More On: Making Connections

The other solution to ms. jared's dilemma is obvious: ditch those no-good philistines you call friends and LIVE ONLINE ALREADY! All the cool kids are doing it.

...since so many leading Weblogs are written by folks in the Internet biz, their entire lives are online. You can write up what you did with your real-life friend yesterday, but you can’t link to that experience. You can link to what your online friend blogged yesterday. The annotated-list-of-links Weblog form, then, becomes one and the same with the diaristic form for Webloggers in the Internet demimonde: Links are diaries because life is the Web.

The page that last link refers to is an in depth review/dissection of Rebecca Mead's (in)famous New Yorker article about blogging. As a service to those of you still living in the "real" world, we present the following excerpt - see how a couple of BlogStars make connections:

I already knew that Meg and Jason were involved, because I'd been reading their Web sites; although neither of them had written anything about the relationship, there were hints throughout their recent entries. Those hints had also been under discussion on a Web site called Metafilter. Metafilter is a "community weblog," which means that anyone who is a member can post a link to it. Most of the posts to Metafilter are links to news stories or weird Web sites, but in early June someone named Monkeyboy had linked to a photograph of Meg and Jason looking into Jason's bathroom mirror. The picture was posted on a Web site belonging to a friend of Meg's who collects photographs of the mirrors of Web celebrities. Monkeyboy also linked to Megnut's "crush" entry, and to an entry that Jason had written on Kottke.org about Meg's site design, and he posted them all on Metafilter with the words "So what's up with this? I think there's something going on here." This generated a lively discussion, with some bloggers furthering the gossip by linking to other blogs whose authors had confessed to having crushes on Jason, while others wrote in suggesting it was none of anyone's business.

A few days later, they stoked the gossip further by posting identical entries on their Web sites: word-for-word accounts of seeing a young girl on a bicycle in the street, and descriptions of the childhood memories that it triggered. Then a strange thing happened. One by one, several bloggers copied the little-girl entry into their blogs, as if they had seen the child on the bicycle, too. Other bloggers started to write parodies of the little-girl entry. Still other bloggers started to post messages to Metafilter, asking what the hell was going on with all these sightings of little girls. When I sent Meg an E-mail about this outbreak, she wrote back, "I was especially struck by the number of people who thought it was a big prank pulled by the `popular' kids to make fun of the uncool kids."

Your life online need not conform to the pesky expectations of every day reality. Make stuff up. Start a revolution. BUT BEWARE! One need only follow the links in the excerpt above to crash headlong into another undeniable truth of life online: 404 NOT FOUND!

The link is just as flawed and ephemeral as that bag of bones.