Skip to primary content

Coolness | Dec 03 2001

Today’s subject is blogs, of which this website may or may not be an example. I mention blogs because I recently realized that I’m just about the only person I know who knows what one is. This of course says something about who I know, or rather, don’t know; I don’t know people who frequent personal websites.

Most people I know use the web for shopping and news and games and perhaps some all-purpose information gathering, and that’s about it. Well, yes, the free pornography. Additionally, a brave few venture to magazine-style sites like slate.com, but almost no one I know visits personal, non-commercial websites, except by accident.

This is not meant as a complaint but an observation. The web is dominated, like everything else is, by corporate interests. Slate is a part of MSN, which is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft drives traffic to MSN via a link on the Windows desktop. The process is neither complicated nor surprising.

Nor it is the subject of this piece. That subject is blogs, of which I’ve yet to read a satisfactory definition. Provisionally, then, I offer the following: a blog (the short form of weblog) is a personal web page which is frequently updated and often includes links to other web pages. More or less. Actually, less, for certain blogs have multiple authors.

A few blog-like sites existed in the early years of the web (circa 1995), although they weren’t called blogs (the term was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger) and were little more than a list of links. Blogs exploded in popularity in 1999, due in large part to blogger.com. I’m leery of the word revolutionary, but it seems safe to say that blogger does something astounding: it provides online content management software, software which allows you to remotely update your site without knowing very much about HTML, and it provides it for free. The operative word, in case you missed it, is free. Blogger charges nothing for this service, aside from the courtesy of a link on your site back to blogger, which if you ask me isn’t asking very much.

The process goes like this. You visit blogger.com, choose between one of several blog templates, customize this template how you like, then link it to your site. Now comes the fun part. Still at blogger.com, you type a bunch of text (known as “content”) into a big empty text box, then click on a button marked PUBLISH. Through the magic of what is probably Perl, your text is automatically tranformed into <HTML> and transmitted to the specified page on your site. As you compose additional posts, the newest post appears at the top of the page, and each post includes the time of update and other helpful extras. All this happens automatically. The only thing you do is type. Over time, blogger archives your posts, arranging them into week-long or month-long chunks. This too happens automatically. All you do is type.

Partly as a result of blogger and other related applications, armies of 14-year-olds are posting online accounts of what they did the previous night and who threw up. Armies. It’s an epidemic of who threw up.

Which is fine by me. Not that I so care about who threw up. I care, rather, about the web as a personal publishing medium. That’s what so cool about it. Blogger simplifies this process, free of charge, and that’s why blogger is cool.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is not cool at all, even if their browser kicks the shit out of that other browser, the one owned by AOL, which by the way is also not cool – AOL, I mean – though perhaps slightly less not cool Microsoft, which is so uncool that it deserves to have every 14-year-old in the world vomit on top of its founder’s head.

In case you were wondering.