| E-commerce super sites are the cookie part of the internet Oreo. Weblogs are the tasty cream filling. |
Okay, weblogging may be just the latest overhyped term for the traditional personal web page. Is that a bad thing? A year ago, everybody was convinced that commercial sites were taking over the web, marginalizing quirky personal pages. The weblogging trend may be the last, best hope of keeping the web from turning into a giant billboard. It seems to be a return to the roots of personal expression on the web. If there's a revolution involved in weblogging, it's probably in the availability of new tools to make personal websites easier to maintain: Pitas, Blogger, that other guy, etc. A few years ago, you had to code and upload your pages by hand. A year ago, you could only simplify things by having specialized software installed. Now, you can update your page from anywhere with a browser, and post that link you might have forgotten by the time you got to your editor. I've made a few half-hearted attempts to maintain a personal page before; the process was so cumbersome that it never went anywhere. In the past month and a half that I've been writing Considered Harmful, I've updated two days out of three. I'm keeping track of links I would have lost. I'm developing a habit of public writing that I've been wanting to develop for years. And I'm making contact with more new people on the net than I have since my BBSing days in college. It may not be some great change in society, but I'm having fun. |
| back in the day, i used to design websites, with very little purpose in mind, and no real intention of ever getting traffic. then i realized that i liked what i was doing, and wanted more people than just my close friends to see the things that i was designing. so i started sites here and there, some of them similar to weblogs, some of them not. but i never found the time to update, and most were forgotten. then i got into buying domains. registering things that were a ridiculous part of my life (ie: chicken.pot.pie & yourMOM) but none of them really made me want to post. i get more hits than you would ever imagine to ://yourMOM.net from people just typing it in and not really expecting anything to be there. i got lost in the web, linking to site after site from people's posts on the fray. i saw alot of emotion, alot of amazing writing, and uber-lots of people pouring their lives out onto the web. it made me miss writing. it gave me floods of ideas, but with no real outlet. so i created myself online and started ://aryn.org on a whim. i spent countless hours scripting the backend so that i would never have to update through a telnet window. i started posting daily, with my thoughts broken up into set categories. i was <ranting>, <raving>, posting <notes>, and <news> about my life to the world. then friends wanted to be a part of the mayhem. so i switched things around, and redesigned. everyone i was aquatinted with, online and off started posting. soon, they took over. so i decided a few weeks back that i wanted something that was just mine. i had been sitting on fcuker.com for months without any real purpose, and finally found one. i joined the blogger community, and really got into it. now, i'm getting random emails from people who linked off of my site from somewhere or another telling me that they like what i'm doing. and i do. it's not really a blog not really a diary it's more just me babbling in HTML. and in most cases, that's what a weblog is. |
| I am perhaps limited in examples I have seen. One is www.dumpfile.com and the other is shmuel@shmuel.org
Both are people I've talked to online and on the phone. The first is more a true weblog, because no matter how dull or seemingly meaningless Bob's entries may be, at least you can tell he updates it regularly. You can tell it's something he comes back to here and there throughout a week, that it matters to him. The second is seldom updated and is more aggrivating for me since I know the person enough to know that there's far more going on in his life than he has time to document. Being the closest thing to a cyberfriend, I check it regularly since it is the only way to be up to date on his life. Both guys are net oriented in their jobs, and being so, are overcommitted and feel stuck often enough to warrant ranting on small scales to their personal site. I have a website also, but it is more a place to reflect than a weblog. I would say a weblog is a sort of voyeuristic diary where, unlike the 8th grade paper variety, you have admitted that you are old enough to not fear someone reading it; in fact, it's half-heartedly the one thing you're hoping for. In my negative opinion of where we are headed technologically, I'd say it's a way for humans to adjust to their environment while also never letting the human need to connect to be snuffed out completely. |
| I suppose you could call my site a web log. I don't usually post about real life, but instead mix fiction and reality together, which becomes reality in itself. Sometimes you can't tell if I'm serious or just joking. Either way it's thoughts that come out of my head so it's a part of my being. I sometimes enjoy reading other people's web logs just because there are interesting people even if they don't make since. It's like a collective thought of people mixing together with a million voices and then sometimes it's just a blur. Then again, how can you tell that it is not real? Maybe it's more real than real life itself with just imagination. I like to complain. James F. Douglas (AKA crakhousecowboy) {crak@ripebastard.com} |
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