Dana Blankenhorn and Paula Rooney over at ZDNet hit it on the head. Bob Young, Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, Linus Torvalds -- put these men in a line-up and most people wouldn't know who they were. Is celebrity contradictory to open source? [1] The open source community as a whole does not lend itself to "look at me".

Here at SxSW Interactive [2] we're learning about "Internet Famous". There was even an entire session [3] dedicated to it. Internet Famous are those who have some degree of on-line fame or notoriety, most notably the latter of the two. Paparazzi sometimes follow them around. There are even gossip pages [4] about them.

This Sunday at SxSW we witnessed the making of the newest member of the Internet Famous when a journalist became the story at the Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) keynote [5]. Many of us had never heard of Sarah Lacey, but when her interview with Zuckerberg bombed and the crowd revolted, suddenly she was the talk of the Internet [6]. While I sat in the keynote, I watched the fame build first-hand via hundreds of Twitters [7], sms-es and blog posts [8]. An Internet Star was born.

SxSW has been an interesting learning experience but we prefer to look up to our Bob Young, Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens and Linus Torvalds (and oh-so-many other open source contributors and leaders) any ol' day.
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Carlie Fairchild [9] is the publisher of Linux Journal.