EGOogling
: This morning I heard Howard Stern et al talking about searching the Internet to find out what people are saying about them. Artie Lang, the new guy, is still looking for anything nice said about him (I like you, Artie). Gary is still amazed at the cruel tooth jokes about his teeth. Howard looks. They all do.
Of course, they do. We bloggers look for ourselves: We go to Blogdex to look up who’s linking to us; we search our names in Daypop. We ego surf. We EGOogle.
And then it occurred to me that, of course, the famous, the stars, and the powerful do the same thing. If Howard’s posse does it, then surely Rosie and Rosanne and Madonna and Bubba Clinton and Al Gore and Bill Gates and Steve Case (if he dares) and the casts of Survivor and Bachelor all do it.
Whenever I write about Howard Stern here, I get more traffic. It’s the power of celebrity; I learned that working at People.
But the difference in this medium is that you can speak directly to the celebrities. You never know whether you are. But I’d bet on it. What if Arafat is reading the blogs? Or Tom Ridge? Or Michael Moore? It adds a new layer of fun.
From sea to shining sea
: I took homeless Nick Denton to lunch in the Conde Nast cafeteria yesterday. He was amazed that we have a food stylist. It’s Conde Nast. Life is style.
Substance is such a bother.
Nick is wide-eyed anew at things American. The other day, I told him that we had a hurricane watch in New York. He screeched: “Hurricane? Here?” Yes, Dorothy.
Now he has written a good column about his trip across America to get to New York (he complains about the edits in the piece as it appears at Management Today; that’s why he prints the whole thing on his blog; Nick is the one who said that the great thing about blogging is that there are “no editors”).
Anyway, Nick sees some differences across the country. But I, protoAmerican — midWest-bred, still serving the heartland in my businesses — have to disagree. What’s comforting (and boring) about America is its Holiday Inn no surprises ethos. Once you leave the city-states, as Nick calls them, of Manhattan or San Francisco and live where most Americans live — in the great suburbs, in the real America — there is very little that separates us and much, economically, that joins us: homes, lawns, mortgages, real estate taxes, Burger Kings, Taco Bells, Starbucks, Targets, Home Depots, food courts, warehouse stores, auto dealers, kids’ soccer games, parent-teacher conferences, malls, Houlihans, Fridays, candle stores, Gaps, and mostly cable TV. Besides the accents (and politics that tend to go with them) and in spite of the ethnic reach (my kids’ playmates are Arab, Indian, French, even Canadian) we are pretty much as homogonized as our milk.
Mail bomb bozo
: The suspect in the mailbox bombings had a web site. It’s down already, of course. But here it is in Google’s cache.
: Their CD: “Sacks of People.” I’d say that shows his attitude toward people.
Pim
: Adam Curry from Amsterdam [via Instapundit] says he would have voted for Pim, if he were Dutch.
