The wonderful

One Red Paperclip

At 26, salesman Kyle McDonald dreamed of owning a house. The problem was, he didn't want to pay for it.

So McDonald came up with a plan to trade his way to the dream. Starting with an ordinary red paperclip, he started a thread on online community classifieds, craigslist.org, offering to trade for anything of value.

The paperclip became a pen, pen became doorknob, doorknob became camp stove, camp stove became beer keg and so on, until McDonald found himself in front of a two-storey farmhouse in the Canadian town of Kipling Saskatchewan in July 2006 - just less than a year from when he made his first red paperclip posting on craigslist.

McDonald recorded his trades in a blog that, at its peak, received about one million unique visitors in a single day. His story appeared on CNN, ABC News, CBC Newsworld, and the BBC, the publicity eventually resulting in high-profile trades of surprising value - like an afternoon with rock star Alice Cooper.

"I heard somewhere that one red paperclip had given the town of Kipling Saskatchewan a freelance marketing push worth over 500 billion dollars," McDonald told PC World. "Yes, that's billion. The current population of Kipling is 1142 people, but town planners are expecting considerably more people to move to town this year as a result of all the because of all the publicity."

Quest completed, McDonald seems happy to be relinquishing his online fame to the town, and enjoying the "old fashioned serenity" of Kipling Sasketchewan.

"At the moment, [I'm] sitting in my parent's kitchen eating trail mix and looking at a banana. My brother is on the couch. He's wearing glasses. My life is wild right now with all this fame going on," he jokes.

"Trust me, the high life is nuts."