The Brightest Stars in Cyberspace

Sept. 11, 2007 — -- It's the modern day diary, online personal journals or blogs attracting millions of viewers to the Internet. But it's the people behind these blogs who have access to the hottest events, keep tabs on the haves and have nots, and can make or break a career and influence an industry with just a stroke of a keyboard. They are blogebrities -- writers, thinkers and gossipers who have branded themselves by taking over the Web, and have thousands of people awaiting their next postings.

Mario Lavanderia, also known as Perez Hilton of PerezHilton.com, is a member of the small community of blogebrities. He has built a career out of writing about celebrities in an unmistakably sardonic style. "Blogebrity to me means someone that has a readership," he tells i-CAUGHT. "Anyone can be a blogebrity. You could have a readership of a couple hundred, a couple hundred thousand, or you could have a readership of several million people a day -- like myself."

Bloggers like Lavanderia, Faran Krentcil of Fashionista.com and Luke Ford of LukeisBack.com top the list of an estimated 101 million blogs that social-media company Technorati tracks. According to Aaron Krane, resident blog expert at Technorati, the blogesphere doubles in size about every six to eight months, to the tune of about 175,000 new blogs every day.

In 2004, after landing a job at a fashion trade magazine, Faran Krentcil started an anonymous personal journal, the Imaginary Socialite, to chronicle the adventures she was having but could not talk about among family or friends. Fast-forward three years and the once-anonymous blogger now serves as editor for a commercial fashion blog and hosts a Web-based show, Girls Gone Styled.

"I think that right now there's still a stereotype that bloggers … are all self-made, the way that Perez Hilton is, that we sit in Starbucks in our pajamas and, you know, we write on our computer for eight hours," says Krentcil. "And that's sort of not true. … I sat down with a group of investors. And they said, 'We want you to write about the world of fashion.'"

With blog popularity comes criticism. Blogebrities often bypass the normal rules and answer only to themselves. Lavanderia, for instance, has been sued by photo agencies for using their pictures without permission. More recently, he has been criticized for insisting on his blog that the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was dead. "I take what I do very seriously and I only put things up on my Web site that I believe to be true, 100 percent. I still stand 100 percent about what I wrote about Castro. … I know for a fact that he is dead. I can't reveal my sources, but my sources are impeccable," Lavanderia tells i-CAUGHT.