The Social

It's like a splashy celebrity drama: according to PaidContent, AOL subsidiary TMZ.com will no longer use AOL to sell its ads and instead will be taking those operations in-house. Television ads will be handled through Telepictures, the Time Warner division that teamed up with AOL to launch TMZ in the first place.

The reasoning, according to PaidContent, is that the Hollywood news and gossip site--which was the first to break the news of Michael Jackson's death--has simply gotten too big for AOL's Platform-A technology. TMZ has been one of AOL's foremost success stories of late, and has served as an indicator of how the once-mighty tech company could reinvent itself as a successful digital publishing power under the auspices of new CEO Tim Armstrong.

This could be a messy breakup on the ad sales front. AOL is in the midst of being spun off formally from Time Warner, with which it became joined at the hip in a massive 2000 merger. Platform-A has gone through one management change after another, and though it has significant reach across the Web, still struggles for legitimate industry cred when it comes to both Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue.

Losing a major player like TMZ will be another blow to Platform-A's image. The bigger question will be whether, as PaidContent suggests, TMZ itself may spin off from AOL--something that seems ludicrous, given AOL's plans to be a digital-age Conde Nast or Time Inc.

But things might actually be simpler: as a PaidContent commenter noted, TMZ might be hunting for advertisers willing to work with content a little bit racier than the family-friendly AOL norm. You know, like hard-hitting investigative reports about just how see-through Megan Fox's outfit was at some L.A. nightclub the other night.

NEW YORK--"They've created quite an industry around this whole thing," one woman in a black cocktail dress and diamond earrings commented as the lights dimmed for the start of the 13th annual Webby Awards on Monday night.

The annual awards ceremony for all things in digital media, held once again at the upscale Cipriani Wall Street restaurant, had packed the gilded space--once home to the New York Stock Exchange--with a mixed bag of folks from marketing, advertising, entrepreneurship, social media, online content, and what-have-you. (A common observation at the cocktail hour beforehand: "I don't know many people here.") It was the final event of Internet Week New York, which is co-organized by the Webby's parent, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. And it was, arguably, the most lavish.

Seth Meyers of "Saturday Night Live" hosted this year's Webbys.

(Credit: Courtesy of Webby Awards)

A cheeky take on traditional entertainment awards shows, the Webbys limit acceptance speeches to five words. The opening video montage, projected on several massive video screens throughout the venue, featured goofy Internet memes like "Keyboard Cat." Red carpet interviews featured a handful of "real" celebrities (like "Saturday Night Live" actor and writer Seth Meyers, who hosted the show) along with Internet-minted stars like "Fail Blog" and "I Can Has Cheezburger" blog impresario Ben Huh, who showed up to the ceremony wearing his trademark cheeseburger hat. (Does he ever wash it? "Every once in a while," Huh told me.)

But this year, following complaints that the ceremony was simply too long, as well as to deal with the fact that the smaller Webby Film & Video awards were rolled up into the main Webbys ceremony this year, the organizers pared it down. All speeches were recorded for video to post on YouTube (a Webbys sponsor) and a select number of winners who would give their speeches live at the ceremony were chosen via random selection. More glaringly, the gulf between traditional and digital media grows slimmer with every year--as exemplified by the increasing number of "real" celebrities who are enlisted as Webby presenters and honorees, like this year's surprise guests Martha Stewart and Cameron Diaz. The Internet has come into its own as a part of life rather than a novelty. The question arises: Do we still need the Webbys?

The see-and-be-seen scene
The thing about the Webby Awards ceremony is that it isn't really an awards ceremony: it's a networking event, albeit one with ball gowns, a Seth Meyers standup routine, and Cipriani's trademark bellinis. Winners know well in advance that they've won. There's something a bit self-congratulatory about the whole thing, as the Webby Awards are bankrolled in part by entry fees that companies must submit just to be nominated, and winners have to pay for seats at the awards show. The real point, as with so many tech industry events, is to be seen, and the best way to do that at the Webbys is the five-word acceptance speech.

Get up there and do something ridiculous--as an Animoto executive did when he walked to the podium to accept his award, stripped off his suit to reveal a pair of zebra-print leggings, donned a wig inspired by the styles of '80s hair metal, and shouted, "Wooooo, thank you, New York!"--and you might get noticed by somebody who eventually approaches you at the ceremony's afterparty. Maybe it's a potential client or investor. Or just somebody who's hearing about your company for the first time and will go check it out.

Musician Trent Reznor received the Webby Artist of the Year award.

(Credit: Courtesy of Webby Awards)

But that changed this year, with the organizers' decision to emphasize the more star-studded awards, bestowed upon Web-savvy celebs like comedian Sarah Silverman and industrial music icon Trent Reznor, as well as Web influentials like Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (accepting the award for "Breakout of the Year") and World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who was given a "lifetime achievement" award. Small-time winners were no longer front and center.

While some Webbys-goers welcomed the new format and how it did away with the lengthy parade of accolades that seemed to just grow longer every year, a few were grumbling that they'd reconsider whether to come back next year if they couldn't be guaranteed those five words at the podium. Listening to Seth Meyers wax philosophical about the Web ("Without the Internet, prostitutes would have to find a Craig without a list") and knowing that their taped acceptance speeches would be on YouTube the next day wasn't enough for at least a handful of winners in the crowd.

This odd dichotomy between community and celebrity might sound familiar.

"So, it's like Twitter," Klickable founder Roger Wu quipped at the noisy Webbys afterparty, held further uptown at the Hiro Ballroom nightclub. On the dance floor below, Webbys-goers were dancing up a storm (a rarity in the tech industry) to a performance by ?uestlove, a member of Jimmy Fallon's house band The Roots. It didn't look like a particularly nerdy affair.

Wu had a point. Once a geek craze, Twitter has turned into the latest vehicle for celebrity self-promotion. Ashton Kutcher's hordes of Twitter followers were what catapulted the microblogging service into the mainstream, but some have said that the community-building work accomplished by Twitter's core pack of early adopters was ignored amid the Hollywood glitz.

And the same could be said about the Webbys. A decade ago, actress Cameron Diaz likely would've snubbed the chance to show up at an Internet awards ceremony, and yet on Monday night she was up there bestowing the "Person of the Year" award to Twitter-happy late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon. The Internet isn't a niche corner of entertainment anymore; it is entertainment--but that's overwhelmingly thanks to the innovators and entrepreneurs behind the scenes, not just the actors and TV hosts who've jumped on board the hottest digital trend. Still, it's going to be the likes of Fallon and Diaz who pull in the headlines.

Digital media's triumph is cause for celebration from all sides. And the Webbys team puts on a well-run, enjoyable show every year. But the increasing presence of celebrity is a sign that maybe this is an industry that's outgrown the need for a quirky awards ceremony. Or maybe it isn't. I'm sure there are plenty of people who'd be happy to debate the point on Twitter.

A correction was made to this article: The acceptance speech involving a strip-down was from Animoto, not Ustream.

(Credit: Columbia Pictures)

A Friday piece in The New York Times exposes what we all sort of knew already: some of those celebrity Twitter accounts are actually ghostwritten. Other ones are fake. That guy twittering as Christopher Walken is not actually Christopher Walken.

It's not terribly surprising. Nobody actually thought, for example, that the official Britney Spears Twitter account was actually written by the pop singer herself. But some others, like rapper 50 Cent's, come across as fairly authentic to the degree that some fans could be miffed to find that it's actually the head of his digital-media team doing the twittering. And it does seem a little bit unnerving that "ghost-Twittering" is now an actual job skill for some freelance writers.

See, here's where the dissonance lies. Twitter has become one of the hallmarks of the Web 2.0 "transparency" movement, recommended by new-media consultants left and right as a way for businesses and brands (not to mention celebrities) to put their real faces forward. It's been effective image repair for tarnished brands such as that of cable giant Comcast, which runs an account called "Comcast Cares" to conduct customer service; then there's former White House strategist Karl Rove, whose shadowy, man-behind-the-curtain persona from the Bush administration is a far cry from the Twitter account with which he converses with followers, hosts trivia contests, and debates which third-party Twitter apps are the most efficient.

If that's your opinion of what Twitter is or should be, ghostwriting just doesn't seem like it's playing by the rules.

Basketball player Shaquille O'Neal, whose @THE_REAL_SHAQ Twitter account has become one of the service's most popular, seemed to disapprove of Twitter accounts that aren't actually written by the people whose names they bear. "It's 140 characters. It's so few characters," he told the Times. "If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you."

John Mayer's deep thoughts on Twitter.

(Credit: Twitter)

So I once went on a movie date with a guy who thought it was sort of weird that I posted to Twitter about the movie in mid-date. In retrospect, it probably was weird, and a bit rude, and I wouldn't do it again (and no, there was no second date). But get a load of this one.

Sources quoted in Star magazine and rehashed by the U.K.'s Telegraph (we can tell this anonymous source is just rock solid) claim that the highly publicized relationship between pop singer John Mayer and actress Jennifer Aniston fizzled because of the evil forces of...Twitter!

"People claiming to be friends of (Aniston) have told Star magazine that she finished the affair after discovering Mayer, 31, spent hours on the networking website, despite telling her he was too busy to get in touch with her," the Telegraph report alleged.

Mayer has become an extremely avid user of the microblogging service (username is @johncmayer), along with fellow celebrities like basketball player Shaquille O'Neal, comedians Jimmy Fallon and John Hodgman, and actor Ashton Kutcher (who famously got his wife, actress Demi Moore, to join Twitter as well).

But now it looks like the celebrity Twitterers may be getting a glimpse of what many of us in the tech industry know already: Chronicling your life in constant 140-character updates doesn't leave much wiggle room once you've gotten used to always telling the world what you're doing. I'm sure more than a few people have gotten in trouble because they Twittered about watching sports at a bar when they'd informed their bosses that they were holed up in bed with the flu.

A concluding note to John Mayer: Look on the bright side. At least this time the tabloids aren't blaming a breakup on infidelity, drug addiction, or the failure to disclose a venereal disease. I know plenty of nice, smart girls who wouldn't mind a Twitter-addicted beau.

I don't think I can come close to beating Kara Swisher's headline at All Things Digital, "Is Wonderwall Gonna Be the One That Saves MSN?"

So I'll just cut to the chase: in a move that seems to be way, way, way out in left field, Microsoft's MSN division has partnered with media company BermanBraun to launch an entertainment news site called Wonderwall.

Geared toward a slightly more highbrow breed of entertainment fan than the Perez Hilton set, Wonderwall primarily aggregates content from other entertainment sites but has an editorial team spearheaded by pop-culture veteran Alex Blagg. (He's on Twitter, natch.)

The launch of Wonderwall comes right before Sunday's Grammy Awards ceremony. It also happens to be timed perfectly to fit two high-profile celebrity scandals, the Michael Phelps up-in-smoke fiasco and the Christian Bale audio freakout.

So--why? Well, big tech players seem to want to have an in-house celebrity news hub, for one reason or another. Time Warner's AOL has the hugely successful TMZ, Yahoo has OMG (and indeed, the interface looks a bit like OMG), and Google has...um...the "entertainment" section of Google News.

And despite this whole "advertising recession" thing, we've seen big tech companies increasingly investing in ad-supported content. Perhaps as blog networks find themselves strapped for cash and print media companies find themselves smacking into financial icebergs, the tech companies see a potential gap in the market.

AOL rolled up all its content properties into a conglomeration called MediaGlow recently. We can only wonder if MSN's Wonderwall is the start of something similar in Redmond.

DeWolfe (in the gray jacket) and Hilton (in the pink dress) leaving a club in L.A. together.

(Credit: X17.com/TechCrunch)

It's not the sort of TechCrunch post you see every day: the Valley blog reported on Friday night that Chris DeWolfe, president of News Corp.'s MySpace, is dating ubiquitous heiress Paris Hilton. It's been going on for a few weeks, editor Michael Arrington wrote, adding that he was tipped off to it when he saw the two together in a video clip from paparazzi site X17.

The gossip column of the New York Post has also mentioned offhand that Hilton has been spotted at parties in a house that DeWolfe has rented in Southampton, N.Y. (That's an upscale summer party town on Long Island, for those of you unfamiliar with mid-Atlantic geography.)

DeWolfe, 42, is married but going through a separation process, according to TechCrunch. Hilton, 27, ostensibly still has a boyfriend, but really, who the heck knows?

Maybe this is what happens after Paris Hilton articulates her proposed energy policy via Web video and receives a resoundingly positive response: she stops dating Greek shipping heirs, B-list musicians, and reality show stars, opting instead for digital-media executives.

It also might be a publicity stunt, a sort of way for DeWolfe to make a statement about MySpace's identity. I mean, could you ever see Mark Zuckerberg doing something like this? TMZ.com once hounded the young Facebook founder as he walked out of a chic restaurant in L.A. with a cute date. In fact, she was his girlfriend of several years; all the pair was willing to do for the cameras was laugh for a few minutes and then walk away.

Buzznet, the social network whose CEO told CNET News.com in April that he'd like to build "the next Viacom," has launched a sister site: Celebuzz, a community for enthusiasts of celebrity news and gossip. It's been in private beta for some time now.

Already dominated by the likes of Perez Hilton, Popsugar, and the AOL-owned TMZ.com, celebrity gossip is a niche of the Web that some might say doesn't need another outlet. But Celebuzz general manager Karina Kogan told CNET News.com that it doesn't matter. Research showed that celebrity gossip fans are more than happy to use "more than one source to get the same exact story. They're interested in different points of view, and frankly, they're happy to look at the same photo ten times, just in different settings."

She also asserted that Celebuzz offers something new. "There is no community dedicated to celebrity out there," Kogan said. "There are news aggregators, there are blogs, but there is no community for the celebrity fans."

(Credit: Celebuzz)

Celebuzz features a full-out social network with user-created content in addition to editorial content coming from in-house reporters, partner bloggers, paparazzi photo agencies, celebrities themselves, and "expert panelists" like celebrities' personal trainers and plastic surgeons. At launch, Kogan said, it's already the "fourth-largest celebrity site on the Internet, period," following People.com, TMZ, and Yahoo's OMG.

Buzznet itself focuses on music, but had already inked "deep partnerships" (read: borderline acquisitions) with celebrity gossip blogs Just Jared and A Socialite's Life. The two social networks are not yet interoperable, but Kogan said that's on the way.

Still, she said, they're meant to be kept separate. "We definitely don't want to shove celebrity media down the throats of music fans," Kogan explained.

The Britney-and-Brangelina crowd may shed a tear (or not): Gawker reported Thursday that the New York Post has closed down PageSix.com, the online arm of its famed gossip page, after just three months in business.

Citing tough economic conditions, PageSix.com Senior Vice President Jennifer Jehn confirmed the shutdown to Gawker's Nick Denton. "Given the difficulty in the economy, it was not the right time for this launch," Jehn reportedly said, adding that the decision would be accompanied by 18 layoffs.

Denton also pointed out that PageSix.com's traffic didn't exactly take off. Here's the thing: With behemoths like AOL's TMZ.com, Sugar Publishing's PopSugar, and the infamous Perez Hilton, online celebrity gossip is a completely saturated market. Despite Page Six's print reputation, it apparently just couldn't compete with Perez's rainbow hair and Microsoft Paint captions.

Nick Denton probably isn't mourning. Gawker Media, which he founded in 2002, operates a number of gossip titles from the eponymous New York media rag to the Hollywood-focused Defamer, and the closing of PageSix.com means one fewer competitor in the mix. But if, as Denton speculates, PageSix.com fell at the hands of an advertising downturn, that could hurt the rest of the gossip press too.

And as a Gawker commenter pointed out, Salon.com ironically published an article about the end of the golden age of celebrity gossip on the same day that PageSix.com closed its doors.

Alice Marwick (bottom right, in the pink jacket) leads a discussion about Internet fame at SXSWi.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

AUSTIN, Texas--What does it mean to be "Internet-famous?"

That was the topic of conversation at "I'm Internet Famous: Status in Social Media," a South by Southwest Interactive "core conversation" hosted by Alice Marwick, an NYU doctoral candidate studying feminism and social media.

Not surprisingly, a good handful of the attendees at the "conversation" displayed various degrees of Internet fame (or notoriety): Dodgeball founder Dennis Crowley, Valleywag writer Melissa Gira Grant, video personality and dating columnist Julia Allison, BoingBoing's Joel Johnson, Ypulse's Anastasia Goodstein, Budget Fashionista blogger Kathryn Finney, Boinkology editor Lux Alptraum, and podcaster Dave Delaney (he co-hosts the "Two Boobs and a Baby" parenting podcast with his wife).

Drop any one of those names in a setting outside the technology community, and it's more than likely that you'll get one blank stare after another. That doesn't mean "microcelebrity" isn't worth talking about. Internet fame is insular, but it's still fame among a very connected and tuned-in subset of the population.

"Pretty much any group, or any community, no matter how big or small, has a kind of hierarchy," Marwick explained. It's not evil, she said. "That's just a normal way that people organize themselves." The Web is no exception.

So what makes people Internet-famous? Attendees shouted out suggestions like page views among the content-creator and blogger communities, valuation and investors among start-up founders, the ratio of "followers" to "following" on Twitter, and how valuable one's reputation is as an "information broker" (i.e. if Michael Arrington or Robert Scoble recommends something, it'll get at least temporary traction).

But we still can't confuse Internet fame with mainstream fame, no matter how high-profile an event like SXSWi, packed to the seams with Web-based "microcelebrities."

"A lot of the time, we overvalue our Internet celebrity," one person in the conversation said, referring to the fact that a popular blogger had recommended the Jeff Buckley cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and it promptly shot to the top of the iTunes download chart, seemingly vindicating that blogger's influence.

Only problem is, people soon realized that pop culture behemoth American Idol had recently featured the song, too.

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).