Welcome, global citizen #2664876669F, to the new World Wide Web. Please note that in this revolutionary many-to-many medium, you get to customize your start page any way you like.
What corporate news service floats your boat? Which stock quotes really express you? Ecommerce? Click right this way....
If such a vision of the Web leaves you cold, Metajournals, slated to launch Friday, may restore your faith in a medium that once promised to be a way for ordinary people to publish their hopes, musings, and daily tribulations to a worldwide readership.
With essays and features that will change every two weeks, Metajournals is aiming to become a centralized resource and gateway -- OK, a "portal" -- for those who are interested in what co-editor Amanda Page calls "interactive autobiography."
The first issue will offer an HTML tutorial on building a navigation system for your site and a roundtable discussion on "online journaling as catharsis." As an indication of how closely knit certain members of the journal-writing community are -- and how distinctive an online voice can be -- there will also be a guess-this-mystery-diarist feature.
For those who want to learn how to create their own online diary, resources available on the site will include tips on choosing a free Web-hosting service and a guide to building an archiving system for your back entries.
If you think online journals are a quaint artifact of the homesteading days of the Web, you haven't looked at the Open Pages index lately. Open Page was founded by Ophelia Z, one of the first Web diarists, who is strictly a journal reader now, but still keeps the faith. In an interview with Metajournals, she says, "Today, online journals are practically as common as links to Yahoo on personal Web pages, but that's just fine with me. With every byte of 'Dear Diary' that's put online, however mundane or extreme, the more complete and accessible the essence of mankind is."
Two years ago, the pioneering meta-list of diary sites contained only 50 links. Now, the ranks of those who are committed to putting their lives online have swelled to more than 450 -- and that's just the tip of the iceberg, says Metajournals editor-in-chief Tori Alexander.
"It's an extension of the whole chat phenomenon. People really want to connect with one another," she says. "The Web is a perfect opportunity to tell your truths."
An essay Julie Petersen wrote in 1995 is often cited by Web diarists as an inspiration for their own sites: "Using the Web, we could study humanity in a way unavailable to us prior to the existence of the Net. We could take a cross section of the human experience ... across boundaries of age, gender, era, and culture. The Web may provide us with a way to transcend our current and limited spheres of knowledge to grasp a further and deeper understanding of what it means to be human and to be alive."
Doug Block, whose film documentary on personal Web sites, Home Page, will be broadcast on Cinemax early next year, sees online diaries as an extension of the contemporary culture of celebrity.
"You don't have to earn fame with talent anymore, you just have to get a name. People are dying for attention," he says, noting an upsurge in first-person video diaries in entries for the Sundance Film Festival.
Kymm Zuckert, who became the administrator of Open Pages last year after running her own site since May 1996, believes the Web is "developing on two very distinct tracks. One is Pepsi.com and the corporate gaming sites, and the other is extremely personal sites, like the journals."
The development of a "united front" for journal authors is a natural evolutionary step as the community gets larger and more diverse, says Zuckert, who gives biweekly Web tours of women's journals in a column called "Tell Me A Story."
Pam O'Connell, the former Mining Company online-journal expert who writes for The New York Times' Circuits section, notes that many of the early pioneers have burned out. She makes the observation that "there's a sense of people struggling to get to another plateau with this form. It's gotten past the infant stage, and now it's in some kind of adolescence, trying to figure out where to go."
Alexander hopes Metajournals will increase the general public's awareness of how diverse the journal-writing community is. "The media sees it as one thing," she says, "but there are so many different stories, so many different styles." (Journal-writers map the universe of online diaries into "burbs," as in suburbs, according to various criteria, such as sexual orientation or astrological sign.)
Derek Powazek, who edits one of the most respected personal-storytelling sites on the Web, The Fray -- which he calls a "distant cousin" of online diaries -- says the best thing Metajournals could do is to "foster the development of a community of artists. Let's hope all the journals get better for it."
