“web”

Everything2 is a strange, addictive website that’s been around for almost 8 years now and still feels as disorientingly original as when I first found it. It describes itself as “an online community with a focus to write, publish and edit a quality database of information, insight and humor,” but I just chanced upon a better description: Everything2 is sort of a Wittypedia. No, really. You want something witty about Michael Spivak? About double penetration? About this quote, this poem, or this phrase? About lust? About Ghost in the Shell? About whores? About sex games? About beautiful, cry-worthy things? About language? About orgasms? About flaunting your sexuality? About menstruation? About growing old? You now know were to find it.

Last time a friend asked me what a blog was, I blabbered and gesticulated madly for a long while, only to cap it off, desperate, with the safe “they’re online diaries”. As it often happens, I ended up saying exactly the opposite of what I believe. I don’t think blogs are mere online diaries. Those are a sub-genre, to be sure, but blogs are much more, and it is misleading, stifling, and plain false, to have that as their only metaphor (isn’t it overstretching to call this very blog post you’re now reading a journal entry?).

So that no one finds himself forced to betray his better knowledge again, I’ve tried to find a metaphor that outcharms the prevailing one—one that’s true and yet as simple and catchy. I think I’ve found it: Blogs are open letters.

Blogs are open letters. Compilations of written communications addressed to whoever may want to read them¹. The title of a blog post, the letter, is in fact its address, crafted to route the epistle to its many recipients (though of course Google, the post master, uses far more clever ways to deliver it). A good dose of current happenings goes in these letters, of course, but there’s much, much else: recommendations, reviews, analysis, reflections, advice, criticism, self-promotion, narrative, essays, rants, howtos, explanations, interpretations, confessions, j’accuses, press releases, calumnies, lies, exaggerations, gossip, sobs—anything that would go on a letter.

So now you know. Blogs are open letters. Spread the word (or challenge it in the comments).

Google is life’s man.