Celebrity-crazy blogger Perez Hilton, aka Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr, is talking to me on the phone while being driven out of Manhattan to the airport. “Before me, most blogs were very first person, like online diaries – ‘I woke up today, I had tea with my neighbour, I went for a walk in the park’ – blah, blah, blah. BORING! I didn’t want to talk about myself. I wanted to talk about celebrities and entertainment because they’re craaaaazzzzeee and they’re so much fun.”

Lavandeira calls himself Perez Hilton because he’s a Latino from Miami and he thought the name brought together the two worlds of his background and his first and most enduring love: celebrity. His blog was originally called PageSixSixSix.com after the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column. But the Post sued and he changed it to perezhilton.com. It’s now, in traffic terms, one of the 1,000 top websites in the world. He also got in trouble with Colin Farrell after posting a link to a notorious sex tape, and with Universal Studios for posting a picture of Jennifer Aniston topless. “I don’t get into trouble,” he claims. “Trouble finds me.” His voice is a cross between Andy Warhol and Graham Norton with a dash of Truman Capote.

PageSixSixSix was named the most-hated site in Hollywood. He loved this, of course, because it meant he was read by the A-list. It also meant he soon had 4.5m visitors a day, a figure that rose to 6.1m in that momentous week when the world stood still as Anna Nicole Smith died and Britney Spears yo-yoed in and out of rehab.

“I worked nonstop for a week. I almost had a nervous breakdown,” says Lavandeira. “You must make a lot of money out of this,” I say. A lady doesn’t discuss her income,” he snaps back, audibly pouting. In the car out of Manhattan, it sounded as though he was about to have another breakdown. More lawyers were trying to close him down, but he was too miserable about the whole thing to talk.

The next morning the first story that pops up on my computer says that Perez has been closed down by photo agencies challenging his use of copyright pictures. But the last time I looked, he was up and running with a post celebrating his beloved Britney – “This crazy bitch rules!” Welcome to the weird world of the web celebs.

And now here on my screen via a Skype video chat is Amanda Congdon, in her mid-twenties, shiny, happy and sitting in front of a window full of sunshine in Los Angeles. “I was basically just a struggling actress trying to find any outlet to act rather than be a waitress or work in a nine-to-five job,” she says.

She’s from the east coast – her parents are actors, her father was “the Duracell man in the 1980s” – but now she looks like all-California. She majored in organisational communications at college. But then the web discovered her, and it all started to make sense for Amanda. She answered an ad on Craigslist, an internet small-ads site, and found herself fronting Rocketboom, a wacky daily news video blog established by the TV director Andrew Baron.

“We never faked anything, we never had fake punch lines, it was always really offbeat or odd, but it wasn’t fake. On the web it works better if it’s not slick and polished like TV. People like me real and raw.”

Rocketboom boomed. No wonder. Congdon is a screen natural. On Skype it’s as if she’s in my room, her eyes fixing the camera and, therefore, mine. She’s the kind of thin, pretty, wacky chick that haunts the dreams of boys and unwise men. She left Rocketboom after a personality bust-up with Baron. She then launched AmandaAcrossAmerica.com, travelling the States, chatting to bloggers and assorted geeks and posting the resulting videos. That’s over, and now she’s landed in LA making a video blog for ABC – abcnews.go.com/Amanda. It’s currently in the world’s top 40,000 blogs. Not bad when there are up to 100m to choose from. Like Rocketboom, it’s a jolly newscast with attitude. Amanda sits at the cutting edge where old and new media converge.

“I always wanted to do television, that’s why I wanted to be an actress. But I’ll absolutely never stop video blogging. I don’t think I’d even stop for a while, it’s a total addiction.”

She’s aiming for a TV show with “a heavy internet component”. If old media wants to save itself from the harrowing commercial inroads of the web, then the Amandas of this world may be the answer. But on the other hand, if web celebs want to become real celebs out there in the world beyond the screen, then they may have to come to terms with old media.There’s also Henry Earl. Now Henry’s a bit of a problem, research-wise. You can find him easily enough at henryearl.messedup.net. Contacting him is another matter. After joining some Yahoo group – a mistake, as it turned out, as I was deluged with various improper suggestions – I managed to send a message. ButI then learnt that Henry had gone back to prison in Lexington, Kentucky. Henry has, you might say, form. He’s been found guilty of around 1,000 offences, mostly alcohol-related, and spends almost 250 days a year in jail.

But it was on the Fayette County Jail’s website that Henry became famous. His long-as-your-arm record and mug shots became hot on the web. Henry started appearing on talk and news shows, just because he was this 57-year-old guy who couldn’t stay out of jail. Now he’s out there on the net, he’s a web hub. Check out What’s up with Henry Earl? for all the latest Henry news.

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