Blogs

From The Oregonian

01/10/03
KRISTI TURNQUIST

Say the word blog, and what comes to mind?

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Some kind of hobbit? A new brand of sensible shoes? A euphemism for being really, really drunk?

Try the latest next big thing in Internet communication. While the Web has been home to personal home pages, online forums and chat rooms for years, blogs are becoming the most streamlined way to share your thoughts with the world.

Online blogs -- a shortened term for Web logs -- are digital soapboxes, personal chronicles of everything from run-ins with crabby store clerks to detailed analysis of President Bush's foreign policy.

While early Web logs required computer design know-how, new sites allow even technophobes to create their own online journals. And the blogger cause recently got a major publicity boost amid reports that political bloggers helped fire up press coverage of Sen. Trent Lott's controversial comments at Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party.

Estimates on just how many people are blogging range from 500,000 to 1 million. Blogger (www.blogger.com), one of the most popular sites for setting up Web logs, says it has more than 1 million registered users, up from 343,000 a year ago. Sample newbie blogs on the site include Thoughts of a Random Kitty; choochy's blog; The Saga of My Life; and A Libertarian's Thoughts on Whatever.

What's indisputable is that what Blogger calls push-button publishing for the people is meeting one of the oldest human needs: to be heard.

If the first wave of personal Web pages were often online equivalents of the family Christmas letter -- photos of Mom, Dad, the kids, the new puppy -- blogs are like being the host, guests and callers of your own personal talk show. With the time and date of each entry automatically recorded, bloggers offer a running commentary on whatever interests them, along with links to news stories, photos, Web sites and other blogs.

Having your unfettered say, even with a small audience, quickly becomes addictive, to hear bloggers tell it.

I'm on there every day posting all this stuff for 20 people to read, Portland blogger Jack Bogdanski says. Part of it's just therapeutic. You get a chance to get something off your chest and out of your system that's otherwise going to gnaw on you. Writing about it helps you actually think about it a little bit harder.

Bogdanski has been posting Jack Bog's Blog (http://bojack.blogspot.com/) since July 6, sharing his views on such subjects as Portland politicians (Stop wasting the money we already pay you on toys that will get you your campaign money from the West Hills and your quotations in The New York Times); singer Howard Tate's Portland Waterfront Blues Festival appearance (showstopper: Get It While You Can); why he's lost interest in the NBA (a big part of my problem is the Portland team itself, managed by a group of nitwits who have assembled roster after roster of players who are impossible for an intelligent fan to like); and increasing the minimum wage (if you can't afford to pay your help $6.90 an hour, you don't deserve any help).

Bogdanski, 48, doesn't fit the stereotype of the youthful computer geek. A professor of law at Lewis & Clark Law School, married with a 2-year-old daughter, Bogdanski was inspired by UCLA School of Law instructor Eugene Volokh's blog, Volokh Conspiracy. I realized anybody can have one of these if you want to have one of these, says Bogdanski.

Jack Bog's Blog generally focuses on Portland and its issues. Everybody's got an opinion about Trent Lott and Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Why would anybody read what I have to say to that? Bogdanski says. Instead, he discusses the sorts of topics civic-minded people traditionally commented on via letters to the editor: the proposed Oregon Health & Science University tram, the proposed ice-skating rink in Pioneer Courthouse Square, a plan to narrow Burnside Street, to name a few.

Matt Whitman, a Portland lawyer and former student of Bogdanski's, started his own blog, Matt's Angry Little Thoughts, just after the November election.

Like a lot of lawyers, I'm a total information sponge, says Whitman, 31. That's how I would define blogging, going out and surveying this vast mass of information and bringing links back to a central point -- the blog -- and commenting on it.

Whitman's site offers his thoughts on everything from the Raelians and their clone claims (he muses that Raelian honcho Brigitte Boisselier is really hot for a CEO, in a French strumpety way) to his Bile-O-Meter annoyance at a fund-raiser for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Edwards (a $250 per head event at a snooty bistro in the Pearl District).

Like many bloggers, Whitman has a hit counter to track how many times his blog is visited. I have now gotten hits from more than 600 unique sites, Whitman says. Which exhausts my sphere of immediate friends.

Christopher Frankonis, a former Internet cafe owner who started The One True b!X's Portland Communique blog a few weeks ago, focuses on issues of Portland livability, planning and development. One of the things I learned through the process of blogging, whether it's about technology stuff or personal stuff, says the 33-year-old, is that having the habit of writing about various topics every day forces me to pay attention on a deeper level.

To Frankonis, who is communications director for the Portland Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Web logs fulfill the Internet's democratic promise. It's that sense of what people really did want from the Internet, he says, that they could grab a little piece of it.

Will blogging itself prove to be a fad? Portland bloggers are reluctant to predict.

It's just this very interesting collection of voices out there, says Bogdanski. It's certainly a phenomenon. I don't know how much hard-drive space there is in the universe to hold everybody's thoughts. But it's filling up fast. Kristi Turnquist: 503-221-8227; kristiturnquist@news.oregonian.com