Author: Tom Coates

by Matthew Ford [e-mail]
Bloggers scour the internet, blog what interests them, read other blogs, and if they see something they like, they blog it on their own blogs too.

Tom is disappointed by the lack of debauchery at his office party, passionate about the creative potential of the web and sometimes strangers like his site enough to send him presents. Tom is a blogger and I know all about him because for the last few months I’ve been reading his weblog (www.plasticbag.org).

In its purest form a weblog (or blog) is a collection of links, commentary and often intimate diary-style content. Blogging is a DIY publishing phenomenon thousands strong, made possible by Pyra, a company that produces a feww internet application called Blogger (www.blogger.com).

To the uninitiated, bloggers can seem narcissistic and slightly geeky, but by putting their lives online they’re probably closer to the DIY utopian dreams of the early internet pioneers than any dotcom ‘cash cow’ can ever be.

Websites used to have to be slowly hand-coded, but Blogger makes it possible to set up a site in minutes, edit it in seconds, and work on it anywhere with internet access. The result is an international, inconnected community.

Some cult sites get thousands of visitors every day, develop a devoted community of readers, and inspire soap opera-style discussion. Two of the most influential US bloggers – Meg (www.megnut.com) and Jason (www.kottke.org) – were outed when sleuths discovered their private romance through clues on their sites.

Bloggers frequently copy, parody and play with ideas from each other’s sites. Many bloggers work in internet-related jobs, and blogs are often the source of trends that are hyped across the web. The ease of publishing on blogs allows individuals to talk to the world, perhaps in a way they couldn’t talk to their friends and family?cated to special interest groups like gay politics (www.hit-or-miss.org/queeries) or media gossip www.medianews.org).
Blogging can seem a strange world, but it’s free, playful and constantly innovative. Isn’t that everything the net should be about?

A quick happy birthday to David Bowie, a tremendously creative individual and an influence to every person in the world who ever wanted to “gazelle on stage and look pleased with [themselves]”.

The short interview I gave to the Bookseller magazine about repurposing print content for the web is currently in print (5th Jan 2001): “Chat Room”. I’d appreciate input from anyone in the industry who would like to comment upon it. [e-mail: tom%40plasticbag.org]

Thanks to Meg and David for coming up with an in-joke so obscure that we will surely be hounded to death by clique-busters for the rest of our lives. I will confess to it being very amusing – at least to me…

For those Americans amongst us, here’s a very bad preview to the movie Snatch, which my flat mate worked on and which really is pretty damn good in places. Go see it.

Yesterday afternoon was spent dozing through my second visit to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and having weird conversations with Meg and David. Is this what the future holds for me? [Pics: Tom, David]

So the biggest news of the day is that yesterday morning I handed in two months notice at my job as Production Editor at timeout.com citing as a reason that there was no longer space for me to take my role forward in a direction that I was comfortable with. I wonder what I’ll do now. [Thanks to: Humanlint, Prolific and Meg for wishing me luck.]

A few quick links: musekick.BLOG uses stylesheets in a fashion that somehow looks harmonious and elegant despite using a substantial variety of different line-spacings, font sizes and the like. It reminds me of some of David Carson’s typographic work in a weird way. Proto-web god Grant Morrison releases his latest memeflood into the etherica. Speaking of which, I didn’t realise that Network Solutions were now selling one year domain registrations, or that their pricing structure had changed, or that they were now selling the .tv domain [more] as well (etherica.org is available to buy).

Pixelflo launches Web Trumps – a new Top Trumps style game where you can play with your favourite web celebs, down-at-heel webloggers, and gods like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Based upon Dan Hon’s Blogtrumps, I am delighted to add that I have my very own card. The whole enterprise is a great laugh, but it does bring up issues regarding the nature of web celebrity, and its disconnected, “clumpy”, community-based nature.

Let’s say, for example, that I ran two sites (I run several more, actually, but that’s not the issue). Both have very different subject matters. Both have received about the same number of page impressions at various points. The two are not connected in any particular fashion. In both communities (weblogger / fan) the site that is relevant to them are well known, while being completely unknown to the other community. At this point you have to ask yourself about whether all communities are equal. Because of (often) our industry connections, do webloggers have an unnaturally significant impact / public image as opposed to other communities on the net? Are we, in fact, more equal than others?