There are no stars on the Web. No big names, no instantly recognizable faces, no paparazzi, no cults of personality. Unless you count Jeff Bezos, the son of Cuban immigrants who runs what is probably the least profitable venture on the Internet; or Jerry Yang, the Stanford geek who was lucky enough to get to the Web before the rest of us geeks. But they are no Elizabeth Taylor, no (as I’ve pointed out) Jennifer Lopez, no Harrison Ford.
The Webby Awards, that exercise in manufactured glitz they like to call the Oscars of the Internet, actually has to hire paparazzi to harangue its nominees. And no awards show that doles trophies to actual stars could get away with the Webby limit of five words (yup, words) for acceptance speeches. No, despite what Webby founder (and shameless promoter) Tiffany Shlain would have us all believe, there are no stars on the Web. Although Shlain has done an admirable job of attracting actual stars – the kind from the film, art, and music worlds – to her show this year. Maybe she won’t have to budget for the paparazzi anymore.
Still, for a medium, nay, phenomena, that has enjoyed more public visibility (and so far, longevity) than the Elian Gonzalez debacle, the Web can boast remarkably few big names. Myself, I chalk this up to the impermanence of the Web.
And speaking of impermanence, a friend pointed out an obituary to me, in last Monday’s New York Times. The headline read: "Phillip Katz, Computer Software Pioneer, 37." I had no idea who Phillip Katz was. What sort of software did he pioneer? Well it turns out he pioneered some of the most ubiquitous software on the Web: PKZip (yup, the PK stands for Phillip Katz). This is the stuff you use to compress data so that it won’t take up so much of that precious bandwidth when it is being transferred to and fro on the Internet. If you use any platform other than the Mac OS, chances are everything you download from the Web is a zip file. Heck, I’ve downloaded a bunch myself, and I pretty much only use a Mac.
So here, as if in testimony to the invisibility of the so-called little people who made it all possible, was an obituary for a 37-year-old software engineer who had died in a Milwaukee hotel room of complications from alcoholism. He may have made possible the Internet as we know it today, but here is no Robert Downey Jr., an addiction-prone actor whose every up and down is recorded in the national consciousness. Phillip Katz, who founded his company in Brown Deer, Wisconsin, was not a star.
Why are there no big stars on the Web? Not only are there too many Web ventures right now for the economy to possibly support in the long run (we’ve heard quite a lot about this lately), but folks are still figuring out what the Web should be used for. Take firefly.com, one of the first online businesses to be covered by the New York Times magazine (in June of 1997). You could surf on over to this site, enter information about the kind of music you liked, and up would pop a list of similar albums for you to try out. What nifty technology! What a money-making idea!
But surf over to firefly.com today, and all you’ll find is a slightly ominous error message: "No more data available." Which drives home the point that on the shaky ground of this Web landscape, today’s hot site may well be tomorrow’s dead link, and simply making all the difference won’t make you a star.
Read more by Andrea Dudrow.
This article was last modified on January 8, 2023
This article was first published on May 8, 2000
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