Weblogging started as a very simple concept. You keep a log of your web activity where you've been, whom you've met, plus your thoughts and reactions and then you publish this log as a series of links and comments, for others to read and use as a customized and topical snapshot of current web activity.
To ease the publication process, new software tools have been developed by companies such as Pyra Labs and Six Apart that allow you to develop a page design and template for your blog, so that each new text entry can be automatically formatted, categorized and displayed chronologically.
This separation of the presentation layer from the content layer, and the automatic organization of content within the site and on the page, is what distinguishes blogging from the more traditional web activity of personal home page building and the creation of specialist interest communities.
The new generation of personal publishing software has meant that budding bloggers require very little knowledge of HTML programming or web design in order to get going. Changes and updates can be completed rapidly and frequently, resulting in blog sites that can react to events at amazing speed.
Blogs are also very easy to find, since the other distinguishing aspect of blogging software is the number of ways that are provided to link to other blogs, be alerted to blog site updates, syndicate your own blog and generally promote yourself and others within the blogging community. No longer do you have to rely on Google and other search engines to pluck you from web obscurity.
Through the approval of your blogging peers it is possible to build up a relatively large audience for your site very quickly. In the case of high profile bloggers such as Salaam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger a seemingly humble online diary can become front page news in an international newspaper.
Unfortunately, ease of access to publishing tools wedded to this increased interest from traditional media companies has led to a bastardization of the blogging ideal.
On the one hand, the blog has become a way for anyone to publish a diary of their daily life, irrespective of whether it involves a lot of online activity or web links or not. This trend away from web linking and toward documenting the tedium of everyday life has become so prevalent so quickly that it's already become the object of several excellent spoofs (for example: the dullest blog in the world).
On the other hand, the professional writing classes journalists in particular have appropriated the blog as a means of self-advancement and promotion. There is no better example of this professionalisation of the blog than Andrew Sullivan. This is a blog with staff and a business manager, it books advertising, and the content of the blog is largely columnist-style articles based on traditional news feeds from mainstream newspapers and TV channel. In short, bloggers like Sullivan are out to link to as many news sites as possible and provide their own expert insight into what the news really means.
In both cases, blogging has become a way of proving to the world not only that you exist, but also that you merit the world's attention for a while at least. On top of this, blog technology is allowing us to become more obsessed about documenting our lives digitally.
Photoblogging takes the touristy urge to capture our experience of the real world on screen to its logical conclusion, allowing the budding digital photographer to organize and publish digital images in a set of themed galleries.
Moblogging automates this process to the nth degree and moves it into the realm of almost real time blogging by allowing you to take pictures on your mobile phone and post them to your blog from wherever you happen to be in the world.
Soon it will be possible to build up your blog entirely from text, audio and image that you have created and uploaded on the fly whilst out in the field. The blog will act as some kind of mirroring or backup of our real lives (in case the real one crashes?).
To a large extent, blogging has grown out of a growing mistrust of traditional media companies and how they purport to show us what is happening in the world. We're all too aware these days that newspapers and television companies only tell us the stories that their owners want to tell us. A Murdoch-owned Times, a Berlusconi-owned Mediaset, a Gates-owned MSN are not always going to report a story from all angles we'd like to view it.
Linked clusters and group blogs that support posts from multiple authors have emerged that allow like-minded people to coalesce around a social, political or economic issue. United by topic, they can discuss, debate and disagree in public. They can act as global stringers allowing readers to compare and contrast how the same issue is viewed and handled in different parts of the globe. They can fact check each others sources, strengthen and corroborate a story.
In short, bloggers can be the independent, authentic voices we all increasingly yearn for, who can report on events as they a happen, unmediated and in a language and vocabulary that is closer to our own. And importantly we can add our own voice or voices to the blog community. We can become both creator and consumer, performer and audience.
In this context, it would seem natural for the world of the blog to become a fertile ground for new forms of digital storytelling and the development of new independent authentic fictional voices. Strange then that there are only a handful of writers out there currently experimenting with the idea of the fictional blog. And the few traditional novelists who have started to blog have done so with mixed results. The most high profile of the latter is William Gibson who started blogging to promote his most recent novel, and then stopped when the time came to write the next one. In his farewell statement he wrote:
I've found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I've most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I'm doing this I'm definitely not writing a novel that is, if I'm still blogging, I'm definitely still on vacation. I've always known, somehow, that it would get in the way of writing fiction, and that I wouldn't want to be trying to do both at once. The image that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid's been left off.
Gibson's assertion that diarising is categorically not novel writing and may be antithetical to it is one in the eye for the many journalists who see fictional diary writing as the quick route to literary credibility. But he may be somewhat naive about what a blog can be (or even a bit cynical in treating the blog merely as a way to promote himself and each new novel as it is launched).
A more experienced voice in the world of digital fiction and hyperliterature is Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems and he is very clear that: "All weblog writing is digital storytelling."
It's true enough that most bloggers are attempting to organize their source material into some kind of personal narrative. And in many cases, bloggers are also using the art of digital testimony to identify and define who they really are.
Just as teenagers use diary writing often to help them come to terms with their growing sense of independence and individuality, bloggers blog in order to make sense of their own position and value in a rapidly changing world.
Or as John M. Grohol points out in a piece entitled Deconstructing Kaycee:
Because virtually everyone who goes online creates personas which reflect but are not accurate portrayals of their real selves, virtually everyone online knows someone who is engaging in a level of deceit or pretend.
The idea of fooling readers and manipulating their emotions with fake blogs has been generally frowned upon in the digital realm. And to some extent it was Kaycee who poisoned the well. Kaycee was supposedly a young girl battling against cancer. When she lost that battle, as documented by her mother in a blog, there was an immediate outpouring of sorrow and condolence from the readership, matched only in its intensity by the anger and vituperation that followed the revelation that Kaycee never existed.
But what was it that made those readers angry? Surely not just that they had their finer feelings manipulated by a stranger (which happens all the time in our lives). Rather were they perhaps affronted at a deception that led them into wasting their real time and emotions on something unreal?
Certainly more recent attempts at blog fiction have been careful to avoid the accusation that they are deliberately wasting the reader's time, and have been especially circumspect about requiring any deep emotional empathy or special bond between the reader and the writer.
She's A Flight Risk, for example, is by an author who purports to be on the run around the globe funded by various online share deals. But from the very beginning there is no serious attempt to make us believe in this person. Yes, there is intrigue and entertainment to be gleaned from her situation, but her personality is left underwritten. And it's absolutely not critical for the reader to know or even wonder whether this person is real or not.
As more and more people start blogging, the lines will inevitably blur between author and reader, and between fact and fiction. But this does not have to be as uncomfortable as it sounds.
Online audiences for this kind of fiction are themselves already developing tactics and techniques for interacting with these kinds of works in new ways, through inbuilt blogging tools such as commenting, trackback and hypertext linking. As web consumers they are more skeptical and less credulous than they were just a couple of years ago. As web creators they are more playful and creative.
Fictional blogging could allow people to develop ideas and rehearse emotions in a playful context that remains relevant to their everyday lives, instead of taking them away from reality. It could also allow them to develop their own playful spaces and identities as readers, as bloggers, and as digital authors in their own right.
Tim Wright trAce's Digital Writer-in-Residence trained as a journalist and editor on various magazines (Which Computer?, LAN Magazine) and newspapers (The Independent, Sunday Times). In 1995 Tim left print publishing to become one of the three Managing Partners of NoHo Digital, one of the UK's most successful independent new media agencies. In 1999, Tim and his creative collaborator Rob Bevan left NoHo to form XPT, with a view to finding markets and audiences for their own original digital works. In that time he has been the lead writer of two BAFTA-winning interactive projects the comedy self help disk MindGym and web & email drama Online Caroline, as well as scripting the lunatic web 'holiday' Mount Kristos and the absurd virtual gift-giving service IT3C.
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writersforthefuture/view/
Links
Bloggers of Note
Rebecca's Pocket:
http://www.rebeccablood.net/
Tom Coates (A much respected blogger of many years standing. Site includes a useful article on the history of weblogging.):
http://www.plasticbag.org/
Mark Bernstein (Personal blog from the chief scientist at Eastgate Systems. Always perceptive and very well connected. Site includes a slideshow on Stories in Weblogs'.):
http://markbernstein.org/
Jill Walker (Jill has recent become Doctor Jill, and is a respected commentator on all aspects of digital culture.):
http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/
Blog Culture
Grand Text Auto (A group blog dedicated to "smashing up digital narrative, poetry, games and art"):
http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/
Weblog Kitchen:
http://www.weblogkitchen.com/
BlogTalk 2.0 (Conference for the bloggerati to be held in Vienna Austria in July 2004.):
http://blogtalk.net/
Blogging - What Is It?:
http://www.infotoday.com/lu/may02/conhaim.htm
BlogFiction
She's A Flight Risk:
http://shes.aflightrisk.org/
The Kaycee controversy:
http://rootnode.org/article.php?sid=26
Deconstructing Kaycee:
http://psychcentral.com/blogs/kaycee.htm
FictionBlogs:
http://fictionblogs2.blogspot.com/
Spoof about Google founders:
http://searchguild.com/googleblog/
Lit Blogging
Booksurfer:
http://booksurfer.blogspot.com/
Arts Journal:
http://www.artsjournal.com/blogs/
Novelist Blogging
William Gibson:
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp
Neil Gaiman:
http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp
trAce Blogs
Tim Wright, Writer in Residence, Writers for the Future
http://timwright.typepad.com/inresidence/
Simon Widdowson, Digital Teacher in Residence, Writers for the Future in the Classroom
http://simonwiddowson.typepad.com/teacher/
