A bum in a Google cap. Now there's a sign of the times, I think as he shambles toward me. He looks pretty much like any other tattered street person in San Francisco - long, windblown dirty-blond hair with a beard to match. Unbuttoned shirttails flapping in the afternoon breeze.
But he's walking with someone I recognize - Andrew, a dapper writer I've known for years. We stop on the sidewalk, and Andrew introduces me to the guy in the Google cap: "This is Jorn Barger," he begins. "Another homeless blogger," his companion finishes.
Jorn Barger. It takes me a moment to recognize the name. Barger is an online legend I've been following for a decade. He was the unstoppable Usenet poster who could carry on simultaneous debates about Ibsen, Chomsky, artificial intelligence, and Kate Bush. He was the keeper of the James Joyce FAQ. Barger's prolific posting made him famous, if not popular, in the protoéblogosphere.
Barger crossed over from Usenet to the Web in 1997 and set up his own site, which he dubbed the Robot Wisdom Weblog. He began logging his online discoveries as he stumbled on them - hence "weblog." I barely understood what he was talking about, and still I read him giddily. Barger gave a name to the fledgling phenomenon and set the tone for a million blogs to come. Robot Wisdom bounced unapologetically from high culture to low, from silly to serious, from politics to porn.
But unlike today's blabby bloggers, Barger steadily honed his one-paragraph posts into shorter and more compact bursts. By mid-2000, he'd shrunk Robot Wisdom into a list of links centered on a minimalist page. His style merged the ethereal brevity of haiku (another peculiar Usenet subgenre) with the restless topic-hopping of Joyce:
Interesting pic from Spielberg's Kubrick's A.I.
Israeli settler gets wrist-slap for kicking 10yo Palestinian to death
Mount Fuji webcams jealous of popo's eruptions?
Variable-star mira's mysterious horn
My new theory of "information density"
Fiendishly clever spam pitch
Five years later, in the San Francisco afternoon, it's hard to reconcile these energetic and intellectually omnivorous posts with the anxious, awkward man on the sidewalk. Speaking quietly in sentences as short as his blog entries, Barger seems ready to implode. It turns out he has good reasons: Homeless and broke at age 53, he allowed the domain registration for robotwisdom.com to lapse and can't afford to re-up it. He has abandoned his Chicago apartment and is staying on Andrew's floor while he tries to get back on his feet. He's looking for work - sort of. After a few hands-in-pockets attempts at small talk, we give up. I continue up the hill.
A few weeks later, I find out that Barger has recovered his domain - and Robot Wisdom pops back up online. I hunt him down for a pint at a local pub and he tells me he's moving on, this time to Memphis. He says he avoids the need for a job by living on less than a dollar a day. "I was carrying a cardboard sign when we met that day," he tells me. "I wasn't sure if I should show it to you. I figured if things didn't work out with Andrew I could pick up some change." On his panhandler sign, Barger had written:
Coined the term 'weblog,' never made a dime.
- Paul Boutin
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Robot Wisdom on the Street
