Published in AustralianIT, April 22 2003

THESE days, if you want to become famous without actually achieving anything, you audition for Big Brother.

At the turn of the millennium, the best way to achieve this goal was to lock yourself up and say you were going to survive solely by buying goods on the internet.

This unusual combination of Robinson Crusoe and a shop-a-holic was deployed frequently as 2000 approached.

In 1999, MSN UK sponsored four people to lock themselves in a room for 100 hours and survive using only internet resources. (The fact that people can survive in frozen wastelands without any net access whatsoever wasn't widely mentioned at the time.)

Undoubtedly, the most famous example of this phenomenon was DotComGuy, who moved into an empty house in Dallas at the beginning of 2000.

Tracked by web cams and with regular online chats and information feeds, DotComGuy was forced to live only on those resources he could acquire online.

Luckily for him, he had a large budget.

The public face of Dot- ComGuy was 26-year-old Mitch Maddox (he changed his name before moving into the house).

But the driving force was business manager Len Critcher.

Critcher ensured a high degree of initial media coverage for DotComGuy, even if much of it was critical.

One publication described him as "just another hi-tech social retard".

More damaging was that the timing was exquisitely bad.

The dotcom collapse of 2000 made it painfully obvious that only the best-planned online ventures would have any chance of succeeding.

Potential sponsors were dropping off the bourse like flies, and once the initial flurry of media interest died down, few gave DotComGuy a second thought.

DotComGuy did complete his task, finally leaving the house (now fully furnished) on a scooter on New Year's Eve 2000.

Reports quickly surfaced that some sponsorship dollars had been pulled and he wouldn't get the $98,280 originally promised as payment for living in the house.

Perhaps he didn't care -- though cash or a sense of purpose might have proved elusive, Maddox announced plans to marry a woman he had met in a chat room while locked away.

Almost 30 months later, DotComGuy has all but vanished from the internet.

The project's website is no longer online, and Maddox and Critcher failed to respond to any email queries from The Australian.

While the aim of DotComGuy may have been to prove that electronic commerce was viable, the real lesson was that electronic fame is not.