Blog This

By Keith Boykin, in pop culture
Wednesday, August 13 2003, 10:18AM

In the past two years, just about everybody from Howard Dean to RuPaul has started a blog. Now in the past few weeks, almost every publication from the Washington Blade to the New York Times to Vibe online has been writing about them. Move over Saddam, Kobe and Arnold. The Internet has become the hot new media story of the week.

I spent Monday fighting an Internet worm that infected my new computer and forced it to crash seven times in four hours. By Tuesday I was relieved to discover the problem was not my computer but a virus that had invaded tens of thousands of computers worldwide. I heard about it on CNN.

There was a time when no one paid attention to the Internet. I remember when my White House colleague Jock Gill first told me about the world wide web back in 1993. I could hardly even understand what he meant, and the media certainly weren't covering it. The media started paying attention in the 90s when soaring Internet stocks made a few instant billionaires. But now the little guys are being noticed too.

A reporter from the Washington Blade interviewed me a few weeks ago for a story on gay blogs. The story ran last Friday under the slightly awkward headline, Burgeoning Blogosphere.

Yesterday, Vibe online, the Internet site for the popular hip hop magazine, contacted me for a story they too are writing on blogs.

Then today the New York Times ran a piece about the blogs of the various Democratic presidential candidates. "The most telling sign that the Internet is no longer the cool American frontier? Blogs, which sprang up to sass the establishment, have been overrun by the establishment," writes Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

Why all the sudden talk about blogs? And what exactly is a blog anyway?

I consider myself to be moderately knowledgeable about new technology. Thanks to two or three techno-savvy friends, I always know what I'm missing. Still, I tend to avoid buying the latest gadget or software. Sure it makes you cool, until you find the same product on sale a few months later for half the price and twice the power.

Not all technology makes sense. Just ask the people who thought the 8-track would revolutionize music. That's why I had some trepidation about starting this blog 16 months ago. Yes, you heard it right, what you're reading right now is a blog.

A "blog" (pronounced as one syllable) is an Internet term for web log. Blogger Jill Walker defines a blog as "a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so that the reader sees the most recent post first. The style is typically personal and informal."

Some blogs, like the blog for conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan, are ardently political. Others, like the blog for author James Earl Hardy, are more informational. Some are simply personal.

Steven G. Fulwood, who heads The Black Gay and Lesbian Archive, writes about his cultural interests. Web designer Donald Agarrat uses his digital camera to spice up his blog with fascinating pictures from his life. While Vibe online editor Lynne D. Johnson uses her blog to tell us more about who she is as a hip hop preservationist, feminist and self-described "fashion whore."

My initial reaction to blogging was not positive. I balked when my web designer first introduced the idea in February of 2002. Who would want to write everyday on a website, I wondered. And would anybody be interested in reading it?

Part of my reaction was illogical and visceral. At the core of my objection was my dislike for the ugly word "blog." Uggh. How could the marriage of two seemingly innocuous words like "web" and "log" generate such hideous offspring? Last year I cringed whenever my web designer used the word in my presence. Then, something amazing happened. I got over it.

Well, not entirely. I still hate the word blog, but I did decide to create one on my site. Using free software from Blogger.com, I set up a blog on my site in April 2002. Later that year, I switched to a more flexible software from Movable Type, which enables me to integrate the various features of my site into the blog.

Even with my blog in place, I still did not quite understand the appeal at first. Why would someone create a blog and why would someone read it? The answers, it turns out, are quite similar.

Disappointed by the sensationalist, profit-driven mainstream media, more and more people are looking for unfiltered information. The war in Iraq, for example, generated hundreds, if not thousands, of bloggers for peace. People from across the world wrote daily, sometimes hourly, commentary about the real war that the American mass media would not cover.

The freedom of the Internet can be both a blessing and a curse. Bloggers aren't required to use "journalistic standards" in what they report, so some information that comes across may be more than readers want to know. That's what's happening with the Internet hype around Kobe Bryant's accuser. Her identity was splashed across the world wide web while the major media, eager to cover the trial in court and unwilling to upset the trial judge, had to refrain from running the story.

So why blog? It not only provides unfiltered information, it's also easy. What makes blogging different from updating a website, for example, is that bloggers don't need to know how to write code. The folks who designed the blogging software made it easy enough for anyone to update a website every day, every hour, or even every minute.

All you do is write your thoughts, click a few buttons, and presto, you're published.

A LIST OF POPULAR BLOGS

Donald Agarrat
Howard Dean
All About George
Steven G. Fulwood
James Earl Hardy
Lynne D. Johnson
Negro Please
RuPaul
Andrew Sullivan
Ronn Taylor

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