In America, celebrities are often what I call “deserving” celebrities, because most of them are 1) smart; 2) talented and 3) hard-working. Observing their behavior, I always thought they deserve to make the amount of money they make for their work, the sacrifices they, and often their family members, have to make. They take the word “professionalism” to extreme in everything they do. Including blogging.
Of course, most celebrities are too busy to write a blog, if people like me only have time to update a couple times a month (although I’m trying to pick up). But many have found it a good marketing tool–after all, they are all confident that the more people know about them, the more they’ll be liked, and the easier for them to sell whatever they need to sell. (I think this notion is generally true here in the US, however I am not sure about its applicability to celebrities in China. It’s more often the case that the more we know about a Chinese celebrity, the less we like them. But this point deserves another blog entry by itself.)
Getting back to my list. I subscribe to two blogs by American celebrities.


The first is Marc Cuban’s Blog Maverick. Yes, this is the guy who became a millionnaire at the age of 32 and a billionnaire at the age of 41, when he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo at the peak of the dot com boom.
What do I like about the blog? Marc Cuban writes his blog exactly as you see him on TV–bold, unabashed, intelligent, thought-provoking and always looking at things from a different angle. The only difference is now he has unlimited space and time (constrained only by his own time) to preach or market whatever he wants to hawk. Oh, did I mention he’s also a master seller? I have never seen a person like him who can sell anything he wants to (ok, so he doesn’t want to sell everything). Just look at this entry in which he solicited new ideas for attracting people to cinemas. He offered to give the person with the best idea a job in his company–not easy since the bar is very high and so many people who would kill to work for him read the blog. Even without finding anything worthy of the prize by his criterion, the entry itself already made enough buzz to market his company.
Reading the blog, with its no-apostrophe rapid-fire style, you can even envision how fanatically Marc typed away in front of his computer–just like him on TV. I once saw him giving an interview on ESPN before this year’s NBA finals. He was talking while exercising on a stairmaster while making jokes of Shaq. (Ignore the idiotic title the uploader gave for the video.)

He’s done other interviews on the same stairmaster in the finals. To be able to speak–let alone telling jokes–while exercising just shows how smart the guy is. I have never seen anyone taking interviews while exercising, and probably never will on anyone other than Cuban.
Well. Enough about Cuban. I’m running out of time. Guess I’ll continue tomorrow. Just so you don’t go to bed unable to sleep, the other American celebrity blog I read is Donald Trump’s blog, the Apprentice guy and real estate fame.