Cum a aparut BLOGGER ...

Tot citind si citind si citind ..., am dezgropat un articol care imi atrasese atentia inca de pe vremea cind il citisem pentru prima oara (prin anul 2000). Habar nu am avut pe-atunci, ca voi ajunge si eu sa utilizez acest DIGITAL exhibitionism (cum il socoteam pe-atunci, ba chiar si acum) ...

Zice articolul:

Meg Hourihan was in a bad mood. She had nothing major to worry about, but she was afflicted by the triple malaise of a woman in her late twenties: (a) the weather was lousy; (b) she was working too hard; and (c) she didn't have a boyfriend. Nothing, not even eating, seemed very interesting to her. The only thing that did sound appealing was moving to France and finding a hot new French boyfriend, but even when she talked about that idea she struck a sardonic, yeah-right-like-I'm-really-going-to-do-that kind of tone.
I know this about Meg because I read it a few months ago on her personal Web site, which is called Megnut.com. I've been reading Megnut for a while now, and so I know all kinds of things about its author, like how much she loved Hilary Swank in "Boys Don't Cry," and how she wishes there were good fish tacos to be had in San Francisco, where she lives. I know she's a feminist, and that she writes short stories, and that she's close to her mom. I know that she's a little dreamy and idealistic; that she fervently believes there is a distinction between "dot-com people," who are involved in the Internet for its I.P.O. opportunities, and "Web people," who are in love with the imaginative possibilities presented by the medium, and that she counts herself among the latter.

Meg is one of the founders of a company called Pyra, which produces an Internet application known as Blogger. Blogger, which can be used free on the Internet, is a tool for creating a new kind of Web site that is known as a "weblog," or "blog," of which Megnut is an example. A blog consists primarily of links to other Web sites and commentary about those links. Having a blog is rather like publishing your own, on-line version of Reader's Digest, with daily updates: you troll the Internet, and, when you find an article or a Web site that grabs you, you link to it—or, in weblog parlance, you "blog" it. Then other people who have blogs—they are known as bloggers—read your blog, and if they like it they blog your blog on their own blog.
Blogs often consist of links to articles that readers might otherwise have missed, and thus make for informative reading: it was via an excellent blog called Rebecca's Pocket that I learned, for instance, that the Bangkok transit authority had introduced a ladies-only bus to protect female passengers from straphanging molestation. It also led me to a site devoted to burritos, where I underwent an on-line burrito analysis, in which my personality type was diagnosed according to my favorite burrito elements: "Your pairing of a meat-free burrito and all those fatty toppings indicates a dangerous ability to live with illusions." Blogs often include links to sites that illuminate the matter at hand. For example, when Meg wrote about planting a plumeria cutting, she linked to a site called the Plumeria Place, which included a picture and a description of the plant.
Many bloggers have Internet-related jobs, and so they use their sites to keep other bloggers informed of the latest news in the world of Web design or copyright law. Jason Kottke, a Web designer from Minneapolis who maintains a site called Kottke.org, is widely admired among bloggers as a thoughtful critic of Web culture. (On the strength of the picture transmitted by his Webcam, he is also widely perceived as very cute. If you read around among blogs, you find that Kottke is virtually beset by blogging groupies.) Getting blogged by Kottke, or by Meg Hourihan or one of her colleagues at Pyra, is the blog equivalent of having your book featured on "Oprah": it generally means a substantial boost in traffic—enough, perhaps, to earn the blog a mention on Beebo.org, which has functioned as a blog best-seller list. (An example from a blog called Fairvue.com: "Jason K. linked to Fairvue. My life is now complete.")
The weblog format of links and commentary has been around for some years, but in the early days of weblogging the sites had to be built by hand, one block of code at a time, which meant that they were produced only by a handful of technology mavens. There were a few weblogs that earned a following among non-tech civilians—Jim Romenesko's Medianews, a weblog of stories about the media business, is one; Arts & Letters Daily, a digest of intellectual affairs, is another—but most remained more specialized. A year and a half ago, there were only fifty or so weblogs; now the number has increased to thousands (... acuma or fi cu mult mai multe, ca au trecut 6 ani), with blogs like Megnut getting around a thousand visits a day. This growth is due in large part to Blogger, and a couple of other weblogging tools such as Pitas and EditThisPage, which have made launching a personal Web site far simpler.
Most of the new blogs are, like Megnut, intimate narratives rather than digests of links and commentary; to read them is to enter a world in which the personal lives of participants have become part of the public domain. Because the main audience for blogs is other bloggers—blogging etiquette requires that, if someone blogs your blog, you blog his blog back—reading blogs can feel a lot like listening in on a conversation among a group of friends who all know each other really well. Blogging, it turns out, is the CB radio of the Dave Eggers generation. And that is how, when Meg Hourihan followed up her French-boyfriend-depression posting with a stream-of-consciousness blog entry a few weeks later saying that she had developed a crush on someone but was afraid to act on it—"Maybe I've become very good at eluding love but that's not a complaint I just want to get it all out of my head and put it somewhere else," she wrote—her love life became not just her business but the business of bloggers everywhere.

Pyra, the company that produces Blogger, has its offices on the ground floor of a warehouse building on Townsend Street in SoMa, the former industrial district that is now home to many of San Francisco's Internet businesses. The company, which was founded last year by Evan Williams (who has his own blog, Evhead.com) in collaboration with Meg Hourihan, occupies two computer-filled rooms that face each other across an atrium littered with random pieces of office furniture discarded by Internet startups whose fortunes took a dive when the Nasdaq did, last April. Pyra survived the dive, with some help from venture capitalists, and from Mr. and Mrs. Hourihan, Meg's parents. (More recently, Advance Publications, which publishes this magazine, invested in Pyra.) Still, Ev and Meg ruefully talk about how they managed to get through the summer of 1999, the season of implausible I.P.O.s, without becoming rich.

"We first met at a party," Meg explained, as she and I sat on a battered couch. Ev rolled his desk chair over to join us. Meg, who grew up in Boston and graduated from Tufts with a degree in English, is voluble and given to gesticulation. She is tall and athletic-looking, and has cropped spiky hair that last spring she bleached white-blond after polling the readers of her blog about her hairstyling options. Meg and Ev dated for a while before deciding that their shared passion for the Internet did not translate into a shared passion for each other; but then Ev drafted Meg to help him start Pyra, the goal of which was to develop a Web-based tool that would help project managers share information with co-workers. (They have since been joined by four other friends.) continuare ...

YOU'VE GOT BLOG : How to put your business, your boyfriend, and your life on-line.
by REBECCA MEAD, The New Yorker, Issue of 2000-11-13