YOU MAY BE ONE OF THOSE people harbouring an extreme disdain for Internet celebutantes – as if it weren’t enough to live with offline celebrities. Just who do they think they are, you may say, clogging up the Web with their glamour shoots on Facebook, delegating decision-making to their blogs’ captive audience (‘So what should I wear to dinner with the Gandhis tonight, guys?’), their narcissistic Flickr accounts and Twitter updates every five minutes?

Oh, that’s right. They’re you. Except that the Internet cliché – you’re not famous for 15 minutes, just famous to 15 people – doesn’t hold true for them. The numbers of their subscriber lists run into six digits. They get book deals and newspaper columns. Their MySpace audio tracks are downloaded by approximately millions. They even get on television – while television’s own goddess Oprah Winfrey gets on Twitter.

Just how do they do it? We can tell you. The truth is that like Amartya Sen’s formulation on why India is poor – ‘because it is poor’ – Internet fame is built on fame. Once you get noticed, you keep getting noticed. Where’s a person to start in this cyclonic storm of attention? We offer some expert tips in our mini-guide to fame online.

TEN WAYS TO GET NOTICED ON THE INTERNET

1. Get noticed. Explanations for this would only curtail your imagination. Go wild. We mean it.
2. Talk about other famous people. Remember the ‘Leave Britney alone!’ guy on YouTube? Exactly. A recent study in Hollywood proved that the most reliable way to create a hit is to tell a story about characters who are already known, from comic books or TV or literature. The Internet basically follows the same principle. Narrative familiarity works.
3. Talk to other famous people. This will only get easier with the passage of time and more and more photos showing up on a search for your name on Google Images. For this, we recommend the next tip in particular.
4. Be photographed with famous people. What? All it takes is the right attitude and a nice dress.
5. Take control. It’s unfortunate but true: you already have no privacy. If it’s on Facebook or Flickr, it’s everywhere. If one friend drops the real name behind your super-popular blog identity, kiss your double-life goodbye. So you might as well invest some time and resources in tooting your own horn. Anonymity is so 2009.



6. Be interesting. If nothing else works, give it a shot. It may seem self-evident but really, you won’t believe the number of people on the Internet telling you about what they had for lunch. Now, whom you had lunch with is a different story.
7. Have passion. Digital guru Clay Shirky will tell you that the Internet is built on love, and you know it’s true every time you look up something obscure on Google only to find a beautifully-crafted 5000-word article about it. This is one of the things that really compels attention. To inspire passion, you must possess it yourself.
8. Have talent. It can do wonders. It works for Amitabh Bachchan.
9. Don’t do anything that will force your web platforms to ban you. Drama is always exciting, but it’s counter-productive.
10. Be famous already. People keep saying that the Internet is a democracy. Can’t you just believe it?

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