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3:44pm Sunday
One Web celeb who didn't make the event is Numa Numa Guy, Gary Brolsma. He became Internet famous in 2004 when he posted a goofy video of himself lip-synching to the song "Dragostea Din Tei" by the Romanian pop group O-Zone to the Web site Newgrounds.com.
Brolsma, who made the video while bored, thought it might make a few people laugh. Instead, it went viral, racking up millions of hits as it spread on the Web like wildfire. Numa Numa Guy even made an episode of Comedy Central's “South Park” alongside animated Web luminaries including Tron Guy, “Star Wars” Kid and Chris Croker – the Leave Britney Alone guy.
"In the time since then, the Numa Numa Guy put up a new site called NewNuma and he's tried really, really hard to prolong his Internet fame, but as a result, no one has paid attention to him, or when they do they kind of make fun of him," Hwang says.
Back in 2004, before most of the world knew what a blog was, former Delta Air Lines flight attendant Ellen Simonetti decided to start an online journal as a way to help her grieve over the loss of her mother to cancer. Simonetti mostly wrote about her travels and work and, over the course of nine months, she cultivated a following of about 100 readers.
Then, her employer stumbled upon her now defunct blog, Queen of Sky: Diary of a Flight Attendant, and discovered Simonetti had posted pictures of herself in uniform. The airline promptly suspended her without pay and, a few weeks later, fired her. Simonetti wrote about her job loss and the story spread around the nascent blogosphere.
"Then the BBC online did a story and I got 90,000 hits on my blog when that came out, and then The New York Times started contacting me and various other people," she says. Much of the media coverage concentrated on free speech and company rules on blogging. "This stuff wasn't the norm back then," she adds. "Nobody even knew what a blog was."
Simonetti adapted her blog into a book – a novel in blog format – and the book was optioned in 2008 for a TV film, which she is working on with a production company based in Canada. She is currently blogging on her new site, The Queen of Screen Blog.
The experience of Web fame did not make her rich nor was it enjoyable, Simonetti says. "I'm a shy person, and so being thrust into the limelight all of the sudden was quite traumatic and so I'm actually glad that it has quieted down now."
Internet fame often comes to people who are awkward or slightly goofy, or who exhibit otherwise fallible traits that everyday people also possess, making them easy for a Web audience to relate to. While the attention may prove embarrassing, his advice is to "roll with it."
For example, Matt Harding, a former video-game programmer from Connecticut who quit his day job to travel, gained Internet fame when a goofy video of him dancing at locations around the world went viral. Now, he gets paid "to travel wherever he wants in the world to do really whatever he wants, and it is really kind of an amazing deal on so many levels," Hwang says.
Harding found the success by accident. He started a Web site, Where The Hell Is Matt, to keep friends and family up-to-date on his whereabouts. A traveling buddy suggested videoing Harding doing his dance – one that his Web site says is "the only dance Matt does." A few years later, someone found the video online and passed it around. The video spread and Harding became Internet famous.
Harding rolled with it. And since then, Stride gum has funded him on two more video-making trips with essentially no strings attached. About a quarter of the way into the most recent video, posted in 2008, Harding invites other people to join him dancing. That video went viral, too. Now, when he talks about his fame, he might even invite the audience to join him in dancing badly.
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Pema Chodron's book "The Places That Scare You" have to remember to look this up.
79pounds
By all means, marry.
If you get a good spouse,
You'll become happy;
If you get a bad spouse,
You'll become a philosopher.
-- Socrates
I was married by a judge.
I should have asked for a jury.
-- Groucho Marx
79pounds