Like a virtual gold rush, millions of people wade into the Internet stream every day to try their luck at the electronic equivalent of panning for gold. Some of them put a video on YouTube. Many start a blog.

Most will not find riches or fame. But every once in a while, digital lightning does strike someone. This time, it's Christian Lander.

If you regularly receive check-this-out links from friends or co-workers, then chances are you know about his blog, "Stuff White People Like," which has just arrived in book form. It's an open-ended list of, as the title says, the stuff white people like.

Stuff here refers to anything from "Coffee" to "Adopting Foreign Children" to "Public Transportation That Is Not a Bus." Each entry is its own little essay, noting the item and discussing the how and why of white people's affection for it.

It would be a much more pleasant, or at least, less fractious world if it wasn't necessary to explain that Lander's blog is intended to be humorous, satirical even, poking fun in particular at white people who are liberal, educated and smug. But judging from the number of angry and offended responses the site has incited, it is necessary.

So, "Stuff White People Like" is supposed to be funny. And it is. Here, for example, is advice on wine:

"When a white person offers you wine, you take a small sip and then say 'ooh, that's nice. What country is it from?' Then they will say the name of the country and you say 'I love wines from that country, I would love to get a villa in the wine region there.' White people will nod in agreement as they all want to have a second home in a wine region like Napa, Tuscany or Santa Barbara."

The site is also popular. Calling it an overnight success may, technically, be an overstatement, but not by much.

Consider this: On Jan. 18, Lander was instant-messaging a friend about the HBO series, "The Wire". His friend said that more white people should watch it. This led to an exchange about the things white people do. The series of messages struck Lander as funny enough that he created a blog to list them.

"At first, I was just thinking this was something that was going to be for me and a few of my friends. I didn't really think much of it," Lander, 29, says by phone from his Los Angeles home.

This went on for a little while. When he got to 20 entries, he decided it was funny enough that he went ahead and sent a link for it to all of his friends. Still, in the worldwide scheme of things, all of his friends weren't that many people - "around 50."

"At first, we were getting like 30 hits a day. But then one day, we got 500. And then a few days later, we got 1,000. The day it blew up was the day we got 30,000 hits. That's when I knew something crazy was going on."

But it didn't stop there. The hits kept climbing, topping out around 800,000, as all his friends told all their friends who told all their friends and on and on. Viral marketing in action.

The success spawned imitators, such as "Stuff Asian People Like" and "Stuff Educated Black People Like." And now, less than six months after those instant messages were pinging back and forth, "Stuff White People Like" has been released as a paperback by Random House. And Lander, a Ph.D. dropout and an associate manager of corporate communications (currently on leave), is now a published author on a book tour.

"It's all happened so fast, so insanely fast that none of it feels real," he says. "It's all just so wild and completely unexpected."

Sure, sure, sure, but now that he's been struck by lightning, people are going to want to know: How did you do it? What's your secret? What secret strategy did you figure out and how can I copy it?

Brace yourself for the inevitable answer.

"I don't know. If some giant corporation like IBM or Coca-Cola gave me $3 million and said, 'Now do that for one of our Web sites,' I couldn't."

But, but, but, don't you have any insights, any kernels of wisdom born of experience that you can share with all those still waiting and hoping?

"I think one of the reasons the site took off is because it was genuine. It really was me writing about stuff I think is funny. I think that's important.

"People on the Internet are pretty smart and sophisticated about what people put out there. I think if someone puts out something that is intended to create a sensation, that's all 'look at me, look at what I can do,' they see right through that, and it's a real turn-off."

As it turns out, trying to be rich and famous is like trying to be cool. If people can tell you are trying, then you're not.