Targeted Serendipity

More established than a cult and less structured than a society, the international community of Webloggers is -- like its chosen medium -- difficult to define and even harder to miss. A hodgepodge of HTML programmers, part-time philosophers, and linkaholics, this scattered population shares one common penchant -- no, make that obsession. The Weblog.

Since banding together three years ago, Webloggers have grown in number and in zeal. As the rest of the digital populace shriveled following the dotcom crash, the group grew more fervent, espousing the mighty power of the Weblog -- or blog, for short -- to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and CNN, among others. But before September 11, most outsiders dismissed blogs as glorified pages of links and rambling personal home pages. And for the most part, they were. Then the landscape shifted.

"I remember one Weblogger, a few weeks after the attacks, writing, 'The wind has changed direction. I was feeling better over the last few days, but the wind changed direction and I now can smell that smell again,' " says Rebecca Blood, a long-time blogger and community spokesperson. "You couldn't read that in the daily newspapers. After September 11, blogs offered a personal level of information and emotion that you couldn't get anywhere other than ground zero."

In the days and weeks following the terrorist attacks, traffic surged to Rebecca's Pocket and other link-heavy blogs as casual readers became fanatical news junkies. Blogs, they found, offered something ABC News and USA Today did not: a human filter on an information overload. Bloggers like Blood spent countless hours sifting through the news, selecting the most pertinent and compelling articles, and linking freely to them. Others simply shared a personal prayer or memory.

"Blogs became therapy," Blood says. "As a coping mechanism, people needed to make themselves feel useful, so they collected information for their blogs 24 hours a day. Others worked through their feelings by writing for an online audience, which forced them to clarify and explain their messy emotions."

In truth, blogs have always delivered personal connections, news filters, and therapeutic value for their writers and readers. September 11 just amplified all that, says Blood, author of the forthcoming book The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog (Perseus Publishing, June 2002). Since she began Rebecca's Pocket in 1999, blogging has also delivered a book deal and a marriage proposal to Blood. (Her husband, Jesse James Garrett, was the first blogger to link to Rebecca's Pocket. They married two years later.) She has seen the metamorphosis of blogs, and she's cheering for more change.

"The Web gives everybody a place to say their peace, talk about what they love, and share their stories," Blood says. "There's nothing more important than that."

The Opposite of Sticky

The origin of the Weblog is somewhat murky, but the name is easily traced back to an essay written in January 1999 by Cameron Barrett, maintainer of CamWorld since 1997. When Barrett published "Anatomy of a Weblog," the community coalesced. The first Webloggers -- largely programmers with too much free time -- began linking to each other, as well as to quirky Web sites and news sources reporting breakthroughs in the world of geeks. Occasionally, they posted off-color comments about the news and tried their hand at irreverence. Stickiness was a dirty word, and the best Weblogs achieved what Blood calls "targeted serendipity," pointing readers to things that they didn't know they wanted to see.

"The people who create Weblogs have an innate understanding of the Web that most business leaders do not," she says. "Bloggers look to the Web first for information -- it's their window on the world. So it was the most natural thing in the world for them to send people away from their sites through links. That's what the Web is good for: sharing information. They understand that people will come every day to a site that sends them to other interesting places."

Back in the era of IPOs and E*Trade, bloggers also thought they could make money doing what they love. They imagined that companies, freelancers, and division managers would hire them to create and maintain Weblogs designed to foster internal communication or to build a professional reputation. The short, pitchy writing of Webloggers looks easy, but it's incredibly difficult to prompt a reader to click on any given link with just a 20-word description. Certainly the marketplace would value this skill, the bloggers reasoned.

"We thought that there would be maybe 100 of us in the end, and that bloggers would be in high demand," Blood says. "We didn't foresee the introduction of tools that would enable anyone to start a Weblog. And we certainly never thought half a million people would be interested in blogging."