Jack Darcher“Blog.” “Blogging.” “Weblog.” If you are not familiar with this lingo, then you may not be aware of one of the Internet’s most unique phenomena.
Officially, blogs are online journals-the combination of web and log, shortened for convenience’s sake.
With the expansion of sites such as Blogger, LiveJournal, and Xanga, which provide hosting and formatting for weblog creators, blogging is developing into a popular and accessible Internet pastime, especially among students and faculty at Washington University.
Fifth year computer science students David Warner and Michael Dixon began their own blog, negative273.com, in December 2000 as an attempt to upstage another blog site. Today they host four other blogs that, along with negative273, link to blogs throughout the nation.
“Blogs weren’t as popular two or so years ago,” said Warner. “Blogger and LiveJournal weren’t around then, so things were mostly restricted to the tech community.”
“Now it has moved away from the do-it-yourself thing of tech people wanting to play around with web pages and put up journals at the same time and become more of a way to simply communicate,” said Dixon. “Sites like Blogger and LiveJournal are good because they have opened blogging up for a larger group. At the same time, however, people on those sites aren’t as interested in how things really look or work.”
Warner said it was fairly easy to get started and spread the word.
“Well when we were thinking about doing it we found out we could get server space for five dollars a month,” he said. “So we said ‘Why not?’ Then we found out that for $20, ten from each of us, we could get 250 stickers. So we said ‘Why not?’ And it spread from there.”
One of the blogs hosted on negative273.com belongs to Professor of Computer Science Ron Cytron. In his blog, Cytron ruminates on his undergraduate days at Rice, his experience teaching entry-level computer science classes, and his dealings with a rental car. He even referred to journals that a former student wrote while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.
“I think people like to blog because it creates an online identity,” said Cytron. “You can really learn a lot about someone by reading their blog.”
Warner agreed.
“Everyone on negative273 has become much better friends through blogging,” he said. “I feel I have really gotten to know the other people on the site by reading their blogs.”
Cytron also said that blogs make up an aspect to communication absent in e-mail and instant messaging systems.
“Blogging has brought back the notion of composition to writing on the Internet,” he said. “With AIM or e-mail you just sit down and write everything really lazily. With blogs you have to compose your thoughts and put them down like a story”.
It is this attribute of blogging, Dixon said, that will limit its growth.
“I don’t think it will ever be as big as AIM or e-mail,” said Dixon. “I think that it is always going to take more effort to blog than it will to sit down and write an e-mail or an instant message and because of that it will never be as popular.”
For the time being, however, bloggers everywhere are excited about the possibilities afforded by this newest form of Internet communication. Long time bloggers are publishing books on the best strategies for creating entertaining journals, users are attending conferences that discuss recently created blogs, and hosting sites are pushing for blogging technology.