Chapter 5. Browse the Internet

Did you ever have a diary? I remember the diaries with the little locks on them that gave the appearance of containing deep and detrimental secrets that would shock even the most avid viewer of daytime soap operas. Everyone with a diary hid it. They walked through life in fear of someone finding and reading the diary. I remember finding my sister's diary once. It wasn't very interesting because she was only 14 at the time. I'm sure someone somewhere still has one of those locked-up books, but diaries have changed in the online world. Not only is the lock off the little book, but the little book is displayed online for all to see. Enter the era of the blog.

Blogs are personal Web sites that can be public diaries, lists of links, political journals, or anything in between. The blog, which is short for "Web log," started out as people posting their browsing habits and favorite Web sites. The personal journal entered the equation next, providing highly addictive online reading for many a closet voyeur. Today blogs are everywhere and have gained a curious importance in our society and culture. It is hard to meet someone anymore without anticipating the URL of their blog. In the 2004 presidential race, blogs helped shape the rhetoric and course of the campaigns, with bloggers even being invited to be press correspondents at the conventions of both parties.

Browsers were one of the killer apps that first helped make the Internet into a popular phenomenon. The power of Internet browsers turned a made-up verb such as "to blog" into an addictive reading obsession. The browser is the center of our online experience, where we can look up things, read e-mail through online clients, and completely do away with the phone book. They have gone from a tool to simply find information, to virtual shopping malls, to communities full of blogged gossip and whiney high school girls pouring out their daily troubles. Before I found blogs, I never knew how interested I was to find out each day what happened in the life of a 30-something businessman or how school went for some 14-year-old girl in the Midwest. Maybe I ought to find my sister's diary again from when she was 14; it's probably more interesting now than I thought it was.