15 minutes, or the new (internet) dream?
When the web first boomed, there were the people who got rich quick. Some of them then got poor quick, but after the first boom people were a little more reticent about investing and a little more sceptical - if it smacked of something that had been done, it wasn’t going to work.
Lately however, there have been a rash of people making the most of the new internet - where the money is thinner, the idea has to be better and where people admire you the most for making it big out of something that already exists.
The flipside of this of course is more user-focused - we are no longer limited by the choices of the publishing or music industries as to what is produced or broadcast. It is the end of dominance of the one-to-many media / broadcasting model and the upsurge of the popular many-to-many system we began to see go big with applications like Napster back in the 90s.
The examples are plentiful - and we watch these people with avid interest to see how far this can and will go:
- Anshe Chung - the woman who made her millions from selling herself and property in the virtual world of Second Life
- Lonelygirl15 - the fictional video log created by an American agency of a 16 year old girl, played by Kiwi girl Jessica Rose, which has led to success and talk of a movie deal
- Lily Allen - the British singer who rose to fame through her MySpace profile, which promoted her music and upon which she also kept a blog detailing her day to day life
- Ze Frank, without who any list of this kind would be incomplete without some mention. In 2001 the viral bug hit Ze Frank’s birthday invitation, and suddenly everyone had seen it. Now, his daily video blog is viewed worldwide.
- Noah Kalina, a photographer who took a picture of himself every day for 3 years. The popularity of the set lead to a Flickr photoset where he posted pictures of himself with celebrities.
I love this phenomenon - and perhaps it will become so commonplace that we no longer remark on the way the internet is changing media consumption. It will be the way things are.
