Silicon Valley as the New Hollywood

Screenshots via People.com People Magazine covered every aspect of Mark Zuckerberg’s and Priscilla Chan’s wedding, including the couple’s dog Beast, who made it to People’s Pets page.

Their wedding was on the covers of the gossip magazines. Every moment of their honeymoon documented across the Web. A lavish boat ride and a stroll down Italy’s old cobbled streets, each footstep photographed by the paparazzi. There were even mundane photos of a receipt signed by the groom at a Rome restaurant called Nonna Betta. (They shared a tasty 32 Euro meal that included artichoke ravioli and two cups of tea, in case you were interested.)

No. I’m not talking about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. I’m talking about Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

It seems that the story of technology is no longer just a technology story. Instead, technology is now the new Hollywood.

Of course, Mr. Zuckerberg isn’t the only person being featured in the entertainment press. There is a long list of tech entrepreneurs who are increasingly splashed across glossy pages of magazines like People, Vanity Fair and Vogue, and pampered and beautified in elaborate photo shoots.

Even more telling, this change is visible on the screens of the technology blogs, especially the gossip-centric ones.

Ryan Tate, a former gossip blogger for Gawker and the author of the book “The 20% Doctrine,” said that over the years, a wider audience has clearly become enamored with the gossip of Silicon Valley notables.

“At Gawker, we saw more and more interest from a wider array of readers about people like Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, the C.E.O.’s of Google, Foursquare, DropBox, and others,” Mr. Tate explained.

He told the story of what he had thought would be an arcane blog post that was recently published in Gawker about Drew Houston, the chief executive of Dropbox.

“This post about Dropbox’s C.E.O. got close to 300,000 page views and was linked to from everywhere, including the British newspaper The Daily Mail,” he said, adding that when he wrote it, he thought it would be read by 15,000 people.

“It hit me that the story of tech is now well outside Silicon Valley,” he said. “When there is so much bad news and economic hardship in the world, people want to read about celebrity, and that is now the Valley people, who have swagger and bling and are often young and glamorous.”

Granted, people like Bill Gates of Microsoft and Larry Ellison of Oracle have been profiled for years, along with the multiple private jets, indoor trampoline rooms and more than one mansion compound that cost tens of millions or dollars, each. But the attention of the public has been drawn more through awe of their gargantuan bank accounts and bravado than by interest in them personally, or the companies they run.

(After all, how sexy can Oracle database software or Windows Office be?)

This new generation of tech celebrities is doted on because their products are more intimate: Facebook, Twitter and Angry Birds are forms of entertainment used by hundreds of millions of people.

The nerds still have nerdy tendencies, like playing Dungeons and Dragons. But the shift in power and celebrity is clearly crossing a once ironclad line between Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

In reaching that plateau of fame, fortune and intrigue, the story of technology is no longer just a story about technology but one that now makes it onto the cover of People magazine.

Correction: June 8, 2012
The name of the company Dropbox was incorrectly rendered with a capital B in an earlier version of this post.