Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Michael Arrington, uber-blogger of TechCrunch fame, posts about Tom Anderson, co-founder of MySpace. Turns out that Anderson may have been lying about his age for years.

How old is he really? We first heard 40. We dug a little online and came up with nothing. But then we got a senior person at MySpace to talk to us about it off record at the Web 2.0 Summit last week: this person confirmed that he’s really “36 or 37″ and that MySpace has been trying to keep this quiet for some time.

The thoughts I had about this, in rapid sequence:

1. Who cares?*
2. Who’s Tom Anderson?**
3. Wait, Arrington thinks Anderson may be “perhaps the most famous person online”?!
4. Am I that out of it?
5. Man, being famous online isn’t all it’s cracked up to be . . .

This is hardly the General Theory of Relativity here, but it bears repeating: the online world can be an insular place. Arrington’s name carries great weight online, but he must be barely known outside the blogosphere. Ditto Anderson and many other Web personalities whose reach doesn’t extend beyond the Web.

Chuck Klosterman was right: there will never be another Johnny Carson.

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* To his credit, Arrington opens the post by writing, “I can’t decide if this doesn’t matter at all, or if it matters a lot.”

** You will have guessed that I don’t use MySpace.