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Confessions of a Web logger

Jennifer Balderama, CNET News.com AnchorDesk

Published: 08 May 2002 09:59 BST

At the risk of ticking off my editors, I'm going to let you in on a little secret: editing tech stories all day, every day, can get -- well -- monotonous.

So it was that last year I decided to flex my writerly muscles and try something new: a column. It would break up the routine, I'd get a byline, maybe I'd get some entertaining email from readers, and then I'd go quietly about my business again, behind the scenes, where I belong.

Not quite. I did get the byline, and I did get the email, but I did not simply fade back into the world of grammar and style. Instead -- and forgive me if this sounds like a pulp-fiction book title -- I was seduced by bloggers.

A blogger is a publisher of a Web log, or "blog." But what's a Web log? As one of my fellow editors recently put it, Web logging sounds like some form of virtual endangerment of the spotted owl. Not so, my friends.

Web logs give voice to people whom just a decade ago, you never would have heard from. There are war blogs, peace blogs, food blogs, crude blogs, humour blogs, culture blogs to occupy your day. Geek blogs, freak blogs, teen blogs, mean blogs, fanaticals and radicals who like to rant away. Worker bees and histories, punditry and poetry, diversity, adversity and spicy verbal play. Optimists, pessimists, enthusiasts and hobbyists, journalists and journal-ists with something big to say.

Among the bloggers who contacted me via email were a couple of tech journalists. After writing back and forth with me and posting comments from those "conversations" on their Web logs, they ultimately suggested, How about starting a blog yourself?