Celebrity Blogs and Doctorow's Law of IP

In case you didn’t know, dear readers, celebrity weblog are big time. I have no scientific data except for the fact that everyone I talks to either reads them or knows someone (their significant other, usually) who does.

Jame‘s favorite, Go Fug Yourself, provides a good example of why.

If you’re looking for a quick-flip based on eye-balls, I’d put something around celebrity blogs on your short-list.

“I didn’t see this in The Economist!”: A Short Explanation of Celebrity Blogs

Celebrity weblogs are the blog version of the super-market check out lane, except they’re “RADIOACTIVATED or something.” They get updated hourly, the authors have no problem totally balling out their victims, and the linkable nature of the web means they have endless content about all your favorite and obscure celeberties.

Celebrity blogs are your best bet for keeping abreast of celebrity’s frog problems and the resulting driving problems.

Here are some examples:

• Go Fug Yourself – raking celebrity fashion-picks over the coals daily.
• Oh no they didn’t – Kim‘s favorite when laptopping.
• Perez Hilton – he’s an MS-Paint master with photos.
• The Superficial – looks classy, don’t it?
• IDontLikeYouInThatWay – studying the advanced science of web page backgrounding. Also supports the EFF!
• WeSmirch – the Memeorandum go at celebrity blogs.

Regular topics include: TomKat, Paris Hilton and “Zahara,” Britney Spears and K Fed, LiLo, and anyone who’s pregnant or has a baby.

Since each blog happily links to each other, you only need to subscribe to one or two of them: you’ll see the same “core” content on each blog, just with different commentary.

Why They Work

Now, I’m only over-the-shoulder status on the celebrity blogs, I primarily look at them when Kim is reading them or recommends something. But, from what I can tell, they’re successful because of 3 things:

• Many people love celebrity news more than any other type of news. Rumors, trash, and embarrassing photos are great fun. The blog format is perfect for feeding this never ending hunger. I can’t help but dork out and think it has something to do with
• There are countless pictures, practically in real-time, of celebrities doing embarrassing things. Couple this with the increase in bandwidth over the past few years, and you have an endless stream of high-quality, candid photos at your finger-tips.
• The authors don’t care about respecting copyright laws. If they find a picture on the web, they use it. Here’s an example of a bunch of images lifted from Getty.

This last point is a classic example of what I call the Doctorow Law of IP: users will do what they want with the content no matter how you try to prevent them. Copyright and DRM are a lost battle on the net. The follow-on “law” is to ask, “why don’t you try to make money off that instead of suing people?”

Ads in Images

For example, instead of putting a silly water-mark in their images, Getty could put ads in each image. Sure, you can’t click on the images, but that doesn’t stop all off-line advertisement from providing good revenue.

The great thing is that though everyone would hate seeing ads in the images, they’d still gobble them up. Anything to keep up with who’s given birth or is still pregnant.

I would expect someone like Google or MSN to figure this out. Everyone would win: the copyright holders would stop “loosing” money, the “pirates” would finally be legal, and the users would keep getting their celebrity news and pictures.

Emergent Communities, Giving Users What They Want

Oh no they didn’t is a particularly interesting blog because it’s not authored by one person. Instead, it’s authored by a livejounral community. The barriers to entry are very low (I believe anyone with an LJ account can join). Despite this, the “quality” of the posts tends to be high: the community is quite good, I hear, at self-policing itself, pushing out bad posters. More importantly, the comments forms are very active.

I can imagine the arguments between the traditional celebrity gossip media (People, US, In Touch, etc.) sound much like the arguments between closed source and open source crowds: once you give control over to the users and “amateurs”, all hell will surely break-loose!

But, we know, dear readers, that that’s far from the case, be it with celebrity blogs or open source. In fact, that concern is more telling of how conservative the incumbents usually are and, frankly, how boring they tend to be. Being boring, in software can be a good idea: the only arguments against open sourcing Java still standing are around stability and interop, that is, preventing Java from changing. (OK, not the only good ones.) Hopefully Sun won’t ignore Doctorow’s Law of IP, and instead use developer’s desires to figure out what to do with Java instead of what to defend against. That is, once you’ve figured out what your users want — embarrassing celebrity photos or dynamic languages — the next step is giving that to them, and fast, before they just do it themselves.

Disclaimer: Microsoft and Sun are clients.

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