After years of debate, the decision to make the web more inclusive in this way by the nonprofit board’s 15 voting members received a standing ovation after a week-long series of meetings in Seoul, Korea.

This will allow governments to submit requests for specific non-Latin domain names, as soon as mid-November, and we’ll start seeing them used early next year. Non-Latin versions of “.com” and “.org” won’t be allowed for a few more years, however.

On October 29, 1969, the Internet came in not with a bang, but with a “lo.”

Letter by letter, UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock sent a message from his school’s host computer to another computer at Stanford Research Institute. Kleinrock was trying to write “login,” starting up a remote time-sharing system, but the system crashed after two letters, and lo! The Internet was born with the first data message sent between two networked computers.

To be fair, the creation of the Internet was peppered with other milestones that could be considered more or less historic. After all, at the core of the Internet was packet-switching–the process of breaking down data into blocks and routing them individually–and in 1968 Donald Davies of the UK’s National Physical Laboratory gave the first public presentation of the idea.

But if we can all agree that communication–e-mail, chat, social networking–is what makes the Internet tick, Kleinrock’s first message was the most significant early step towards what we have today.

Look how far we’ve come–and how much further we’ve yet to go. The internet started with a lo, evolved into a social stream–what will come next? How much more pervasive will it be in another 40 years?

I can’t wait to find out.

Ali: Are you usually this friendly with strangers?
She: Always.
Ali: Any particular reason?
She: A stranger is a safe place. You can tell a stranger anything.
Ali: Suppose I put it in my book.
She: You write fiction.
Ali: So?
She: So you won’t tie me to the facts.
Ali: But I might tell the truth.
She: Facts never tell the truth. Even the simplest facts are misleading.
Ali: Like the times of the trains.
She: And how many lovers you’ve had.

Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook

If there is any phrase that summarizes what enabled us to advance as far as we have, it’s “question everything.” Yet as more information becomes available to us via the web, we wander farther and farther away from this concept. Lost? Google Maps. Doubt? Wikipedia. New crush? Google.

This would be excellent if the information available to us was always accurate. The problem is that it isn’t and we’re no longer used to doubting all data until verified. The problem with the disparity between the digital and analog was illustrated perfectly today by Dr. Mark Drapeau, adjunct faculty member in the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In a post on his Posterous, he detailed an incident at Washington’s Union Station, where he was boarding an Amtrak train.

An abridged excerpt:

A few weeks ago, someone installed new screens around Union Station that give gates and updated information about trains. You know, “On Time,” “Boarding,” and so forth. You can find summary boards around the train station, and individual boards near the gates. They’re coordinated, and most likely run by some central software.

As we were running a few minutes late to board, the automatic screen at the gate switched from “On Time” to “Boarding.” Except we weren’t boarding at all. The attendant said it would be just a few minutes, and the door was shut with a fabric rope. The attendant went in the back with his walkie talkie to check on something and we quietly stood by the gate, about a hundred of us.

Suddenly, we hear a shriek. A middle-aged woman is running at us, yelling about how her train is boarding, hurdling over people and their bags. “Where’s the train to Newport News?! My train is boarding!!” Before anyone could say two words to her, she quickly glanced at the sign that said “Boarding,” tore off the fabric barrier, barged through the door, and started running towards the escalator to the train.

This is a good example of how updated technology not only can be merely a cosmetic improvement, but also can be harmful when used improperly. In this case, Amtrak personnel clearly knew we were not boarding, yet the signs said we were.

In the minds of people these days, virtual boarding is as good as the truth, and we saw this with the middle-aged woman, who ran by a hundred people waiting to board because a digital display convinced her that her train was boarding.

This is a similar problem to the “celebrity death hoax” phenomena whereby Kanye West or a similar high-profile person is declared “RIP” by an enterprising Twitter user–and the information spreads like wildfire. Being dead on Twitter is now equivalent to actually being dead, unless you literally “resurrect” yourself via a YouTube video (Zach Braff) or a late-night TV appearance (Jeff Goldblum).

Today’s incident could have been prevented in a number of ways. It was very minor, but it serves as an example of what happens when half-assed technology is involuntarily injected into our daily lives by people we don’t know, who don’t care about us. If we don’t have standards about making digital information match reality, where does that logically leave society? Working bathrooms declared closed? Incorrect pricing on lattes? Misleading highway directions during an emergency?

What I want to know is: Who’s going to be in charge of coordinating the digital and the real as our country moves toward a more technocratic future?

It’s a loaded question. One of the greatest aspects of the internet is the freedom with which it provides us. Coordination would require regulation. Do you draw the line at stations and airports providing information? Doesn’t it logically follow that any resource offering information (be it medical, historical and scientific) should comply? And so would the content provided by citizen journalists who are more and more providing the information for their communities. What would this regulation look like? More importantly, how would it be enforced?

The great journey of life became ours alone because we no longer shared in the wisdom of those who came before us or walked beside us.

I see this changing. More and more, people are telling their stories the web over. It is as though we have exchanged the fire for the glowing screen of our laptops. We may be alone in our apartments miles apart, but once again, we have each other.

We have made a brave return to the great tradition of story-telling. I see this as a wonderful thing. But there are those who are not so relieved.

CONFESSIONAL JOURNALISM

“There is a new and very weird and, to my mind, very wrong genre of journalism that is becoming all too popular: female confessional journalism,” writes Hadley Freeman at The Guardian:

Here’s how it goes: a female journalist describes her obsession with her weight/breasts/ageing face/food or alcohol problems/inability to have a happy relationship. The article is illustrated by the journalist looking as miserable as possible. There are tales of daily woe. It concludes with the writer still sufficiently unhappy to be commissionable for another very similar piece.

This genre has nothing to do with journalists opening a window into what life is like for women today. It does women no favours at all. It is entirely about perpetuating an editor’s misogynistic image of what women are like (self-hating, self-obsessed) and making a semi-celebrity out of the writer in the belief that readers like to read journalists whose names and faces (and breasts) they recognise.

Perpetuating an editor’s misogynistic image of what women are like: self-hating and self-obsessed. Freeman completely ignores the feelings and trials of the women who inspired her column, labels their editor a misogynist and says that this form of writing is setting feminism back 50 years.

Who are these women?

TERRORISTS OF FEMINISM

Christa D’souza wrote about her three breast surgeries, the problems with encapsulated implants, breast cancer, and her final decision to have her implants completely removed.

Liz Jones has never loved food. Her need to be thin and have control of her life through food rationing has ruled her life since she was eleven. This summer, when her sister visited, she decided to eat normally for three weeks. Her journey of discovery is brutal, sad and heart-wrenching. She describes her change in mood—she’s happier, she feels better, she has more energy. Her skin is less dry. She is alive. But just the same, she knows that when her sister leaves, she will return to her regime. She is an anorexic. This is the truth she is facing within herself.

The story of the playwright Zoe Lewis was pointed out by Anna N in a post at Jezebel on what they’ve labeled “the business of self-hate.” Lewis is successful and independent, but she is questioning her choice of career over that of being a housewife.

NOT JOURNALISM

“Certainly, sometimes a bit of personal experience can add to an article,” writes Freeman. “A first-person piece about, say, drug addiction in the week the government is voting on downgrading the classification of certain drugs is journalistically justified. An extended piece pegged to absolutely nothing in which a ‘former anorexic’ journalist describes her hilarious horror at having to eat ‘normally’ for three weeks is not, and simply suggests that the journalist can think of nothing to write about but herself.”

But who said it was journalism? Is it really that surprising that, in an age where blogs are becoming more and more popular than print media, editors would seek to emulate their qualities in their publications’ lifestyles sections?

How about giving the finger to inverted pyramid style in a burst of first-person, politically irrelevant humanity?

“Many editors do love this genre of journalism,” Freeman adds. This sort of story drives page views. “But do readers [love it]? Well, speaking purely from personal experience, I have yet to encounter a single woman ever saying to me, ‘Hey, did you read that article by that woman in The Daily Mail about how she only eats 500 calories a day, and how she knows that all women are secretly as self-obsessed as her? Wow, I loved that!’”

Well, I’ll be the first, Hadley.

THINKING OF FOR YOU

“I have no doubt that the women who write these articles truly feel the emotions they describe,” Freeman says dismissively in her Guardian piece. “But these women need help; they do not need to be made to feel that their professional USP is to play up their misery. Yet I’m a lot less bothered about the effect these articles have on the journalists who write them than I am about the readers who read them.”

Why? Because we’re so suggestible that reading about a woman’s losing battle with anorexia or another’s miserable journey to find youth in implants will destroy our idea of what it means to be a woman?

Freeman’s verdict is final: “This kind of journalism sets feminism back by about 50 years, because not only does it perpetuate offensive stereotypes about women as needy, helpless, childlike narcissists, it suggests that the most interesting thing a woman can offer up to others is her own battered, starved, bloated, enhanced or reduced body. And that seems a lot sadder to me than any shocking revelation I ever read in a single piece of confessional journalism.”

What I see here is not the call of feminism, what I see is women trying to silence other women. I see women dismissing the realities of other women using words and phrases like, “dangerous,” “self-hating,” “self-obsessed,” “childlike narcissists,” “needy,” “fucked up by aesthetic and social strictures,” “twisted view of what it means to be a woman,” and “not normal.” And that is a lot more horrifying to me than anything I have read in a confessional piece.

It’s clear that the writers of the confessional pieces are not in a happy place within themselves. Should we silence them, then? Should we cut their experience away and lock it up somewhere lest they tarnish the notion that women are strong, are invincible, are women? Heaven forbid they influence other women, who obviously can’t think for themselves! How dare the press and blogosphere not do more to keep this sort of rubbish away from the masses?

Anna N makes a point for me when she points out that no one who reads D’Souza’s piece is going to run to get implants. There is a lesson in her story, just as there is one in that of Jones and Lewis. The decision to get implants involves more than knowing what size breast you wish you had. The decision to limit your calorie intake has more consequences than physical ones. The choice to give up a relationship for your career is a big one.

They may not be happy stories, but look at fairy tales—before Disney had its way with them, that is.

“Stories are medicine,” writes Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her classic work Women Who Run With The Wolves. “They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything—we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories.”

Sterilizing the media of the battles that women (or men, for that matter) face everyday is not going to make us stronger. What does make us stronger is not being alone in our struggles. And when we hear the stories of those who have lived what we are living, we are heartened.

PLEDGE

I’m a confessional columnist. I have made terrible and wonderful mistakes in my life. I have been hurt, I have hurt myself and I have hurt others. I have questioned myself, I have lost myself and I have found myself. And I have written it all. I will never stop.

I think of Muriel Rukeyser again as I write this, those immortal lines: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.”

In victory or defeat, we will not be silenced.

And if that’s a threat to feminism, then down with feminism.

Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and scholar of the social effects of the web, presented an interesting point, complete with an anecdote about his wilder days:

When I was a junior in college, I spent a semester studying abroad. We were a small group of students, far from home and not well integrated into the life of our host country, so a typical Friday would involve settling in at one of our various seedy flats and drinking.

One particular Friday evening, which started with lime-free tequila shots and moved to swigging cheap vodka from the bottle, my hair caught fire. (I think — though I am hazy on the details — that I may have set it on fire myself.) In any case, my hair lit up quite nicely, which might have alarmed me while sober, but on that particular evening, it seemed like the sort of thing that happens from time to time.

Fortunately, my friend Paul was better able than I was to imagine a bad outcome from leaving my hair alight. He leapt to his feet, staggered to the couch where I was sitting, and extinguished my head. My haziness notwithstanding, I have an indelible image of Paul leaning over me, his face lit by the flame, as he blew out my hair like a birthday cake.

Good times.

It’s a safe bet that one or more pictures of those proceedings would be on Facebook, had I not been born so deep in the last century that we had no Facebook.

Society has always carved out space for young people to misbehave. We used to do this by making a distinction between behavior we couldn’t see, because it was hidden, and behavior we could see, because it was public. That bargain is now broken, because social life increasingly includes a gray area that is publicly available, but not for public consumption.

Given this change, we need to find new ways to cut young people some slack. Privacy used to be enforced by inconvenience; you couldn’t just spy on anyone you wanted. Increasingly, though, privacy will have to be enforced by us grownups simply choosing not to look, since it’s none of our business.

This discipline isn’t just to protect them, it’s to protect us. If you’re considering a job applicant, and he has some louche photos on the Web, he has a problem. But if one applicant in 10 has similar pictures online, then you’ve got a problem, because you’ll be at a competitive disadvantage for talent, relative to firms that don’t spy.

People my age tut-tut at kids, telling them that we wouldn’t have put those photos up when we were young, but we’re lying. We’d have done it in a heartbeat, but no one ever offered us the chance. Now that kids have these capabilities, it falls to us to keep our prurient interest in their personal lives in check. Just as Bill Clinton destroyed the idea that marijuana use was a disqualifier to serious work, the increasing volume of personal life online will come to mean that, even though there’s a picture from when your head was on fire that one time, you can still get a job.

Could our overshares ever be accepted and embraced? It makes me think of a piece in The Austin Chronicle from March, which predicted the changes in society if this were the case:

This is who we were: communities of individuals who forged identities, selves, and lives via formal (or informal) interactions within a societal whole. We met one another at home, school, work, play, and everywhere else, and we did it all face to face. We were first persons singular or plural, intensely social creatures with a craving for companionship but neurotically fixated on who, exactly, we really were. I was and we were writers who wrote, readers who read, and artists who actuated the unreal, cunningly, with artifice that reflected not only our own inner selves but also the identity – the soul? – of our surrounding communities. Persons of cerebral substance, literally, recognizing ourselves in the morning mirror and muzzily wondering if anyone else saw what we saw. That was us for millennia.

This is who we are: communities of individuals who are online half the time; often inseparable from our laptops; clustered in the muted, ambient click-type drone of coffee shops or working late into the night alone in home offices; hearing the quiet pattering of unclunky keyboards; the kids in the kitchen instant-messaging before the bus arrives, after the bus arrives, on the bus; Dad scrolling through Slate/Wired/Salon or eyeing the tumbling economic dice; Mom wondering why she even bothered to get that now silly-seeming Realtor’s license; chatting; texting; iPhoning; linked-in; sharing our individual triumphs and tragedies, from Obama to Mumbai, in real time, for all the online world to see, read, and share. We are as quick and relevant as our streams of consciousness (and Twitter) allow. Today, transparency trumps privacy, because, honestly, who wants to keep it all bottled up at a time like this? Share enough, and maybe somebody will care enough.

This is who we will be: a single community; global; linked-in; variegated and living lives beyond the passé 20th century notions of borders, beyond languages; a new species almost, Philip K. Dick-ensian in our comfort with multiple on- and offline identities; keenly aware of the marketers and corporate data-mining that exist primarily to sell us back to ourselves; and able to take advantage of the strange sense of slow self-empowerment that arrived near fully formed once we realized privacy as it once was is no longer privacy as it has become, or needs to be. The more we share – online – the less we have to fear. Transparency is the new privacy, the new safety, the new community, the new flesh, the new you, me, I, we.

In 10 years’ time, no one will remember that racy photo you uploaded to your MySpace profile following a drunken collegiate revel, even though it will still be there, for those who care to dig down through the Web 4.0, 3.0, 2.0, hacking back through the digital crust into the ever-present past. Ten years from now, your twentysomething predilection for obscurantist Japanese hentai B&D porn will seem more quaint than sordid or even titillating: archaic, digital daguerreotypes with tentacles. Does it matter? Do we care? We’re digital pioneers birthing digital natives who will have to evolve, socially, psychologically, possibly physically, as fast as the data stream. Their very concepts of “self,” “community,” “privacy,” and the way they view and mirror their world – as individual people and as part of a far greater, online whole earth – will be as different from our current definitions of the same, as the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux are to the digital artisans of EA or Rockstar Games. Long live the new unflesh? Maybe. Probably. Yes.

… Why not? As a species, we’ve been building walls and erecting boundaries, metaphorical and otherwise, since the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey upgraded bones and blood for bricks and mortar. Why not start cyber-kicking holes in the fences, the fortresses, the prisons with which we’ve surrounded ourselves? Personal and societal self-discovery on an epic, historical scale appears to be finally within striking distance for much of the online world. Humanity’s me generation is being force-evolved by onrushing technology into some new state of we.

On May 11, the acclaimed author Paulo Coelho blogged about revealing shameful acts. He asked his readers to respond in the comments.

He received 195 responses.

Sharing connects us. In the web, we have found a new way to do it. And as Coelho noted in his post, telling these stories sets us free.

Bruce Sterling, Austin’s “once-and-futurist post-cyberpunk seer,” who was interviewed by The Chronicle put it this way: “there’s a lot to be said for being ‘out.’ Put a bold, Nicolas Sarkozy-style public face on your indiscretions. If you quiver all over, thinking you should privately hide in the back of the bus–’I'm private and invisible here, no one should know I exist’–that just strengthens the hands of bossy people who want to keep you hidden in the back of the bus. Nobody outs Rosa Parks.”

I imagine that image of the future and I like it. But it’s not here yet. It’s in our hands to bring it, to shatter the world with our truth.

Who wants to go first?

Perhaps it’s just me. I don’t really have a childhood home the way most people do. I had many, all around the world. When I moved out from my parents’, I lived in many spaces, but these always felt temporary, too. I am a creature of motion. The places that were always a constant for me, the ones that I devoted time and energy into making mine, have all been online. I have made a few moves here, too, sometimes taking all my things with me, and sometimes leaving it all behind as one does when they’re walking out of a life that no longer suits them, with nothing but their name.

I can count these occasions.

My childhood homes, on the other hand—well, they require more than all the digits on that other hand.

I LOVE PARIS IN THE SPRINGTIME

Yahoo is pulling the plug on its free personal home page service, GeoCities.

For those who were not around in the early days of the web, GeoCities was the original social networking site. Only clunkier, devoid of most features you use without a second thought on Facebook—and on dial-up.

Back in the days when basic knowledge of HTML was required to carve a space on the web, and when very few people really knew it, GeoCities gave us n00b pioneers the ability to get ourselves started without too many complications, as well as helped us connect with others through “neighborhoods,” a feature of GeoCities that subdivided its users into categories (Paris for romance and the arts, SoHo for the hipsters and the arts, SunsetStrip for music, SouthBeach for intensive socializing, etc.).

It’s nothing new now, but back then, it was revolutionary. In 1997, a little after I joined, GeoCities was the fifth most popular site on the interwebz.

I don’t remember the kind of stuff I put up there now, but I do remember the wonder of discovery as I began, for the first time, to make, what I felt, was a home online. Before this moment, I had “rented” on bulletin boards and chat rooms. This, however, was like “buying.” It meant long-term. I made my little Paris place home.

(Of course it was Paris. I was a fetus, give me a break.)

THE END OF AN ERA

Perhaps more than places of residence, spaces online are like lovers. We enjoy many people who touch our lives, but there are only a number of them that really change us so deeply, and teach us so much, that we remember them forever.

In a sense, GeoCities was that. It may not have been the moody codependent relationship I had with Diaryland, or the drama-filled, torrid affair I had with LiveJournal or the wild, no-strings-attached fling I’ve been having with Wordpress, or the warm marriage I enjoy on this self-hosted blog—but it shaped me.

Maybe it was my first crush.

And now, it’s gone. Yahoo, which bought GeoCities in 1999 for a sweet $2.9 million, will be closing GeoCities later this year. Their statement doesn’t say much else in the way of whys or hows, but that isn’t necessary.

We’ve grown up. That first crush doesn’t make our heart melt when we see it or think of it. Instead, it fills us with a nostalgia. Not for the thing itself, but for who we were when we were first discovering it. That wide-eyed wonder, where expression meets exposure: one part confessional, one part art exhibit, one part life with a dash of dream.

Everything has the power to trigger memory. A sunset, a song, a scent. And now, a site.

THE CITY AND THE PICKAX

There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickax. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickax and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand.

– Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook

So long, GeoCities. You may have already been forgotten, but our Facebooks, Tumblrs and Twitters will forever rest on the ruins of your temples.

More ruminations across the web:

As URLs Go By by Atherton Bartelby
Because, much like I can vividly recall the scene outside of my apartment’s balcony when my brother told me over the telephone that our mother had died, or describe in minute detail the scents that filled my nostrils as I lost my virginity, so too can I recall precisely which design forums I was frequenting when my father died, or which blog I was maintaining when I was told that my first friend to die of AIDS had just been diagnosed with it, or exactly how many subdomains resided on my website when I experienced the most soul-destroying breakup of my life.

I was 10 on April 2, 1993, the day that the brand died.

On that day, Phillip Morris dealt a 20 percent slash to the price of its cigarettes in an effort to take on bargain brands, which were seriously pwning Marlboro’s market share. The slash had serious repercussions. If Marlboro’s carefully groomed brand wasn’t enough to take on the generic brands, then there no longer was truth to the brand equity mania that had rocked the eighties.

That is, if the brand was not powerful enough to sway sales on its own, if a marketing icon like Phillip Morris had to give in to the utterly lowbrow price war being waged against it, then the brand was as good as dead.

The panic that spread over Wall Street was immediate: Philip Morris’s stock fell 26 percent, and with it, other high-profile brands went down, among them Coca-Cola, Heinz, Quaker Oats, and PepsiCo. The brand is dead, experts said. As a result, companies cut advertising spending dramatically.

But the brand did not die. In fact, the opposite happened… Read more at The Cause Is The Habit

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence; at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar, sternly. “Explain yourself!”

“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

“I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar.

“I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied, very politely, “for I can’t understand it myself, to begin with; and being so many different sizes a day is very confusing.”

“It isn’t,” said the Caterpillar.

“Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,” said Alice; ‘”but when you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel a little queer, won’t you?”

“Not a bit,” said the Caterpillar.

“Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,” said Alice; “all I know is, it would feel very queer to me.”

“You!” said the Caterpillar contemptuously. “Who are you?”

– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

THE ELEVATOR PITCH

That’s the assignment: write an elevator pitch for your blog.

Assignment, yes. Darren Rowse at Problogger is hosting his biennial 31 Days to a Better Blog challenge, which combines theory and homework, and I’ve joined.

I signed up because I’ve been feeling a little disconnected from my blog and I thought that having a reason to reflect on it daily would be a good way to get back on track. I didn’t foresee that the first assignment would expose the main reason I’ve been drifting away from my blog.

I don’t know what my blog is about.

How technology is changing our our lives? Personal branding? What people are doing around the web? Traveling? Relationships? All of the above? Where do I fit into all of this?

“If you’re fuzzy on what your blog is about it’s unlikely than anyone else will have much of an idea either,” Rowse writes in his first post.

We all keep blogs for different reasons, but most of us want to be read, want to share, and a great many of us would like to give our careers, and maybe even our incomes, a boost through it. Having a focus is smart business. It enables you to connect with a specific audience and develop a community, it gives you visibility and credibility in your field, it allows you to effectively implement advertising and helps attract sponsors.

“I started out with a personal blog that covered everything from spirituality and church to photography to blogging (and more),” writes Rowse in his book ProBlogger: Secrets to Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income. “And though the blog did become quite popular, after 18 months of running it, I began to notice a number of things that made me consider a new approach: some readers became disillusioned with the blog. My blog had a number of main themes and different readers resonated differently with each one… when I focused on a topic they were not interested in, they either ignored the post or, at times, pushed back… I began to feel guilty about blogging on certain topics.”

Rowse decided to break his blog into different, well-focused niche blogs.

“The result was a more natural blogging experience for me and a more useful one for my readers,” Rowse recalls.

REBRANDING SMUT

In 2004, my friend and fellow writer Laura Roberts turned me on to her newest endeavor: Black Heart Magazine, an independent webzine featuring “the dirtiest minds in literature.”

My career as a blogger started in high school, centered around the wonders of dating and sex. Before there were blogs, there bulletin boards and I was on there, pushing the pixels into elaborate recreations of my adventures and experiences. By the time Laura and I connected, blogs had taken off and we each had a nice crowd of readers who were eager for more.

And more we gave them. Even as we continued to evolve, wrapped up the college years, hit the workforce, got into more and more serious relationships, we continued to write about sex—how we liked it, how we had it, how it played into our everyday lives. We were driven by desire and desire would always enjoy an audience.

Or so I thought.

Last month, Laura sent me a direct message on Twitter asking what I thought about changing the tagline of the magazine to shift the focus from smut to literature.

“That will change the whole direction of Black Heart, won’t it?” I asked her.

Yes, it would. And that’s essentially what she wanted to do.

“Rather than cater to the sex crowd, when I find myself increasingly bored with erotica, I am looking to bring my love and lust for literature to a new format,” she elaborated on a Facebook note. “Black Heart will be moving in a new direction as a result of this, focusing more on the literature side of ‘literate smut’ … I’m looking for people who are passionate about reading and writing, who love literature in a slightly dirty way … interviewers, authors, book lovers, book snobs, lit pimps, booksellers, book publishers, book readers, book reviewers, academics, writers, dilettantes, anybody who considers themselves a writer of poetry, prose, journalism or blogs/rants/whatever pops into their head.”

I didn’t comment because I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t understand what I felt about it.

The next time I stop by Black Heart Magazine, I notice the banner has changed from “the dirtiest minds in literature” to “sex, love, literature.” The featured story is “Poetry for the People.”

I don’t click.

Mind you, I love literature. But my relationship with my books was never what Black Heart Magazine was for me. Black Heart, for me, was about the ever-evolving process of sexual discovery. I don’t want to read that April is poetry month unless—pardon my boldness—the poetry in question is being written on my back in cum.

That’s the reaction Rowse was talking about—that’s the reader pushing back. In this case, it’s not that the blog has gone off-course. Laura has carefully navigated where she wants to go after some careful deliberation and discussion with her contributors. She has done everything right.

Still, here I am, staring at the main page of Black Heart Magazine and feeling, though I’m sitting in an office wall-to-wall with classic literature, that I no longer belong.

WHEN YOU TURN INTO A CHRYSALIS—YOU WILL SOMEDAY, YOU KNOW

Blogs are not static because people are not static. The reasons for choosing a blog with a specific focus have been enumerated here and elsewhere. But just as they give you a solid framework within which to work, they also serve to restrain you.

“I would really like to be one of those bloggers who is comfortable with being all ‘niche,’ all ‘industry-specific,’” my friend Atherton Bartelby remarks in a post regarding the elevator pitch assignment. “I would love to be termed a ‘design blogger’ or a ‘media blogger’ or a ‘gay relationship blogger.’ But neither I, nor my blog, will ever be just any one of those things, because one’s life is not single-faceted like that; one’s life, and certainly mine, is multi-faceted: the professional and the personal, the good and the bad, the specific, and the all-encompassing.”

WHO ARE YOU?

After thinking about my blog for several hours, I decided to let it speak for itself.

Since the inception of this blog, I have put out seven interviews, 11 news items and 26 essays relating to blogging, web culture, social media, old media versus new media, oversharing, cruelty on the internet, branding, marketing, gender, relationships and, on two occasions, travel.

As more and more of my relationship discussions move over my column at BlogHer and as more of us begin to settle into the world of new media to the point where it’s no longer appropriate to call it “new,” the content that initially made this blog an adventure in discovering how technology is affecting the way we interact with one another is becoming scarce.

Further, as I continue to attend events and meet people working on web-based projects around Southern California and elsewhere, the focus is shifting to them and their endeavors. Four of the seven interviews conducted on the blog happened after 2009 kicked off, and I have quite a few more in the works.

So what are you, blog? Or should I say, what are you becoming in that chrysalis?

A reflection on the web—the people in it, the things we’re doing, the customs we’re adopting, and the things we’re leaving behind as we venture forth into this uncharted territory of trial-and-error, where more and more, the digital is colliding with the analog.

And I hope you, dear reader, will stick around to see the wings that surface from this chrysalis and the many, many rabbit holes thereafter.

While Celebrity gossip blogs have existed for a while and Hulu, which brings film and television to computers everywhere, won best of show for film and TV at the South by Southwest: Interactive awards this year, in general, the merging of Hollywood and the web has been slow and clumsy.

Enter Leslie Gornstein, the Answer Bitch for E! Online. After working at a start-up that failed and spending some years freelancing, Gornstein got a column online when an editor at E! approached her in 2004.

“He was looking for a sassier, angrier ‘Ask Marilyn’ character,” Gornstein explained over coffee at Caffe Luxxe in Brentwood, where she met with me, Laurie Percival, editor-in-chief of Lalawag and Macala Wright, director of marketing and PR for 1928 Jewelry.

“He said, ‘I’m looking for someone to be the answer bitch, you can be the answer bitch,’” Gornstein recalled. “I said ‘all right.’”

Thus, the entertainment question and answer column ‘Ask The Answer Bitch’ was born. Gornstein never looked back. After living and breathing the celebrity lifestyle for four years, writing a book was natural progression. Her book The A-List Playbook, was released by Skyhorse Publishing last month.

“Despite what’s going on in technology right now and despite the ways that you can push yourself out there to a lot of people, people still see a book as a calling card,” Gornstein said. “I learned some really fascinating basic facts about Hollywood. But there was no compendium of it anywhere—the fact that celebrities have three nannies per child, the fact the average celebrity spends an hour a day with their child, and maybe three to four during a vacation period, the fact that most celebrities get 20,000 dollars a month of free stuff—and the fact that’s how you can gauge if they’re A-list or not. I wanted to put it in a survival guide format because I thought that was the most fun way to read it. But really it’s a window for the rest of us about how those people really live.”

“Are you using social media to promote your book?” Lalawag’s Laurie Percival asked.

“Everything that has an internet connection is now my bitch when it comes to promoting my book,” Gornstein responded, laughing. “Facebook, MySpace—not so much, there is something really disco about that. It looks like a Lebanese disco whenever I go on there! I can’t deal with that. So Facebook, Twitter, E! Online—even World of Warcraft. If it has a line out to the world, it’s my bitch.”

Gornstein, who started tweeting as @answerbitch only last November has almost 2,000 followers. She follows almost everyone back.

Macala Wright can’t get over the information saturation that comes with following that many people on Twitter. She confessed she’d pulled a Loic just a few weeks ago to make her stream more manageable and reflected on how annoyed some people got when they were unfollowed.

“Someone has decided following everyone back is Tweetiquette and you know what? I think people are taking things way too personal,” Gornstein replied. “Because, what does that mean when I don’t return someone’s phone call? Sometimes I’m just not going to return a phone call.”

“I think about this all the time, too,” Laurie Percival pitched in. “Do I have to reply to every @message? How do people do this all day long? There’s no way!”

She described with awe the people who sent personalized direct messages (DMs) after she followed them.

“I just don’t know how they have time,” she said. “So I just don’t do it.”

“You could send out auto-DMs.” Gornstein suggested.

We looked at her with horror. I think one of us even gasped.

“The only reason I think an auto-DM would be offensive, and I got one of these recently, ‘thank you for following, be sure to link my blog’—that’s not cool,” Gornstein defended her position. “When people follow me I send out an auto-message that says, ‘Welcome to the all American festival that is me!’ I don’t see that as a particularly obnoxious thing to do.”

Gornstein seems to have an inherent understanding of how to work new media and leverage the power of real-time user feedback.

“I’m really careful to do it,” she said about self-promotion. “You have to come correct about it, as the drug dealers say. You come to people correct and you say ‘yes, I’m pimping now,’ or I’ll make it participatory and say, ‘correct me if I’m wrong…’ and people like that. It’s conversation. I think that’s respectful.”

She limits the bulk of her self-promotion to Sundays and constantly invites input from her followers and readers. To a large extent, the web has allowed her following to grow and thrive.

“On the internet we have the concept of microcelebrity—being famous for fifteen people, as Momus said in the early 90s,” I told her. “Do you think of yourself as one?”

“I’m definitely famous for fifteen people,” she responded. “My husband loves me!”

“Do you think microcelebrities could apply some of the knowledge found in your book?”

“No,” she said, laughing. “You really need to be visible planet-wide to be able to sling this kind of power around.”

“So you don’t think Julia Allison could get through airport security without having to remove her stilettos?”

“No,” she replied. “Microcelebrities are most famous to themselves. Without the internet, would these people be famous?”

Sounds like a challenge to me. Hear that, NonSociety?

Gornstein pointed to a copy of her book on the coffee table, buried under iPhones, packs of cigarettes and idle Flip cams.

“These people are all cross-media megastars,” she said. “If the internet did not exist, Julia Allison would be a nice intern somewhere, working her microminis and then maybe one day meet Tina Brown and have something nice happen to her for a year. She’s extremely bright and when you read what she writes you see it’s well thought-out, but to be really famous your face needs to be recognizable, your name needs to be recognizable—by more than a small subset of people. If you said, ‘I saw Julia Allison yesterday!’ most people wouldn’t know what you were talking about. But if you said, ‘I saw Julia Roberts yesterday!’ they’d know what you were talking about.”

She’s right. Even so, the section about how Paris Hilton plays the press (“The Paris Hilton Method,” page 65) could be of some use to aspiring fameballers—I’ll trade Laurie’s home phone for Owen Thomas’!

Seriously, though, the way fame is spreading on the web, and with microcelebrity having such a wide and bizarre array of wonders and dangers (from the power you can exert dating the founders of your choice start-up to death by commenter execution) I think there’s a definite sequel there.

Of Possible Interest:
Leslie Gornstein will be signing books and holding a live chat in Los Angeles on Thursday, March 19, 2009, at 7:00PM at the Barnes and Noble at the Grove on 189 Grove Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90036. Call (323) 525-0270.

Full disclosure—Leslie gave me a copy of her book. Yes, I’ve read it, but I’m not gonna tell you just how juicy it is. I’ll leave it by saying that two friends have already attempted to steal it.

POPPORN.com offers an light-hearted spin on adult entertainment industry news and events and provides regular fun, irreverent video content. I caught wind of it when they added me on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. I knew right away I had to get some more information, so I shot off an e-mail to editor-in-command Brian Bangs to get the skinny on how the site came about, how they’re making use of social media to gain popularity and where they wanna take their vision.

When did POPPORN get started and what’s the concept behind it?

POPPORN started unofficially in March of this year. Our goal with the site was to create something that offered a totally different perspective on the adult industry and then cross over adult and mainstream content.

It seems that even as the adult industry continues to reach into the mainstream there aren’t many sites dedicated to this concept. Sure, you have adult industry news sites which serve a great purpose, but they don’t really offer much to the casual adult fan.

POPPORN tries to create an environment that can reach into a more wide-spread demographic and retain a sense of humor about what adult content is.

How did the idea come about?

The idea was kind of a fluke. We are all amateur film makers with an interest in the adult business and I’m kind of a project guy so we decided at last year’s AVN [the Oscars of adult entertainment] to bring a camera and interview folks. Our perspective is a little more skewed than most adult news or review agencies and the folks and studios we covered really liked what we were doing: giving adult an attitude and opinion. So we figured creating a blog where this content could reside made the most sense. Sort of right time scenario.

Do you feel the industry has a need for this kind of angle?

I’m not sure there was a need for what we were doing, It would be a little arrogant to believe that, but I think what we saw was a void in the market for this kind of content. We knew that we could do something a little different that could put an edge on adult content, yet still keep it more mainstream for folks who aren’t diehard porn fanatics, while at the same time, adding a little levity to the adult industry as a whole.

So you see yourself developing into a mainstream-adult industry hybrid media outlet, a sort of sex for the common man, fun, accessible and real.

I would be cautious in saying we believe we can become a mainstream porn outlet, I don’t see that as a goal. But I do see us as being a fun resource for folks who are either into porn or curious about porn. A site that can give a laugh while still giving folks a valuable look into the adult industry.

Would you say it was accurate to say POPPORN was an SNL-meets-The Onion of adult entertainment?

Hmm, I never thought about the SNL angle, but maybe, yes.

Are you making money with the site? If not, how do you finance your endeavors?

We are making money off of the site. We sell advertising and while it’s not making us rich, it runs our site.

A lot of people are getting on the social media bandwagon—obviously Twitter was how we connected initially. How has that been working for you?

I think that taking advantage of social networking is the key in a web 2.0 environment. Twitter and Myspace have been excellent resources in helping folks find us who may not have had the opportunity to find us in the past. Those networking sites spread like wildfire and we’ve been very successful with finding new readers taking advantage of them.

Honestly, the success we have had has been through a lot of persistence and word of mouth. We’ve just focused on trying to create something new and unique, something that we are proud of that makes us laugh. It seems that kind of attention to the process has resulted in folks responding very positively and it’s trickled down from there via word of mouth.

What are your visions for POPPORN in the future?

A ton. We actually launched a sweepstakes for this year’s AEE [Adult Entertainment Expo] show sponsored by AVN so we’ll be running around shooting tons of content there. We’re also shooting the red carpet at the AVN Awards with Wicked Pictures contract star Jessica Drake, she’s co-hosting with our host Spock Buckton and then in the New Year we are shooting our first adult film. We are partnering with a major adult studio to bring our retardation to a living room near you!

What’s your first film about?

Our first film is kind of classified at the moment. Ideas tend to get ripped off like crazy in the adult business but it will tie into POPPORN very directly and feature a lot of the characters and stars we feature on the site.

As filmmakers do you eventually see yourselves eventually running your own studio?

We are considering developing into a studio; however, there is so much bad porn out there we want to take it very slow to make sure what we put out is worth the consumers’ dollars.

What do you mean when you talk about bad porn?

There is an influx of cheap, poorly-made porn. Bad lighting, poor production values, etc. When someone tries to make a funny adult film, it’s rarely funny. I mean, watch Not The Bradys XXX and you will see what I mean. As for how we can improve on it—I think that we have a certain personality that will come through in our films.

POPPORN isn’t currently looking for talent for their debut film, but they’ll always take your n00dz.