Good article in the New York Times abut the slog that is being a struggling rock star via the web:

In the early days of the Hold Steady, Kubler fielded only a few e-mail messages a day, and a couple of "friend" requests on MySpace. But by this spring, he was receiving more than 100 communications from fans each day, and he was losing as much as two or three hours a day dealing with them. "People will say to me, 'Hey, dude, how come you haven't posted a bulletin lately?'" Kubler told me. "And I'm like, 'I haven't done one because every time I do we get 300 messages and I spend a day going through them!'" To cope with the flood, the Hold Steady has programmed a software robot to automatically approve the 100-plus "friend" requests it receives on MySpace every day. Other artists I spoke to were testing out similar tricks, including automatic e-mail macros that generate instant "thank you very much" replies to fan messages. Virtually everyone bemoaned the relentless and often boring slog of keyboarding. It is, of course, precisely the sort of administrative toil that people join rock bands to avoid.

Anyway, it is interesting as an example of how there is this natural ceiling within the medium, one of those things boosters like to set aside and place a tea cozy over. The marketplace and the larger community operates on a large degree on anonymity and partial information. I do not know anything about the bakery my bread comes from, I just need to know I like the bread. In fact, I cannot know everything about all the people I rely upon for my day-to-day life as a consumer and even a citizen. No one can. You can learn more about this bit or that bit of it all but to do that you have to know less about another area. Web rock star groupies can't spend the same hours pursuing their civic duties or, one might assume, their own lives.

So, while Internet-built fan bases inevitably do hit a plateau, they also sop up activity that is actually productive, though less allegedly personal in another direction. Something of a dead end...in addition to something about the incompleting of things...and some more about inefficiencies...and...stuff. Hard to keep up concentration all of a sudden.

[Ed.: "...stuff..."? When the hell was our last blog-o-bot 2000 upgrade?]