Blogging. It started as web-logging – a convenient way of recording your daily trawl through web esoterica and current affairs for others to see. Now all manner of news sites, embarrassing online diaries and gossip sites are using blogs of sorts to keep their site freshly updated.
Just Another Buzzword
Well yeah, of course it is. Web-critters do love to add new bookmarks in their vocab. But give blogs a chance? For starters, ‘Blog’ sticks a little better than ‘frequently updated personal commentary’. The word has also become the glue of sorts for a whole treasure of sharply written, informative, often hilarious and mostly daily updating website authors. Exploring only a few of the following blogs will quickly show you just how interwoven their links can be, and the extent to which people are banding together around the concept of the ‘blog’.
Do It Yourself
Probably the best thing about a ‘blog’ is that it facilitates very easy online publishing and continual updating. A thriving collection of online software allows you to create and maintain your own website merely by visiting a particular webpage and typing in your new entry and sending it off. Voila. Your website now has a new commentary pushed to the top of your page for all to read. www.blogger.com is one of the more prominent offerings, although for a thorough listing of blogging tools, u needs to be chekkin:
www.lights.com/weblogs/tools.html & for blognews – http://blogdex.media.mit.edu
Cream of Da Blogs?
Like beer, taste in a blog is a personal thing. Some though have floated to wider recognition within the blogger community, even flirted with earning an income for their authors. Cult bloggers include Metafilter, milkandcookies, Memepool, fuckedcompany.com and Boingboing.net, but while their relentless delivery of weird to profound bounty impresses the socks off me, my barefeet do prefer to be tickled by some of the more offbeat blogs you can find in the side caverns linked by these or other blogs.
Guess What The Date Project is?
http://thedateproject.blogspot.com/
One computer types online diary of his attempts to get a girlfriend. On Saturday, June 29, 2002 he writes – ‘K’ and I have gone out a few times more, things are getting serious and continue to look promising. Of course, the journey is often more important than the destination, and this romantically entrepreneurial coder wants to keep going. “The introverted side of myself enjoyed the challenge of having to start three new conversations a day and go out to meet people”. See? Rivetting, isn’t it? Tha boy wants to keep these social experiments up though, so maybe keep your blog dial tuned for how this will affect him and ‘k’.
A Popular Blog
www.metafilter.com deals tha juice nicely, with a wide assortment of unusual stories and links. Catching my eye halfway down the page was their link to another blog ‘Supermodels Are Lonelier Than You Think!’, which combines ‘two of the best things in the world, blogs and beautiful women’, giving all manner of weird model related stories and updates. Clicking through to this blog, www.saltyt.com, showed them proudly noting their link from metafilter and commenting on an extra 16,000 visitors in the day since it was added.
NonBloggers
Ok, just gotta add – to anyone with a sampler, do chek www.CelebrityPrankCalls.com and please – run riot.