What is a Weblog?

What is a Weblog?

A Weblog is a Web site that maintains a constantly updated list of links to other sites; those links can deal with any subject or focus on a particular one. Webloggers typically offer pithy, sarcastic commentary about the links.

Weblogs, in effect, are annotated bibliographies of the world.

But that’s not all. Because Webloggers are a self-selected group of mostly young under 30, relentlessly verbal, fiendishly well-read, usually subversive folks who relish tying together the shoelaces of the stiffly homogenized corporate world, a Weblog can be highly personalized and exhilaratingly eccentric, with more than a touch of the rebel and the poet.

The best Webloggers provide a daily journal of what they’re reading and what they’re thinking about it. That chronicle — at times funny, angry, cranky, sad, bored, unpredictable and contradictory — is like an independent film on an endless loop. It’s like a memoir of the future.

What makes a Weblog a truly creative pursuit and not just a soulless, arbitrary list is the individual voice that emerges from the screen, the personality that squeezes out between the links like sunlight between the slats of a Venetian blind.

SHE HAS SEEN THE FUTURE AND IT IS — WEBLOGS By Julia Keller Chicago Tribune Staff Writer September 7, 1999