For many women, a $1,000 dress is something they admire in the pages of a glossy magazine or see draped on the frame of a celebrity–not an item hanging in their closet.

But a nascent Web site called Rent the Runway is hoping to make high-end fashions much more accessible and almost as easy as renting a movie from Netflix (NFLX).

Read the rest of this post on the original site

A new celebrity site has launched a campaign to get Tracy Morgan, a star of NBC’s “30 Rock,” on Twitter.

The site, OMGICU, encourages visitors to send their celebrity sightings, and Mr. Morgan is its most-seen subject. Its founder, Hugh Dornbush, on Tuesday created a second site, Twacy.org, to convince the comedian to get to tweeting.

Mr. Morgan “is someone who just really resonates with people, and his sense of humor and his sensibilities are so well-suited to the medium,” Mr. Dornbush said. “Once you put it on their radar, it’s been pretty easy to find people who say, ‘I would rather be living in a world where Tracy Morgan is sharing his day to day life with us.’”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Twitter went silent for a few hours on Thursday, and popular Tweeters had plenty to say about it.

Comedian Andy Dick complained that the outage kept him from blocking a user who had taken a swipe at his celebrity status. Mr. Dick says he usually blocks someone about once a week for writing rude comments, calling himself “an easy target” and the offenders “haters.”

When Twitter wouldn’t let him obstruct a particular insulter Thursday, Mr. Dick persisted. “I tried it about 10 times in a row,” he said, to no avail.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

While the very phrase “product placement” elicits jeers and hisses in the TV and movie worlds, on the Web something surprising has been happening: Branded content is emerging as not just a promising way to make money, but as creatively viable as well. Take Ashton Kutcher’s “Blah Girls,” which features sassy teen celebrity-bloggers who pause occasionally to quaff VitaminWater as they chase celebrity dirt.

Read the rest of this post

Good to know that with Tribune Co. slogging its way through bankruptcy amid an industry-wide existential crisis, its chief innovation officer, Lee Abrams, is concentrating his brainpower on the stuff that really matters: a pop singer’s phony quote from 10 years ago.

In his latest “think piece,” the free-associative Abrams takes on the issue of “celebrity crimes against humanity,” imploring Tribune journalists not to “feed this machine” by mindlessly reprinting the inanities of famous people.

But one of the examples he uses–of Mariah Carey saying she’d love to be as skinny as a starving child in the Third World “but not with all those flies and death and stuff”–is bogus.

Read the rest of this post

What does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge–broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider–the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on “Survivor” or “Oprah,” then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves–by being seen by others.

Read the rest of this post

Ashton Kutcher’s practiced finesse and stage presence were completely out of place at the TechCrunch50 conference earlier this week, but his appearance was the talk of the show. Kutcher wasn’t in San Francisco to run a casting call for “Beauty and the Geek,” but to launch a Web video show focused on something about which he knows a fair amount: celebrity gossip. Celebrity spokespeople are a fact of life at this point, but celebrity tech founders? Like so many things, it’s a phenomenon that gets frothy every time there’s a bubble.

Read the rest of this post

It was another indication of the emerging paradigm shift in Internet comedy. In a San Francisco nightclub this past Wednesday evening, a noisy crowd gathered for the weekly taping of “Internet Superstar,” an online-only TV show that chronicles goofball Web celebrities. Since the people behind the program have been plowing this field longer than just about anyone, you would expect them to be unbeatable at what they do.

Read the rest of this post