May 30th, 2008, 14 Comments »
I’m not going to judge you for caring about celebrities. They’re about as meaningless and stupidly aspirational as sports, and I’m a big ice hockey fan.
However, I find the intense interest in celebrity’s children appalling. I was reminded of this the other day when I saw the oddly-named baby of someone famous on the cover of People magazine. And today, I read on TechCrunch that, coincidentally, People.com has bought Celebrity Baby Blog for an undisclosed sum:
Celebrity Baby is FM Publishing’s top parenting blog, and has recently started to pull in more pageviews (and thus advertising impressions) than FM stalwart BoingBoing. Since February its traffic has shot up—to 6.9 million pageviews and 720,000 unique visitors in April, according to comScore. That month, BoingBoing had more unique visitors (2 million), but fewer pageviews (3.7 million).
Why do I find this so heinous? Because I think children have rights to their own privacy, even before they’re mature enough to exercise them. I find it morally corrupt to exploit toddlers in order to serve advertising to the multitudes. It’s reflective of the shallowest, most fickle tastes of our society. If only we could take a fraction of the cognitive surplus we waste on our worst devices and turn it to more admirable pursuits.
I’m not sure how to distribute the blame, but I’m certain that everyone–celebrities, paparazzi, publishers and consumers–is culpable. It’s obviously not climate change or poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, but it still rankles me. If you’re a consumer of celebrity gossip, I urge you to skip the baby pages.
14 Comments »
March 27th, 2007, 3 Comments »
I’ve been doing lots of reading about the death threats that Kathy Sierra received. It’s hard to avoid in the blogosphere this week, and rightfully so. I wrote about it earlier in the week, but I’m afraid the events and culprits are no more clear in my head.
This whole despicable event has verified one of my (and lots of other people’s) pet theories: the social web has created a long tail of celebrity. I often use this example to explain the long tail idea, because it seems to both surprise and resonate with people.
I don’t write this post to, in any way, make light of Kathy’s situation. I write it to highlight a cultural trend that I think all bloggers need to be aware of.
In a pre-Internet world, here’s what fame looked like. A relatively few number of people were famous (click for larger version, long tail graphic borrowed from Alex Barnett):
However, the Internet came along, and made a bunch more people a little bit famous. There seems to be more fame to spread around, but I don’t want to get into a discussion of the attention economy. Even if you have, say, twenty readers who aren’t your friends and family, you’re a little bit of a celebrity. Here’s what that chart might look like now:
Sure, Robert Scoble’s more famous than a college professor, but I don’t want to quibble over the relative positions. The gist is in the broad strokes.
This new long tail of fame is a micro version of what A-list celebrities experience, and that comes with its relative blessings and curses. I’m sure that Angelina Jolie or Jodie Foster get a lot more death threats than Kathy Sierra has, but they’re a lot more famous.
What’s my point? If you’re a blogger, you’re more visible than the average person. Be sure to protect yourself as best you can.
3 Comments »
