Features

They call themselves bloggers—creators of weblogs, otherwise known as blogs—and they’re realizing the writer’s age-old dream of instantaneous publication to a worldwide audience. 

The blogosphere, as bloggers call their cybernetic world, now numbers somewhere in the neighborhood of eight million sites, according to a recent estimate cited by the fortuitously named Scott Hacker, webmaster for UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. 

Two years ago, the estimate was 500,000. 

So just what is a blog? And what the heck does a blogger do? 

Beyond a web address and a collection of items—written, graphic, and sometimes, musical—that the blogger wants to share, Hacker says the main criterion is chronological ordering: The newest item sits at the top of the page, followed by the next most recent, and so on to the bottom of the web page. “Blogs aren’t like newspapers, where the most important stories are placed first,” he says. 

“Part of their popularity comes from their spontaneity,” Hacker says. 

Internet users can find a sense of community in the blogosphere, as sites often provide click-on links to similar blogs—and users can blog-roll from site to site in pursuit of their interests.  

Blogs are starting to make the news. Matt Drudge’s website (www.drudgereport.com) played a major role in whipping up opposition to Bill Clinton’s presidency, and Hacker points to the role of bloggers in forcing the mainstream media to focus on Trent Lott’s otherwise unreported remarks in praise of Strom Thurmond’s racist presidential run—coverage that ultimately forced Lott to step down from his post as Senate majority leader. 

Bloggers also kept alive the controversy over George W. Bush’s peculiar National Guard service, where the issue bubbled for months until boiling over into the corporate press after documentarian Michael Moore called Bush a deserter. 

But serious political blogs, though the most reported on by the mainstream media, are in the minority. And while many confine their observations to a single theme—politics, music, law, and the media—many others are more random, covering anything and everything that crosses the blogger’s mind. 

Content ranges from the serious to the sardonic, and site design varies from the lavishly produced to the simplest of bare bones style. 

Hacker says nobody’s quite sure when the form first arose. “I’ve seen examples going back to ‘94 and ‘95 back when the [World Wide] Web was being born.” 

Though some purists shudder at the thought, Hacker includes the posters at Livejournal.com—the phenomenally popular site where users can post online diaries—among the ranks of bloggers. 

A quick surfing tour of the blogosphere reveals that Berkeley’s a hotbed of blogging, hosting two of the country’s most influential blogs—appropriately, both political from a left/liberal perspective—and teeming with scores of other sites. 

So just how many blogs does Berkeley have? Hacker doesn’t know, nor does anyone else, but blogs are a natural fit for a town with a reputation for activism and filled with citizens with something to say. 

The website Berkeley Blogs (www.berkeleyblogs.org), devoted to the city’s weblogs, features a far-from-exhaustive list of categorized links to 44 weblogs, but a quick search engine foray leads to dozens of others that aren’t listed. 

But a couple of days’ worth of web surfing shows that the answer has to be in the hundreds. 

Besides the blogs he helps classes run at the school, UC’s Hacker runs one the city’s most sophisticated personal blogs, The Bird House (http://birdhouse.org/blog), a site that’s everything you’d expect from the fellow who runs the Internet presence for one of the country’s most respected journalism schools. 

Drawing about 1,500 visitors a day, Birdhouse is a pleasure to view, full of crisp, clear photos and nice clean type. What makes the site especially memorable for the visiting cybersurfer is the series of 13 entries grouped together under the heading TAXONOMY. Click on “Media,” and the blog instantly recreates itself, extracting all the entries focused on the Internet, television, films, and the press. Click “Family” and you learn about a toddler named Miles. Click “Politics,” and you find entries a lot of Berkeleyans would endorse. 

“Even so,” Hacker says, “most people go to the [unsorted] home page,” where the ordering principle is the standard chronological blog format. 

Most Berkeley sites aren’t as sophisticated, but they still qualify as blogs. 

For sheer entertainment value, try In Passing (www.inpassing.org), an anonymously posted blog memorializing weird and savory nuggets of conversation overhead at such public places as the line at Andronico’s on Shattuck Avenue, the sidewalk in front of Pegasus Books, and at a nearby table at Peet’s coffee. The distinctly surreal touch of many of the conversational nuggets makes the site a popular spot across the blogosphere. 

But no blog in Berkeley gets more hits than The Daily Kos (www.dailykos.com), a political site so popular with its vast audience that they coughed up the cash to send site founder Markos Moulitsas Zúniga—the site name derives from the last three letters of his first name—traveling around the country to cover the Democratic primaries. 

The site has drawn attention from national print and broadcast media, thrusting the non-doctrinaire blogger into rarefied heights. Rating site Blogstreet ranks The Daily Kos as the country’s sixth most influential blog. 

The site’s closest Berkeley rival is Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal (www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type), the blog of a UC Berkeley economist, ranked in 14th place. 

In terms of overall visits, The Daily Kos is the clear winner, collecting nearly 110,000 hits a day, compared with DeLong’s 8600. But DeLong packs the heaviest credentials, having served as an economic adviser to Bill Clinton, holding a professorship at UCB and writing prolifically for academic journals and Big Name Press (New York Times included). 

DeLong himself earned an unintentional accolade earlier this month when one of his journalistic critiques—a staple of his blog—provoked the ultimate expletive from Washington Post economics reporter Jonathan Weisman. After DeLong zinged his coverage of the new Bush budget as posted on the paper’s website, Weisman grumbled “Fuck Brad DeLong” in an e-mail he copied to the Berkeley blogger. “The first piece put on the web is slapped together as quickly as possible, and the guy for some reason doesn’t like me.” 

Needless to say, the intemperate e-missive quickly flickered through the blogosphere, provoking countless comments. 

The overwhelming majority of weblogs are personal, Hacker says. Most are high tech diaries, recording the musings of people who feel compelled to share something of themselves with the world. Two Berkeley examples are The Golden Blog (http://thegoldenblog.typepad.com/the_golden_blog), offering reflections and photographs reflecting the public life of Kathy Sierra, an eight-year Berkeley resident who plays fiddle with her band, Golden Bough, and Berkeley Crossroads (http://crossroads.berkeleyblogs.com), looking at the city through the eyes of a gay man who’s just come out. 

Beast Blog (www.beastblog.com) is a collaborative effort drawing its name from Pig Latin, “East Bay” being the way “beast” is said in that arcane childhood lingo. Thanks to a handy list on the page’s right-hand column, surfers can call up items by neighborhood (six for Berkeley, nine for Oakland); likewise for 14 categories of food. Nine entries describe places visitors can find free wireless Internet service.  

In the civic organization category, baha news (www.berkeleyheritage.com/weblog/blogger.html)—the Journal of the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association—offers a pleasantly designed and well-illustrated look at some of the city’s endangered landmarks and the preservation efforts of BAHA and others. 

Then there’s the city’s own newsblog (www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/news/newsscan.asp), a digest of news items about the city assembled from print and electronic media. 

Armed with the free high-speed Internet service that comes with enrollment, UC students comprise a major force in Berkeley’s blogging community. 

Res ipsa loquitor (http://resipsaloquitur.blogspot.com) is a collaborative blog providing a forum for conservative UC students and alums, while the Angry Clam (http://angryclam.blogspot.com) features the political pronouncements of an anti-Bush conservative 

CalStuff: News About Berkeley (http://calstuff.blogspot.com) is the work of Kevin Deenihan, the techie who created the Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive, a favorite site for fans of the New York Times columnist. CalStuff focuses mainly on campus-related events, with the occasional foray into the larger Berkeley scene. [Note to blogger: the Daily Planet is back in business, so you might want to correct your links listing].  

Rebecca C. Brown and Tommaso Sciortino cover the campus with a satirical touch in CalJunket (http://caljunket.blogspot.com) while tackling national politics from a decidedly left-liberal perspective. Their site, frequently updated, competes with far better-known sites for timeliness and frequency of postings. 

Another student blog, Beetle Beat: Liberals Are People Too (www.beetlebeat.blogspot.com), seems to consist mainly of Aurora Drake’s none-too-kindly musings on the Daily Cal.  

If Six Was Nine (www.ifsix.blogspot.com) is a six-person collaborative blog—five with UC e-mail addresses—that covers the music scene, featuring nice lists of links to local and regional music venues and publications and the websites of a long roster of performers. 

Other student sites aren’t as accessible to most American surfer, appear in (among other scripts Chinese, Japanese, and Cyrillic characters. 

Berkeley High School boasts its own collection of student bloggers, including Rachel Rudy’s literate, perceptive Gwar Like Whoa (http://vilekeg.blogspot.com), Ram Dass Khalsa’s Life Is What Brought You Here (http://ohthatsucks.diaryland.com), Andy Moskowitz’s infrequently updated Toasty Kingdom ([http://s88215129.onlinehome.us), and Mischa Spiegelmock’s lavishly illustrated happiland.2y.net (http://happiland.2y.net). 

Blogs are here to stay, and they’re increasingly important. In this year’s election, candidates at all levels are exploiting the form (Dennis Kucinich’s blog is a creation of Berkeley blogger Henry Poole).  

But for most bloggers, a long-timer surfer might conclude, the main function the medium serves is to offer an unprecedented chance to be heard, to reach across the electronic ether and touch another life, however remote.