Valleywag magnified the "celebrity" part of micro-celebrity practice. Highly read gossip columns covering the lives, loves, outfits, and scandals of tech industry players would inflate the profiles of the people it covered; Gawker, for instance, was almost wholly responsible for Julia Allison's rise to fame, and Allison was well aware of this. It, like Valleywag, mapped the values of celebrity culture onto the technology scene by publicizing gossip and rumors. Valleywag also demonstrated the process by which people were transformed into characters, as it ascribed public personas to regular people and created interconnected, well-worn plots around them. People who had been ascribed micro-celebrity by Valleywag were also taken up and written about by other news sources, further inflating their visibility.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 366