Reinventing the Diary

Where we are: 
1999: 23 known blogs
2000: 200
2002: 300,000+ at Blogger.com
2004: 10 million (projected)

-More on the history of blogs from Rebecca Blood and Dave Winer

-Watch the blogosphere fill at Weblogs.com
-Blogs about blogs: 
www.cyberjournalist.net/the_weblog_blog
blogdex.net
www.globeofblogs.com

What they are:
Continually updated online journals containing links and personal commentary or narrative. 

Diary vs. Scrapbook

-Diaries in history
From the BBC: 

The most common reason for keeping a diary in the seventeenth century was to keep an account of providence or God's ordering of the world and of individual lives. Ralph Josselin called the diary he kept between 1641 and 1683 'a thankfull observation of divine providence and goodness towards me and a summary view of my life'. As Isaac Ambrose put it in 1650, a diarist 'observes something of God to his soul, and of his soul to God' ... In an age when life in this world and salvation in the next were both uncertain, diaries were a way of making sense of and ordering existence.

Interesting diaries appeal to readers and students of history and human nature on many levels. Peeking into other people's diaries has always held a certain voyeuristic attraction, but more than anything, I believe, diaries are low-tech time machines allowing us to see and experience the past through the eyes and minds of people who were there. 

"a generation of compulsive-self-chroniclers":
90% of bloggers are under 29 (interesting exception)
51% of bloggers are between 13 and 19, teenagers

excerpt: 

"I have depression, bad skin, weight problems, low self-esteem, few friends and many more reasons why I am angry. ... Hey everyone ever. Stop making fun of people. It really is a sucky thing to do, especially if you hate being made fun of yourself. . . . This has been a public service announcement. You may now resume your stupid hypocritical, lying lives.''

"Women in Iran cannot speak out frankly because of our Eastern culture and there are some taboos just for women, such as talking about sex or the right to choose your partner.... I have the opportunity to talk about these things and share my experiences with others." 

(Now they and other Iranians are fighting censorship)

One blogger e-mailed this to me:

I blog because I want to give a unique aspect of who I am as a person. I am a gay asian male and there isn't a lot of us out there. And I have readers that get inspired because they finally found someone that they can relate to. About half of my readership is outside of the United States, so in a sense I am their voice where there is supression of the gay life especially in Asia. That is what blogging is to me.

Weblogs are a grassroots phenomenon. They weren't created in a board room and unleashed on waiting consumers. They were created by people with something to say in a format that works well on the Web. With all of the media attention and debate surrounding weblogs, it's easy to lose sight of what they are: people speaking and connecting online. We called this site Blogroots because we feel it's important to keep this grassroots nature in mind.

-Instaneity, in a culture of continuous spontaneity
Blogs prize instaneity over reflection, study, learning, care, craft--in defiance of H.H. Williams, who observed: "Furious activity is no substitute for understanding." 

-Quantity of blogging threatens the quality of it. Room on the Web is seemingly infinite--you can never reach the "end of the page." So much output, so many blogs, so much verbal effluvium. 

-More on the Web and monkeys typing Shakespeare

-Typical insights amid this infinite disgorging: 

"When our dear Kelly drinks a bit too much, she gets what we have now affectionatly [sic] termed the `Vodka Voice'"

"My youngest kitty has hiccups. I didn't know cats got hiccups, did you?"

"And now, for your boobelicious viewing pleasure . . ." 

-Self-described dullest blog on the Web
-Geoff Nunberg on proliferating diaries and snarky discourse

-Penumbras of Privacy
Blogs are public, but may contain private thoughts and events. Intimate matters are announced to strangers. In the age of Dr. Phil and "The Bachelor," self-expression to strangers is a cultural ritual. 

The result is a bizarre quasi-intimacy:
Blogger and author Steven Johnson:

On a day-to-day basis, I am more intimately aware of the latest happenings in the world of my 10 favorite bloggers than I am of what's going on with my closest friends. And of those 10 bloggers, I've met only two or three in person."

No society ever had more means of communication, yet no members of a society ever felt so out of touch with one another. Blogging, like personal Web pages and live Web cams, is one way that individuals can speak out and feel like they matter in this impersonal world. Blogging is a public way of saying, "I'm here. I exist. Please acknowledge me!" ... [Bloggers]  tend to blog as a matter of purely personal and often self-disclosing venting of personal feelings. Too often blogging becomes a strangely public form of talking to one's self about intimate matters. ...continued

Nussbaum:

But the linked journals also form a community, an intriguing, unchecked experiment in silent group therapy--a hive mind in which everyone commiserates about how it feels to be an outsider, in perfect choral unison.

Jon Rochmis, WiredNews.com:

Prior relationships and 'community' had usually always been created based on accidents of geography and chance. Your friends were your neighbors or school chums or work mates. Now, a fan of Yo Yo Ma in Austria can easily find one in Omaha, for example. Some of my closest friends now are people I've met through email who share my common interests.

The Internet is suited to fostering what I call 'mono-communities,' people willing to engage others around a single concern, interest, or activity," he says. "In fact, the anonymity of members of the more profound online mono-communities allows them to become more revealing and open more quickly than if they were face-to-face. But they are fundamentally different from communities where members have to compromise across many contexts to survive and flourish. link

There is no high-tech means to instant friendship of lasting merit. ... In fact, the extent to which we spend time online rather than in person, the weaker our communities will become. We need to be sharing lengthy meals together, walking together, volunteering together, worshipping together and the like--not blogging. We need to revive traditional Christian social practices such as hospitality, friendship, neighborliness and Sabbath leisure. Only if these kinds of practices are strong can we really afford blogging. 

- From my debut B&C blog:
We're looking for that elusive Aristotelian golden mean: the middle ground between a dangerous addiction to the constant manipulation of digital data and shying away from it altogether. Discerning readers can pluck the many intellectual fruits the Web does bear ... The Web is neither a magic bullet for social progress (as mainstream culture believes) nor a complete waste of time, and this weblog will try to illustrate both these points. After all, it's possible to use the Web to search not just for information, but for wisdom—and to avoid confusing the two.

-Blogs trace a pattern of thought

Blogs, the Ivy, and the News
-Profs using blogs in classes:
http://legacy.centenary.edu/~balexand/novels/students.html
more
-Profs blogging:
http://www.instapundit.com/
http://volokh.com/
http://www.languagelog.org/

-Will there be a New York Times on paper in 15 years?
Andrew Sullivan:

of course there will. it's just that readers will also want to compare its coverage with lively criticism and rival coverage from the internet. the times won't disappear, thank god. but its monopoly power will be greatly diminished.

Time Inc. editor e-mails this: "Many blogs are a refreshing alternative to the stale and predictable punditocracy, but ... offer no real challenge to the meat-and-potatoes business of news gathering."

Blogger Mitch Ratcliffe, interview at E&P:

News is becoming a dialogue, not a one-way announcement. ... [Bloggers] fact-check, criticize and debate with the news media, remaking stories and spreading links. Most news blogs wouldn't have anything to write about if they weren't pointing to existing news stories about which they want to comment, so the proliferation of blogs should be generally good for the readership and traffic figures at commercial Web sites.

-Bloggers hired: Salam Pax (see 7th item here), TwinsGeek
-Blogging journalists:
www.cyberjournalist.net/cyberjournalists.php

Update: Mark Tapscott, director of the Heritage Foundation's Center for Media and Public Policy in Washington. "News is now a conversation. It is no longer this elite telling us what is important." link