Livejournal articles
Mar. 21st, 2003 06:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldAt work, I did a search on INFOTrac for articles mentioning livejournal. I found ten.
Here are the most relevant ones:
Source: Yahoo! Internet Life, July 1, 2002 pNA.
Title: Diary Lands: a Primer.
Subjects: Web sites - Services
Online services - Marketing
Full Text COPYRIGHT 2002 Ziff Davis Media Inc.
Want to let millions of strangers in on the intimate details of your sex life, homework, medicine cabinet, and dog-washing schedule? Want to read the intimate details of millions of strangers? Whether you're a voyeur or an exhibitionist, the Web's journal sites will provide days--if not years--of entertainment. Here are the cream of the crop.
LiveJournal[livejournal.com]
An enormous, open-source and open-ended amoeba of refracted and intersected online lives. Cascade around the interconnected journals or set up your own for free and contribute to the beautiful mess. An optional fee ($5 for two months; $15 for six months; $25 for a year) gets you perks such as a livejournal.com e-mail address, a personalized domain, and full control over the coding of your pages.
Free Open Diary[freeopendiary.com]
Free Open Diary is a gratis service that carries ads. Its sister site, The Open Diary [opendiary.com], costs $20 for six months but has no advertising, includes tech support, and runs on faster servers.
Blog*Spot [blogspot.com]
Blogs and journals are different creatures--journals are primarily about their author; blogs tend to be about everything but. However, the tools for creating them are practically the same. One of the best is Blogger [blogger.com], a revolutionary piece of software that makes it possible for even the most computer-phobic to blog. And Blog Spot will host your Blogger-powered journal/blog for free.
Random Access Memory[randomaccessmemory.org]
More an art project than a journaling site, its aim is to provide "a backup archive for your personal memories." Its creators hope to see patterns emerge as more people use the system; they want to discover "what kinds of memories characterize certain years." Example: "1978--October 23rd, the day my sister was born. I was eight at the time. I had to stand out in the corridor at the hospital while my mother was giving birth to her. I cried my eyes out."
Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, Dec 26, 2001 pK1483.
Title: Getting Personal: Online authors share their thoughts with the world in Weblogs.(The Dallas Morning News)
Author: Doug Bedell
Full Text COPYRIGHT 2001 Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service
Julius Caesar has one. So does RuPaul, the drag queen.
And each day, more than 1,000 people are joining the ranks of real and fictional authors posting personal journal entries to the Internet using free tools available from Blogger (www.blogger.com) and Greymatter.com, as well as those of commercial counterparts such as LiveJournal.com and Manila (http://manila.userland.com).
Text-based, chronological, often deeply personal Web diaries--known loosely as Weblogs or "blogs"--are forming unprecedented new communications niches.
Their number has grown so rapidly in the last two years, it's gotten almost impossible to keep track of them all. Sites such as Blogdex (http://blogdex.media.mit.edu) now list links to more than 12,000 blogs, but that is only a fraction of the actual number worldwide.
As a form of personal journalism, blogs such as LikeAnOrb.com have provided instant impressions and pictures from ground zero in New York on Sept. 11. As vanity press, they can allow performers such as RuPaul (www.rupaul.com/weblog.shtml) to give fans an intimate look at their daily lives.
And as educational tools, fictitious Weblogs like Bloggus Caesari (www.sankey.ca/caesar/index.html) can enlighten history buffs on Julius Caesar's ancient world.
Many are fashioned around areas of common interest, where multiple contributors assemble vast libraries of links to key Internet information sources. Some, such as Rebecca's Pocket (www.rebeccablood.net) are gut-wrenching, personal musings on life in general. And other Weblogs simply help small groups communicate on the Web in a simpler, easier-to-follow fashion than allowed by e-mail and online discussion forums.
"Blog posts are like instant messages to the Web," says Blogger.com co-founder Evan Williams of San Francisco-based Pyra Labs.
And thanks to developers such as Williams, creating a dynamic Weblog has never been easier. Blogger is the acknowledged leader in getting people started on
Web publishing adventures. More than 326,000 registered users have used the Blogger method to set up their own journals on company intranets and at publicly accessible Web addresses.
Blogger requires no knowledge of the underlying code--hypertext markup language. And it's extremely flexible. It can set up diaries in a variety of professionally designed templates, or incorporate more complex original
creations.
Blogger will host your blog for free, as long as you don't mind the intrusion of a banner ad. (In an innovative twist to commercial Web design, you can also pay Pyra Labs $12 a year to suppress advertising on your site.) Or you can use Web space that has been established with your Internet service provider. In the latter case, you should know the file transfer protocol address, password and the URL assigned by your ISP to get started
When you arrive at Blogger.com, simply punch Create a New Blog. On-screen instructions will march you through the process. If you want to use the free hosting service, your URL will be set up as yourname.blogspot.com. That's an address that can be shared and linked from anywhere in the world.
Next, the Blogger wizard allows you to select from eight different templates to display your daily text entries. All have been designed by professionals. Other code can be added but isn't necessary.
Another push of a button, and Blogger generates the HTML and sets up your website. If you are using your own ISP and URL, the program automatically logs in and uploads the template to your personal Web space.
One last click, and a form will appear in your browser. As you type journal entries, a tool bar allows you to create links from any word you highlight, adding interactivity and depth to your creation.
Blogger will time-stamp and date each entry created in the form. Another part of the input interface allows users to modify how journal entries are displayed by your blog. Sort them by date, or by key words contained in your text. Archiving of weekly, monthly and yearly journaling can also be automatically set up.
Punch the Post and Publish button and you're done.
To update your blog, simply return to the Blogger.com site and find the title listed in the right-hand menu. One click, and you're brought directly to the posting form. Updating can be done with any computer as long as you have the password with you.
Williams believes that Blogger will remain a free service "indefinitely"--even as the number of no-cost Web services seems to be dwindling daily. The company, he says, is creating some new commercial software based on this original Blogger design.
The original creators of Blogger--who include Weblog pioneers such as Meg Hourihan (http://megnut.com), Matt Haughey (http://haughey.com) and Derek Powazek (www.powazek.com)--have long espoused the virtues of personal publishing on the Internet. Much of what Pyra provides for free is an
outgrowth of that founding philosophy.
All they ask is that you include a link back to Blogger if you created a new journal with their software. And they'll even give you the graphic button to do that.
All for free.
___
Visit The Dallas Morning News on the World Wide Web at http://www.dallasnews.com/
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
_____
ARCHIVE ILLUSTRATION on KRT Direct (from KRT Illustration Bank, 202-383-6064):
INTERNET DIARY illus., 300 dpi, 1 x3.5, Richard Hodges black and white illustration of a diary with open padlock and computer cable.
(c) 2001, The Dallas Morning News.
Source: Internet Magazine, August 2002 p14(1).
Title: Lord God Almighty. (Missing Links).
It seems everybody wants to share their intimate thoughts with the Web at large nowadays. Even our Lord God Almighty has jumped on the weblogging bandwagon. Readers can now gain an interesting insight into the personal thoughts of the creator through his regularly updated Web journal, aptly titled God Dot Corn. The religiously sensitive might want to stay away as they're likely to take offence at this blatant blasphemy.
www.livejournal.com/users/goc_dot_com
Source: Technology & Learning, Feb 2003 v23 i7 p11(3).
Title: Writing with Web logs.
Author: Kristen Kennedy
Subjects: Education - Economic policy
Technology - Usage
Schools - Economic policy
Electronic publishing
World Wide Web - Usage
Blogs - Usage
An emergent genre is making a space for students to publish online.
The Web has opened up almost limitless possibilities for publishing. With so many online magazines, newspapers, and journals, there's no shortage of venues
for both professional and practicing authors. Stephen King may be the best-known writer to dabble in self-publishing online, and many have followed his lead. Educators have also been using the Web to publish course descriptions and syllabi, while building professional development communities dedicated to sharing best practices.
Publishing student writing, however, has yet to gain widespread adoption in middle and high school English classes, a fact that seems particularly striking when you consider the advantages of inviting readers to respond to student-authored work. For starters, Web publication gives students a real audience to write to and, when optimized, a collaborative environment where they can give and receive feedback, mirroring the way professional writers use a workshop environment to hone their craft. Jeff Golub, technology spokesperson for the National Council of Teachers of English, says that the organization supports the use of Web-based publishing tools to celebrate and share student writing. Golub, who is also associate professor of English education at the University of South Florida, teaches future educators three central principles about encouraging student authorship: "Students will write when they have something to say, when they have an audience, and when they get feedback."
The challenge, as it so often is with new uses of technology, is integration. How do educators take advantage of the Web's publishing tools with limited rime and resources and in keeping with the standards? Enter a promising new use of technology called Web logs--or blogs, for short. Part Web site, part journal, part free-form writing space, blogs have the potential to enhance writing and literacy skills while offering a uniquely stylized form of expression.
What Is a Blog?
Web logs started out primarily as a self-publishing movement for both professional and armchair journalists making their voices heard in an open online press. For some, blogging--the act of writing and publishing to a blog--takes the form of a digital diary, such as those found at studentcenter.org. And for a handful of educators experimenting with this new genre, blogs offer them and their students an interactive and immediate publishing tool.
What makes Web logs unique is their emphasis on publication and their signature as a dynamic genre of Web writing. Forming the technical backbone of blogs are content management programs, such as PostNuke or UserLand's Manila, that are built to be "personal publishing systems" as UserLand president and COO John Robb puts it. No HTML is required, since these programs are designed to be as easy to use as a word processing application, but with additional collaboration and communication features. Manila, for example, can manage 500 individual student sites, discussion boards, mail bulletin functions, and digital portfolios all with site search and syndicated news stream capture capabilities.
Unlike most Web sites, which generally combine static and dynamic features, a blog is produced with an active writer in mind, one who creates in an online writing space designed to communicate an identity, a personality, and most importantly, a point of view.
Blogging in English Class
Will Richardson's weblogg-ed.com is a virtual goldmine of blogging resources, including best practices, educator blogs, and technology recommendations for choosing content management tools. A Hunterdon Central Regional High School English teacher from Flemington, N.J., Richardson is among the few educators
starting to explore Web logs in the writing classroom.
Journalism at Hunterdon is a paperless course, with all student work posted exclusively to a class blog. Working collaboratively, students select stories from online newspapers to post to their section, with group editors meeting with Richardson to choose the top story of the day. Individually, kids select a beat to cover throughout the quarter, collecting stories and then writing about them at the end of the term. Richardson has found discussion tools the most helpful feature of his Journalism Web log, noting that the online interaction "provided students an opportunity to articulate their ideas in ways they haven't been asked to before."
In American Literature, students post their responses to a class reading of Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees. The class blog includes commentary, criticism, and artistic interpretations of key passages and literary images from the novel. Best of all, students got to ask Kidd questions about her writing when she made a virtual appearance on their site. Meanwhile, Richardson has invited parents to read along with the class and publish to their own book club blog.
While only a few months into his blogging experiment, Richardson sees some impact on the way students are approaching their writing. "My kids are more aware of what they're writing and of the potential audience they're writing for," he says.
While still in the early stages, blogs in education are starting to catch on. The National Writing Project recently purchased server space to see how the medium facilitates dialogue and sharing of best practices among teachers who teach in writing-intensive classrooms. Last summer, students attending three local NWP Young Writers' Camps joined in online writing workshops using blogging technology. Camp teachers modeled this experiment after the NWP's E-Anthology, a Web log of educators working together to develop and support each other's writing.
The Politics of Online Publishing
If blogs are so easy to use and so invaluable for motivating student writing, then why aren't more students publishing online? According to Web log pioneer Pat Delaney, librarian at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Academic Middle School in San Francisco, Calif., and associate director of technology for the Bay Area Writing Project, "The barriers are permission and server space. Most schools want to set up an intranet where a Webmaster can approve new content and then push some of it live" But if you have 75 students all posting to a class blog, it's going to take a prohibitively long time to evaluate students' work, aside from the fact that publishing on a school intranet defeats the goal of publishing for a broad audience. Delaney adds, "If you limit students' power by wrestling over permission to publish, then they'll ignore technology use in school."
One solution adopted at King is to make sure all students posting online have parental permission and that they don't publish any identifiable pictures of themselves. Teachers can password protect their sites, as well. For those just starting to blog, Delaney suggests contacting their local National Writing Project office to inquire about blog-based programs. Free Web-based tools, such as Blogger and LiveJournal (see "Blogging Tools," page 11), are also available.
If the fear of giving students an open forum to publish to their personal Web pages without an editor's approval keeps schools from exploring Web logs, consider that self-publishing encourages ownership and responsibility for content. UserLand COO John Robb notes, "Web logs are attached to an individual in the way a discussion board isn't. There are rules to using a Web log. If students break them, they can lose their site."
The impact of such technologies on students who've used them regularly offers a picture of what happens when they're given the freedom--and responsibility--to publish their own work. For example, student editors of the King online newspaper, after attending a school dance late one Friday evening, went home and posted their reports. "That never happens," Delaney says. "Not in middle school" Nadine G., a student from Richardson's Journalism class, wrote in her evaluation of the course, "My Web log became a personal voice for me, and I found I could express opinions, even in my class work. It also helped me organize all my work in one place."
Entering a Conversation
Creating online communities where student writing takes center stage means inviting audiences to read and reflect on published work. For educators, this involves reaching out into virtual and professional communities for collaborative opportunities. For instance, working writers and journalists could volunteer to serve as editors of student blogs. Additionally, alliances between K-12 and higher education would benefit preservice teachers who could gain valuable teaching and technology
experience responding to student blogs, while students would benefit from having reliable readers critiquing and encouraging their work. A partnership
of this kind started last fall between Middlebury College students and fifth-graders from Shoreham Elementary School in Vermont. Mentors guided students' writing using blog discussion and writing tools. Hector Vila, Ph.D., associate director of distance education for the Center for Educational Technology at Middlebury College, is convinced of the effectiveness of this emerging technology on K-16 education. "This is the sort of collaboration that will get technology into schools," he says.
Blogging Tools
Check out these options for content management and online publishing.
Commercial blogging software can get you up and running faster and with broader functionality than some of the free offerings that may be full of advertising. Userland.com PostNuke.com, pMachine.com, and MoveableType.org offer full-featured publishing tools at reasonable prices.
Virtual learning platforms, such as blackboard.com and WebCT.com, also provide a variety of template-based publishing options.
Find free Web-based blogging tools at Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com and Xanga.com; add features for a fee.
Blogs in Education
Visit these sites for models and best practices.
Check out Will Richardson's professional and student blogs at weblogged.com.
Web logs created by teacher Peter Ford and middle school students from the British School of Amsterdam are available at class6f.bsablogs.som/stories/storyReader $226.
Links to Pat Delaney's insights and articles on blog technology: interactiveu.Berkeley.edu:8000/ PatD/stories/storyReader$479.
The Challenge of Assessment
In many ways, blogs combine the best elements of portfolio-driven courses, where student work is collected, edited, and assessed, with the immediacy of publishing for a virtual audience. Content management platforms on which blogs are built make this entire process easier and more efficient. But while new uses of Web-based applications can make writing more real for students, educators will still need to consider how to evaluate what happens when students write online. Here are a few places to start when evaluating students' Web logs.
* Start slowly by asking students to post once a week in response to a specific assignment. Allow them to customize and personalize their site as much as their Web log application and school policies will allow. With that freedom comes responsibility, so spend a class drafting the rules for publishing to their sites. Have each student sign a copy, and keep it on file.
* Optimize the journal format by evaluating student writing over rime, not just in one high-pressure testing event. Schedule several formal assessments during the school year at which time you can give a term grade that will be averaged with grades from subsequent evaluations.
* Involve students in their own assessment Assign a written self-evaluation students can submit before giving term grades where they reflect on their strengths and weaknesses. Ask them to provide two examples of where their writing is strongest, where ifs weakest, and what they need to focus on for the remainder of the course.
* Encourage students' development of voice by giving two grades, one for grammar and one for style.
* Build rubrics that evaluate quality, not just quantity. Co-authors 5tephen Valentine, a finalist in this year's T&L Ed Tech Leaders of the Year program, and Gray Smith write about this challenge in Writing in a Wired World: Improving Student Writing Using a Computer, forthcoming from Teacher Created Materials. To encourage substantive discussion in student message board communication, they've developed conversation assessments using a five-point rubric that outlines the key criteria for determining a student's grade, including use of evidence, engagement with the text, and whether or not a student responded thoughtfully.
* Use models. Bookmark examples of well-written blogs. Take a class period to discuss what an effective post looks like. The same goes for examples of helpful reader response. If you use discussion board features to workshop students' writing, you also need to guide and reward the difficult work of learning how to give constructive criticism.
Kristen Kennedy is senior editor of T&L.
Source: Newsweek, March 5, 2001 p62.
Title: Who's Blogging Now? More and more Internet users are sharing their lives in public online journals called Weblogs that can be strangely addictive. Charting a phenom.(Focus on Technology)(Brief Article)
Author: Deborah Branscum
Subjects: Online services - Usage
Diaries - Information services
If you want reality, forget "Survivor." Check out Weblogs: public online journals that can be racy, riveting and alarmingly blunt. The updates--often daily--let fans follow every twist and turn in an author's life. In Tennessee, Meghan O'Hara has been working up the courage to ask Alex out for a date--a mere eight years after she first got a crush on him in high school. In Texas, chest pains sent Noah Grey to the hospital again, and his camera is broken--a blow to the self-described gay, agoraphobic photographer who rarely leaves the home he shares with his mother and two sisters. Writing from the Netherlands, American Rachel James shared an erotic Valentine's Day surprise engineered by her Dutch boyfriend. And it wasn't a teddy.
Online diaries aren't new. Ryan Kawailani Ozawa, who created Diarist.net, traces the earliest Web journal to January 1995. Later, Weblogs, or blogs, were born. These are personal sites, such as Tomalak's Realm (www.tomalak.org), that organize links to other Web content on a particular topic of interest. Early bloggers needed to know HTML and have access to a network server. Updating entries was a technical chore. That began to change in 1999 with easy Web tools and free hosting sites, such as Blogger.com, Editthispage.com and LiveJournal.com. Some 100,000 people have tried Blogger.com, the most popular site. "The great thing about Blogger.com and Diaryland.com is that anyone who can fill out a form can have an online journal," says O'Hara.
That's not necessarily a good thing, at least for readers, according to John Grohol, a Boston-based research psychologist who runs PsychCentral.com and tracks Weblogs. "The majority of these journals are not all that interesting," he says. Maybe not, but these snapshots of life--and, perhaps, fantasy--can be strangely addictive nonetheless. Unsurprisingly, some of the longest-running journals belong to techies. O'Hara, for example, is a Web designer. She describes her breasts, piercing, smoking habit and height in her online diary, Squirrel Bait (www.treehaus.addr.com/blog), and that's just on the About page. O'Hara has been chronicling her life online since 1995, when she was a first-year college student. She claims to be shy in real life--a fact that comes as a surprise to anyone who reads Squirrel Bait, which has given her a somewhat limited measure of fame within the Weblog community. But don't get the wrong idea--Weblogs are "not all Jerry Springer," says O'Hara. "It's not all people writing, 'My boyfriend dumped me, he's a bastard'." Still, regular readers want to know: will she ask Alex out or not?
For isolated individuals, blogs can be a lifeline to a larger community. Noah Grey's journal (www.NoahGrey.com) offers readers a view into the often difficult life of a bipolar agoraphobic with a troubled history as a rape survivor. You might expect Grey's postings to sound like a whole week's worth of "Oprah," but it's not the case. Grey's musings, photos and links can be somber, sensitive and inspirational, as well as raw. "Throughout all my adult life, computers and the online world have been the only real outlets I've had," he writes in an e-mail exchange. "In a very real way, they've kept me alive." Grey's postings, online since 1998, have also drawn a following, much to his surprise. "It just thoroughly astonishes me that anyone could give a damn about this insecure and fundamentally frightened guy who still sleeps
with a teddy bear every night," he says.
An aspiring Samuel Pepys can turn to many sites on the Web for launching a personal journal, including DiaryLand.com, Pitas.com, Diaryx.com and Blogspot.com. Joint journals, or discussions, can be conducted at sites such as Metafilter.com. So far, there's not much commercial interest in Weblogs; companies hosting these sites attract users but not cash. But according to one practitioner, Weblogs aren't about making money; they're about revolutionizing communication. Dave Winer, a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur and founder of tiny Userland Software, has been maintaining his Scripting.com Weblog since 1997. For this baby boomer, Weblogs aren't just a publishing medium; they're a crusade. "I'm interested in creating a new form of journalism," he says. "I don't trust the media sources, the TV networks and magazines."
Will Weblogs change journalism? They'll do more than that, if you believe Winer. "We have a lot of problems to solve on this planet," he says. "We need to gain consciousness as a society, and one of the best ways to do that is to start talking and also to listen. There are 6 billion people on the planet, and if everyone on the planet had a Weblog, we'd be better off." Six billion people sharing their secrets and fears? Now, there's an idea for a reality show.
Source: Yahoo! Internet Life, July 1, 2002 pNA.
Title: Who Was Billiam? and Why Was He Murdered On the Net.
Subjects: Web sites - Design and construction
Billiam was a new breed of human.
Call it Homo journalicus--a curious creation of the Internet Age that lives the majority of its life on the Web and interacts almost solely with other members of its species. There are legions of them out there--people who use online services such as LiveJournal [livejournal.com] and DiaryLand [diaryland.com] to post the nitty-gritty details of their existence, tossing in everything from their fear of commitment to what they ate for breakfast. But none could do it like Billiam.
Billiam lived on LiveJournal, the kind of low-budget, for-the-love-of-it space that is the Net's pluralistic promise made manifest. Its code was cobbled together by a legion of distributed programmers who have rolled chatrooms, message boards, diaries, and blogs into one living, breathing, electric hive. If you're an LJer (as they call themselves), 500,000 or so of your closest friends hang there 24/7. Within its walls you will find gossip, infighting, sex talk, hugs, and no small amount of whining about science teachers. The simple innovation of making every post in your Weblog (or blog) a topic for discussion means that LJ is endlessly interactive: Posts lead to discussions, which lead to subdiscussions, which people comment on in their journals, where the endless dissection begins anew. The friendships, feuds, loyalties, and betrayals change so quickly and cascade through so many incarnations that you could easily sympathize with someone about a caustic post in his journal only
to trace the thread back and find that you left it there yourself.
But be warned: Stumble across one of its pages while at work, and you may well find yourself, five hours later, knowing a great deal about JoeyJoey and how she's cheating on her boyfriend TimmyThumbs with a hot Latin Casanova video store manager (who drives a Camaro and has a reputation for making great bouillabaisse), but precious little about the presentation you're giving tomorrow. As the site itself encourages: "Let the world know the story of your life, as it happens. (Whether they want to or not!)" Beyond mere voyeuristic journal peeping, LJ is humanity on display in all its glory, confusion, angst, and banality. It is heroin for procrastinators, a black hole for your attention span.
And for a brief, intense Net moment, it was home to Billiam and the chaos he created.
Calling Billiam's journal, dubbed HardcoreBilliam. com, different is an understatement. For one, this obsessive diarist didn't seem to care about making or keeping friends, only about speaking his mind: "I don't sugar coat my wordz at all mothaphuckaz!!!!!!! it ain't my fault you can't handle my truth!" But despite (or perhaps because of) his cavalier, id-centric approach, Billiam had plenty of friends. It's not clear that Billiam had a specific agenda in mind or that he knew what he was doing. But whatever he was doing, it worked. Hardcore Billiam was the toast of LiveJournal, with thousands visiting each day to read his musings, many of them scatological, misogynist, or just plain nasty.
But who was Billiam really? The pictures of him plastered all over his site weren't much help. Most were just crude Photoshop doodles--cut-and-paste jobs that transformed Billiam into a professional wrestler, a chick magnet, or Britney's hoochie-coochie man.
Actually, the phrase "pictures of him" isn't entirely accurate. Billiam never used any real photos of himself. A little digging reveals that the cocksure mug dominating Hardcore Billiam belongs to Josh Souza, a runner-up on the TV reality show Big Brother (Josh Souza Online [joshsouzaonline.com] apparently provided Billiam with immense amounts of raw material). Indeed, Billiam played with the concept of identity as if it were Silly Putty--you never knew when you'd come to the bottom of his rabbit hole. A disclaimer on his site reads:
Women wanted to meet him. Scores sent pictures with his obliquely perverse trademark phrase ("Billiam, would you like some sausage?") written across various body parts. His groupies eventually organized themselves into a fan club of sorts called Billiam's Bichaz. To meet demand, Billiam had to start up an altogether new journal just to handle questions about sex. And so "Ask Dr. Billiam" was born. LiveJournal, it seemed, had found its alpha male.
Of course, Billiam failed to charm many. The women who sent him naked pictures were virtually impossible to age-verify--a fact that made even the notoriously libertarian creators of LiveJournal nervous (but didn't stop them from giving him a free permanent account). And then there were the LJers who were just
plain jealous of the attention the community lavished on Billiam.
One of his main detractors was a thuggish ex-New Yorker living in Malibu who went by the handle Primo. His LJ page mainly focused on his phat ride (his
car), his ice (jewelry), and his views on just how foolish you would have to be to mess with him. At least that's what his journal was about until he tangled with Billiam. Thereafter, it was pretty much about how dumb/soft/ugly/gay Billiam was. Typically, though, Primo was more interested in Billiam than Billiam was in him. After slapping him around with some verbal jousts, Billiam left Primo to his ranting and went back to spreading his views on Lucky Charms, Willy Wonka, and freaky sex.
Was there a point to all this? It's hard to say. Billiam's journal tended to reveal more about others than it did about him. For all his outrageousness, Billiam was actually something of a blank canvas. While most LJers are pathologically exhibitionistic, he eschewed tortured re-creations of his inner life, preferring to coast on pure personality, watching as others projected their own biases and judgments onto him. Where other LJers would note that they had Trix for breakfast, Billiam would use it as an excuse to give the people what they really wanted--more Billiam:
Amid the free-form, Ebonics-like jabbering, a few facts emerged. Billiam was the nephew of Barry Williams (who played Greg on The Brady Bunch). He was 25. He lived in Canada and hated it. He smoked Herculean amounts of marijuana.
He also loved women, and he held a typically raunchy contest to determine which lucky one would get a free plane ticket to come meet him. The winner, by virtue of a stash of Webcam pics that would have put Danni Ashe to shame, was one TomorrowWendy, a longtime fan who couldn't wait to meet the man.
And this is where the mask began to slip, the hero began to falter. After a tumultuous weekend at Club Billiam, TomorrowWendy returned home and posted a detailed description in her journal. For Billiam's fans, it was all a little unfortunate--like meeting the real Bill and Ted and realizing they were more fun on DVD than they were to hang out with.
Billiam was no slick player by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the person TomorrowWendy met looked suspiciously like a loser with no job and nothing to do all day but get high and post on LiveJournal. Billiam's "crib" was a dank basement filled with dirty laundry and pot smoke, TomorrowWendy reported. The beauty of suspended disbelief is that it allows us to live vicariously through our heroes' outrageous actions. This becomes tougher to do when you find out your hero still lives with his mom.
Without going into the rest of the gory details, let's just say things didn't work out for Billiam and Wendy. Her posts sparked a he said/she said mess of epic proportions. Billiam claimed they slept together. TomorrowWendy said Billiam merely exposed himself to her and bluntly propositioned her (several times). Billiam said TomorrowWendy is certifiably crazy and a pathological liar (but that he found that sexy). TomorrowWendy said Billiam finds anything with a pulse sexy. Billiam then saw fit to post in his journal all the naked pictures she'd sent him (something she'd expressly asked him not to do).
The controversy eventually drowned beneath a tidal wave of spaced-out rants and dirty pictures. At the end of the year, Billiam announced he'd be going offline for a couple of weeks. He'd scraped together the cash for a trip to his favorite place on earth--Disneyland. For almost a full month leading up to the trip, readers of his journal heard no end of his excitement:
That quote is from a post he wrote on January 3, the night before he left. It was to be his last. Billiam's journal went dark until the 17th, when a post came across from his pal HardcoreScotti with a link to TomorrowWendy's journal. There, fans read the news. Billiam was dead. Primo--yes, Primo, the thug from Malibu--had killed him.
TomorrowWendy reported in her journal that she and Billiam had met up in California (they were dating, she admitted; the fight had been a publicity stunt), and that while there, Billiam had also decided to see his old nemesis Primo to show he had no hard feelings. The rendezvous had turned ugly. Billiam couldn't resist taking Primo down a peg or two with some semi-playful verbal smacks. Primo took something the wrong way and stormed off. The next morning, he showed up at their motel with a gun and put five bullets into Billiam. "I remember feeling his body shudder as he coughed...his body trying to suck air into lungs that couldn't hold it. I remember his mouth moving as he tried to speak, but no words would come. Only blood." He died in her arms, TomorrowWendy wrote, before the ambulance could arrive.
A community this large and emotionally charged is inevitably going to be home to some unstable people. The kind of people who wouldn't recognize a joke if it insulted them in their journal. Behind his monitor, Billiam was king, and none of his outrageous actions had consequences. Now the online had moved offline with its volatility and unpredictability dangerously intact--and the LJers were stunned.
But not for long.
Billiam was dead, yes, but only insofar as he had existed in the first place. Which is to say, not at all.
The LiveJournal community was apprised of this salient fact by a grudge-holding LJer named Visions, who was on a personal crusade to unmask the man. With the help of some IP address sleuthing, Visions ultimately proved that not only was this goofy, obnoxious, fun-loving Canadian pothead not who he said he was, he wasn't anybody at all. A phantom. A digital hallucination.
The man responsible was one Joe Humphrey, a struggling screenwriter living in Victoria, and a man who is about as un-Billiam as someone could be without turning into Orrin Hatch. Billiam was a fiction that somehow escaped Joe's brain, landed on the Web, and promptly seduced a few hundred women. TomorrowWendy? That was Joe, too. And Primo? Of course. Using photos of Big Brother contestants for Billiam and Primo (and an aspiring nudie model named Stormy as TomorrowWendy), an active imagination, and equal parts charm and obnoxiousness, Joe managed to create a minor Web celebrity out of whole cloth, along with a full cast of supporting characters. Think of it as a documentary within a reality show within a movie. A movie where Peter Sellers plays all the parts.
On the phone, Joe Humphrey is soft-spoken and thoughtful. He says Billiam began as a prank to tweak his LiveJournal pal HardcoreScotti. Scotti had been anonymously messing with Joe in Joe's journal. Joe created Billiam to mess back. A little trash talk from Billiam was all it took to get Scotti interested. Soon the fur was flying, and Joe was hearing incredulous stories from his friend about this mysterious Billiam character. Like any good fight, Scotti and Billiam's fracas attracted some rubberneckers. By the time Joe let Scotti in on the joke, Billiam was getting cheered on by a large and unruly crowd--one that featured many nubile women. From there it was a simple matter of widening his sights a bit and pissing off the rest of the world. To quote Billiam:
To quote Joe Humphrey: "I was basically trying to make a character that people would just hate automatically." Perhaps, then, we should call Billiam's species Homo journalicus chimericus. But then again, maybe we'd all be more balanced people if we had an unedited alter ego. Says Joe: "Billiam can say whatever he wants to say and get away with it. That's not something you can really do. Y'know, unless you're a jerk."
Billiam may never have existed in the conventional sense. But for his legions of followers, he did. In the process, he created a new kind of fame, and a new form of entertainment, one where the stars are completely accessible to the people, whether they actually exist or not.
And Joe Humphrey? He hopes to get a movie deal out of his online adventure. For now he's keeping things as schizophrenic as ever with his new project, Up Your Mind [upyourmind.com], a collaborative site run by several of his different personalities, including such luminaries as TomorrowWendy, Darth Vader, and Christopher Walken.
As for Billiam, though his time may be up, we all know that nothing ever really dies on the Web. Good night, sweet prince, and angels sing thee to thy rest, biznatch. Dat iz all.
Here are the most relevant ones:
Source: Yahoo! Internet Life, July 1, 2002 pNA.
Title: Diary Lands: a Primer.
Subjects: Web sites - Services
Online services - Marketing
Full Text COPYRIGHT 2002 Ziff Davis Media Inc.
Want to let millions of strangers in on the intimate details of your sex life, homework, medicine cabinet, and dog-washing schedule? Want to read the intimate details of millions of strangers? Whether you're a voyeur or an exhibitionist, the Web's journal sites will provide days--if not years--of entertainment. Here are the cream of the crop.
LiveJournal[livejournal.com]
An enormous, open-source and open-ended amoeba of refracted and intersected online lives. Cascade around the interconnected journals or set up your own for free and contribute to the beautiful mess. An optional fee ($5 for two months; $15 for six months; $25 for a year) gets you perks such as a livejournal.com e-mail address, a personalized domain, and full control over the coding of your pages.
Free Open Diary[freeopendiary.com]
Free Open Diary is a gratis service that carries ads. Its sister site, The Open Diary [opendiary.com], costs $20 for six months but has no advertising, includes tech support, and runs on faster servers.
Blog*Spot [blogspot.com]
Blogs and journals are different creatures--journals are primarily about their author; blogs tend to be about everything but. However, the tools for creating them are practically the same. One of the best is Blogger [blogger.com], a revolutionary piece of software that makes it possible for even the most computer-phobic to blog. And Blog Spot will host your Blogger-powered journal/blog for free.
Random Access Memory[randomaccessmemory.org]
More an art project than a journaling site, its aim is to provide "a backup archive for your personal memories." Its creators hope to see patterns emerge as more people use the system; they want to discover "what kinds of memories characterize certain years." Example: "1978--October 23rd, the day my sister was born. I was eight at the time. I had to stand out in the corridor at the hospital while my mother was giving birth to her. I cried my eyes out."
Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, Dec 26, 2001 pK1483.
Title: Getting Personal: Online authors share their thoughts with the world in Weblogs.(The Dallas Morning News)
Author: Doug Bedell
Full Text COPYRIGHT 2001 Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service
Julius Caesar has one. So does RuPaul, the drag queen.
And each day, more than 1,000 people are joining the ranks of real and fictional authors posting personal journal entries to the Internet using free tools available from Blogger (www.blogger.com) and Greymatter.com, as well as those of commercial counterparts such as LiveJournal.com and Manila (http://manila.userland.com).
Text-based, chronological, often deeply personal Web diaries--known loosely as Weblogs or "blogs"--are forming unprecedented new communications niches.
Their number has grown so rapidly in the last two years, it's gotten almost impossible to keep track of them all. Sites such as Blogdex (http://blogdex.media.mit.edu) now list links to more than 12,000 blogs, but that is only a fraction of the actual number worldwide.
As a form of personal journalism, blogs such as LikeAnOrb.com have provided instant impressions and pictures from ground zero in New York on Sept. 11. As vanity press, they can allow performers such as RuPaul (www.rupaul.com/weblog.shtml) to give fans an intimate look at their daily lives.
And as educational tools, fictitious Weblogs like Bloggus Caesari (www.sankey.ca/caesar/index.html) can enlighten history buffs on Julius Caesar's ancient world.
Many are fashioned around areas of common interest, where multiple contributors assemble vast libraries of links to key Internet information sources. Some, such as Rebecca's Pocket (www.rebeccablood.net) are gut-wrenching, personal musings on life in general. And other Weblogs simply help small groups communicate on the Web in a simpler, easier-to-follow fashion than allowed by e-mail and online discussion forums.
"Blog posts are like instant messages to the Web," says Blogger.com co-founder Evan Williams of San Francisco-based Pyra Labs.
And thanks to developers such as Williams, creating a dynamic Weblog has never been easier. Blogger is the acknowledged leader in getting people started on
Web publishing adventures. More than 326,000 registered users have used the Blogger method to set up their own journals on company intranets and at publicly accessible Web addresses.
Blogger requires no knowledge of the underlying code--hypertext markup language. And it's extremely flexible. It can set up diaries in a variety of professionally designed templates, or incorporate more complex original
creations.
- What you need to start
Blogger will host your blog for free, as long as you don't mind the intrusion of a banner ad. (In an innovative twist to commercial Web design, you can also pay Pyra Labs $12 a year to suppress advertising on your site.) Or you can use Web space that has been established with your Internet service provider. In the latter case, you should know the file transfer protocol address, password and the URL assigned by your ISP to get started
- Step-by-step
When you arrive at Blogger.com, simply punch Create a New Blog. On-screen instructions will march you through the process. If you want to use the free hosting service, your URL will be set up as yourname.blogspot.com. That's an address that can be shared and linked from anywhere in the world.
Next, the Blogger wizard allows you to select from eight different templates to display your daily text entries. All have been designed by professionals. Other code can be added but isn't necessary.
Another push of a button, and Blogger generates the HTML and sets up your website. If you are using your own ISP and URL, the program automatically logs in and uploads the template to your personal Web space.
One last click, and a form will appear in your browser. As you type journal entries, a tool bar allows you to create links from any word you highlight, adding interactivity and depth to your creation.
Blogger will time-stamp and date each entry created in the form. Another part of the input interface allows users to modify how journal entries are displayed by your blog. Sort them by date, or by key words contained in your text. Archiving of weekly, monthly and yearly journaling can also be automatically set up.
Punch the Post and Publish button and you're done.
- Keeping it fresh
To update your blog, simply return to the Blogger.com site and find the title listed in the right-hand menu. One click, and you're brought directly to the posting form. Updating can be done with any computer as long as you have the password with you.
- Keeping it free
Williams believes that Blogger will remain a free service "indefinitely"--even as the number of no-cost Web services seems to be dwindling daily. The company, he says, is creating some new commercial software based on this original Blogger design.
The original creators of Blogger--who include Weblog pioneers such as Meg Hourihan (http://megnut.com), Matt Haughey (http://haughey.com) and Derek Powazek (www.powazek.com)--have long espoused the virtues of personal publishing on the Internet. Much of what Pyra provides for free is an
outgrowth of that founding philosophy.
All they ask is that you include a link back to Blogger if you created a new journal with their software. And they'll even give you the graphic button to do that.
All for free.
___
Visit The Dallas Morning News on the World Wide Web at http://www.dallasnews.com/
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
_____
ARCHIVE ILLUSTRATION on KRT Direct (from KRT Illustration Bank, 202-383-6064):
INTERNET DIARY illus., 300 dpi, 1 x3.5, Richard Hodges black and white illustration of a diary with open padlock and computer cable.
(c) 2001, The Dallas Morning News.
Source: Internet Magazine, August 2002 p14(1).
Title: Lord God Almighty. (Missing Links).
It seems everybody wants to share their intimate thoughts with the Web at large nowadays. Even our Lord God Almighty has jumped on the weblogging bandwagon. Readers can now gain an interesting insight into the personal thoughts of the creator through his regularly updated Web journal, aptly titled God Dot Corn. The religiously sensitive might want to stay away as they're likely to take offence at this blatant blasphemy.
www.livejournal.com/users/goc_dot_com
Source: Technology & Learning, Feb 2003 v23 i7 p11(3).
Title: Writing with Web logs.
Author: Kristen Kennedy
Subjects: Education - Economic policy
Technology - Usage
Schools - Economic policy
Electronic publishing
World Wide Web - Usage
Blogs - Usage
An emergent genre is making a space for students to publish online.
The Web has opened up almost limitless possibilities for publishing. With so many online magazines, newspapers, and journals, there's no shortage of venues
for both professional and practicing authors. Stephen King may be the best-known writer to dabble in self-publishing online, and many have followed his lead. Educators have also been using the Web to publish course descriptions and syllabi, while building professional development communities dedicated to sharing best practices.
Publishing student writing, however, has yet to gain widespread adoption in middle and high school English classes, a fact that seems particularly striking when you consider the advantages of inviting readers to respond to student-authored work. For starters, Web publication gives students a real audience to write to and, when optimized, a collaborative environment where they can give and receive feedback, mirroring the way professional writers use a workshop environment to hone their craft. Jeff Golub, technology spokesperson for the National Council of Teachers of English, says that the organization supports the use of Web-based publishing tools to celebrate and share student writing. Golub, who is also associate professor of English education at the University of South Florida, teaches future educators three central principles about encouraging student authorship: "Students will write when they have something to say, when they have an audience, and when they get feedback."
The challenge, as it so often is with new uses of technology, is integration. How do educators take advantage of the Web's publishing tools with limited rime and resources and in keeping with the standards? Enter a promising new use of technology called Web logs--or blogs, for short. Part Web site, part journal, part free-form writing space, blogs have the potential to enhance writing and literacy skills while offering a uniquely stylized form of expression.
What Is a Blog?
Web logs started out primarily as a self-publishing movement for both professional and armchair journalists making their voices heard in an open online press. For some, blogging--the act of writing and publishing to a blog--takes the form of a digital diary, such as those found at studentcenter.org. And for a handful of educators experimenting with this new genre, blogs offer them and their students an interactive and immediate publishing tool.
What makes Web logs unique is their emphasis on publication and their signature as a dynamic genre of Web writing. Forming the technical backbone of blogs are content management programs, such as PostNuke or UserLand's Manila, that are built to be "personal publishing systems" as UserLand president and COO John Robb puts it. No HTML is required, since these programs are designed to be as easy to use as a word processing application, but with additional collaboration and communication features. Manila, for example, can manage 500 individual student sites, discussion boards, mail bulletin functions, and digital portfolios all with site search and syndicated news stream capture capabilities.
Unlike most Web sites, which generally combine static and dynamic features, a blog is produced with an active writer in mind, one who creates in an online writing space designed to communicate an identity, a personality, and most importantly, a point of view.
Blogging in English Class
Will Richardson's weblogg-ed.com is a virtual goldmine of blogging resources, including best practices, educator blogs, and technology recommendations for choosing content management tools. A Hunterdon Central Regional High School English teacher from Flemington, N.J., Richardson is among the few educators
starting to explore Web logs in the writing classroom.
Journalism at Hunterdon is a paperless course, with all student work posted exclusively to a class blog. Working collaboratively, students select stories from online newspapers to post to their section, with group editors meeting with Richardson to choose the top story of the day. Individually, kids select a beat to cover throughout the quarter, collecting stories and then writing about them at the end of the term. Richardson has found discussion tools the most helpful feature of his Journalism Web log, noting that the online interaction "provided students an opportunity to articulate their ideas in ways they haven't been asked to before."
In American Literature, students post their responses to a class reading of Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees. The class blog includes commentary, criticism, and artistic interpretations of key passages and literary images from the novel. Best of all, students got to ask Kidd questions about her writing when she made a virtual appearance on their site. Meanwhile, Richardson has invited parents to read along with the class and publish to their own book club blog.
While only a few months into his blogging experiment, Richardson sees some impact on the way students are approaching their writing. "My kids are more aware of what they're writing and of the potential audience they're writing for," he says.
While still in the early stages, blogs in education are starting to catch on. The National Writing Project recently purchased server space to see how the medium facilitates dialogue and sharing of best practices among teachers who teach in writing-intensive classrooms. Last summer, students attending three local NWP Young Writers' Camps joined in online writing workshops using blogging technology. Camp teachers modeled this experiment after the NWP's E-Anthology, a Web log of educators working together to develop and support each other's writing.
The Politics of Online Publishing
If blogs are so easy to use and so invaluable for motivating student writing, then why aren't more students publishing online? According to Web log pioneer Pat Delaney, librarian at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Academic Middle School in San Francisco, Calif., and associate director of technology for the Bay Area Writing Project, "The barriers are permission and server space. Most schools want to set up an intranet where a Webmaster can approve new content and then push some of it live" But if you have 75 students all posting to a class blog, it's going to take a prohibitively long time to evaluate students' work, aside from the fact that publishing on a school intranet defeats the goal of publishing for a broad audience. Delaney adds, "If you limit students' power by wrestling over permission to publish, then they'll ignore technology use in school."
One solution adopted at King is to make sure all students posting online have parental permission and that they don't publish any identifiable pictures of themselves. Teachers can password protect their sites, as well. For those just starting to blog, Delaney suggests contacting their local National Writing Project office to inquire about blog-based programs. Free Web-based tools, such as Blogger and LiveJournal (see "Blogging Tools," page 11), are also available.
If the fear of giving students an open forum to publish to their personal Web pages without an editor's approval keeps schools from exploring Web logs, consider that self-publishing encourages ownership and responsibility for content. UserLand COO John Robb notes, "Web logs are attached to an individual in the way a discussion board isn't. There are rules to using a Web log. If students break them, they can lose their site."
The impact of such technologies on students who've used them regularly offers a picture of what happens when they're given the freedom--and responsibility--to publish their own work. For example, student editors of the King online newspaper, after attending a school dance late one Friday evening, went home and posted their reports. "That never happens," Delaney says. "Not in middle school" Nadine G., a student from Richardson's Journalism class, wrote in her evaluation of the course, "My Web log became a personal voice for me, and I found I could express opinions, even in my class work. It also helped me organize all my work in one place."
Entering a Conversation
Creating online communities where student writing takes center stage means inviting audiences to read and reflect on published work. For educators, this involves reaching out into virtual and professional communities for collaborative opportunities. For instance, working writers and journalists could volunteer to serve as editors of student blogs. Additionally, alliances between K-12 and higher education would benefit preservice teachers who could gain valuable teaching and technology
experience responding to student blogs, while students would benefit from having reliable readers critiquing and encouraging their work. A partnership
of this kind started last fall between Middlebury College students and fifth-graders from Shoreham Elementary School in Vermont. Mentors guided students' writing using blog discussion and writing tools. Hector Vila, Ph.D., associate director of distance education for the Center for Educational Technology at Middlebury College, is convinced of the effectiveness of this emerging technology on K-16 education. "This is the sort of collaboration that will get technology into schools," he says.
Blogging Tools
Check out these options for content management and online publishing.
Commercial blogging software can get you up and running faster and with broader functionality than some of the free offerings that may be full of advertising. Userland.com PostNuke.com, pMachine.com, and MoveableType.org offer full-featured publishing tools at reasonable prices.
Virtual learning platforms, such as blackboard.com and WebCT.com, also provide a variety of template-based publishing options.
Find free Web-based blogging tools at Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com and Xanga.com; add features for a fee.
Blogs in Education
Visit these sites for models and best practices.
Check out Will Richardson's professional and student blogs at weblogged.com.
Web logs created by teacher Peter Ford and middle school students from the British School of Amsterdam are available at class6f.bsablogs.som/stories/storyReader $226.
Links to Pat Delaney's insights and articles on blog technology: interactiveu.Berkeley.edu:8000/ PatD/stories/storyReader$479.
The Challenge of Assessment
In many ways, blogs combine the best elements of portfolio-driven courses, where student work is collected, edited, and assessed, with the immediacy of publishing for a virtual audience. Content management platforms on which blogs are built make this entire process easier and more efficient. But while new uses of Web-based applications can make writing more real for students, educators will still need to consider how to evaluate what happens when students write online. Here are a few places to start when evaluating students' Web logs.
* Start slowly by asking students to post once a week in response to a specific assignment. Allow them to customize and personalize their site as much as their Web log application and school policies will allow. With that freedom comes responsibility, so spend a class drafting the rules for publishing to their sites. Have each student sign a copy, and keep it on file.
* Optimize the journal format by evaluating student writing over rime, not just in one high-pressure testing event. Schedule several formal assessments during the school year at which time you can give a term grade that will be averaged with grades from subsequent evaluations.
* Involve students in their own assessment Assign a written self-evaluation students can submit before giving term grades where they reflect on their strengths and weaknesses. Ask them to provide two examples of where their writing is strongest, where ifs weakest, and what they need to focus on for the remainder of the course.
* Encourage students' development of voice by giving two grades, one for grammar and one for style.
* Build rubrics that evaluate quality, not just quantity. Co-authors 5tephen Valentine, a finalist in this year's T&L Ed Tech Leaders of the Year program, and Gray Smith write about this challenge in Writing in a Wired World: Improving Student Writing Using a Computer, forthcoming from Teacher Created Materials. To encourage substantive discussion in student message board communication, they've developed conversation assessments using a five-point rubric that outlines the key criteria for determining a student's grade, including use of evidence, engagement with the text, and whether or not a student responded thoughtfully.
* Use models. Bookmark examples of well-written blogs. Take a class period to discuss what an effective post looks like. The same goes for examples of helpful reader response. If you use discussion board features to workshop students' writing, you also need to guide and reward the difficult work of learning how to give constructive criticism.
Kristen Kennedy is senior editor of T&L.
Source: Newsweek, March 5, 2001 p62.
Title: Who's Blogging Now? More and more Internet users are sharing their lives in public online journals called Weblogs that can be strangely addictive. Charting a phenom.(Focus on Technology)(Brief Article)
Author: Deborah Branscum
Subjects: Online services - Usage
Diaries - Information services
If you want reality, forget "Survivor." Check out Weblogs: public online journals that can be racy, riveting and alarmingly blunt. The updates--often daily--let fans follow every twist and turn in an author's life. In Tennessee, Meghan O'Hara has been working up the courage to ask Alex out for a date--a mere eight years after she first got a crush on him in high school. In Texas, chest pains sent Noah Grey to the hospital again, and his camera is broken--a blow to the self-described gay, agoraphobic photographer who rarely leaves the home he shares with his mother and two sisters. Writing from the Netherlands, American Rachel James shared an erotic Valentine's Day surprise engineered by her Dutch boyfriend. And it wasn't a teddy.
Online diaries aren't new. Ryan Kawailani Ozawa, who created Diarist.net, traces the earliest Web journal to January 1995. Later, Weblogs, or blogs, were born. These are personal sites, such as Tomalak's Realm (www.tomalak.org), that organize links to other Web content on a particular topic of interest. Early bloggers needed to know HTML and have access to a network server. Updating entries was a technical chore. That began to change in 1999 with easy Web tools and free hosting sites, such as Blogger.com, Editthispage.com and LiveJournal.com. Some 100,000 people have tried Blogger.com, the most popular site. "The great thing about Blogger.com and Diaryland.com is that anyone who can fill out a form can have an online journal," says O'Hara.
That's not necessarily a good thing, at least for readers, according to John Grohol, a Boston-based research psychologist who runs PsychCentral.com and tracks Weblogs. "The majority of these journals are not all that interesting," he says. Maybe not, but these snapshots of life--and, perhaps, fantasy--can be strangely addictive nonetheless. Unsurprisingly, some of the longest-running journals belong to techies. O'Hara, for example, is a Web designer. She describes her breasts, piercing, smoking habit and height in her online diary, Squirrel Bait (www.treehaus.addr.com/blog), and that's just on the About page. O'Hara has been chronicling her life online since 1995, when she was a first-year college student. She claims to be shy in real life--a fact that comes as a surprise to anyone who reads Squirrel Bait, which has given her a somewhat limited measure of fame within the Weblog community. But don't get the wrong idea--Weblogs are "not all Jerry Springer," says O'Hara. "It's not all people writing, 'My boyfriend dumped me, he's a bastard'." Still, regular readers want to know: will she ask Alex out or not?
For isolated individuals, blogs can be a lifeline to a larger community. Noah Grey's journal (www.NoahGrey.com) offers readers a view into the often difficult life of a bipolar agoraphobic with a troubled history as a rape survivor. You might expect Grey's postings to sound like a whole week's worth of "Oprah," but it's not the case. Grey's musings, photos and links can be somber, sensitive and inspirational, as well as raw. "Throughout all my adult life, computers and the online world have been the only real outlets I've had," he writes in an e-mail exchange. "In a very real way, they've kept me alive." Grey's postings, online since 1998, have also drawn a following, much to his surprise. "It just thoroughly astonishes me that anyone could give a damn about this insecure and fundamentally frightened guy who still sleeps
with a teddy bear every night," he says.
An aspiring Samuel Pepys can turn to many sites on the Web for launching a personal journal, including DiaryLand.com, Pitas.com, Diaryx.com and Blogspot.com. Joint journals, or discussions, can be conducted at sites such as Metafilter.com. So far, there's not much commercial interest in Weblogs; companies hosting these sites attract users but not cash. But according to one practitioner, Weblogs aren't about making money; they're about revolutionizing communication. Dave Winer, a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur and founder of tiny Userland Software, has been maintaining his Scripting.com Weblog since 1997. For this baby boomer, Weblogs aren't just a publishing medium; they're a crusade. "I'm interested in creating a new form of journalism," he says. "I don't trust the media sources, the TV networks and magazines."
Will Weblogs change journalism? They'll do more than that, if you believe Winer. "We have a lot of problems to solve on this planet," he says. "We need to gain consciousness as a society, and one of the best ways to do that is to start talking and also to listen. There are 6 billion people on the planet, and if everyone on the planet had a Weblog, we'd be better off." Six billion people sharing their secrets and fears? Now, there's an idea for a reality show.
Source: Yahoo! Internet Life, July 1, 2002 pNA.
Title: Who Was Billiam? and Why Was He Murdered On the Net.
Subjects: Web sites - Design and construction
Billiam was a new breed of human.
Call it Homo journalicus--a curious creation of the Internet Age that lives the majority of its life on the Web and interacts almost solely with other members of its species. There are legions of them out there--people who use online services such as LiveJournal [livejournal.com] and DiaryLand [diaryland.com] to post the nitty-gritty details of their existence, tossing in everything from their fear of commitment to what they ate for breakfast. But none could do it like Billiam.
Billiam lived on LiveJournal, the kind of low-budget, for-the-love-of-it space that is the Net's pluralistic promise made manifest. Its code was cobbled together by a legion of distributed programmers who have rolled chatrooms, message boards, diaries, and blogs into one living, breathing, electric hive. If you're an LJer (as they call themselves), 500,000 or so of your closest friends hang there 24/7. Within its walls you will find gossip, infighting, sex talk, hugs, and no small amount of whining about science teachers. The simple innovation of making every post in your Weblog (or blog) a topic for discussion means that LJ is endlessly interactive: Posts lead to discussions, which lead to subdiscussions, which people comment on in their journals, where the endless dissection begins anew. The friendships, feuds, loyalties, and betrayals change so quickly and cascade through so many incarnations that you could easily sympathize with someone about a caustic post in his journal only
to trace the thread back and find that you left it there yourself.
But be warned: Stumble across one of its pages while at work, and you may well find yourself, five hours later, knowing a great deal about JoeyJoey and how she's cheating on her boyfriend TimmyThumbs with a hot Latin Casanova video store manager (who drives a Camaro and has a reputation for making great bouillabaisse), but precious little about the presentation you're giving tomorrow. As the site itself encourages: "Let the world know the story of your life, as it happens. (Whether they want to or not!)" Beyond mere voyeuristic journal peeping, LJ is humanity on display in all its glory, confusion, angst, and banality. It is heroin for procrastinators, a black hole for your attention span.
And for a brief, intense Net moment, it was home to Billiam and the chaos he created.
Calling Billiam's journal, dubbed HardcoreBilliam. com, different is an understatement. For one, this obsessive diarist didn't seem to care about making or keeping friends, only about speaking his mind: "I don't sugar coat my wordz at all mothaphuckaz!!!!!!! it ain't my fault you can't handle my truth!" But despite (or perhaps because of) his cavalier, id-centric approach, Billiam had plenty of friends. It's not clear that Billiam had a specific agenda in mind or that he knew what he was doing. But whatever he was doing, it worked. Hardcore Billiam was the toast of LiveJournal, with thousands visiting each day to read his musings, many of them scatological, misogynist, or just plain nasty.
But who was Billiam really? The pictures of him plastered all over his site weren't much help. Most were just crude Photoshop doodles--cut-and-paste jobs that transformed Billiam into a professional wrestler, a chick magnet, or Britney's hoochie-coochie man.
Actually, the phrase "pictures of him" isn't entirely accurate. Billiam never used any real photos of himself. A little digging reveals that the cocksure mug dominating Hardcore Billiam belongs to Josh Souza, a runner-up on the TV reality show Big Brother (Josh Souza Online [joshsouzaonline.com] apparently provided Billiam with immense amounts of raw material). Indeed, Billiam played with the concept of identity as if it were Silly Putty--you never knew when you'd come to the bottom of his rabbit hole. A disclaimer on his site reads:
i know da pichaz are of Josh Souza from Big Brother...everyone knows dat. You aint speshal cuz u figured it out. Pretty much evrything u read in here iz bullshit, an it don't got nuffin ta do with Josh Souza. So, eitha laff an enjoy, or move on.
Women wanted to meet him. Scores sent pictures with his obliquely perverse trademark phrase ("Billiam, would you like some sausage?") written across various body parts. His groupies eventually organized themselves into a fan club of sorts called Billiam's Bichaz. To meet demand, Billiam had to start up an altogether new journal just to handle questions about sex. And so "Ask Dr. Billiam" was born. LiveJournal, it seemed, had found its alpha male.
Of course, Billiam failed to charm many. The women who sent him naked pictures were virtually impossible to age-verify--a fact that made even the notoriously libertarian creators of LiveJournal nervous (but didn't stop them from giving him a free permanent account). And then there were the LJers who were just
plain jealous of the attention the community lavished on Billiam.
One of his main detractors was a thuggish ex-New Yorker living in Malibu who went by the handle Primo. His LJ page mainly focused on his phat ride (his
car), his ice (jewelry), and his views on just how foolish you would have to be to mess with him. At least that's what his journal was about until he tangled with Billiam. Thereafter, it was pretty much about how dumb/soft/ugly/gay Billiam was. Typically, though, Primo was more interested in Billiam than Billiam was in him. After slapping him around with some verbal jousts, Billiam left Primo to his ranting and went back to spreading his views on Lucky Charms, Willy Wonka, and freaky sex.
Was there a point to all this? It's hard to say. Billiam's journal tended to reveal more about others than it did about him. For all his outrageousness, Billiam was actually something of a blank canvas. While most LJers are pathologically exhibitionistic, he eschewed tortured re-creations of his inner life, preferring to coast on pure personality, watching as others projected their own biases and judgments onto him. Where other LJers would note that they had Trix for breakfast, Billiam would use it as an excuse to give the people what they really wanted--more Billiam:
fo some reason da kidz have decided dat Trix r only fo kidz an not fo rabbitz. where da phuck doez it say dat?!?!? wot kind of fascist phuckan country do we live in where certain peepz can eat certain cereal cuz of their species?!?!?!.
Amid the free-form, Ebonics-like jabbering, a few facts emerged. Billiam was the nephew of Barry Williams (who played Greg on The Brady Bunch). He was 25. He lived in Canada and hated it. He smoked Herculean amounts of marijuana.
He also loved women, and he held a typically raunchy contest to determine which lucky one would get a free plane ticket to come meet him. The winner, by virtue of a stash of Webcam pics that would have put Danni Ashe to shame, was one TomorrowWendy, a longtime fan who couldn't wait to meet the man.
And this is where the mask began to slip, the hero began to falter. After a tumultuous weekend at Club Billiam, TomorrowWendy returned home and posted a detailed description in her journal. For Billiam's fans, it was all a little unfortunate--like meeting the real Bill and Ted and realizing they were more fun on DVD than they were to hang out with.
Billiam was no slick player by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the person TomorrowWendy met looked suspiciously like a loser with no job and nothing to do all day but get high and post on LiveJournal. Billiam's "crib" was a dank basement filled with dirty laundry and pot smoke, TomorrowWendy reported. The beauty of suspended disbelief is that it allows us to live vicariously through our heroes' outrageous actions. This becomes tougher to do when you find out your hero still lives with his mom.
Without going into the rest of the gory details, let's just say things didn't work out for Billiam and Wendy. Her posts sparked a he said/she said mess of epic proportions. Billiam claimed they slept together. TomorrowWendy said Billiam merely exposed himself to her and bluntly propositioned her (several times). Billiam said TomorrowWendy is certifiably crazy and a pathological liar (but that he found that sexy). TomorrowWendy said Billiam finds anything with a pulse sexy. Billiam then saw fit to post in his journal all the naked pictures she'd sent him (something she'd expressly asked him not to do).
The controversy eventually drowned beneath a tidal wave of spaced-out rants and dirty pictures. At the end of the year, Billiam announced he'd be going offline for a couple of weeks. He'd scraped together the cash for a trip to his favorite place on earth--Disneyland. For almost a full month leading up to the trip, readers of his journal heard no end of his excitement:
diz shit iz da bomb!!! i lovz dizneyland so much!!!! Luv iz fo mommiez an puppy dawgz an dizneyland!!!
That quote is from a post he wrote on January 3, the night before he left. It was to be his last. Billiam's journal went dark until the 17th, when a post came across from his pal HardcoreScotti with a link to TomorrowWendy's journal. There, fans read the news. Billiam was dead. Primo--yes, Primo, the thug from Malibu--had killed him.
TomorrowWendy reported in her journal that she and Billiam had met up in California (they were dating, she admitted; the fight had been a publicity stunt), and that while there, Billiam had also decided to see his old nemesis Primo to show he had no hard feelings. The rendezvous had turned ugly. Billiam couldn't resist taking Primo down a peg or two with some semi-playful verbal smacks. Primo took something the wrong way and stormed off. The next morning, he showed up at their motel with a gun and put five bullets into Billiam. "I remember feeling his body shudder as he coughed...his body trying to suck air into lungs that couldn't hold it. I remember his mouth moving as he tried to speak, but no words would come. Only blood." He died in her arms, TomorrowWendy wrote, before the ambulance could arrive.
A community this large and emotionally charged is inevitably going to be home to some unstable people. The kind of people who wouldn't recognize a joke if it insulted them in their journal. Behind his monitor, Billiam was king, and none of his outrageous actions had consequences. Now the online had moved offline with its volatility and unpredictability dangerously intact--and the LJers were stunned.
But not for long.
Billiam was dead, yes, but only insofar as he had existed in the first place. Which is to say, not at all.
The LiveJournal community was apprised of this salient fact by a grudge-holding LJer named Visions, who was on a personal crusade to unmask the man. With the help of some IP address sleuthing, Visions ultimately proved that not only was this goofy, obnoxious, fun-loving Canadian pothead not who he said he was, he wasn't anybody at all. A phantom. A digital hallucination.
The man responsible was one Joe Humphrey, a struggling screenwriter living in Victoria, and a man who is about as un-Billiam as someone could be without turning into Orrin Hatch. Billiam was a fiction that somehow escaped Joe's brain, landed on the Web, and promptly seduced a few hundred women. TomorrowWendy? That was Joe, too. And Primo? Of course. Using photos of Big Brother contestants for Billiam and Primo (and an aspiring nudie model named Stormy as TomorrowWendy), an active imagination, and equal parts charm and obnoxiousness, Joe managed to create a minor Web celebrity out of whole cloth, along with a full cast of supporting characters. Think of it as a documentary within a reality show within a movie. A movie where Peter Sellers plays all the parts.
On the phone, Joe Humphrey is soft-spoken and thoughtful. He says Billiam began as a prank to tweak his LiveJournal pal HardcoreScotti. Scotti had been anonymously messing with Joe in Joe's journal. Joe created Billiam to mess back. A little trash talk from Billiam was all it took to get Scotti interested. Soon the fur was flying, and Joe was hearing incredulous stories from his friend about this mysterious Billiam character. Like any good fight, Scotti and Billiam's fracas attracted some rubberneckers. By the time Joe let Scotti in on the joke, Billiam was getting cheered on by a large and unruly crowd--one that featured many nubile women. From there it was a simple matter of widening his sights a bit and pissing off the rest of the world. To quote Billiam:
da funniest part iz dat u r gettin yo granny pantiez in a bunch over some shit dat a fictional character iz saying. everythin im doin iz an elaborate joke...a joke played on YOU...a joke played on peepz too stoopid to realize dat wot im doin izn't real. u think i CAN'T type normally? U think dat i write like diz because i think itz COOL or somethin?
To quote Joe Humphrey: "I was basically trying to make a character that people would just hate automatically." Perhaps, then, we should call Billiam's species Homo journalicus chimericus. But then again, maybe we'd all be more balanced people if we had an unedited alter ego. Says Joe: "Billiam can say whatever he wants to say and get away with it. That's not something you can really do. Y'know, unless you're a jerk."
Billiam may never have existed in the conventional sense. But for his legions of followers, he did. In the process, he created a new kind of fame, and a new form of entertainment, one where the stars are completely accessible to the people, whether they actually exist or not.
And Joe Humphrey? He hopes to get a movie deal out of his online adventure. For now he's keeping things as schizophrenic as ever with his new project, Up Your Mind [upyourmind.com], a collaborative site run by several of his different personalities, including such luminaries as TomorrowWendy, Darth Vader, and Christopher Walken.
As for Billiam, though his time may be up, we all know that nothing ever really dies on the Web. Good night, sweet prince, and angels sing thee to thy rest, biznatch. Dat iz all.
