By: Co-Editor, Bobby B:

Andy Warhol, one of the pioneers of the so-called pop art movement, was certainly an American original. If you ever get a chance to visit the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, you should go, it is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist.

In any event, besides the famed Campbell Soup Cans , Warhol is most known for the phrase: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

Uttered in 1968 by Warhol the term has been shortened in common use to “15 minutes of fame.” The expression refers to the fleeting condition of celebrity that grabs onto an object of media attention, and then passes to some new object as soon as people’s attention spans wane. With YouTube, Paris Hilton and Reality Television this phrase seems more prescient than ever.

A new site called 15tofame.com, launched in alpha just before the new year and based in Italy, seeks to fulfill Warhol’s prophesy to an even greater degree.

15tofame allows users to have a video shown continuously for 15 minutes that they have chosen in an effort to be famous. During those 15 minutes everybody all over the world on the site sees the same video simultaneously. After that another user gets their 15 minutes of fame. Any video that YouTube deems appropriate can be posted.
Read more

By: Co-Editor, Bobby B:

In this country, we devour celebrity culture. More people could name Brad Pitt’s and Angelina Jolie’s kids’ names than could name the vice presidential candidates during last year’s election. Websites and television shows devoted to such things as the latest shenanigans of Lindsay Lohan are everywhere. So it would appear that the technology offered by Junkflash.com would be attractive to the multitudes that follow celebrities like I follow the stock market.

Junkflash is a new way to access celebrity news. The Junkflash browser add-in recognizes and tags up celebrities you come across while browsing. When you point at a celebrity name a sidebar appears showing the latest published headlines about that person. These are aggregated from the feeds of 50 top celebrity news sites.

Junkflash users do not have to search sites or clear out feeds to find gossip for which they have an interested. Junkflash brings relevant celebrity news to the context of your browsing. When you shop online for movies or music, or watch clips on YouTube or read a movie review and a celebrity is mentioned, Junkflash shows you the latest gossip about that person right there and then.

Another neat feature is that when you are already at a celebrity news site, Junkflash lets you see other sites angle on a story, or more recent developments.

Junkflash is a privately funded startup developed and run by a small team in Stockholm, Sweden. Open beta of the Junkflash Internet Explorer add-in was released October 2009.
Read more