Got blogs?

Web logs becoming outlets for news, views, photos, communication

By Clint Cooper Staff Writer

If you.re a redhead, or love baseball, or live in Scotland, or want to
talk about Howard Dean.s scream, there.s a "blog" out there just for
you.

" A what?" you might ask. A blog is short for Web log, or weblog,
which is a regularly updated Web site featuring items arranged in
reverse chronological order. The items may be original or postings of
other people.s work.

Blogs are less immediate than chat rooms, more expansive than bulletin
boards and often linked to one another for broader readership.

The term weblog is said to have been coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, a
New Mexico resident and editor of Robot Wisdom. Blogger Peter Merholz
is credited with first using the term "blog."

"Sometime in April or May of 1999," Mr. Merholz wrote on his blog,
peterme.com, "I posted, in the sidebar of my homepage: .For what it.s
worth, I.ve decided to pronounce the word weblog as wee-blog. Or blog
for short.. I didn.t think much of it. I was just being silly,
shifting the syllabic break one letter to the left. I started using
the word in my posts, and some folks, when e-mailing me, would use it,
too. I enjoyed it.s crudeness, it.s dissonance."

People maintained what became blogs long before the term was coined,
but the trend gained momentum with the introduction of easily
automated published systems, including Blogger at blogger.com.

Chattanoogan Josiah Q. Roe founded chattablogs.com a year ago this
month. Chattablogs, according to its Web site, provides free weblogs
to people and groups based in the Chattanooga area.

After that, according to the 24-year-old project manager at Coptix in
St. Elmo, "it.s all about what you want to do."

Postings on a personal blog, according to the Web site, can be "pretty
much anything you want, so long as it.s not illegal, pornographic or
constitutes hate."

Chattablogs has had 111 people sign up for personal blogs in its first
year, said Mr. Roe. About 90 of those are active, he said.

Since it began, he said, the site has had about 500,000 hits. Of
those, there were 28,623 "unique visitors" in December, "a slow
month," he said. In January, that number is expected to exceed 30,000,
he said.

Blog entries, Mr. Roe said, are "almost like a journal, but calling it
that can degrade the quality it can be."

Blogs, after all, have been credited for toppling Trent Lott from the
post of U.S. Senate majority leader and Howell Raines as executive
editor of the New York Times.

One of the most cited political blogs is Instapundit
(http://www.instapundit.com/), which is run by Glenn Reynolds, a law
professor at the University of Tennessee, where he teaches
constitutional law, administrative law and Internet law. Another is
The Daily Dish (http://www.andrewsullivan.com/).

There is no typical blogger, Mr. Roe said. Harvard professors have
blogs and teenagers have blogs.

"It.s across the spectrum," he said.

On Chattablogs recently, postings included an Associated Press story
on the late Bob Keeshan, who portrayed Captain Kangaroo on television;
a locally written discussion of smoking and a National Public Radio
story on the subject; a discussion of marrying young; a rant about
abortion; and a brief on an "American Idol" hoax.

Andy Montgomery, 27, a Covenant College graduate, said his site,
www.loapher.com/blog, is a photo blog. A programmer and a freelance
photographer, he said posting daily photographs motivates him into
thinking of his day visually.

"It.s a visual journal of my life," he said of the blog, which also
contains comments which put the photos into perspective. "The neatest
thing is that so many people I know, or have known, can keep up with
what I.m doing."

The fact each entry is dated and that readers have the ability to make
a comment make blogs interactive, Mr. Roe said.

"That.s a big thing," he said. "You can have instant feedback."

Bloggers, Mr. Roe said, see their sites as more reputable than the
Internet.

"Bloggers are vicious to get the facts straight," he said. "We.re more
cynical about the Internet, which is more of a free-for-all for
information. There.s no accountability there.

"There.s just something about reading a blog from somebody in Iraq
that gives more insight (than other sources)," he said.

Mr. Roe said he was close to graduating from Covenant College over a
year ago when he saw that blogging was taking off.

"I don.t like reading random people.s blogs, so I thought why not root
them in one place," he said.

Coptix, a software development company, agreed to host the site, which
has no pop-up or banner ads, Mr. Roe said. Google, the Internet search
engine, has the only ad on the site, for which it pays a small amount.

The Chattablogs founder said he has spent around $1,000, including his
time, to start and maintain the site. His friends, many of whom were
the site.s first bloggers, now help do the programming and update the
server. Occasionally, he gets donations to help maintain the site.

Mr. Roe also has helped start sites for, among others, bloggers in
Atlanta, Baltimore, Berkeley, Boston and San Diego, and the state of
Vermont. However, he said doing so has not made him any money.

"We got it rocking and rolling," he said. "Now if investors came along
and wanted to buy them, that would be great."

Chattablogs, Mr. Roe said, "gets crazy amounts of traffic." The peak
times for bloggers, he said, are 11 a.m. to noon, 3 to 4 p.m. and 9 to
10 p.m.

"It.s a good way to waste time at work," he said.

Mr. Roe said he posts on his personal blog,
www.chattablogs.com/quintus/, about three times a week, but he said he
checks out comments and other postings in quick peeks throughout the
day. However, during a typical week, he probably spends less than two
hours blogging, he said.

Blogs are a way to stay in touch with friends and make new ones, he
said.

"It.s a really great news source, most people love to interaction and
it.s another form of communication," said Mr. Roe.

E-mail Clint Cooper at ccooper@timesfreepress.com

This story was published Tuesday, January 27, 2004