Net-oriety and Blogger Fame

Posted on June 17, 2005

A Newsweek article 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 (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 blog at wilwheaton.net.