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Why Does Alyssa Milano Hate Me?

By Robert Stacy McCain on 11.22.09 @ 8:19PM

Honestly, I'm not an online celebrity stalker. But I am an avid pursuer of Web traffic -- having recently cleared the 3-million-hit mark on my personal blog -- and a few months ago, I added Twitter to my arsenal of online weaponry. What I've discovered is that big-name celebrities tend to have huge followings on Twitter, so that if a really big name posts a link to your site, it's almost like getting a Drudge headline.

Last month, a Slate item by Mickey Kaus got Tweeted by Alyssa Milano -- and the former child star of the '80s sitcom Who's The Boss has nearly 400,000 Twitter followers.

Since then, it has become my life's ambition to be Tweeted by Alyssa Milano, an ambition that so far has been frustrated by my celebrity tormenter. Today, as if to tease me, she Tweeted a New York Times article by Brad Stone, prompting two questions:

• Is this a case of political bias? Some of my friends say that Alyssa is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, and that she would never Tweet anything from a conservative publication like the American Spectator. Surely, however, she would not allow mere politics to prejudice her Twitter habits.
• What's Brad Stone got that I ain't got? Excluding the possibility of political bias -- and Kaus has been accused of neocon tendencies -- the question becomes somewhat more personal. Am I simply a bad writer? Does Alyssa refuse to Tweet me because my journalistic output is inferior to that of Mickey Kaus or Brad Stone?

Whatever the answer, I'm nothing if not persistent. In the New Media age, Internet traffic is the only arbiter of success, and in journalism nowadays you're nobody if you're not getting Twitter traffic from celebrities. Alyssa Milano has a choice: Tweet me now or Tweet me later. Otherwise, I'm likely to become the Twitter equivalent of paparazzi, and we wouldn't want that to happen, would we?