Personal Web Logs Put a Face on a Faraway Disaster

You might know a George Weld: Married, 29, one cat, partial to bourbon and hamburgers on a summer’s day. Fled an English doctoral program for the dot-com world in New York City. Thinks his mom grows the most delicious strawberries that he has “ever, ever eaten.” Flip through the rest of his Web log, and you get a sense of who he is, the way you do when you check out David Letterman or Mike Royko.

Personal Web logs, or “blogs” in abbreviated form, are running newsletters of sorts, compiled and written by solo cyber-commentators. Blogs reflect the blips on their personal radar screens, tracking the news, the Internet and their lives--an exercise, critics once scoffed, in self-importance. Weld’s blog drew about 15 friends and family members a day until the morning of Sept. 11, when he and his wife rode their bikes to work in lower Manhattan .... And then thousands of Web readers worldwide watched events unfold through his up-ended prism on https://likeanorb.com.

Since the terrorist attacks and U.S. retaliation in Afghanistan, blogs nationwide have taken on unprecedented visibility and, in some cases, new identities as a source of alternative news or “personal journalism.” During the recent news events, when traditional media sites crashed or lacked timely updates, online readers jumped to fast-loading blogs. Blogs also are easy to update, providing their audiences with not only breaking news but the first-person eyepiece they covet.In the past two years, more than 250,000 people have started blogs, which were once dismissed as the province of teenage girls who put their diaries online, or a quirky repository of musings for a largely Gen-X-Y-techie crowd. Recently, Web log creators, or “bloggers,” threw together a panel in San Francisco to discuss their coverage of the events as “amateur journalists.” Meanwhile, scholars are working on a project to identify and archive material on blogs related to the attacks.

Even Web log critics such as Charles Cooper, executive editor of commentary at the respected technology site CNET https://news.com, admitted turning to blogs on Sept. 11 and beyond. “Sometimes they were raw, sometimes they were pretentious and sometimes they were flat-out wrong,” wrote Cooper in a column headlined “When Blogging Came of Age,” “but the information was fresh and real and unmediated by any intervening institutions.”

A blogger spins news into a context that regular readers come to trust, with a worldview that is likely to parallel theirs and dig up Web links that would resonate with followers of similar sensibility. They point to news stories on CNN and the Iranian press, and to obscure Web pages and blogs. Fans say the terrorist attacks seemed unreal when conveyed in the detached manner of TV journalists, but their own sense of horror was confirmed by reading blogs such as worldnewyork.org, which relayed news wrapped in the intimate cloak of conversation: “Not just one plane, but two. Not just one tower, but two. Sweet Jesus.”

Weld’s blog pierced the numbing blizzard of information and transported readers into his apartment, a mile away from the World Trade Center. Along with picture of the dying towers, he posted his father’s e-mail from his hometown of Charleston, S.C. “Your pictures, George, made me shake. Though not that different than the ones offered by the news, they were not taken by a faceless photographer but by my eldest son ... I love you two. Come home and let me hug you for a long time--Papa.”

And he posted a photograph of a small group of young men playing instruments, following a leader who carries a huge American flag: “On Saturday, on my way to the office,” Weld wrote, “a marching band without a parade and apparently nothing else to do was heading north on Varick Street, playing some patriotic song to which I’m ordinarily immune, and I burst into tears.”

Some bloggers say traffic to their sites still is on the upswing. The popular blog https://metafilter.com, for instance, reports an increase from 30,000 hits a day before Sept. 11 to up to 50,000 in the days after the attacks. (The number of blog readers still pales compared to figures reported by major Internet media sites on Sept. 11, such as MSNBC’s, which had as many as 400,000 hits at any point.)

Readers found blogs like Weld’s through search engines by typing in “World Trade Center” and “Web log” or by checking sites such as https://daypop.com or https://portal.eatonweb.com, which index blogs, or https://weblogs.com, which provides a “hot list.”

Blogs took off in late 1999, when San Francisco-based Pyra Labs and other companies began offering free software that makes it easy for even newbies to post updates as often as the urge strikes.

Pyra, as an offshoot of its work developing Web tools, released the software on blogger.com as a way for small groups to keep in touch. On https://blogger.com, registered users who run and finance personal blogs total more than 260,000, said Pyra’s co-founder and CEO Evan Willilams. (Other blogs accept ads, hire staff, feature a theme such as media gossip or are part of a news site or other enterprise.)

Last month, Dave Winer, CEO of UserLand Software, Inc., moderated a panel discussion on how blogs and mainstream media covered the terrorist attacks. Winer has run a high-profile blog called Scripting News since 1997. “There’s a sense of urgency that didn’t exist before in technology [circles],” he said. “We all have the sense that we might be at ground zero for the next one, and there is so much more we can do.”

He equates his role as a blogger to “the front-page editor of a newspaper, and the newspaper is being published every five minutes.”

Bloggers aren’t journalists who report the news, pointed out Paul Grabowicz, director of the New Media Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Rather, they are an “alternative media delivery source,” relaying news from traditional media, sometimes without attribution.

Most of the new audience is likely to wane, Grabowicz said. “I don’t know if there’s some sort of lasting impact from all of this,” he said. “I frankly think it was just for that period, they filled that sort of gap.” Still, media executives should watch the way that bloggers engage their audiences, he advised.

“If the communication keeps going on in Web logs, and the media isn’t opening its doors, slowly over time, you will see people gravitating away from [traditional] media sites, and that will be tragic,” he said. “I think you need to create a place where people can gather and put up their feelings and communicate with each other. The press used to be that kind of public gathering place--part of the community rather than standing apart from it.”

Blog e-mail is posted instantly, an instant community sounding. “We are ... because of this, cycling through the process of grief much faster,” e-mailed Grant Barrett, creator of https://worldnewyork.org and a student at Columbia University. On a few blogs, readers rant and joke and opine every day as a “form of keeping your own record. I find my memory of the 1993 [World Trade Center] tower bombing is clouded by the endless news coverage that came after ... I hope that it won’t be so with these events. I want to remember for myself, and I think that’s what others are trying to do.”

“They are resisting handing off the control of the record keeping--the photos, the stories, even of conventional wisdom and the undercurrent of opinion--to others.”

An Internet research group called https://webArchivist.org is studying how blogs and other Web spaces responded after the hijackings in a project with the Library of Congress and The Internet Archive in San Francisco.

“What’s happening on the Web right now is of historical importance to the entire nation,” said Kirsten A. Foot, a co-director of https://webArchivist.org and assistant professor of communications at the University of Washington.

Among the group’s areas of study: “In the aftermath of the attacks, what difference does it make for Joe Citizen to be able to express himself and read what other people are expressing? ... better information, more information, more politically active in new ways? Easier ways? A stronger sense of community with people who share their views?”

Before Sept. 11, blogs had begun to emerge as a distinct Net subculture. A few got Webby Award nominations or honors, which recognize the world’s best Web sites. In Brill’s Content magazine, which covers the media, a May cover story on bloggers calls them “human portals” and says “ ... the next chapter of the Internet may be about Web sites that are smart and intimate and, most important, reflect the folks behind them.”

Also in May, https://MetaFilter.com, made news for its role in uncovering a hoax that played out on a blog called Living Colours, which drew thousands of followers. The blog’s creator later was forced to admit that she had fabricated an ongoing story chronicling a 19-year-old’s struggle with leukemia, after MetaFilter readers and others caught inconsistencies in Kaycee Nicole Swenson’s fictional life and death.

“The Kaycee thing--I can’t imagine it happening again,” said MetaFilter creator Matt Haughey, a San Francisco Web designer. “Everyone’s so cynical after [the hoax] ... people on the site are trying to be their own filters.” By contrast, he said, last month’s attacks underscored how blogs can shine. These days, “everyone stays pretty civil and intelligent.” In July, Cameron Marlow, a doctoral student at MIT’s Media Lab, began a project called “blogdex,” which studies blogs as a way of distributing “personal news.” The project monitors the most popular links provided by blogs as a way of tracking interests in their community.

Before Sept. 11, according to blogdex, the top blogger link jumped to a Web site run by Wil Wheaton, who played Ensign Wesley Crusher on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” (Tech geeks, Marlow pointed out, are Trekkies at heart.) These days, blogdex is topped by links to sites about the airstrikes in Afghanistan, sprinkled with Trekkie culture favorites: “Click here to find out what [kind of] robot you really are.”

The spectrum is broad, Marlow said. “But I think the events of Sept. 11 will change the community because they realize the rest of the world is looking at them .... It’s not a trend. What they’re doing is something that’s going to be around forever. Now it’s not like, ‘I’m so hip, I have a Web log.’ Now it’s, ‘People who have Web logs have a duty in life.’ They want to tell the world what they think.”

Which means that bloggers such as Weld have turned into civic commentators. Before Sept. 11, https://likeanorb.com--named after a Wallace Stevens poem--read more like a running journal. You knew that Weld missed the smell of honeysuckle and jasmine in Charleston, that he was big on Robert Hass but not on a recent book of his poetry.

Weld transformed his blog when emergency officials began turning volunteers away. “It was really frustrating to be here and not be able to do anything,” said Weld, who had a view of the twin towers from his apartment. “Suddenly, this thing I was doing on the side was a way to contribute, something to help out.”

Weld isn’t sure how much longer he will keep up his role as a chronicler of the city’s recovery. “For all I know, the people who came to my site [recently] may never come again, and I’ll be writing for my friends and family again,” he said. “But I hope that what I write, no matter who reads it, I write thoughtfully and accurately. I think there’s a real civic value in doing that, especially when events like the attacks occur and people’s rhetoric becomes overheated.”

In his blog, for instance, Weld has reported and photographed the makeshift memorials on sidewalks--so many that the cement is slick from candle wax--with offerings to loved ones: a basketball, hammers, a Bart Simpson doll and a slice of watermelon (wrapped).

Kristi Johnson, a 22-year-old Web designer, checked likeanorb.com, along with CNN, and her local newspaper and radio stations in Phoenix. Blogs whisked her into the whirlwind of events. “The Web logs just supplied details that the media didn’t have time really to broadcast,” Johnson said in an e-mail interview.

“Long journalizations about how it felt to wake up, hear what was going on, give their feelings about knowing that a huge chunk of what they saw on a daily basis all their lives was destroyed. The media pictures were like scenes from a horrible war movie; the Web logs were like your best friend, sitting down and telling you what they saw firsthand.”

In Alberta, Canada, 23-year-old Taz Dhariwal now is a regular reader of likeanorb.com. “ ... it was more real than anything I saw on TV,” he said in an e-mail. “I got to know who was near ground zero ... I didn’t want to hear about the attacks from someone in some TV studio. People on the street. Normal people who were there. There’s where the meat lies.”