Hardest working Media Slut of the Noughties: Katie Price.

The insight that “Sex sells” is hardly a new one – and blonde sluts selling particularly well is also not a new invention.

But Blonde was the ruling colour in Entertainment and our Celebrity obsessed culture.

And nobody personified this better than Paris Hilton. Already rich she simply hungered for fame and glory. In the case of Katie Price and many of her modified sisters I can understand the motivation: they wanted to make money with their blondness – but Paris already had all that already …

But there was something new: Media Whoring developed into a new form – Web Sluttism (my other essay on the very same topic can be found here “Princess Salome and her modern Web 2.0 Sisters“).

The Celebrity Obsession found a much better soil to grow on and accelerate to new insane heights. “Leaked” sex tape and naughty photos on the net (read YouTube) allowed unknown starlets to become world wide brands within 24 hours.

Websites like TMZ and Bloggers like Perez Hilton became the new News Channels and pushed classical mainstream media aside. Media Whores like Paris or the Cutchers could also build their audiences via Twitter and Facebook.

Thanks to new technology we could track, watch and talk about (and with celebrities) 24/7. Their lives became our lives …

Carrie gave Dumbness a bad name …

Suddenly we mere mortals could be “friends” with our Alpha-Males & Females. Social Porn (read also my essay “Why do we love to watch Social Porn on TV?“) became a much stronger and intimate part of our lives – we were “connected” with the stars and could “talk” with them …

Death is just the beginning for some …

But nobody epitomized our Celebrity Obsession like the life and death of Michael Jackson. From his downfall, ruin and trial to his sudden death … the whole globe was watching and going mad with hysteria.

Jacko is now a modern God – his fans worship him like one and I wonder if this madness will increase the longer he is dead?!

Michael Jackson might well be our first Cradle-2-Grave-Celebrity – who’s first and last steps have been documented without mercy for the real person behind the surgery.

Thank the Digital Gods for iPods, hard drives and flash memory. Tapes were a great and cheap medium. Remember when we taped Top of Pops from radio or made great mix tapes for our beloved girlfriends?

But tape sucked: finding the right track was hard by winding it all forward and backward. All that winding drained your Walkmans batteries and wasted precious time. Some weaker Walkmans couldn’t "pull" long C120 tapes …

The sound of tapes wasn’t that bad – because radio and records weren’t that great either. But when the CD appeared you could hear the difference, which sucked.

And tapes could simply tear or the cheap plastic parts inside could brake. So you had to know how to repair a precious tapes.

Good bye tape – you won’t be missed … ever!

It’s up, it’s down. It has been sued, it has been sold. It will disappear, it stays. Whatever!

The Pirate Bay is one of the web’s most important and busy websites. Billions of downloads are initiated via the Pirate Bay’s HUGE database of torrents. And most of them "point" to illegally shared music, books, games, software or videos.

File Sharers and Content Producers alike should finally come to terms. Sharing copyrighted files is still theft – no matter how many cool new media terms you use to explain it. But content producers should finally follow the market – iTunes was a great start and the prices for music are now at an realistic and affordable level. For movies they still charge too much and deliver too little.

Most of all: theft won’t go away, but don’t treat all your customers like criminals. You should charm and educate them into good customers. Threats don’t work … and some people simply will never pay up.

Many of your customers are also thieves. Sometimes people buy stuff legally and also "own" pirated stuff at the same time.

Make buying an easy process, skip all the DRM crap and complicated protection software. Shopping should be fun! Offer additional services pirates can’t offer, like re-downloading stuff you might have deleted accidentally or free media web space to host my media collection?

There should be more innovation and less threats.