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?
