for $5,000, which Mr. Blount quickly deleted. Dozens of questions piled up in his eBay account inbox, asking him if the Wave invite was real, and if so, whether it could be purchased on the spot. One man from Sweden offered $700 to buy it outright, and another who identified himself as "a businessman" said he would pony up $27,000 if the invite was authentic.

However, Mr. Blount said he received an automated message from eBay, saying that he was violating the site's terms of service by trying to sell an item without owning the copyright. "I'm sure somebody flagged it for a terms-of-use violation because they didn't think of the idea," he said. "This was more of an experiment, to see what it was going to become, rather than trying to sell the thing."