It's about this.
I am this guy.
[City Link Magazine, April 14-20, 2004; pages 17-21]
By Colleen Dougher
Randy and Jacquie Jenkins don't know many of their neighbors. They don't go to bars or nightclubs, or go out to socialize with friends and co-workers. Instead, they conduct their social life using a mouse and a Webcam. "In fact, we don't have any real-life friends," Randy Jenkins says. "We talk to people online all the time."
When the couple's daughter, Kaitlyn, was born in December, they held her up to the Webcam for their online friends to see. On holidays, they send cards and gifts to those friends, whom they've never met in person. The Jenkinses and their Internet pals constantly e-mail and instant message one another, often about what they've written in their Weblogs, which is what brought them all together in the first place.
The term Weblog was coined by Jorn Barger, a reclusive Chicagoan who in 1997 launched www.robotwisdom.com, which contains links to Web sites and articles he finds interesting. Today, the Web is filled with blogs: business blogs, band blogs, psychology blogs, sports blogs, music blogs, gossip blogs and moblogs, which post pictures taken by camera-equipped mobile phones. Some people even write blogs about blogs. Last year, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean used a blog (www.blogforamerica.com) to campaign for president online, raising millions of dollars and generating massive hype.
But the Jenkinses, who met eight years ago in an Internet chat room, are part of a growing breed of personal bloggers, or diarists, who write regularly about their lives and obsessively read the blogs of others who share their passion for journaling. Randy, 32, launched his blog in 2000 while working as a Web designer for an online aviation magazine. While surfing the Net during his downtime, he discovered www.diaryland.com and posted a journal under the name Icebear, which he began updating from work.
"In one day at work, I'd probably spend almost a third of my day messing with my diary site, how it looks, etc.," he recalls. "And then, after I'd get that done and get an entry done, I'd go and read others. ... It was addictive. I was reading them every day."
Before long, Randy was praising the work of fellow DiaryLand bloggers such as Anenigma, Unclebob and Uberhamster, even when they were only writing about their lousy days. "We want to hear how ****ty someone's life got, because then, we know we're not alone," Randy wrote in his blog. "If I go too long without reading Anenigma or Unclebob or the Uberhamster (as well as many others), I feel kind of empty. I know it sounds corny, but it fills something in me. It lets me know that I'm not going through life and feeling the things I feel alone."
"You see everything in their lives and their different views and stuff," adds Jacquie, a 29-year-old pet groomer who writes under the pseudonym KittiKity but uses her real name in her online profile. "It's like a soap opera."
That doesn't mean that every blogger's life is like The O.C. Sarah, a 15-year-old high-school student from Hollywood, writes in her online bio that her life is "pretty damn boring." But that hasn't stopped her from writing all about it in a blog that chronicles her trips to the mall, "shrink" appointments and drinking binges. She writes about coming home smashed on Saturday nights without her parents noticing. In fact, she repeatedly writes about how no one seems to notice or care about anything that happens in her life.
The Jenkinses, meanwhile, chronicle everything from their boogers to their bowel movements. Occasionally, they post emotional, moving stories, such as the ones Randy wrote about the loss of his grandmother and the death of his dog. But mostly, they just write about work, sex, financial woes, shopping trips, video games, heavy metal, what they had for dinner and their three kids. Both say they try not to censor themselves, and it shows. In one entry, Randy wrote that he was "tired of hearing about the oppression of Jews, African-Americans and Hispanics/Cubans." On another occasion, he wrote, "I think the Mexicans and Cubans should go back to their countries and work to solve the problems that made them come here in the first place."
Good or bad, blogs allow diarists to publish anything they want, and increasingly more people are taking advantage of the opportunity. Last fall, Perseus Development Corp., a Braintree, Mass.-based Internet marketing research firm, randomly surveyed 3,634 blogs on eight sites including DiaryLand, BlogSpot, LiveJournal and Xanga to develop a model of blog populations. Perseus estimates that 4.12 million blogs were launched on these sites and that 91 percent of them were created by people ages 13 through 29.
John W. Grohol, a Boston-area psychologist who studies blogging, says the reasons people spill their guts online are as varied as the bloggers themselves. "Some do it as a creative exercise," he explains. "Others do it to help keep boredom at bay. Still others write daily because they feel compelled to keep their readership coming back."
He attributes the increasing number of blogs to more people going online and more server-based tools that allow people to publish them without installing new software. Blogger.com, for instance, helps bloggers publish to the Web instantly "whenever the urge strikes." The site's slogan is "Push-Button Publishing for the People." While blog host sites often offer extra services, such as counters and password protection for an annual fee, many offer the basic diary setup for free. Getting started is easy. Maintaining a blog is not.
"Initially, blogging sounds like fun and as if it might be interesting," Grohol notes. "But as any daily or even weekly columnist can tell you, it's hard writing about new stuff day after day, week after week, year after year. It's a challenge to keep it fresh."
People who begin writing for a readership, whether it's composed of friends, strangers or family members, Grohol says, feel a responsibility to keep adding new entries, no matter how mundane they may be. Many bloggers fear that if they don't constantly update their journals, they will lose readers and their blogs will fall into obscurity.
Jordon Kalilich, a 14-year-old Pompano Beach High School freshman, started blogging to keep his quasi-geeky site www.theworldofstuff.com from going that route. Although his site links to some of his favorite Web pages, "I realized that those little pages weren't enough to keep people coming back," he says. "What I needed was something daily or every other day, and a blog seemed to be the perfect idea." So last summer he posed the question, "To blog or not to blog?" on his site. "But then, reality got a hold of me," he wrote. "I mean, come on, who's going to want to read about a 14-year-old kid?"
He started blogging anyway, and while his journal isn't as personal as some others, he writes regularly about everything from school to his Beatles cover band to his trip to the eye doctor. Before he started blogging, his site received about nine hits a week. Now, he's getting about 105, he says, and is using a free advertising service called BlogSnob.
Jacquie Jenkins, who is not a member of a blogging community, says her site doesn't get many hits. "But I'm also not one of those people [who] writes just to get people to come to their sites and brag about how many hits they get. My blog is more for me and the few people I know online. If I get a new reader, then great. But if not, I don't care."
Grohol says people who post blogs generally do seek recognition and popularity. "It doesn't have to be widespread, large, Google-like popularity," he argues, "but rather popularity amongst their peer group or the group they most admire online. Many bloggers don't care if Joe Smith from Tennessee reads their blogs, but they do care if other popular bloggers — or the bloggers that travel in their circles and that they admire — are reading their blog and linking to it."
At some point, many bloggers develop a need for feedback. They want to know their readers are out there. "I don't want 800 links to my diary or **** like that," Randy wrote shortly after he began blogging, "but an e-mail every now and then saying, 'Hey, Bear, noticed you haven't posted for a few days. Just wondering if you're OK, because I miss reading your diary.' I started this diary for myself, and I didn't care if anyone read it. But after seeing all the people who are fans of Unclebob and [Anenigma] and Banky and such, I just wonder. Do I have any fans? Are there people who get a slight bit bummed if I don't post?"
Many bloggers are starting to get recognition. Last month, the fourth annual Bloggie Awards were presented at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. The ceremony, hosted by blogger Nikolai Nolan (who this year sang "Win a Bloggie" to the tune of Justin Timberlake's "Rock Your Body") honored 30 bloggers, voted the best by their peers, in categories ranging from Best Weblog About Weblogs to Best Merchandise of a Weblog.
Some people promote their blogs by distributing stickers or selling coffee mugs, mousepads and T-shirts. Randy once considered merchandising. "My diary was also a bit more popular then," he says. "Now, it's kind of fallen into obscurity."
Randy, who is presently employed as a maintenance worker for the Broward County Parks and Recreation Division, reports that his blog now gets only about 15 hits a week, some of which are from Jacquie, checking to see whether he has updated it. "If it picks back up again," Randy says, "I might revisit the idea of merchandise." For now, not being able to blog at work has cut back on Randy's updates considerably.
As Grohol notes, keeping a blog fresh is a challenge, one that many bloggers eventually give up on. The blogosphere, as bloggers have come to call it, is full of neglected blogs that once had vivid lives. Yet Grohol maintains that there are gems to be found among the abandoned. Infrequent updating is not necessarily a bad thing. One of the problems with blogs, he says, is that bloggers become slaves to the medium, since maintaining one requires far more attention than a regular Web page.
"The real question, of course, is whether a home page that is updated two or three times a day is really more interesting or stimulating than one that isn't," he observes. "Some people sometimes confuse frequency of updates with 'interesting,' when, as any casual reader of random blogs will attest to, more frequent usually does not translate into higher-quality content."
In an article on blogging, Grohol wrote that "this is what separates a good journal from a horrible one. Knowing a person ate Chex at 8 p.m. on a Saturday has about as much insight and entertainment value as watching a leaf grow. Some things just don't need to be shared with the world."
ARE YOU BEING BLOGGED?
With so many people writing online diaries, your chances of knowing someone who blogs are greater than ever — as are your chances of being blogged about. Consider Randy Jenkins' rants about his former co-workers, including one he calls a "brain-dead idiot," on his blog at http://icebear.diaryland.com.
"She's about 25 years old, sounds like Shirley Temple on helium and is not the sharpest knife in the drawer," Jenkins wrote of one colleague. "She lives in Boca with her mother, and her grandparents pay for everything. She's got a brand-new Mustang, which Grampy bought. They pay her bills, so she spends her entire paycheck on whatever she wants ... usually drugs and really bad clothes. ... She's rather small-breasted; she's pretty chubby. I mean, she has rolls, come on, and she insists on wearing skintight outfits to work that are just so unappealing." He then goes on to attack the woman's job skills before revealing that she beat his wife out for this position.
Jenkins isn't overly concerned that this woman might read what he wrote about her. "She could possibly find it, and she may already have," he says. "But I don't think she'd take it too personally."
In fact, Jenkins rarely mentions the people he's writing about by name. He also writes under a pseudonym, Icebear. Many bloggers don't use their real names, but determining their identities is often simple. Jenkins provides a link to the blog written by his wife, who uses her real name on her site and mentions his as well.
Psychologist John W. Grohol points out that some bloggers carefully measure what they write and how they say it to stay out of trouble with their friends, families and co-workers. "Others seem not to care and seem to believe there is a greater degree of privacy online than actually exists," he explains. "So people need to be aware of all the risks and seriously consider making and keeping their journal writings more private to help limit such risks."
Jenkins says he once considered keeping his diary private so he could vent without worrying about anyone reading it but decided against it. "I'm going to let everything out here," he wrote, "and if people don't like it, **** 'em."
START BLOGGING
While BlogSpot (www.blogger.com/blogspot-admin) claims to be the easiest option when it comes to host sites, it's just one of many. DiaryLand, LiveJournal, Weblogger, Xanga and other such sites will set up your blog for free, charging only for additional services. Following is a step-by-step process to getting started, using BlogSpot as an example.
1. Give your blog a name, describe what you will write about and offer a little background on yourself.
2. Select a host (such as BlogSpot).
3. Select a name for your URL (http://obsessivecompulsive.blogspot.com, for example).
4. Pick a template design. If you know HTML, you can design your own and replace the template that comes with your blog.
5. Write about your life, your dog, your bowel movements, your dog's bowel movements, your co-workers, politics or anything else you care to share with the world.
6. Click "post and publish" to send your writing out into the blogosphere.
[Copyright © 2004 Forum Publishing Group, a subsidiary of Sun-Sentinel Co. Reprinted in accordance with the fair use guidelines stated in 17 USC §107.]
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