On the sixteenth minute - Brian Maupin and Michael Hanscom

If the name Brian Maupin doesn't immediately ring a bell, perhaps you'll realize who he is when I mention a few other words.

iPhone.

Evo.

Best Buy.

Yes, Maupin is the person who, as I write this, is suspended from his job at Best Buy because of a variety of videos that he posted - some of which mentioned Best Buy, some of which didn't. I recently cited the most famous of his videos as an example of how people (and businesses) sometimes ignore facts that don't fit their preconceptions.

But what of Maupin?

He has a Twitter account (@beemop) and tweeted the following yesterday:

Again, haven't heard anything from Best Buy since the suspension. Not sure what the whole Monday thing is about.

"The whole Monday thing" is a reference to a quote attributed to Best Buy spokesman Justin Barber, but since the quote appeared in an Associated Press article, I don't want to endanger my life savings by quoting it here.

So Maupin is in a sort of limbo at this time, job-wise, although obviously he can continue to create things artistically. And he has time to reflect:

YouTube fame is kind of like “interviewed on the local news fame,” I think, in that for the first day or two you’re calling everyone and saying “hey did you see me!” and then not much more than a week later it’s old news and something else is happening. I imagine next week some lucky guy with a video of his buddy failing a backflip off a moving car will experience what I’m going though now.

This comment was posted at his "Also Coin Operated" comic web site, which has seen a huge surge in traffic. Hey, when you're an internet sensation, items related to your dog see a huge surge in traffic.

But time will pass, the notoriety will fade, and Maupin will continue to work (somewhere) and (maybe) create videos and (maybe) create comics. Then what happens?

For an illustration of this, I go to my favorite "fifteen minutes" person, someone who was also Dooced. Not Dooce, but Michael Hanscom. I heard about his story at the time, and I continued to mention Hanscom in my blog (at that time, the Ontario Empoblog), but most of the mentions had nothing to do with his Macintosh photographs, but with other stuff he did. See this February 2004 post about Howard Dean, this September 2004 post about Pat Robertson, and this September 2005 post about Katrina. Now I'll admit that I did also mention him in other posts about people fired from jobs, such as my August 2004 post about Joyce "Troutgirl" Park.

But I continued to read Hanscom because he continued to do interesting stuff. (As it turns out, because of the many changes that resulted when I created Empoprises, Hanscom fell off my radar, but I've reintroduced his blog to my feeds now.) And he continues to write interesting stuff - see his May post Driving is a Privilege, Not a Right.

So will we read Maupin after his fifteen minutes of fame are up? There's a fighting chance that we will. He seems to have a good head on his shoulders (even if I had a slight problem with some of the language issues in the iPhone video), so if you want to continue to monitor him, check:

http://acocomic.com/
http://www.beemop.com/
http://twitter.com/beemop
http://www.bestbuy.com/ (maybe)

It's interesting to note that Yahoo Finance lists Amazon as a major competitor to Best Buy. Think Maupin would fit in at Woot?