t is one of the enduring cycles of the Internet: the techies build a utopia and then complain when noisy crowds crash their party.
This time it is happening to Weblogs. Five years ago a few programmers pioneered this form of hyperlinked online journal, posting their thoughts on technology matters and personal musings. Later they built Weblog publishing tools for nontechies, and a vast spectrum of Weblogs — blogs for short — quietly bloomed.
Then came the war bloggers. The war-blogging movement took off after Sept. 11 as people used blogs to vent their anger about the terrorist attacks. Though they are still commonly known as war blogs, these sites now address a wide range of news and political topics, usually from right of center.
Thanks in part to the participation of some prominent journalists and academics, the pundit-style blogs quickly reached a level of public and media recognition that other blogs had never achieved. As a result, some latecomers now think Weblogs are inherently political. That has perturbed some Weblog veterans, who say the war bloggers are rewriting history and presenting a distorted view of blogs. They say the diversity of Weblogs is being overshadowed by the attention-getting style of war blogs.
"War blog editors need to make it clear to their audience that they are not the only kind of Weblog out there," said Cameron Barrett, a programmer and Web designer in New York who has been publishing his Camworld blog (camworld.com) since 1997, making him one of the first bloggers.
In response, the war bloggers say they represent the evolution of a medium that might have languished in obscurity without them.
"The Weblog world before Sept. 11 was mostly inward-looking — mostly tech people talking about tech things," said Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who publishes InstaPundit.com, a popular site in the war blog camp that attracts about 19,000 readers on weekdays. "After 9/11 we got a whole generation of Weblogs that were outward-looking" and written for a general audience, he said.
The war bloggers and veteran bloggers have largely ignored each other, rarely reading or linking to one another's sites. What brought some factional tensions to the surface was a plan, hatched by several war bloggers, to compile the best Web writings about the aftermath of the terrorist attacks into a book to benefit charity. In mid-April two bloggers, Eric Olsen and Ted Frank, took charge of the project, setting up a Weblog (blogbook.blogspot.com) and asking people to nominate their "favorite 9/11-related posts from ANY blogger." Mr. Reynolds agreed to make the final selections for the book, which is not yet titled.
The project was in part a reaction to the release of "September 11 and the U.S. War: Beyond the Curtain of Smoke," a book of left-leaning essays about the attacks. On the project site, Mr. Olsen called on fellow bloggers to crush "Western-civilization-hating, lefty-fascist essayists."
The partisan talk was not out of place in the war blog sphere, but it brought a sharp response from Jason Kottke, a blogger from another sector of the Weblog universe.
Mr. Kottke, a Web designer in San Francisco, has been updating kottke.org for four years, offering tidbits of personal insight on Internet happenings and his favorite movies, among other things. His site is popular within a tech- and design-minded Weblog crowd whose most influential members have some connection to Pyra Labs, the small San Francisco-based company behind the publishing tool Blogger.
On his site, Mr. Kottke mocked the suggestion that all bloggers were hawkish right-wingers and questioned the "us versus them" rhetoric: "How about letting everyone play . . . or at least make folks who may not be right-wing or pro-West feel welcome to contribute?"
A few other bloggers in Mr. Kottke's circle also chimed in. Members of the book team quickly responded on their own site, saying the call to arms had been exaggerated and that all submissions were welcome. They also got in a few digs. "It strikes me that a lot of the backbiting is really a complaint from longtime bloggers that the center of the Weblog universe isn't where it used to be," Mr. Frank wrote.
In an interview, Mr. Frank suggested that the veteran bloggers were also annoyed at how much media attention the war bloggers were getting, and how blog pundits like Andrew Sullivan were being called Weblog pioneers.
Mr. Kottke acknowledged that he felt a little resentment about the rise of war blogs, but said that was natural when an underground phenomenon goes mainstream. "It's like being the punk-rock fan who was into punk rock before everyone else," he said. The criticism of the book project was meant to improve the book by providing some perspective, Mr. Kottke added.
Three other old-school bloggers, all former employees of Pyra Labs, are also trying to convey a broader view of blogs with a site called Blogroots (blogroots.com). The site, introduced on Friday, has discussions of Weblog-related news and issues. It will eventually include the text of the trio's forthcoming book, "We Blog: Publishing Online With Weblogs," which includes a chapter on Weblog history.
Veteran bloggers say they are happy that blogs are catching on with a wider audience, but some challenge the idea that war blogs are somehow more relevant than other kinds. "I talk about things Glenn Reynolds doesn't understand, but that doesn't mean they're not important things to talk about," said Dave Winer, founder and chief executive of UserLand Software, whose Scripting News (scripting.com) is one of the oldest blogs.
At the same time, there are war bloggers who feel little need to pay homage to the tech crew. Ken Layne, a journalist in Los Angeles who publishes a blog at KenLayne .com, argues that he, Matt Drudge and others were writing about current events on the Web long before the term Weblog had been coined. "There's nothing novel about the tech bloggers, beyond the fact that a few of them made simple tools for updating Web sites," he wrote on his site last week.
Mr. Reynolds was more diplomatic, saying he "never would have gotten started without Blogger," Pyra's publishing tool. He cautioned against making too much of labels like war blog, and said he hoped that in the end the Sept. 11 book, which is still accepting submissions, "will represent the best work of the blogger community."
Mr. Reynolds said he was not sure why the old guard should have a problem with war blogs. "The essence of the Internet is constant change, and to get your nose out of joint about that is just silly," he said.
===== Kevin Dean Buffalo, NY ICQ: 8616001 AIM: KDean75206 Buffalo Activist Network http://www.buffaloactivist.net http://www.yaysoft.com
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