A Newsweekarticle is discussing Internet celebrities or
net-oriety. The article says the line between real-world
celebrities and Internet celebrities is blurring. This is a bit
of a stretch. Outside of the Internet most popular bloggers
and website owners are not very well known. There are a few exceptions
like Matt Drudge and Mark Cuban. The article also discussed the
Blogebrity website which categorizes bloggers into
A, B and C categories.
The site provoked intense reaction, much of it critical. For example,
Zero Boss (www.zeroboss.com) blogger Jay Allen (a B-lister) complained on his site, "Why would anyone hate bloggers enough to want to make celebrities out of them?" Others primarily seemed unhappy about their placement on the list, or total lack of inclusion. Several
tried to lobby for promotions and a few sent hostile e-mails,
according to the Blogebrity founders.
Micropersuasion.com's Steve Rubel, a popular blogger,
discusses Internet fame with a New Yorker cartoon showing a dog at a
computer that is telling another dog, "On the Internet nobody
knows you're a dog." Rubel then explains how being famous online
is not the same as being an offline celebrity and that he
doesn't expect many A-list bloggers to achieve offline fame:
So, if you aspire to become Internet Famous, I guess I can tell
you first hand it's fun, but it doesn't make you any more well known
in the meatspace, really. It's more of a sideshow to see how people
make a big deal of it. And I don't expect many people on that A-list
to achieve lasting offline fame. Basically we're all still just dogs,
right dawg? Woof. Woof.
Following along in the web fame concept Shai Coggins has a post
titled Are
You a Search Term?, where she tested some well-known Internet people's names in Overture's
keyword selector tool. Wil Wheaton came in first on her test for the most
searched people in April, 2005. Wheaton is technically also an offworld celebrity actor, but he has risen to fame online because of his popular weblog.
