Reality TV has a lot to answer for. Just as the summer schedules are filling with ever more D-list celebrities, along comes a trend promising that you too can be an instant video star. The video blog, or "vlog", is the fashionable new way for amateur performers to find an internet audience, whether by chronicling their domestic minutiae or wittily parodying mainstream news bulletins. With audiences typically in the dozens or hundreds, the vlogs aren’t yet threatening ratings at the BBC. They are, however, creating a new generation of online stars – from schoolgirls as young as 11 to a bubbly New York actress with a cult international following.

To join them, all you need is a digital video camera, a high-speed internet connection and a website that will host your oeuvre. Ian Mills, a 17-year-old college student from Milton Keynes, spends around £5 a month to host his daily show, The 05 Project (the05project.com). But his growing fan base, currently around 100 visitors a day, has already donated enough cash to keep him online for another six months, and Mills is determined to upload a fresh three-minute video every day this year. "I’ll spend two or three hours filming and editing whatever amuses me that day," he says. "The most popular entry was probably the one where I had my Spider-Man doll make a cup of tea. It’s the feedback that keeps you going."

Recently, several British vloggers have come to the attention of directories such as VlogDir.com. As with many weblogs, the appeal can be hard to understand: recent video-diary entries by a 15-year-old London schoolboy, Topher Collins, included him eating a banana, and screaming into the camera. Occasionally, though, you encounter bursts of creativity that are at least as compelling as anything on Saturday-night TV. Rocketboom, a daily three-minute vlog produced in New York, is just waiting to be picked up by an established broadcaster.

Each weekday, Rocketboom’s anchor, 23-year-old actress Amanda Congdon, introduces bizarre film reports about breakdancing bodybuilders, sarcastic items about Arianna Huffington’s weblog, even serious local investigations into alleged police brutality. The show (at rocketboom.com/vlog) claims to reach 30,000 viewers. Last month, when it advertised for an unpaid weather forecaster, more than 300 applied. Not bad for a show made in a one-bedroom flat using a standard video camera, a laptop and a $10 map as a backdrop.

If you want to join the party, then an explanatory site such as Freevlog.org is a good place to start. Better still, explore the best of what is out there. Start with The Dylan Show, in which 11-year-old Dylan Verdi takes you on outings with her dad and grandma (dylanverdi.blogspot.com). Or, if you can’t quite break that reality-TV habit, tune into The Carol and Steve Show (stevegarfield.com), in which a Boston couple share their trips to the carwash. Hardly riveting, yet the Garfields are now internet superstars.

Will vlogging be more than a fad? Google certainly thinks so, and is investing to profit from the expected boom. The vloggers, meanwhile, seem determined to nurture their small-time fame. "It makes you a semi-celebrity, and you get to leave your mark," reflects Ian Mills. "Although no one has yet come up to me in the street and said, ‘Hey, aren’t you that idiot with the videoblog?’"

david.rowan@thetimes.co.uk

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