We Blog!

by Jon Lebkowsky. Edited version originally appeared in The Austin Chronicle as A Corner in Cyberspace Turned Blog Party.

"...the average weblog is unreadable."
– Jakob Nielsen

"Blog" is short for "Web log." Several years ago, heavy Web surfers began creating logs-compendia of curious information and interesting links they encountered in their travels through cyberspace. Improvements in Web design tools have made it easier for beginners to create their own Web logs and update them as often as they wish-even every five minutes, as this guy was doing. Blogs are thus more dynamic than older-style home pages, more permanent than posts to a Net discussion list. They are more private and personal than traditional journalism, more public than diaries." - Henry Jenkins, MIT Enterprise Technology Review, March, 2002.

Checking in with friends ... Honoria is sitting at Mozart's, working on her dissertation and overhearing a conversation in "fluent Wired MBA." David's discovered another weblogger at work and is looking forward to a collaborative effort to set up work-related weblogs. Adina mentions a prototype for a phone that will shock you if your voice is too loud. Adam just learned that the weblog software he uses is getting an upgrade, just after he installed the current version on a new host. Prentiss's kids were on television over the weekend, and he's linked to the video. Jenny's pissed because her weblog software is on the blink. Tim threatens to sell his too-vocal dogs to the local Chinese restaurant for dog suey. Chris is thinking about a project that provides books for prisoners.

I seldom get a chance to hang out and talk with my friends in the "real world," but they're just a click away. I keep up with 'em by reading their thoughts, posted on the web in weblogs or online journals. (Which is which? Weblogs are notes about stuff encountered online, with links, whereas journals are personal but public diaries, but webloggers that I queried recently said the distinction's unimportant. They do both.) "Blog" is the common term for this kind of web site, and as Henry Jenkins says above, the term is an abbreviation for weblog. The diminutive caught on after information architect Peter Merholz wrote, in 1999, "For What It's Worth I've decided to pronounce the word 'weblog' as wee'- blog. Or 'blog' for short." The Pyra Labs adopted the term for its weblog application, Blogger. Use of the term became so common so fast that the Oxford English Dictionary added it to their lexicon in 2002.

New York Times columnist Willam Safire defines a blog as "a Web site belonging to some average but opinionated Joe or Josie who keeps what used to be called a 'commonplace book' -- a collection of clippings, musings and other things like journal entries that strike one's fancy or titillate one's curiosity. What makes this online daybook different from the commonplace book is that this form of personal noodling or diary-writing is on the Internet, with links that take the reader around the world in pursuit of more about a topic." Blogger Rebecca Blood, author of The Weblog Handbook, is less dismissive, and her description suggests why some professional journalists, like Safire, make light of the blog phenomenon: "By highlighting articles that may easily be passed over by the typical web user too busy to do more than scan corporate news sites, by searching out articles from lesser-known sources, and by providing additional facts, alternative views, and thoughtful commentary, weblog editors participate in the dissemination and interpretation of the news that is fed to us every day. Their sarcasm and fearless commentary reminds us to question the vested interests of our sources of information and the expertise of individual reporters as they file news stories about subjects they may not fully understand."

Actually, they're both right: some blogs are trivial (in fact, celebrate the trivial) and some are not. Some have huge audiences, some speak only to a small circle of friends. Many are individual, but some are team efforts. Professional blogs are appearing. Jupiter Research launched blogs by six of its senior analysts. Journalists like Dan Gillmor, Peter Maass, Andrew Sullivan, and Scott Rosenberg are blogging. Even celebrities have blogs, like Melanie Griffith, Wil Wheaton, RuPaul, Al Roker, and Jeff Bridges (whose blog is handwritten!).

There are also "metablogs" like Blogdex and Daypop that show which stories are getting the most attention, or Blogstreet, that lists the top blogs and shows blog "neighborhoods" (blogs that are related through their "blogrolls," which are those marginal lists of favorite blogs).

Since the Internet bubble burst and hyperdelusional notions of net-based wealth went south, blogs have become a major source of free online content (often licensed under the Creative Commons project, which offers free boilerplate licenses for those who want to give their content away while reserving some rights.)

Blogging is more than writing and publishing, it's increasingly interactive. Bloggers link and respond to each other, and they include discussion links so that readers can give feedback. Some technologies, like Slash, which is the engine for Slashdot.com, combine blogs with forums, and include other enhancements, like reputation systems in which comments are rated so you can filter out those with low ratios of signal to noise. You can see blogs as an extension of zines, small independent magazines that published inexpensively, not for profit, but as a means of expression and a way to communicate. Zines were facilitated by the desktop publishing revolution, and many zinesters moved from paper publications to the web because the barriers to entry were even lower, so eventually there were fewer zines but many webzines appeared, and they weren't tied to a production schedule, so we evolved away from the sense of the "periodical" with the realization that the web is always on, so you can publish any time.

One of the most popular and influential weblogs, boingboing, began as a zine published by Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair. Like so many zinesters, Mark and Carla stopped publishing hardcopy and moved to the web, where Mark published occasional articles and eventually incorporated Pyra's Blogger technology. boingboing became a directory of wonderful things, and became increasingly popular. Mark asked Cory Doctorow to blog while he was on vacation, and it was like showing a duck his first pond: Cory jumped in, splashed around, and realized that blogging was a big part of his calling. With Cory on board, and later additions of David Pescovitz and Xeni Jardin as members of the team, boingboing became a first stop for the best and brightest denizens of Greater Blogistan. So how'd this all get started?

During the dotcom frenzy an important technology emerged from the need to build efficient publishing systems for large web sites: the content management system. Content management systems allow non-techies to add, edit, or delete web site content through a relatively easy web interface, and publish the changes more or less immediately. The elements of the web page that don't change are stored in a template, so if you're a writer or editor you can focus on the text you're creating; and the technology automates the generation of a web page that combines the template elements with your additions or changes. With this kind of software, daily updates are a cinch.

As dotcoms were tumbling, a few companies started building simple content management tools to make weblogs and journals much easier to update. Blogger, Radio Userland, Movable Type, and LiveJournal are all free and more or less easy to set up, and they all found bunches of users. So many, in fact, that it's been tough to keep track of the emerging blogsphere without meta tools for searching, measuring, and especially filtering weblogs and journals. One of these tools, Blogstreet (http://www.blogstreet.com), showed 80,444 total blogs as of this writing, and more coming on every day.

Is "blog" a technology or a form of content? Smart Mobs author Howard Rheingold has an answer: "The technology makes it easy. The type of content is brief, contextual, opinionated, and linked. I'd say it's both." I asked author Doug Rushkoff if blogging is a killer app, or the fad du jour. " Isn't there something in-between?" he asked, and went on to say "I think it's an indication of the appropriate use of web technology." How else might you describe it? "DIY (do it yourself) grassroots bottom-up chaotic self-organizing ... capable of overthrowing a fascist regime. Just watch."

How many blogs in Austin? It's hard to tell, because there's no accurate count of weblogs anywhere that I can find. Evan Ralston's Austin Index at http://koax.org/austin/index.php lists almost ninety are weblogs, but that list is no way comprehensive. The web site GeoURL at http://www.geourl.org/ lets you find lists of bloggers within a specific location, but that list is limited to those who have actually signed up. If you click the GeoURL link on my own weblog at http://www.weblogsky.com, you'll see GeoURL-aware blogs within 500 miles of the illustrious 78704 zip code, with distances, sorted by proximity. Of those, 37 are within 30 miles. I entered "Austin Texas" as search keywords at Blogstreet and got 103 hits, but who knows what that means?

Then there's Meetup.com, a web site that orchestrates physical meetings of various special interest groups from JAG fans to Slashdot devotees to Chihuahua lovers. The Weblogger Meetup was one of the first the company organized, and the one for Austin has 52 members. Some subset of that gang of 52 will show up on the meetup date every month and talk about blogging and just about anything else. I've been to three meetups, and each was very different. The latest, at Mojo's Daily Grind, included a dozen or so bloggers, all males, geeking out over issues like the best way to specify text size. Why all male? Probably an accident of timing - there are plenty of women who blog, Jenny Nazak, whose blog is called "Trailer Park Girl" (http://crossroads.net/jnazak/blog/), says she thinks her own female blogpals are more attracted to meetings with members of a community, i.e. bloggers who've connected through email and other channels as a result of reading each other's comments, than with meetings that include a bunch of people who happen to blog but haven't found that affinity, at least not yet.

The blogger scene is well represented at South by Southwest Interactive, and in 2002 a blogmanic herd gathered in a circle for Ben Brown's session, Taking Online Interactivity Offline, which was about extending the stuff you do online into the community and the world. That discussion had two directions. First, there was talk about hardcopy publishing, i.e. books, as a way to extend your reach beyond the limits of your computer monitor. Then there was a longer discussion about taking the communities you build online and extending them into the realm of the physical, and this was the real focus of the session, and something that people who do "virtual communities" have been talking about for several years. Examples: Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community and Katie Hafner's The Well, both of which discuss the way online relationships formed on The WELL, a Bay Area conferencing system and a seminal online community, extended offline.

Ben Brown and I had a hypercaffeinated discussion at Bouldin Creek Café (coincidentally the site of my first blogger meetup). Says Ben ironically, "You don't have a weblog because you're a socially adept person." I figure if that's the case, the tendency of bloggers to find each other and form communities might suggest that blogging is terrific compensation for whatever social skills may be lacking. When you're online you're disembodied; in a text-based reality, you are what you write, which means that you don't have to get past appearances. You can present a multidimensional view of your self - your inner self - so that people who find you online know you better than people you encounter in your daily experience of the physical realm, even if they've never set eyes on you.

If this social aspect of being-online is what blogging's about, weblogs don't have to be literary. They're more like casual conversation, often trivial, sometimes profound. Brown notes that he was pretty negative about weblogs when they started popping up on his radar. In a personal essay he posted on 3/21/2000, after appearing on a blog panel at SXSW, he quotes his own words, describing how, on a weblog panel at SXSW Interactive, he made a passionate condemnation of the increasingly popular blogs, suggesting that they are too trivial, and a waste of talent:

"... a few years ago, people were talking about this internet revolution thing, people were saying that it was so amazing that anyone could go out and publish their own manifestos, their own magazines, people could connect on whole new levels because shit! you can do it all from a computer and it's so much easier. And everyone can do it, everyone can write their novel, everyone can say what they need to say. And now, good god, now you guys are telling me that the revolution, the way that independent personal content is going is to the WEBLOG? It's quick, it's easy, but is a link to a wired news article and a snarky comment content? Is that what you want to be reading on the net? Is that what you want the future to be? Jesus man! That's not content! That's the patter for a radio ad!"

If you forget the revolution, forget art, and figure that blogs are conversations, it's easier to make sense of their popularity. But how can these published pages be conversations? I suggest that , while they may appear at first glance to be traditional one-to-many publications, they're actually a manifestation of the many-to-many conversational character of the Internet. Bloggers read other blogs and respond, they link to each other, and many if not most blogs incorporate feedback via a discussion component. Nobody's satisfied hanging solitary thoughts on a sign - they want to correspond.

One group of Austin bloggers has created a metablog web site (http://austinbloggers.org/). A metablog compiles items that were originally posted to other sites. In this case, the site picks up posts automagically from sites built with Movable Type's weblog software, using a feature called TrackBack, which integrates blogs by allowing bloggers to link related content items. AustinBloggers, by accumulating links to Austin-related items posted at participating sites, represents an active slice of the growing Austin community of bloggers. The site was created by Adina Levin, an Austin consultant whose usual focus is business strategy. One of her pastimes, though, is figuring out how to modify blog tools, coming up with new applications for the technology. She created the metablog with help from Chip Rosenthal and Adam Rice, active proponents of a loose association of bloggers formed via the Meetup.com gatherings. Given evidence that a community is forming, David expects more than technology. " It's my hope that our fledgling community broadens our discussion away from just geeky stuff," he writes in an email to the austinbloggers list. "For example, I want to learn from the rest of you about how to craft good stories, hear your experiences dealing with visitors and privacy, and discover what you think this whole blogging thing means for our society and, in particular, Austin."

Then there's online journals. When I conducted an informal poll via email, most respondents said they didn't see much of a difference. On the other hand, Ryan Ozawa at Diarist.net says (at http://www.diarist.net/guide/blogjournal.shtml) that there's a difference: " a traditional weblog is focused outside the author and his or her site. A web journal, conversely, looks inward - the author's thoughts, experiences, and opinions." Austin has a journal community so active that the fourth annual Journalcon will be held here, and there's a site, Austin Stories (http://www.austin-stories.com/), that aggregates content from almost 50 local journals, a good place to get started if you want to get your head around the journal scene. You might think that journals, because they're "personal," are obsessive, neurotic, trivial, or mundane, but the best journals are like the best short stories in that however micro their focus, they contain revelations.

For instance, as I look in on "Gwen's petty, judgmental, evil thoughts," I learn of her attempt to remove a "humongous (but still tiny) spider" from her house by putting a transparent box over it and scooting it out the front door. There'sso much more to the story, though. Her life as mother of three boys with "tiny violent men" (toys) and her retreat into the Hello, Kitty safety of her own room. Her respect for life: she cares enough about the spider to ease it along the floor, taking a long time, pausing because "I'm so old and worn out, that I kept having to stop to stand up and stretch my back." Worried because she thinks he might've crushed a spider leg, checking back to make sure it's moved from where she left it outside the door.

Gwen (who according to her bio has moved from Austin back to her hometown, Houston) is a self-proclaimed "corporate peon." If not for the Internet, would she be publishing her thoughts? This got me thinking about the motivation for the hundreds or thousands of weblogs and journals that are popping up, many of them off radar. Before weblogs, even before the web itself existed, Mike Gunderloy was writing about this urge as it manifest in the zine world, in a 1988 essay called "Why Publish?" from How to Publish a Fanzine: Why do people spend all their spare time and money publishing something that, in the great majority of cases, will bring them nothing but hate mail and big bills? I think the reasons break down pretty neatly into three classes: Fun, Fame and Fortune. (http://www.zinebook.com/resource/gunder1.html)

Mike went on to note that fun is the best of reasons, along with its corollary, friends. Fame is a maybe, and with the web, considering the sheer numbers, you're unlikely make a splash heard 'round the world. A friends & family audience seems to be enough for many, though.

Says Drucilla Blood, who blogs at "fullbleed: confessions of a zine girl" (http://surreally.net/fullbleed):

I find that as a mom who rarely gets time to write, the blog is the perfect place to release those quick bursts of writing that I can afford. It helps that there's an audience to give me instant feedback, as well. I kind of grew up in the age of zines, which was nowhere near as gratifying in terms of the immediacy of the connection between the writer and the reader. Yet, somehow, I managed to continue to do zines for years, spending all of my money on copies (when I couldn't steal them) and postage (which I never quite figured out how to steal, consistently). The blog is also much, much less expensive.

Adam Rice adds

I think that many people, myself included, have a primal urge to create order in some corner of the universe. Tinkering with my blog is one way to give vent to that urge. Then there's fortune, but you might as well forget it. In the zine world it was enough to break even; and in the blog world, nobody's making a cent, not directly, anyway. Some writers and consultants demonstrate their value and expertise through their blogs, so there's an indirect payoff.

According to David Nuñez, "The personal/vanity websites are the business cards of the 21st century because they have substance; with my site, people can get a better idea of what I know,where I am coming from, and most importantly what I am DOING." He adds, "My web presence allows me to shake new hands over the ether."

Other bloggers make peripheral sales (e.g. via links to eBay or the Amazon associates program) and some have Paypal buttons encouraging donations, but they're lucky to recoup costs. Blogging is clearly not about money.

Honoria's spending the morning fixing files she accidentally wiped out yesterday, and I'm feeling her pain. David is coping with his feelings of revulsion and disgust over the Michael Jackson documentary. Adina notes that online networking sites like Ryze.com "are socially weird. You ask someone to be your friend without any of the social context of a shared activity or conversation." Prentiss is thinking about language and grrrls. Jenny got email from her third grade first crush, who once stabbed her with a pencil. Tim needs a new toilet seat. Chris wonders why a record industry concerned about digital piracy doesn't drop CDs and retreat to vinyl....

Welcome to the neighborhood! Pull up a keyboard!