So why, I kept wondering, does anybody participate? Who would give money for so little in return?

Now, when you’re a tech columnist, you get e-mail pitches every day from P.R. people hoping you’ll write about their clients’ products. But in the last few months, I’ve started getting something really strange: pitch letters about products on Kickstarter. Products that aren’t even products, just concepts. Weirder yet, these pitches aren’t coming from the creators of those products. They’re coming from ordinary citizens.

I started reading about their projects. The one that seemed to be drumming up the most interest lately is called the Elevation Dock. It’s just a charging stand for the iPhone, but wow, what a stand. It’s exquisitely milled from solid, Applesque aluminum. You don’t have to take your iPhone (or iPod Touch) out of its case to insert it into this dock. And the dock is solid enough that you can yank the phone out of it with one hand. The dock stays on the desk.

The engineer behind this dock, Casey Hopkins, needed to raise $75,000 to make his dock a real product. But his pitch was so popular, it met that goal in only eight hours. “In 24 hours, it was at $168,000,” Mr. Hopkins told me by e-mail. “It was shocking. I couldn’t eat and I didn’t sleep for about three days. The euphoria lasted about a week; then it was nose to the grindstone to start getting all the manufacturing and a million other things in place.”

Today, with 16 days left to his deadline, he’s raised $700,000. That’s a Kickstarter success story, all right.

So is the TikTok Watchband, which turns an iPod Nano into a touch-screen watch/computer on your wrist. Its goal: $15,000. Its final take: $942,578. It’s now a real product and it’s for sale in the Apple Store.

The creators of the PID-Controlled Espresso Machine, a new design that brings the consistency of expensive espresso machines to a low-cost machine, sought $20,000 — and raised $369,569 by its deadline last week. The Cosmonaut wide-grip stylus for tablets blew past its target back in April; the video points out that for a low-resolution surface where you can’t rest your hand, a fat stylus makes more sense than a pencil-like one.

Still, these are risky ventures. Many of the projects are offered by first-timers who have no idea how complicated it is to bring a product to market. In these tough economic times, why would average people give money to such iffy entrepreneurs, knowing that all they will get is a T-shirt?