Available Online: http://www.nadotimes.com/technology/story/754576p-5456182c.html
Have a personal story to
tell? Become a Blogger - KAREN MANN, Nando
Times
Feb. 09.2003
What's a blog? Not a new
horror movie creature, something that chases
Harry Potter, or low-fat
diet fad. BLOG is short for "Weblog," the
latest thing in online
communications. When Cleveland native Emil Thomas
Chuck, 30, accepted a
position at Duke Medical Center in Durham, N.C.,
in 2001, he found that
keeping up with friends and family back home -
repeating the same stories
to different people - was a bit of a hassle.
So he became a blogger - he
started an online diary.
"I post for all my
friends to read what's been going on since I moved,"
he says.
Internet technology site
Whatis (www.whatis.com) defines a blog, as "a
personal journal that is
frequently updated and intended for general
public consumption."
Really a blog is nothing
more than a Web site with certain key
characteristics: It usually
contains the subjective views of one person
or occasionally a small
group of people, is updated frequently, and
almost always contains lists
of links to other blogs, Web sites the
author likes, and articles
he or she thinks are worthy of commentary.
A blog can be about
anything: knitting, a bad boss, the situation in
Iraq, your child's
accomplishments. Though it's impossible to say for
sure how many blogs there
are, Blogger (www.blogger.com), perhaps the
best-known blogging tool,
recently announced it had 1 million registered
users.
"It's like a 24-hour
holiday letter," says Frank Boosman, 39, of Apex,
N.C. Boosman began his own
blog in June after hearing a friend in Japan
talk about his own. In it,
he shares his thoughts on technology, the
Internet, popular culture
and pretty much anything that strikes his
fancy.
But keeping a blog has its
downsides. As with a traditional journal,
there's always the chance
that the wrong person - a boss, a roommate, an
old flame you'd really
rather forget - will find it, and that something
you write will come back to
haunt you.
Mark Pilgrim, 30, a Web
developer and trainer for the Washington-based
company MassLight, says a
boss at a previous job didn't like information
posted on his personal blog
and demanded his site be taken down.
When he refused, he was
fired, he says.
Blogging is also changing
the way people get their news, and the way the
media is presenting it.
When former House Majority
Leader Trent Lott gave his controversial
speech at Sen. Strom
Thurmond's 100th birthday party, the story was
largely ignored in the
mainstream press. But political blogs such as
www.talkingpointsmemo.com
jumped on it, turning it into a national
story. Traditional media
outlets took notice of how the story got out.
Now many newspapers and
other news outlets are promoting news "blogs" by
their reporters and
columnists.
It's a concept many bloggers
consider the opposite of what a blog is all
about - an uncensored,
unvarnished and usually very opinionated look at
the world.
San Francisco writer and
blogger Rebecca Blood, author of "The Weblog
Handbook," (Perseus
Publishing, $14), understands this idea.
"A reported story is a
different animal," she says. "A blog is good at
explaining something on the
Web or putting two seemingly unrelated
stories together."
For Blood, the value of
mainstream media is in the in-depth presentation
of a story. "A reporter
goes into a situation, talks to a primary
source, does research and
tries to present the whole story for a general
audience," she says.
Still, for all their
emphasis on individuality, Blood says bloggers have
much to learn from
mainstream media. In her Web site, Rebecca's Pocket
(www.rebeccablood.net),
Blood writes that "the weblog's greatest
strength - its uncensored,
unmediated, uncontrolled voice - is also its
greatest weakness," and
suggests several ethical guidelines. Among them
are to publish only what the
blogger knows is true, and to credit all
sources.
But what inspires people to
reveal so much of themselves online?
Pilgrim compares making his
first blog entry to his first (and only)
time skydiving. "It's
very scary," he says, "to put yourself out there
and do it every day."
Even more perplexing: Why do
people want to read intimate, and often
mundane, details about other
people's lives?
For Raleigh, N.C. blogger
Lisa May Terwilliger, 28, reading other
people's blogs is a matter
of curiosity. One of Terwilliger's favorites
is by a woman in San
Francisco whom she's never met.
"She likes the same
books; she likes the same music," Terwilliger says.
"It's like having a
friend but not having the demands of a relationship;
it's one-sided and you're
not having to return their calls or buy them
birthday gifts."
