If I were to tell you about a stock that has jumped 500 percent in share price in the last two weeks, you'd take it as good news, right? How about if I told you that this is a dot com stock, and unlike most of the other companies on the Internet right now, it's just gotten two and half million dollars in a new round of fundraising. More good news, right?

'Well, hold on a second,' you might say. 'Maybe this company isn't getting attention. Maybe the press has become so cynical that it's ignoring positive news.'

To which I'd respond: No, this company gets so much media exposure that surely there is no company that trades in its price range that even approaches the level of attention it receives. In fact, when this company makes news, forget The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The news is deemed so important that journalists at Time and Newsweek find it necessary to wag their tongues.

The company that I'm talking about, of course, is Salon.com, which I'd like to hereby nominate in the category of 'World's Strangest Stocks.'

What other company, after all, could you go to the message boards at Yahoo Finance, and find not the usual pump-and-dump banter, not a deconstructive analysis of its financials, but rather an energetic discourse on the liberal slant of its product?

Well, this is Salon.com for you.

Salon's major news these past few days was an announcement of $2.5 million, mostly from investment bank W.H. Hambrecht and the generosity of John Warnock, chairman of Adobe. The announcement has sparked a new round of catcalls, with some of the most noted financial pundits in the media weighing in on the most simple of questions: 'Will this be enough?' Should we believe TheStreet.com's James Cramer, who writes that 'Salon's going to make it,' pointing out Salon's stock sells for .5 times sales, a tenth of what traditional media companies sell for? Or should we turn to MSNBC.com's Christopher Byron, who believes that '$2.5 million in tide-me-over capital' won't do much more than buy the property an additional three months of life.

Keep in mind here that we're not just talking about a company's prospects. No, by the nature of the discussion - a dialogue about a company whose share price up until two weeks ago was trading at a measly 12 cents - it's clear we're discussing the entire future of online media.

While it's apparent that some would call the latter part of that last sentence drastic, and others would figure it as obvious, make no mistake about the fact that somewhere down the subtextual lane, Salon has come to be perceived as signifying something much more than itself. Something that strikes deep resonance in the journalists who are covering the fate of this six-year-old-company-with-not-much-revenues.

In other words, all bets are off on Salon's future as the bookmakers charged with taking money on this horserace have, well, slept with the jockey. Mr. Cramer will behave as cheerleader-in-chief because the Street.com site he cofounded is generally perceived as being in the same possibly-sinking boat as Salon. And on the other side of the fence, Mr. Byron, an oft-self-described 'Curmudgeonly Arms,' has long staked his reputation in numerous columns that this sort of thing won't work.

As for Salon, itself, it's hard to figure out how all this attention affects its business. On the one hand, management has acknowledged that when its sales force goes out to sell advertising, they are constantly face-to-face with media buyers who have ingested all sorts of 'Salon.com deathwatch' tales of woe. But on the other hand, the online magazine has deeply slashed expenditures and marketing, and is gathering record numbers of visitors. It's not hard to do the simple arithmetic to add up The Why.

What we got here, folks, is one hell of a sticky media situation, the type that is impossible to report on because frankly the story resembles a quirky phenomenon in quantum physics: The observation of matter affects that matter's position. (The position, in turn, affects ours.)

As soon as some pundit sadly sings out, 'Salon, one of the first and most noted independent voices on the Internet, has eaten its $2.5 million it received in August and is expected to fold its site soon,' as might happen in the near future, don't be surprised to see some sort of clich? ending, a scribe seeking the spotlight by playing Deus Ex Machina.

And if this happens, don't come running to me with the news. Who knows? I might feel compelled to write about it again.