health & fitness
Blogging on.
Someone told Rob to just go ahead and kill himself. Actually, it was written in the response section of his blog, codename: MURDERAMA, after a self-degrading entry. "I've been a really horrible person all my life," Rob Gillaspie, Lawrence resident, says as he sips his Jack and Coke and nervously smooths his eyebrows. "I intentionally live life as a vagrant, a Skid Row asshole." Gillaspie's nonchalance gives the impression that he expects readers to respond with ruthless criticism. That is how he reaches people with his blog; he pisses them off.
I am sitting across from him amidst the smell of stale cigarettes and liquor at a local dive. His impish grin, fair skin and freckles make him look much younger than he really is, 27. Gillaspie's years as a drug addict, a homeless deviant, and now the father of a little girl whom his estranged wife will barely let him see, do not show. His black shoes are shined and his tattooed arms are covered by a gray suit jacket with a skull-and-crossbones pin fastened to the lapel. Gillaspie now has a full-time job cooking at Milton's coffee shop and a blog that is growing in popularity. Despite the suggestion from one anonymous commenter to kill himself, each addition to Gillaspie's blog is reputed to be "the best one yet."
I know all this because Gillaspie writes about his experiences as a social vagabond for the readers of lawrence.com, The Lawrence Journal-World's online entertainment Web site. He is also my online arch nemesis.
Gillaspie bashed my former blog,
Powder Room Confessions, in my comments section and his comments section. He started writing the misogynistic and sometimes tear-inducing insults from the time I first began posting on lawrence.com until to my last blog. Those who followed our exchanges would probably do a double take at us sitting politely across from one another.
A blog, short for "Web log," is a sort of online column or frequently updated journal written by unpaid, and often untrained, writers. But a concrete definition has yet to be agreed upon. "Blogs are what people decide they are. It's an outlet of writing that shows more personality." Joel Mathis, lawrence.com blogger, says. Phil Cauthon, lawrence.com cofounder and editor, views blogs as a place for reflection on community and its events, community journalism of sorts.
Bloggers who have been around awhile have a narrow definition of what exactly it means to blog and what kind of writing constitutes blogging, says Steve
Outing, senior online editor of Poynter Online and Internet and news columnist for Editor & Publisher. Outing cites Jim Romenesko's media blog posted on Poynter Online as one that adheres to the traditional definition. It is comprised mostly of links to previously published news stories on other Web sites and involves a lot of user interaction where readers give feedback and Romenesko responds with in-depth replies.
According to an October study by Perseus Development Corp., a marketing research firm, 80.6 percent of blogs link to external Web sites, though few links are actually to news-related information. The study, published on Business Wire, a full-text news-release database, indicated more than four million blogs had been created on the eight leading blog-hosting services. The study estimated the number will grow to five million in the next two months and to 10 million by the end of 2004.
Gillaspie's blogs are written as columns, hybrids of "exaggerative" writing and actual events. Codename: MURDERAMA contains no links or Web references. "It's a document of all the crazy shit presented in an interesting way," he says. It resonates with the voice of the little man, says Gillaspie. He, of course, is the poster child of the proletariat, the honorary underdog. Gillaspie's entries are posted after a brief editing process and go online almost as soon as he finishes them. "I like them to be hot off the paper," he says. Despite the gray area blogs reside in, Outing says, blogs require spontaneity and quick editing. However, some blogs are defined by their unedited content.
In a Sept. 1 blog, Daniel Weintraub, sacbee.com blogger and Sacramento Bee employee, posted a controversial piece about California Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante. Weintraub wrote "he certainly owed his elevation to the job of Assembly Speaker to his ethnic background and to the support he received from fellow Latinos. If his name had been Charles Bustamante rather than Cruz Bustamante, he would have finished his legislative career as an anonymous back-bencher." The Sacramento Bee, in response, hired an ombudsman and installed an editing policy to scrutinize Weintraub's previously unedited blog.
Comment sections are another area that has been closely watched. In the last few months, lawrence.com implemented a registration system where, before posting a comment, readers must enter information including an e-mail address and a user name as a way of controlling the content. Powder Room Confessions and codename: MURDERAMA gave this system a trial run, and it is now used on each lawrence.com blog. Not surprisingly,
thursday, october 30.2003
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