MSNBC reports on the application of Web 2.0 sites, and then tells the story of how entertainers and performers have by-passed the agents, promoters and various other middle-men that previously held the keys to broad market exposure.
Before the Living Web, celebrities trying to get access to media had to cope with editors, television bookers and program directors. Now musicians, celebrities and fame wanna-bes start their own MySpace pages to get close to audiences (in early: R.E.M., Tommy Lee, Nine Inch Nails). For comedians the road to stardom used to begin on Johnny Carson's couch. But when a fairly obscure comic named Dane Cook fanatically began grooming the MySpace page he began in December 2003�approving every "be my friend" request until his network approached a million friends, and relentlessly plugging his CDs and appearances on his page�his career took off. He's hosted "Saturday Night Live," cut an HBO deal and has a hit album. "That [success] tends to get attributed to MySpace," boasts Anderson. "All the comics are superpumped to be the next Dane Cook." Bye-bye, Johnny, Jay and Dave. Heeeeeere's collective intelligence.