Former dating columnist Julia Allison, an Internet microcelebrity now famous for not being particularly famous, has finally gone too far in her attempt to acquire Facebook fans. She may even have broken the law.
Dating columnist Julia Allison must be figuring that everything she has done is meaningless compared to someone paid to throw a ball around. Her Internet popularity has peaked after her dalliance with a football player.
Has anyone else noticed how bored people look when photographed with dating columnist Julia Allison? As this Ken Burns-style clip reveals, the relentless egoblogger's picture companions look desperate to be somewhere else.
In the '90s, the Web cognoscenti joked about doing crack. But New York Times columnist David Carr actually did crack! Which might explain his befuddlement in this clip from the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin.
You know one thing that schools should really be teaching our kids these days, for the good of the world? How to get "Internet famous." If only...oh hey, there is a class for that already!
Fame has always had its downsides. But Internet fame, like the kind TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington has accumulated, provides all the downsides and very few advantages. Now he wants to go into hiding.
No one has been an Internet microcelebrity longer than Hilary Rowland, who began her Web career in 1995. But her hunger for attention could doom an April ski party for startup founders. Oh no!
Judson Laipply's pop-choreography clip "Evolution of Dance" hasn't made a dime from his stardom. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, no one in the crowd could place him. His nine-figure viewcount has proven to be nothing more than the transitory flitter of eyeballs.
We like to watch people trying to be famous. And we're so desperate for a shred of authenticity that we'll watch just about anyone doing anything, as long as it's live and on the Internet. Hence the lifecasting phenomenon.
The Internet is relentlessly eliminating the entertainment value of fame in favor of commerce. In the old days, you'd get a publicist in L.A. or New York in the hopes of garnering the attention of some producer or director and becoming a star. The end result: You get rich by titillating the masses. Now, you hire a…
If you weren't live-tweeting the debate last night, you have missed out on all the hoopla concerning Joe the Plumber — the Ohio Mr. Clean doppelganger that asked Obama about his tax plans for small businesses — now being used as the archetype for American blue collar. But it's another Joe, one from Texas, who owns…
The trolls will always be with us, because the Internet is full of insane sociopaths. Charming sociopaths, clever sociopaths, perhaps even magazine-profile-worthy sociopaths — but sociopaths all the same. Wired profiled a videogame-heavy set of Internet trolls in January. The New York Times Magazine hunted and…
"Good news! Julia is moving to Silicon Valley for the winter!" — Valleywag intern Alaska Miller, reporting live from the TechCrunch party on notorious nontrepreneur Julia Allison's plans to move to the Bay Area from New York later this year. By "good news," I assume he means the fact that we have all fall to prepare.
Google's Wikipedia competitor, Knol, is now open to the public. Take a hint from journalist Cyrus Farivar: "Yes, I added an entry on myself to Wikipedia. Why haven't you?" Unlike Wikipedia, Knol doesn't yet have complex rules requiring you to use a sock puppet account to write about yourself. Go literally make…
Back in San Francisco: Wired covergirl "Julia Alison," attending Facebook's F8 developers conference. Say what you want about her, just get her name right — so she can Google herself later. As tight as Allison is with Randi Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg's older sis, having attended Randi's Vegas bachelorette party,…
With nary a crotch-covering laptop shot among them, the latest hot blogger list distinguishes itself by rounding up ten guys. My sweaterbear editor insists this is the most important list ever — probably because it features ursine crush object Alex Blagg from VH1's Best Week Ever. I'm just waiting for when the…
"I realized that I was and am the center, the focus of attention by millions and millions of people. My family and everyone I knew were and are actors in a script, a charade whose entire purpose is to make me the focus of the world's attention." No, it's not a new blog post by Wired cover girl Julia Allison. It's a…
Thanks for the cover, Julia Allison writes to Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, with the curious caveat: "I would never want your editorial prowess to be called into question over me," and a heavily dropped hint that she's not done with Wired yet. What's her game?
Snake, meet tail. The voyeuristic ouroboros that is Julia Allison's love affair with Valleywag got even more play in her coveted Wired cover story than her own startup did. Don't let us waste your time when you could be hustling us for fame; here's the 100-word version of her "secrets" to self-promotion.
Wired's August cover, featuring Internet nobody Julia Allison, wouldn't normally be going online for another week or so, when the ink-on-dead-trees version hits subscribers' mailboxes. (How pre-postindustrial!) We asked Wired executive editor Bob Cohn why the magazine rushed it online. He told us the posting got…
