We knew you'd ask. So I called Wired executive editor Bob Cohn: He confirmed. August 2008, undeserving Internet fame recipient Julia Allison hits the newsstands, becoming an undeserving print fame recipient. Now the prematurely dysfunctional launch of her blog collective, NonSociety, makes some sense; she rushed the site out to meet Wired's print deadline. How did we not see this coming? Oh, wait: We did.
Peter Thiel, the famed venture capitalist who cofounded PayPal and funded Facebook, has not spoken about his private life since Valleywag broke the curious silence about the gay entrepreneur's sexuality in December. (He hadn't really discussed it before then, either.) But it has again become the topic of conversation. Out has put him in tenth place on its Power 50 list of prominent gays and lesbians. The magazine praises him for his multibillion-dollar hedge fund (Out says it's worth $3 billion, but we've heard $5 billion) as well as his $1 billion stake in Facebook and his funding of the Methuselah Foundation, an anti-aging research group. Knowing Peter, we suspect that none of this bothers him particularly — except for the fact that he wasn't No. 1.
This morning's SXSW conversation panel with Alice Marwick, "I'm Internet Famous," stimulated the following tragically telling prediction: it's not how many friends you have that grants Web celebrity, but how many you have to reject. "But how do you track that online?" asks Marwick. I walked out before someone pitched it as a Facebook app.
According to rough stats from Compete, Connected Ventures cofounder Jakob Lodwick and professional geek groper Julia Allison's joint blog, JakobandJulia.com, saw nearly 14,000 unique visitors in November. We're not privy to the algorithm, but our guess is that might be enough get the pair an A in Jamie WIlkinson's "Internet Famous" class at the Parsons design school in New York City.
NICK DOUGLAS — "I'm thrilled to now add being part of a Super Bowl commercial to my list of accomplishments." Sad. But that's what one of the actors says in a promotion called My Bowl Ad, another chance for has-been internet stars to milk one more appearance out of the fame from their year-old YouTube video. But this is only one of the four paths that the career of an Internet celebrity (or "webtard") can take after the first 15 minutes.
NICK DOUGLAS — Forbes 25 Web Celebs! Technorati 100! Never have so many lists given so little information about who the real top bloggers are. Why is this Jeff Jarvis dude so high up on Technorati's list if you've never actually read his blog? Why does Forbes think Nick Denton is so goddamned important? Here's a simple explanation of what these "top blogger" lists really mean (short answer: less than you think).
