An audio file of the reading, accompanied by frequent collaborator Jonathan Coulton playing "Big Rock Candy Mountain" "live for an hour, one take", was posted to a page on the promotional website for the book.

In October 2005, on hearing the audio file, Mark Frauenfelder proposed on the BoingBoing website to have "700 cartoonists volunteer to draw one of the 700 hoboes" that Hodgman listed in the book.

Len Peralta of Jawbone Radio came up with a design for the site and passed it on to Dan Coulter, who built a back end system using phpFlickr, his open source wrapper for Flickr's API.

Hobo illustrators Adam Koford, Mike Peterson, Ben Rollman and Eric Vespoor contributed to the creation of the website, www.e-hobo.com.

While Hodgman's story is entirely fictional, an actual furry lobster, Kiwa hirsuta, was discovered in March 2005 in the South Pacific.

Hodgman includes a photo of the newly discovered crustacean in the rear cover of the paperback edition of The Areas of My Expertise, along with the words, "Some readers have taken this as a worrisome portent that certain items in my book of lies may be coming true.

Coulton has performed the song on Attack of the Show, at many of Hodgman's book signings, and on the audiobook version of The Areas of My Expertise.