Internet's invasion of the blogs continues apace

May 31, 2003

My son Peter Seebach, who goes by "Seebs" online, started a Web log last week.

Oh, I know, he and about 30,000 other people. The online diaries called Web logs, blogs for short, are a thriving hobby and are rapidly self-organizing into a complex ecosystem. What I find interesting is that it took the Web search engine Google less than 48 hours to find his new blog.

His first post to what he was then calling "Brain of Seebs" went up on May 22, a Thursday. When we talked on Sunday, he was no end pleased that asking Google for "seebs blog" already went directly to this brand-new site.

I stopped by the News office on Memorial Day to pick up some papers, so naturally I tried it out. And I was reading "Brain of Seebs" when the phone rang.

"I was just reading your blog," I told Peter.

"I know," he said.

Peter runs his own small Internet service provider, and ISP software tracks, in considerable detail, who comes to the site, what they look at, and where on the Web they came from. So he knew, for example, that his reader had come directly from a Google search for "seebs blog" (and no one but me was likely to have done that) and he also knew the address of my server.

More than a little spooky, that, in the age of the Total Information Awareness program, we agreed.

He can also find out if other sites have linked to his, which my occasional e-mail correspondent Bill Hobbs of the blog www.hobbsonline.blogspot.com graciously did. Such links are the way energy is transferred among blogs, and the basis for the "blogosphere ecosystem" managed by www.truthlaidbear.com. Truthlaidbear has also just launched a "showcase" specifically for new blogs, which will honor (and send readers to) the one that garners the most links each week.

Another way to pass around readers is the Carnival of the Vanities, a weekly compilation of bloggers' own favorite postings. Started by www.silflayhraka.blogspot.com, it is hosted by a different site every week. This week's CotV is at www.deanesmay.com.

This is an entire virtual superorganism evolving in Internet time right before our eyes, based on an unfiltered free trade in ideas. Its participants are far more engaged than the average newspaper reader. The top of the food chain in the ecosystem is www.instapundit.com, which gets 100,000 to 200,000 pageviews a day and 1,000 to 2,000 e-mails - way more than the News' letters page.*

And the blogosphere is not limited by geography. At www.buzzmachine.com Jeff Jarvis harps on the importance of nurturing Web logs in Iraq, Iran and other places where the means of free expression have been severely restricted.

If the Web has created a new way to trade ideas, it has also fostered new ways to trade goods. Everybody knows about the success of eBay, the continentwide garage sale, but another successful model, www.cafepress.com, is much less well known although it's almost four years old. It offers people with ideas the chance to put their ideas on bumper stickers, T-shirts, coffee mugs, whatever. It manufactures the merchandise as it's ordered -- "no fees, no inventory" says the Web site -- takes care of payment and shipping, and sends the contributor a portion of the sales price.

"We leverage content," says Maheesh Jain, a co-founder.

Cafepress has more than 500,000 individual stores, Jain said, selling just about anything you can put a digital design on. Well, not sheet cakes -- I asked, but they're too hard to ship.

Most of these stores are very tiny, of course. Peter set one up -- in fact, he decided to start the blog to help direct attention to the store -- but to date, has sold exactly one bumper sticker. It said, "I eat my young . . . and I VOTE!" Which doesn't exactly make any sense.

But some Cafepress stores are substantial enterprises. One sells Dilbert merchandise, and another features items from Penn and Teller. Jain says that the top 10 percent or so have annual sales above $100,000. And the smaller ones can always hope for a breakthrough. What matters is that if there is a market for their ideas, or their art, or their CDs, there is also a way for them to find it. More than 2,000 bands sell CDs through Cafepress, for instance.

In one last nod to the marketplace of ideas, Peter says he's not good at names. So he's invited readers to "Name my Blog," and he'll change the name when he finds one he likes better. Right at the moment, it's "Seebie Jeebies." I like that.

* UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit writes, "Thankfully, (Seebach) overstates the number of emails I get per day. I don't think I've ever gotten 1,000, though at the beginning of the war I got more than half that. Now, though, things are back to normal."