Blogging your mind

Voices for the offbeat? Links to obscure sites?A home? Weblogs conform to nonconformity

By Doug Bedell
Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News

They are called weblogs - blogs for short. In the space of a mere two years, this new breed of Web site has begun changing the way Net denizens navigate through the Internet's sometimes mind-boggling info-clutter.

Blogs are enigmatic. Not even those who created this growing genre can agree on a definition. Some of the movement's founders, in fact, deny they're even blogging. But one thing is certain: These personal, energetic, heavily linked commentary pages have struck a resounding chord with Web surfers seeking alternative but reliable guides through the tangled jungle of Internet news, entertainment and general e-silliness.

"You know how people nudge each other and say, 'Holy crap! Get a load of that!' " says Derek Powazek, award-winning designer of Fray, Kvetch and other smart Web sites. "That's what a weblog does."

The explanation seemed to sit as well as any with an audience gathered recently for an intense South By Southwest Interactive Festival panel discussion in Austin on weblogging, which Mr. Powazek ( www.powazek.com ) moderated. Still, as the number of cataloged blogs has swelled from a handful to hundreds, commonalities have grown harder and harder to pinpoint.

By and large, weblogs shun heavy graphics. Blogs are bursts of text and hypertext packaged chronologically, mapping the designer's treks across the Internet and pointing out noteworthy sights along the way. The most successful collect wide followings of users who feel simpatico with the creator's tastes for news, offbeat information and collections of fascinating info.

Says renowned Geeks author Jon Katz: "To me, weblogs may embody personalized media on the Net - enterprising geeks creating interesting new sites that set out to define news in different ways, to be ... interesting, coherent and more civil.

"This is the complete opposite structure of conventional media, which is top-down, boring and inherently arrogant."

Mr. Katz's treatise on weblogs, quite properly, appeared last year in Slashdot ( www.slashdot.org ), which itself started as a sort of weblog carrying the motto, "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters."

Like many of this ilk, Slashdot is vertical, or specialized. It was created to provide insider news on the development of the Linux operating system but has expanded to become something much more.

This collection of reader-submitted news bits and commentary - moderated by Mr. Katz and Internet icons such as Hemos and Cmdr. Taco, a.k.a. Rob Malda - has grown so wildly that the mere mention of a Web site in its columns can wreak havoc for the unprepared. So many devout Slashdot fans immediately flock to featured sites that servers often experience severe overloads, sending sites crashing. This phenomenon, for those maintaining Web sites, is now known as "getting Slashdotted."

But there are plenty of other signs that blogging is becoming a valuable addition to life online.

Growing movement

The EatonWeb Weblog Portal ( www.eatonweb.com/portal ) started trying to keep track of the blog movement about two years ago when there were about 50 such sites.

Today, it lists 741 sites and is losing the battle to keep up. In the last six months, software developers have created programs such as Blogger, Pitas, Grok-soup, and Editthispage to serve a burgeoning demand for easy-to-use weblog authoring tools.

Since its launch late last year, Pyra's Blogger ("The Revolution Will Be Bloggerized!") has registered more than 3,000 users, and the company says subscriptions are growing at a rate of 30 percent a month.

Many confirmed Web addicts such as Meg Hourihan (www.megnut.com) have found blogs to be exhilarating. "I had lost my browsing enthusiasm," she admitted during the SXSW session. "It had become shopping. I got away from the fun of using the Web. Weblogs opened up this weird world. Now, you know, it's 3 a.m. I've got to go to bed, but I can't stop browsing!" At the SXSW panel moderated by Mr. Powazek, weblog fans - from buttoned-down businessmen to tattooed, purple-haired Gen-Xers - were united in their infatuation for online reading and artful, stylish writing. In fact, the biggest controversy seemed to be a rift between bloggers and those who consider themselves online diarists.

Creators of Web journals, such as Ben Brown ( www.benbrown.com ), pour hours of work into their daily entries. "I get so angry when I hear people say they don't have time to write," a visibly shaking Mr. Brown told the bloggers. Friends patted his back as he talked, trying to keep him from breaking into tears. "I spend hours on my site, and here are all these people just shooting off little blurbs of stuff, saying they don't have time."

Another faction in the crowd railed against some blogs for being monolithic, eschewing two-way exchanges with readers. Many consider the weblogs undesirable alternatives to the rapid-fire text interaction of e-mail lists and online message boards.

In the end, participants seemed to agree that there is plenty of room for just about any kind of writing on the Web. Says Jesse James Garrett, a Web de-veloper who edits the JJG.Net weblog (www.jjg.net) and Weblog Nation ( www.weblognation.com ): "I love the fact that a lot of people are passionate about, and committed to, personal expression on the Web. What I don't love is that some people seem to have an unbridled hostility toward forms of personal expression different from their own.

"Some people seem to feel that if you don't produce a certain number of words or you don't delve into certain aspects of your personal life, then you shouldn't have a Web site at all."

Adds blogger Rebecca Blood ( www.rebeccablood.net ): "Short-form writing isn't inherently inferior to longer essay-style pieces; I would almost always rather read 20 well-formed, well-thought-out words than 1,000 that have just been tossed onto a page. But I think there's room on the Web for all forms of personal expression. The more voices - in any form - the better."

Blogs are decidedly noncommercial. Some Web historians, in fact, have called them micro-portals - a reaction to mass-appeal, for-profit portals such as Yahoo and Excite.

Banner ads are rare. In many cases, blogs seem to exist for each other, creating communities to help filter quickly through new, hot information and trends discovered on daily Web sojourns. "All of a sudden, the entire Web became an associative bookmark for me," said SXSW attendee Brad L. Graham ( www.bradlands.com ). "You cultivate people who are reliable and trustworthy. Weblogs are a very valuable filtering tool for so many of us."

Bloggers add their own foraging notes to links discovered on other weblogs. As a result, some estimate, anything new on the Web will filter through the blog system in some form in about 30 days. With so many blogs now online, some sites have actually transformed into meta-blogs - pages that list the most noteworthy discoveries by other bloggers.

Designer-writer Cameron Barrett, creator of Camworld ( www.camworld.com ), was one of the first to be called a blogger. Mr. Barrett describes weblogs as the Internet's "pirate radio stations." But he only recently acknowledged his work may be part of the blog trend. Camworld, he writes, has "all of the aspects commonly associated with web-logs. It's updated regularly. It's got a nice, clean, easy-to-use design and user interface. It doesn't patronize to the end user, dumbing things down too much. It has a theme [Random Thoughts + Web Design + New Media]. It has a way for the users to interact with each other [a mailing list]. It even has somewhat of a community, maintained by repeat visitors and list members who contribute many of the links often found in Camworld."

Mr. Powazek was also initially reticent to call his creations part of the weblog movement. "I hated the fact that the essence of weblogging at that time, and perhaps still today, was the off-site link, a witty quip, a link away, updated as much as possible," he writes in his essay "What the Hell is a Weblog? And Why Won't They Leave Me Alone?"

"It was easy (and predictable) to fore-see a future Web of independent content that solely consisted of pointing at people who are pointing at other people." Yet when he cranked up his own blog, Mr. Powazek says, he quickly became intoxicated. "As soon as I began posting every day, I started getting e-mail," he says. "The voices were friendly and encouraging. My hits rose steadily, and people started to link back. What's more, I found I had a forum for the voices in my head that didn't fit anywhere else."

Coffee house quest Indeed, weblogs can settle into weird niches. Peter Merholz ( www.peterme.com ), a Web designer for Epinions in San Francisco, began a quest for the ideal coffee house floor plan at his pioneering blog site. Dozens of readers have responded with their own schematic diagrams of fave cafes.

Weblogs can also be intensely personal journeys through everyday life with the creators. A visit to Dinah Sanders' Metagrrrl site ( www.metagrrrl.com ) might bring you the latest letter from her mom, Jinx, juxtaposed against her thoughts on technical aspects of Web design trends.

Many, like Mr. Katz, point out that links sites with commentary are really nothing new. Some of the first Web pages were little more than pointers to other sites of note. Sometimes they were called Jump Stations. The word weblog is actually a technical term for server records of surfer visits, or hits. "But in the context of the e-community, the weblog is new and evolving rapid-ly, despite the fact that specialized and idiosyncratic sites have been around for some years," Mr. Katz writes in Slashdot. "Weblogs, however personal, are foraging sites in the classic sense of the term."

The sense of community is undeniable. After the recent SXSW confab, several bloggers - all fans of each other's work who had rarely met face to face - came up with a list of blogger pickup lines: "Hey, I linked to you three times last week. Let's dance!" "I'm glad you shared pictures of your tattoos on your site. Now I have two just like yours." "You are my inspiration. I read your weblog 14 times a day, and you are the reason my hair is purple." To outsiders, some of the synergy between bloggers may seem cliquish and overblown.

Hypercharged enthusiasm for the medium has led some weblog creators to predict their new form will supplant mass publications as primary information sources on the Web.

Cautionary notes

But there are always voices of caution. Gregg Knauss, in Stating the Obvious ( www.theobvious.com/archives/112299.html ), says: "Can you not boggle at the level of self-delusion, of self-infatuation, it takes to declare that weblogs are going kill off traditional journalism? ... The only consolation a naysayer can find in all the current hubbub is that inside of a year, the inevitable winnowing will be complete and the weblog community will have matured into something efficient, useful and blessedly quiet.

"The remaining webloggers will go about their business, providing links and commentary, without all the noisy hoo-ha of revolution. And the current maniacal enthusiasm will be thankfully buried, forgotten and unloved, next to every other next New Thing."

Change is always in the weblog wind. And, says Mr. Garrett of Weblog Nation, about the only thing certain on the Internet is that the form will adapt to the needs of readers in search of the best online content.

"Weblogs are as old as the Web itself," says Mr. Garrett. "But the Web is a moving target, and weblogs are no exception. "There was a time when the appearance of any new Web site was newsworthy enough to merit mention on a weblog. These days, weblogs serve as uniquely personal instruments for individuals to blaze trails through the increasingly tangled informational jungle the Web has become. "As the character of the Web as a whole changes, weblogs will continue to evolve to reflect that." Staff writer Doug Bedell can be contacted by sending e-mail to dbedell@dallasnews.com