Personal Branding and User Generated Crappy Graphs

I've been a pretty frequent visitor at Brian Shaler's Crappy Graphs lately, it's an amusing site. Now Brian has released a app for you to create your own crappy graph. That's pretty fun, and of course I tried it out and the result is the graph above.

The function is purely for fun, just as the Crappy Graph site.

What is interesting is the purpose of the application and the Crappy Graph site overall. Brian seems to be exploring different ways of marketing himself and his work using social networks as Twitter, Pownce, Facebook and obviously conventional blogging, and I'd say he has proven himself to be quite successfull. For example, a Google search on "Brian Shaler" results in 220,000 hits and he has 7000 followers on twitter. According to Brian he started building his personal brand less than a year ago, so I must say he is a great example of what you can accomplish with some talant and determination.

So what is his underlying purpose for branding himself? His purposed contribution to an interactive festival this year is named "Internet Celebrity: An entrepeneur's Ace in the Hole". "Name recognition can make the difference between reaching your market and sinking into oblivion" he continues. So what web2.0 application will Brian launch?

I find this very interesting.