Cult Blogs and Celebrity Blogs

Blogs are no longer simply personal diaries. The blog is becoming the standard web interface for information sites, on topics ranging from geeky google watching to the research and announcements of a noted facial plastic surgeon.

As the weeks and months pass, expect to see many celebrities launch blogs. There are already perhaps over a million blogs online (have a look at weblogs.com to see how many 'pingers' have updated in the last hour). Few blogs, ironically, are maintained by people who are already celebrities -- although some bloggers have become celebrites, at least on the web. Journalists and authors are more likely than other types of celebs to keep blogs, but music artists and movie stars, were they to regularly update with genuinely 'exclusive' content, would attract more hits and grow their fanbases.

From today, I'm going to keep a list of 'celebrity blogs' that I've found (email me if you're aware of any others). I've decided not to include sites that allegedly contain diaries or journals but do not conform to the interface, or where so-called blogs are clearly merely shop-fronts, or where the celebs in question don't appear to be genuinely involved.

Comments

2 comments

JB / January 14, 2003 5:01 PM / #

So will biographies become irrelevant? Blogs put celebrities in continual, interactive contact with their fans.

In years to come, a book that deals retrospectively with the life of a celebrity may be irrelevant; instead a collection of blog entries will reflect the celebrity's personality or mental health at different points in time.

Michael Heraghty / January 14, 2003 5:50 PM / #

Funny you should mention mental health: it makes me think of the famous (in web history) Mariah Carey breakdown postings. The Observer article gives only a snippet of what the star purportedly posted to her own site while she was suffering a nervous breakdown.

(Mariah's site is often listed among 'celebrity blogs' but clearly it has no blog or journal section, so I haven't included it in my listings.)

The Mariah breakdown incident reminds us that information posted on the web is subject to the same laws as those governing other media. Yet web postings can be spontaneous, with texts getting becoming globally accessible without ever passing through the hands of sub-editors, editors, etc. If a user publishes a defamatory or otherwise distasteful text while suffering from mental ill-health, should he/she still be subject to the laws set up for traditional media, which have better 'saftey nets'?

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