Blogs are set up to be personal forums for someone's opinions. That's the point, the liberating thing about them. Bloggers don't have to get their copy past an editor, and they can sound off at any length — no word limits in cyberspace. They're products of a seismic cultural shift that makes someone's hangover as newsworthy as the arrival of a Harry Potter novel. The sassier the voice, the more successful the blog is likely to be.

Blogs? Blah! Two days don't go by that someone doesn't e-mail me a link to a blog. It's a whole sentence, by the way, that I wouldn't have understood, much less uttered, two years ago. A blog is a kind of instantaneous diary that someone writes on a Web site so that other people might read it. People send me links to their blogs, their's daughter's blog. 'She's in the sixth grade; isn't that cute?' Or 'Princeton; isn't that wonderful?' A friend's blog, blogs kept by friends of friends. Entertainers and political candidates post blogs, or at least someone on their staff does it for them. But thousands of unsung people also post blogs. That's their beauty. A taxi driver can post a blog that Jennifer Lopez and millions of others can read.

Several blogs I've seen seem entertaining and interesting, but many remind me why writing can be a profession and that confession may be good for the soul but bad for literature. A great many blogs seem to consist of kvetching and moaning, not rumination.

After talking a lot about Frontier and Scripting News
(www.scripting.com), I decided to start my own webpage logging the best
stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis:

<URL:http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html>

This will cover any and everything that interests me, from net culture
to politics to literature etc.