Mystery fuels huge popularity of web's Lonelygirl15

Lonelygirl15 appears to be an innocent, home-schooled 16-year-old, pouring her heart out for her video camera in the privacy of her bedroom. But since May, her brief posts on the video-sharing site YouTube and the social networking hub MySpace have launched a Web mystery eagerly followed by her million-plus viewers: Who is this sheltered ingenue who calls herself "Bree," and is she in some sort of danger -- or, worse, the tool of some giant marketing machine?

By Richard Rushfield and Claire Hoffman

September 8, 2006