2003-04-03T22:54:00.000-08:00

Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston Globe

April 2, 2002, Tuesday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: LIVING; Pg. C1
LENGTH: 737 words
HEADLINE: ALEX BEAM;
IN THE WORLD OF WEB LOGS, TALK IS CHEAP
BYLINE: BY ALEX BEAM, GLOBE STAFF

Aimez-vous blog? Then you must enjoy Andrew Sullivan, the creator of andrewsullivan.com. In real life, Sullivan is a writer for The New Republic and The New York Times Magazine who pens occasionally cogent essays on being gay, British, and/or Catholic, three bases he has well covered. But as a daily "Web logger," Andrew is movie critic, literary tastemaker - he even has a Middle East peace plan!

Welcome to Blogistan, the Internet-based journalistic medium where no thought goes unpublished, no long-out-of-print book goes unhawked, and no fellow "blogger," no matter how outre, goes unpraised. In a recent blogophilic outing in Fast Company magazine (old media = bad!), former Globe columnist John Ellis asked, "Is there anything more tedious than the editorial page of The New York Times?" Well, yes. How about a frequently updated Web log that randomly posts leader-board rankings from ongoing golf tournaments? That would be John's site, www.johnellis.blogspot.com. "The golf stuff connects directly with about 35 people," he says. "But those 35 people really are into it."

At a site called the Daily Bleat (www.lileks.com), humor writer James Lileks spews forth about his lovely child, the leaking fridge, and late-night television (Rod Serling is "overrated"), and he even begins a recent meditation on events in the Mideast with the words "I don't know what to say today. I really don't." My point precisely.

Bestirred by my uncharitable inquiry, Lileks demonstrates that he does have something to say: "Oh, no. You're not going to write one of those clueless old-media 'blogging phenomenon' stories, are you? My Bleats are just end-of-the-day remarks. That's all. Granted, I'm not writing about deathless issues such as the movie rights for the story of a Providence mayor" - ouch! - "but now and then a few notes on the war just slip in for the few dozen readers interested in the subject." Lileks also writes for the soon-to-be-extinct newspaper medium and signs off on his message with this comradely quote from Elvis Costello: "I wish you luck with a capital F." Double ouch!

Andrew Sullivan piles on: "I know how threatening this new media is to old newspapers. I don't blame you for wanting to swat us down. But we're definitely appealing to a new audience, providing something fresh."

The Web loggers' main shortcoming is their compunction to "say" something several times a day, consequences be damned. This is roughly equivalent to writing a daily newspaper column, which no one has done here since the late novelist George V. Higgins. It's hard: At a lunch graced with an unending series of kirs at Locke-Ober long ago, Higgins likened the daily writing grind to marriage with an 800-pound gorilla. His precise words were a bit salty for the newspaper, but perhaps you see the point.

Another cloying attribute of bloggers is their intense admiration for other bloggers. Many of their Web sites link to one another's, which serves to build the collective audience. But clicking beyond the above-mentioned writers, or the likes of Virginia Postrel and Mickey Kaus (both too smart to write every day), lands you in the remote wilds of Lower Blogovia very quickly. Over the weekend, for instance, Postrel posted a link to Norwegian revolutionary (!) Bjorn Staerk's bizarre recommitment to left-wing raving: "This new blog is dedicated to the coming revolution, and the age of peace and equality it heralds." (More Staerk: "Noam Chomsky is a brave man, and how he escapes imprisonment in that horrible police state he lives in is beyond me.") It goes without saying that Staerk includes a link to Postrel's site, www.dynamist.com, in blogland's infinite echo chamber of self-regard.

If you've read this far, you may have enough time on your hands to become a blogger yourself. It's not very expensive - check out www.blogger.com - and then you can become one of the select 500,000 commentators, like the bilingual Chaotica ("Men are like a fine wine. They all start out like grapes, and it's a woman's job to stomp on them and keep them in the dark until they mature into something you'd like to have dinner with") or Rachael Carothers, who launched her Daily Cassandra site on March 3 with the fateful words "I gave into my weakness and started a blog."

Maybe you will even be mocked in a medium that people actually read.

a. beam II