Building blogs: Anyone can have a voice on the Web
5:38 PM 1/14/03
Fred McKissack Wisconsin State Journal

It's either the best "big thing" on the World Wide Web or the most profound example of narcissism, but one thing is for sure - Trent Lott will never forget the power of the weblog.

"Joshua Marshall, whose talkingpoints memo.com is must reading for the politically curious, (is) more than anyone else, responsible for making Trent Lott's offensive remarks the issue they deserve to be," Paul Krugman wrote in a Dec. 13, 2002, New York Times column on how Marshall and other professional bloggers turned an afterthought into a scandal. Glenn Reynolds' InstaPundit.com is also credited with bringing down Lott.

In Wisconsin, Milwaukee radio personality Charlie Sykes has been using his "Sykes Writes" blog on the WTMJ Web site ( www.wtmj.com) to declare war on former Democratic Assembly Speaker Tom Loftus. Meanwhile, the independent media center site, www.madison.indymedia.org, offers anyone a shot at grassroots journalism.

"It's the ultimate decentralization of opinion," Sykes said of blogs. "People can enter the fray themselves."

However, not all who blog are professional gadflies or amateur journalists. In fact, the blog is fast becoming the open diary for people who let us peep in on their lives. The West Wash blog (www.sleevestar.com/westwash), for example, is made up of more than 30 friends from the UW-Madison and a prime example of technology theorist Rebecca Blood's notion that a weblog "is a coffeehouse conversation in text, with references as required."

So, what's a blog?

A blog - short for weblog - is most easily defined as a frequently updated, generally text-based Web page, written by a single person or a group of cohorts, that is organized in chronological order, much in the way a diary is kept. Usually these time-stamped and dated entries tend to be short bursts of commentary or analysis with a link to more content.

Blogs have an architecture that simplifies use for the writer. Blogger.com offers free Web logs to the public. It's a simple four-step set up and the user is online. The blogger doesn't need to be a computer programmer or worry about server applications and site hosting. Just type and post.

Blogger, which is owned by San Francisco-based Pyra Labs, also offers fee-based blogs that offer more sophistication.

While blogs have been around since the late 1990s, and sites such as Matt Drudge's drudge report.com is a proto-blog, the events of Sept. 11 and the creation of so-called "war blogs" piqued the public's interest.

Writers and pundits such as former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan (andrew sullivan.com) and Slate's Mickey Kaus (kaus files.com) became celebrities posting instant analysis on everything from the bombing of Afghanistan to President George W. Bush's State of the Union address to pointing out flaws in The New York Times.

The entertainment industry has also found the blog as a tool to connect with the public. Musician Moby is using his blog (www.moby.com/index2.html) to comment on everything from Illinois Gov. George Ryan's decision to commute the death sentence of inmates to detailing a recent run-in with three attackers outside a club in Boston.

Yet not every one of the estimated 500,000 blogs that can be found on the Internet serves a commercial purpose.

"ohhhhh aint gon' be no fun wakin' up at seven in the a.m. ... just watched high fidelity for the umpteenth time and man is that speakin volumes to me right now."

This was a recent posting on the West Wash blog. The writing style is informal, the tone cheeky. The sentiment is common. But if you think the West Wash blog is nothing more than an online episode of "Friends," then you'd be wrong. Past posts include a discussion on taxes and pension benefits.

"The WWB, as it's commonly abbreviated, was originally conceived by Jason Ough, who was going to start a blog for the six residents of his house on West Washington Avenue," Steve Reidell, a 23-year-old UW-Madison grad living in Chicago, wrote in a recent e-mail exchange about the site. "My roommate and I lived across the street, and so I launched what was at the time an eight-person blog, existing mostly as a forum for stupid inside jokes and a counterpart to many of our friends' blogs that had already been around for a while."

"As time went on, more and more people that we knew were added to the roster, and now there's about 30-plus people involved, many of whom post multiple times a day."

Reidell said the West Wash blog is easier to use than a listserve because he can scroll straight through a discussion rather than having to sift through various e-mails.

"It's totally ridiculous and totally dorky, but it's fun," said Jennifer Pfafflin, a 23-year-old UW graduate student and an entertainment columnist with the Green Bay Press-Gazette, of her participation on West Wash blog. "We're all in our mid-20s, so we all grew up around the culture of the Internet. I just think it's natural for us to talk to each other over a Web page."

Pfafflin keeps a list of blogs with Wisconsin connections, Wiscoblogs, on her site (www.aworkingproject.org/wiscoblogs/index.html). There's also a site specifically for Madison-area blogs that can be found at www.suite102.com/madison.

Pfafflin's list of 59 sites on her Web ring cover a diversity of topics from environmentalism and animal rights activism (www.greenconsciousness.org/log) to the random musings of Tess, a 21-year-old Door County woman who, if you looked at her anime-infused blog (http://leontheyal.com/) on Monday, is currently listening to Iggy Pop's "Real Wild Child."

Critics of blogging wonder why the world needs to know what the typical blogger has to say about anything?

"Bloggers are navel-gazers," Elizabeth Osder, visiting professor at the University of Southern California and a former Internet executive with the New York Times, recently told Wired.com. "And they're about as interesting as friends who make you look at their scrapbooks."

Osder said there's an overfascination here with self-expression and opinion. "This is opinion without expertise, without resources, without reporting," she said.

Sykes attributes comments like these to the media's need to "knight" who is acceptable and trash the rest. Both Reidell and Pfafflin praised the blog as advice that fulfills a niche in communication.

"Blogs are a great tool, for whatever the user wants them to be," Reidell said. "Jason said it best early on (about West Wash blog): 'This blog definitely see-saws between meaningful discourse and utter stupidity. If anyone reads this besides us, it must be a real roller coaster.'"