On cross-genre and cross-object collaborations: At the curated level, you could give two writers objects and ask them to come up with a central “relationship” or core shared history for the two objects, and then each writes a piece from the vantage point of their object. Or you could pair a writer and artist/illustrator to work on a story together.

In terms of broadening participation, one idea would be to have a forum space, or a secondary site that functions more like a blog, where many stories could exist for each object … there would be some minimal editorial oversight, but not necessarily selection. And these stories wouldn’t come to bear on the Ebay profile of the objects, but would rather give people an opportunity to imagine, create and participate in the project, while you’re still maintaining the curatorial style on the main site and in Ebay.

Here are a couple ideas for features or contests or different ways to invite an audience to plug in…

“Garage Sale” – post an image of many objects and readers choose two or three, and create a story that ties in the duo/trio. This could be a contest, or just an occasional feature on the forum/blog.

“Road trip” – you could give point of origin and invite people to write a journey that takes the object somewhere.

“Haiku for Tchochkes” – cousin to the 6-word memoir contest

“Icebreaker” – like that old summer camp game where you tell a story collaboratively – one person says a sentence, the next person says what comes next, etc – you could have a regularly scheduled ice-breaker post where maybe one of the authors from the curated site writes a first sentence, and then people take over in the comments section from there, building a narrative collaboratively, line by line. Something like this could be a total disaster, or it could be kind of cool.

“The Object Formerly Know As …” – you could invite winning bidders to send follow-up stories for their objects, either an epilogue or next chapter of the story written for the project, or their own story about how the object fits into their life, or the meaning it has for them, or something

Etc etc … just a few thoughts.