|
Web of
blogs
By JULIE
MORAN ALTERIO
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: January 26, 2003)
If you stumble upon Morgan Johnston's Web log, you'll learn
that he was born at 4:50 in the a.m. on Oct. 18, 1977, in
Burlington, Vt.
You'll also learn that at 11:43 p.m. on Jan. 9 of this year
he was listening to Chuck Mangione's "Feels So Good."
Trivia like this is posted along with Johnston's musings on
everything from junk e-mail to Legos to Pakistan.
"It's just a cross section of my life," Johnston says.
The self-described "computer and video geek" from Port
Chester is one of a half-million or so people who've signed
onto the latest Internet craze — writing a regularly updated
Web log, or "blog" for short.
Somewhere between a diary and a digest, blogs mix opinion,
news, gossip and personal revelations.
Think of it as reality TV meets the Web.
Johnston started his blog about a year and a half ago. "It
became an easy way to update my friends and family on what I
was up to," he says.
It's also Johnston's running commentary on his Web surfing,
complete with links to other people's sites. "If someone has
something interesting to say, I'll link to it," he says.
Johnston slams "The Osbornes" for gratuitous profanity,
recommends the latest edition of Wired magazine and describes
a recent trip to Orlando, where he dined on andouille-crusted
Texas redfish at Emeril's restaurant.
"It's what you talk with your friends about. It's what you
talk with your parents about. You might say you had a great
time in Florida, but you also discuss what's going on with
technology, or, 'Wow, I just read this interesting article,' "
Johnston says.
Blogs satisfy the primal human desire to stand on a
soapbox, says Rebecca Blood, the San Francisco-based author of
"The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and
Maintaining Your Blog" (Perseus Publishing, July 2002).
"For many people, the ability to put their point of view
out for anyone to read is irresistible," she says.
Blogging is too new to have attracted attention from
established monitors of Internet traffic. A blogger herself,
Blood says even the most popular Web logs only reach between
1,000 and 3,000 readers. Fewer than a dozen have more than
10,000 daily visitors, she estimates.
"A columnist in a college newspaper or local magazine will
reach many more people than even the Web logs with the largest
audiences," Blood says.
Johnston gets an average of 40 visitors a day to his
"Knitwitology" blog, including college chums and family.
How does Johnston feel knowing that he must keep even a
relatively small audience entertained?
"It's a little daunting," he admits.
Because events in Johnston's life overlap others, he's
careful to get permission from family and friends before
posting details or photos that could embarrass anyone.
"When I started this, I sat down and thought about what I
felt like sharing and what I felt like keeping quiet," he
says.
His mother, brother and girlfriend all have Web logs of
their own, and everyone avidly reads and links to each other's
sites.
Something very similar is happening on the Web at large.
Blogs are still too novel to have made much of a dent on the
American psyche, but to those who enjoy them, they mark a new
way to meet and mix in cyberspace.
Though most experts peg the number of active blogs at about
500,000, typing "blog" into the Google search engine yields
3.3 million results. It's hard to say exactly who is doing all
this blogging. There's no official central repository of
demographic data to reveal the age, gender or geography of a
typical blogger.
What is clear is that the population of bloggers has
created a community by linking to one another's sites.
Sometimes the community can be huge — University of
Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds receives upward of
50,000 page views a day on his Instapundit site thanks in part
to links from other bloggers.
Sometimes the circle is tiny. West Point cadet Tony Yang
says the only readers he can count on are his high school
pals.
The 21-year-old transplanted Californian fills his blog
with details about his new life at the U.S. Military Academy.
One day Yang revels in the movie houses, nightclubs and
sheer diversity of people in New York. Another day he
complains about frigid temperatures putting a damper on a
snowboarding excursion. "All of my buddies who are 3,000 miles
away can hear how I'm freezing my toes off, and I can hear how
they're partying their heads off," Yang says with a rueful
chuckle.
Blogging is a creative outlet for the cadet, who begins his
day at 6 a.m. and is busy with classes and homework until
lights out at 11:30 p.m. "It's just light-hearted,
let-off-some-steam venting. It's also a way to keep in touch
with friends who are miles away," Yang says.
Visitors to Yang's blog get a glimpse into his interests,
which include marathon running and travel. There's also a
photo of Yang with prominent Asian American writer Helen Zia
at a benefit for Wen Ho Lee. Yang agitated for Lee's release
when the former Los Alamos scientist was accused of spying and
jailed.
"A lot of people who know me look at it and say, 'Wow, I
didn't know you were into that,' " Yang says.
Yang doesn't count visitors to his blog, but he belongs to
several Web rings, which link sites with similar themes.
Links are the hallmark of the "blogosphere." If Web logs
didn't link to one another, they'd simply be diaries, Blood
says.
"Web logs are arguably the first form that is native to the
Web. They emerged from two key elements of the Web: hypertext
and the ability for anyone with an Internet connection to
create a Web page," she says.
The idea for hypertext links dates back to the late 1930s
and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Vannevar
Bush. He had the basic ideas that would lead, decades later,
to the World Wide Web, and to blogs.
Bush visualized a system of information processing that
would permit users to browse content, create home pages, scan
texts and make and follow links (he called them "trails"). He
was thinking about microfilm and machines with levers, but the
concepts were there.
Like the Web itself, blogs first attracted the technically
savvy who knew how to create home pages from scratch. "The
earliest Web logs were all link-driven, and the people who
created them were, I think, information junkies who were
fascinated with the Web and wanted to share their finds with
others," Blood says.
The nascent movement came to life in August 1999 when a
service called Blogger went online. Blogger offers free,
easy-to-use software that novices can use to automatically
build and update a Web log.
With specialized software from Blogger and the similar
technologies that followed, free time and something to say
soon became the only prerequisites to blogging.
The trend's increasing popularity inspired online magazine
Salon last year to give its readers a chance to create their
own Web logs. After a 30-day trial, Salon provides a year of
software and Web site hosting for $39.95.
With blogging freed from the ranks of the technocracy, a
wider range of people have flocked to the hobby, says J.D.
Lasica, senior editor for the Online Journalism Review and
media columnist for the American Journalism Review.
"The early bloggers wrote about what they knew best:
technology and software," Lasica says. "The form has only
begun to flower in the past year when Web logs moved beyond
their original moorings into a broader array of topics:
politics, foreign policy, debates over public affairs."
Andrew Sullivan, a writer for the New Republic and other
print publications, writes one of the best-known political
blogs.
One might visit Sullivan's blog because of an interest in
politics, but the asides on his conversion from Windows to
Macs, or on walking his dog, or on his battle with HIV, draw
the reader into a personal circle usually reserved for family
and friends.
These kinds of revelations can go both ways.
Johnston started a blog to give other people a peek into
his life, but he says he's found that in creating a virtual
roadmap to his personal interests, he's learned about himself.
"When you pour everything out there, it guides your thoughts."
Send e-mail to Julie Moran Alterio
| 
