Perez Hilton heads list of internet celebrities

Perez Hilton, who made his name blogging and bitching about the rich and famous, must think that he has now joined their ranks after being named as Forbes magazine's number one internet celebrity - for the third year running.
 
That Hilton (above) has held onto his crown yet again comes as no surprise given the obscurity of many of his rivals, who may be known to online obsessives but are unlikely ever to show up on Perez's blog.
 
Forbes compiled its list using four main criteria: how many web references the candidates enjoyed, the traffic ranking of their home pages, how much TV and press interest they provoked and the number of their followers on micro-blogging site Twitter.
 
Hilton's blog attracts more than 7.2 million visitors a month and he has 1.77 million followers on Twitter. His reputation is such that he also appears in gossip columns in his own right. Last year he made headlines when he got involved in the Miss USA furore and called Carrie Prejean a "dumb bitch". He also claimed he had been attacked by the manager of the Black Eyed Peas.
 
His closest challenger is the rather less well known Michael Arrington, founder of website TechCrunch. Third was the Scot Pete Cashmore, founder of Mashable. It is the third time Cashmore has made the list and his site, which records 'all that's new on the web', is now regarded as the sixth most popular blog in the world. Like Perez, he has more than 1.7 million followers on Twitter.
 
In fourth place are Evan Williams and Biz Stone whose claim to fame is that they invented Twitter. Unsurprisingly they score well on the Twitter followers scale, with more than 2.5 million between them.
 
Lingerie model Tila Tequila comes in eighth on the list, even though she announced this week she was quitting Twitter. Tequila hit the headlines when her lesbian fiancee, heiress Casey Johnson, died in January. Tequila tweeted regularly in the aftermath but has now announced she is leaving the site, denouncing Twitter as "the most hateful, devil worshippers [sic], racist, and violent community I have ever experienced."
 
Other notables in the Forbes Top 25 are Matt Drudge, founder of the Drudge Report, and Kevin Rose, who set up the social news site Digg.com. But, in an illustration of the fickle nature of internet fame, there is no place on the list for Lonelygirl15, aka Jessica Lee Rose, who topped the inaugural survey in 2007 after finding fame on YouTube. ·