Her ‘real’ name is Christine Dolce, and she has a Wikipedia page in her own name - so you know she must be someone. Online, she’s known as ForBiddeN, and 976,420 ‘friends’ currently link to her MySpace page, making her one of the three most popular personas on that website.

A recent Economist article describes Dolce as follows: “Bleached, buxom and with impressive marketing savvy, she is arguably the most successful brand to emerge from MySpace, and has already launched a line of clothing.” (That line of clothing is “Destroyed Denim.”)

The print version of the Economist ran a photo of Dolce with the caption, “The future of marketing? Really?” underneath. It does seem a bit hard to believe. Blogger Mathew Ingram points out that MySpace superstars such as Dolce and Tila Tequila are, “busy making themselves, rather than having others make them.”

That’s the part I don’t buy. As Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 points out, “It’s not clear whether MySpace is getting any revenue from ForBiddeN’s [commercial] deal[s] or any of the ads she runs for her own products…MySpace is serving ads on ForBiddenN’s page.”

Both Dolce and Tequila remind me of Japan’s Kano sisters, who are famous for…well, just for being famous. In this case, the Kano sisters were essentially a pre-packaged product developed by media and PR firms that knew exactly what they were doing and how to build an image that would sell.

I don’t know who’s behind Dolce’s “brand building” efforts, but it’s clear that what has been done so far goes beyond the bounds of what one person could reasonably do. A recent Stuff magazine piece on Tequila noted, “Being famous now has become it’s own reward…Tila Tequila has used simple, and some might agree Punk DIY ethics to create her stardom, one fan at a time…”

That last line is what I don’t (and you shouldn’t) believe. It’s part of the ‘brand’ image, what a PR firm somewhere would like consumers to believe. Rupert Murdoch didn’t pay $580 million for MySpace to stand by while other people collect the ROI.