What Are Weblogs?

Most simply, weblogs are personal websites. Jorn Barger, the proprietor of the Robot Wisdom Weblog, first coined the term in December1997. Originally, weblogs (in Barger's definition) were simply webpages "where a weblogger (sometimes called a blogger, or a pre-surfer) 'logs' all the other webpages she finds interesting." But quickly weblogs became something closer to personal journals. They were updated daily and the commentary about the links--and the persona of the commentator--became at least as important as the links themselves. As another prominent weblogger (Cameron Barrett of Camworld) puts it, "weblogs ... are designed for an audience. They have a voice. They have a personality... they are an interactive extension of who you are."

This eclectic effort by individuals to tame the wilderness of the Web marks weblogs as a distinctive new form of writing. They are, observes journalist Jon Katz, "the freshest example of how people use the Net to make their own radically different new media." Although they share many of the characteristics of a diary and a scrapbook, they are distinct in being public and published and in their communal nature--they are part of a web publishing community. Most often, webloggers focus on a particular slice of Web life--web design, the arts, software coding, media gossip, Internet finance, or even other weblogs--but the idiosyncratic commentary generally ranges much farther afield.

Starting in 1999 weblogs spread rapidly across the Net, fueled, in particular, by the availability of easy-to-use software packages like Pitas, Frontier, Blogger, and grokSoup that simplify the task of creating and maintaining a weblog. Given the personal nature of the form, no one has a complete count or directory of weblogs. But one fairly comprehensive directory, eatonweb portal, currently lists more than 3,000 weblogs.

Who Logged What

To the benefit of future historians, the growth in weblogs almost perfectly coincided with the twenty-first century's first major historical event--the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Our concern at the September 11 Digital Archive is that this rich source of personal responses not prove as ephemeral as diaries about December 7, 1941.

Fortunately, a quick-thinking software engineer in Boston, Jason Desjarins, acted to preserve these hothouse flowers. He wrote a program to locate, download and archive web logs which discussed the events of September 11, and made them available to the public at his personal web site, The Great LaRouche Toad Massacre. These nearly 500 weblogs represent an extreme range of opinion and emotional response, from simple declarations such as, "today my generation just experienced our pearl harbor" (Brooklyn Kid), to detailed discussions of efforts to locate friends and family in New York and Washington, DC (see the account by the punk rocker at Tawdry), to critical questioning which began for some only hours after the initial plane crashes had occurred, such as the Southern Gurl, who asked at 2:40 PM on 9/11/2001, "You think this chaos? Imagine the Middle East. This is normal for people over there. Imagine how scared children stay over there everyday." Like the web culture of which they are a part, these weblogs reflect the extreme variety of opinion and perspective which abound in our turn-of-the-century culture.

A Note on Copyright and Fair Use

The copyright in these weblogs remains with their authors. These excerpts from much longer weblogs are made under the principle of "fair use" and for the purposes of preserving the historical record. If any individual whose work is included here would prefer that their comments not be included in this archive please contact info@911digitalarchive.org and we will remove it.