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Hail! All hail the “Queen of MySpace”, newly crowned by Vanity Fair in their March 2006 issue. The Queen herself has almost a million Myspace “friends” and counting (982229 at time of posting), including real celebrities such as the band Nine Inch Nails.

Christine Dolce, who also goes by her Myspace alias Forbidden, used to be a cosmetics salesgirl at some mall before her inspired take towards her MySpace profile shot her into stratospheric fame. Reading her blog is like a “Celebrities for Dummies” tutorial.

Whats her formula? Pics always tell the truth, not words (unless you are JK Rowling)

The last pic above is from Stuff Magazine, one of many “lad mags” you will find her on. But the first two photos are symbolic of her style that got her fame.

A buxomic figure + Edgy/ Punk Rock style + Good photography + provocative poses = glamorous shots, which are damn viral on social networks and ensure high attention and profile views from all the men. The professional and methodical approach to marketing herself and even branding herself as “Forbidden” is simply alluring and differentiates herself from so much of the MySpace sluts. Not to mention throwing in dozens of photos, blogging frequently about her road to glamor and glitz, “mentoring” wannabes, being nice and welcoming to all friend requests on MySpace. Christine kept her story real, keeping to her amateurish roots on Myspace, told the story faithfully through personal media such as blogs and balanced it well with her increasingly professional studio shots.

She has rode on her initial fame to also launch her own clothing line(Destroyed Denim jeans) like many other self-respecting celebrity would too, think JLo, Britney. And similarly, she also has multiple product endorsements on her profile of her photographer, media firms, all neatly tied in with her own personal brand which shines ever so brightly on MySpace. It was her latest conquest of Unilever that caught my attention as she’s hired to market the consumer giant’s line of Axe deodorant products.

Everyone loves a rags to riches story, particularly one that is gathering in steam like Christine’s. Its way cooler to be part of the making of a celebrity on a social network than just witnessing the finished product which skips the social participation stage like so many other offline manufactured celebrities.

>And if you think softcore porn photographs are not enough for her to hit the mainstream, you will be surprised to hear of her mentions on established mainstream media such as the Economist, Wall Street Journal, Business 2.0 who have lauded her as the icon of the New Media wave that Rupert Murdoch is betting his fame on to ride it successfully. Business 2.0 went as far to laud her as one of the hits in their “Hits and Misses” feature, alongside Valley luminaries such as Steve Jobs, the godfather of PC Bill Gates, and the Google rock stars of Sergey and Larry.

Christine Dolce’s meteoric rise through the Internet is set to go even further when she appears on Playboy in October 2006.

While her achievements are certainly noteworthy by themselves, her role in our cultural world today has a deeper significance. A new message to all aspiring fame-seekers:

Celebrity status is no longer a monopoly of media giants but a democracy for web-savvy amateurs.

Christine’s a web-born celebrity, one of a few that have escaped the monitor screens to really hit paydirt and gain fame in the offline world. The empowering influence of the internet used to centre around existing offline celebrities such as Britney Spears, Baywatch babes, Beyonce who occupy top spots on search engine traffic but the Youtube phenom has spawned multiple amateurs who have relied on sheer ingenuity and raw talent or looks to rub it with the multi-million dollar image makeovers by professional firms.

Christine certainly won’t be the last web celebrity we see to have been pushed to the top of her career by a mass of gawky internet users on a social network.The Internet has given birth to the voices of millions who clamor for celebrities or cutural icons that are truer reflections of ourselves rather than the manufactured superstars of yesteryear. That fuzzy, warm feeling, of knowing someone who was equally an unknown as you were years ago to have made it and become a celebrity through a social network alone, is truly inspirational.

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More here…

I have a very good friend who always asks me: “How do you make a million bucks?”

There’s a lot of vaporish theories lotsa smart alecs try in wrestling over this question.

But, here’s a smart-ass answer I like: Make a $1000 a 1000 times.

There’s another way to interpret the question though. A two-sided answer to this classical question:

1. Sell a lot of a few items (be it goods or services)
2. Sell a few of many items.

The Autocratic World of the Creator Age

The thing is, in a time not too long ago (before the Internet Age), there’s an amazing homogeneity in the products we buy, the clothes we wear, the books we read, the movies we watch, the songs we listen to. You go into a shopping centre and you end up buying the same birthday gift for every friend, disappointing the poor fella who wonders what he did wrong to receive three CDs of the latest hit album which he hated but was considered a safe choice.
Many successful enterprises today subscribe to Point 1. They hold a carefully-groomed, meticulously-managed product portfolio and hire legions of pesky salesmen, clairvoyant crystal-ball-gazing marketing gurus, self-righteous management consultants in an attempt to uncover the Next Big Thing before their “Auld Enemy” or competitor beats them. In order to manage the scarcity of their resources enforced upon by the classical laws of “brick and mortar” economics, they focus their efforts on a select small group of products and attempt to homogenize product selection choices of customers. They treat customers as target boards and call effective marketing “targetting” as if finding customers was an activity akin to shooting at the rifle range. During selling, some seek to convince you honestly, some to brainwash you and totally rewire your brain (check multi-level marketing), and some just plain tricking/ scamming. It was a Command and Control Economy.
Jailed by the Space-Time Continuum: The Autocracy of Shelf Space and Distribution Cost

In pre-Internet Days, consumers were dung, subjected to the whims of Creators also known as manufacturers and their partner-in-crime, the Retailers. Retailers had finite shelf space, finite stores, limited human and financial resources to make and subsequently sell products. This is the Spatial Limit.

During the Cold War, the communist regimes best exemplified this as they gave out ration coupons for goods no one had a choice to say no to. With Democracy, we had Sears, evolving to Walmart today with thousands of selections. Yes, the regimes are getting ircreasingly democratic, but the democratization process is by no means complete for us the consumers.

Add the Time Limit too. Our world is segregated by our natural universe of Light and Night. Barring nocturnal humans, our modern society adjusts to nature and structure our social and economic activities in line such conventions. Save for 7-Eleven, most stores earn diminishing returns once we go past peak hours of human activity and encounter rising labor costs.

The Democratic World of the Consumer Age

Enter Ebay, iTunes, MySpace, Amazon. No longer are consumers subjected to the tyranny of the physical world. The Digital Age brought us the Internet, a virtual marketplace of unlimited ideas, products and opportunities. It injected transparency into the consumer world, bringing us hope and optimism while conversely bringing gloom to the Creator class that now has to grapple with a “sentient” Consumer Class no longer shackled by lack of choice.

• Why buy a whole CD when u only like one song? It took almost a decade of online piracy and still the music industry, which is supposed to be in the business of providing listening pleasure, is not listening.
• If you thought you liked Artist A, well there’s tons of Artist-A clones, or remixes. And this is just the variance in terms of product - the “What”. The “how” of listening to music by Artist A is no longer only your local record store, you could still choose classicial CD format, or DVD of the music video versions, MP3 format, AAC for your iPod. Same goes for say a book u liked.
• If you thought Dan Brown was good, check out the clones he spawned, the reviews on Amazon, the thousands of retailers you could possibly get it at, at a price cheaper than your local brick and mortar store. Or perhaps you can buy an “ebook”. Maybe you prefer listening as it fits your commuting lifestyle in the mornings while fighting with the peak-hour traffic in the trains or the highways. Buy an “audio-book” then.
• No time to shop because you are at work all the time?

Disrupting the Space-Time Continuum

Well, the Internet Store’s open 24/7/365. Globally. Anytime. Anywhere. Any customized format.

I just had to plug this book. I am halfway through and I can’t stop nodding my head all the time as I read it. The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. He inspired me to write this dead in the middle of the night at 3am.  There’s a Long Tail blog too. Click here to check out Guy Kawasaki’s new-found affection for Long Tail theories too.

An article by Wired magazine quips Steve Jobs pitching his iTunes music service versus its strongest competitor: Free P2P downloading services like Kazaa, eDonkey, Bittorrent, what-have-you… I found this great response which makes a lot of economic sense… but maybe only to those who value their time, that rules out college students…

How low should the labels go? The answer comes by examining the psychology of the music consumer. The choice facing fans is not how many songs to buy from iTunes and Rhapsody, but how many songs to buy rather than download for free from Kazaa and other peer-to-peer networks. Intuitively, consumers know that free music is not really free: Aside from any legal risks, it's a time-consuming hassle to build a collection that way. Labeling is inconsistent, quality varies, and an estimated 30 percent of tracks are defective in one way or another. As Steve Jobs put it at the iTunes Music Store launch, you may save a little money downloading from Kazaa, but "you're working for under minimum wage." And what's true for music is doubly true for movies and games, where the quality of pirated products can be even more dismal, viruses are a risk, and downloads take so much longer.

So free has a cost: the psychological value of convenience. This is the "not worth it" moment where the wallet opens. The exact amount is an impossible calculus involving the bank balance of the average college student multiplied by their available free time. But imagine that for music, at least, it's around 20 cents a track. That, in effect, is the dividing line between the commercial world of the Long Tail and the underground. Both worlds will continue to exist in parallel, but it's crucial for Long Tail thinkers to exploit the opportunities between 20 and 99 cents to maximize their share. By offering fair pricing, ease of use, and consistent quality, you can compete with free.

The Long Tail
I will be thinking a lot about the Long Tail economy this summer holiday, or rather, a market of obscure tracks and searches that reflects the true diversity of options and choices, in products and services, to the consumer. As the Internet enters perhaps its 2nd decade of mass adoption, the commercialization stage is just barely emerging out of the chasm as business models have so far failed to materialize. This is particularly evident in the first "Old Economy" industries to be hit — music, TV, radio and movies. Where NewsCorp bravely embraced what could be the singular most powerful force to revolutionize their business by promoting digitalization across all their business units, many other media juggernauts are still grappling with the harsh new economic realities by reining in innovation and relying on legislation to halt this innovative.

Point to note: the overt support of the courts of MPAA and RIAA against P2P illegal music downloading companies are not sending the right message to the prosecuting companies that their legal opponents/ defendants are the ones utlizing technology the right way (i mean channel, not the business model of free) to serve customer needs. Or the network neutrality vote in COngress that was overwhelming defeated in favor of the telecom and cable companies seeking to exert their economic power to restrict open access by users to the internet. The issue may be more complicated than it seems and I must admit I haven;t studied it at length but it appears to me that this was a political decision not based on the merits of long term policy benefits to the future of our society. It appears to be a vote by the Republicans for Big Business and their special interest groups that dominate the political arena on Capitol Hill. And that simply pisses me off if the stupid decisions of some cronies impact our future generations' rights to information.