09/20/2001

By DOUG BEDELL / The Dallas Morning News

While traditional media provided most of the world with news of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a new form of war zone coverage took shape on the World Wide Web.

Some of the first images and accounts of the destruction were recorded and instantaneously published by New Yorkers, Washington D.C.-area residents and others who maintain thousands of low-traffic Weblogs, or "blogs" – easily updated sites designed for sharing observations and collaborating.

With some mass media Web sites overwhelmed by page requests, millions turned to rolling Internet discussion boards such as Slashdot (slashdot.org), which instantly converted its "News for Geeks" format into a clearinghouse for news blurbs and live feeds from Ground Zero.

"With the collaborative news model, the reader is part of everything," said Slashdot's editor-in-chief Robin "Roblimo" Miller. "It's a new model, an experiment. The fact is our readers were the stars of the show. We had, in essence, 10,000 bird dogs out there filing right from the scene."

What emerged was a rolling, chaotic electronic tableau. Slashdot's Jon Katz said it represents "the evolution of two media – online and off." Academics and historians from webArchivist.org and the Library of Congress, keenly aware that Web content is transient, are already scrambling to preserve the Net record for posterity.

As a result, for the first time, rank amateurs such as New Yorker George Weld are supplementing coverage from traditional media.

Up until the day of the terrorist attacks, Mr. Weld, a Web company worker who lives only blocks from the World Trade Center, said he maintained his Like An Orb site (www.likeanorb.com) as "a place for my friends to make fun of me."

Mr. Weld's site is a blog. Over the past four years, this breed of Web site has emerged as a way for Net denizens to help each other navigate through the Internet's sometimes mind-boggling info-clutter.

When the first jet careened into the World Trade Center, Mr. Weld instinctively grabbed his digital camera and began a harrowing journey toward the inferno.

"I posted my photos (www.likeanorb.com/photos.php) as quickly as possible because I didn't really comprehend the scale of it all (a mixture of shock and incredulity)," Mr. Weld said this week.

"It hadn't actually occurred to me that the news of the collision would have hit the networks. In any case, I wanted to let my family and friends –who had previously been the only regular readers of my site – that my wife, Jennifer, and I were OK, that our office was OK and to give them a sense of what things looked like from here."

Word of the photos zipped across the blogger community.

"It spread like proverbial wildfire," said Mr. Weld. As the second tower collapsed, Mr. Weld's site – normally viewed by only 15 or so people daily – began recording thousands of hits from across the world.

"My host is not happy with me," he said.

Strangers began to send e-mail. Some messages came from inside the strike zones where television towers had crumbled with the World Trade Center wreckage. Others were far-flung.

"I received one e-mail from a woman in Hawaii who said that she'd felt profoundly isolated through the disaster until she'd discovered a couple sites on which she was able to engage with other people – arguing with them, sharing experiences and so on," said Mr. Weld.

"I think her experience is pretty typical and shows that people don't feel satisfied with a one-way news experience. They don't just want to hear pundits and anchors give opinions; they want to give their own thoughts voice and, even more than that, connect with other people over things that matter to them."

This libertarian, personal quest for interactivity and shared experience rippled across the Internet. While many mass media news sites pulled together coverage, offbeat Web spots such as Metafilter. com crackled immediately with pointers to relevant bits and pieces.

Another layer of information came from sites such as Blogdex (blogdex.media.mit.edu), a service that searches Weblogs for the most linked articles, videos and images. Blogger.com, meanwhile, pulled postings from the community into a single searchable index (page.blogger.com/search_attack.pyra).

Slashdot and its team of six full-time workers deliver between 1.3 and 1.5 million page views on a normal weekday to about 500,000 logged-in users worldwide. Readers submit about 4,000 comments per day, primarily about technology subjects.

Within 30 minutes of the first attack in New York, the Slashdot workers had converted their site into a fluid news portal built on reader submissions that poured in by the thousands.

Over the next 24 hours, Slashdot delivered more than 3 million page views. At its peak, Slashdot was pushing out about 40 pages per second – a total still dwarfed by mass media sites such as the Lycos news network, which includes Wired News, at a daily average of 115 page views per second.

But the type and scope of the 8,460 reader posts in the 24 hours after the attack were stunning and deeply personal (slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/09/11/2213210). As quickly as one on-scene account could be posted, another popped up with responses and elaboration.

Readers argued and cursed. They tunneled down into Internet information banks to immediately offer research on Osama bin Laden. They compiled their own collections of video and still images, such as www.fxracer.com/trade, to take loads off mainstream media Web sites. Many published disturbing shots that would never be allowed by mainstream media.

When information was incorrect, readers were quick to right it.

"What we have here is instant correction," Slashdot's Mr. Miller said this week. "We have thousands of fact-checkers. We're not trying to compete with The New York Times. Our discussion boards are just better than theirs."

In the end, Slashdot and other blogs had shown that the true interactivity of the Web – with warts and rough edges – fills a void left by traditional, broadcast-style information distribution.

"The Internet, in its current incarnation, allows for the many-to-many communication that you don't get with TV, radio, newspapers, magazines or any other form of mass media," said blogger Jason Kottke (www.kottke.org). "That's why it shined in this situation."