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Recently in Salon Technology

Dot-com dogs
With Net-stock fever showing no signs of cooling, mediocre IPOs are growing as plentiful as fleas on a stray hound.
By Mark Gimein
[12/09/99]

Your boss may be monitoring your e-mail
Personal computers were supposed to liberate the workplace. So why do so many companies use them to spy on workers?
By Maura Kelly
[12/08/99]

I e-shopped till I dropped
Playing Santa's little helper, I surfed for a digital camera -- and longed for an elf to take a load off my aching eyes.
By Morgan Sande
[12/07/99]

Technology: View from the top
Prime time online
Jim Moloshok just launched the multimillion-dollar Entertaindom portal. Can he create the successor to network TV?
By Susan Kuchinskas
[12/06/99]

Column
See spot run
Internet firms throwing big money at TV ad campaigns are making an elementary goof.
By Scott Rosenberg
[12/03/99]

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"I dunno ... I'm just a little weird today."

-- Oct. 18 Diaryland entry from "faded_mind"

While the Web seems to be slowly collapsing into a small, well-publicized group of uniform, corporate-sponsored networks (Snap, Go Networks, Lycos), online diaries have survived on the outside, occupying that Internet space where a level ground for publishing still exists. Minimal design skills are required; all you need is a healthy obsession and a modest amount of disk space on someone's Internet server. Online diaries are of course inconsistent in their quality, but they're also unrelenting in their honesty. If the bigger sites are starting to resemble major television networks, complete with the accompanying "same crap, different channel" feeling, online diaries are holding their position as the public-access programming of the Web.

When human nature meets easy entry, confessionalism results. Services like Geocities and Xoom, which offer free Web sites to anyone (no matter how great their personal problems), have been responsible for thousands of individuals creating and maintaining diaries for everyone (or no one) to view. The subjects range from the outrageous to the everyday, but the structure is fairly consistent: today's date and entry, links to previous dates and entries, a guestbook, an e-mail link. But even with free server space and online connectivity at work and school, it has been the responsibility of the individual to plan the structure and design the diary.

But Andrew Smales and an ingenious site called Diaryland might change all of that. Smales is a longtime Web diarist and Internet absurdist. His personal domain, Be Nice to Bears, boasts the slogan, "No Content Ever. It's a Promise." (In fact, it has a personal diary, some links and a selection of animal pictures against weird backgrounds.) He launched Diaryland in September, marrying his experience as an online diarist with his programming skills.

Diaryland is an online community-cum-free Web service for other diarists. Users sign up, receive a Diaryland subdomain with unlimited e-mail aliases, and gain access to a variety of diary templates.

Yes, templates. What distinguishes Diaryland from most other free home-page services is the way it is custom-built for handling journal entries. The templates are many and dizzyingly varied -- a riot of colors and formats and background designs. Each template offers the same navigation: "latest entry," "older entries," "contact me" (with the e-mail link of your choice) and a link back to the Diaryland home page. No HTML required, and the site automatically archives your older entries for you. Diary-in-a-box.

"A conversation in my religion class reminded me of how i used to try and send chad a thought. I'd trace the thought's path from me in my bed, down the street, through my neighborhood, across the highway, through chad's neighborhood, through the door, past the kitchen and the living room, into his bedroom and into his sleeping brain. Once the thought was there, i would concentrate on deeply nesting it there ... rooting it. I just wanted him to keep me in his thoughts. I wanted him to call me the next day."

-- Nov. 16 Diaryland entry from "engineer"

On any given day, one can browse the members directory and read entries that range from the exhaustingly banal ("A new mall just opened up a couple of miles from my apartment, and a new Wal-Mart supercenter and Sam's Club just opened up here, too" -- Steeve) to the revelatory (from Serenity: "I mean I can actually look in the mirror and NOW finally say 'Alyssa Blythe Megan, you are beautiful' ... and actually be able to believe it") to the unabashedly ugly ("I was just summoned into the other room so that my father and his shithead girlfriend could make fun of me. I hope she dies slowly"). Cliques have even formed, producing the occasional meta-narrative in which diarists reference other diarists (sometimes describing the same event in two different voices).

The collective Diaryland population certainly boasts some variety in personal experience and eloquence -- after all, the diarists' ages range from 10 years old to a few members of the punchcard-computer generation -- but most of the entries share a common fabric from which most expositional writing is woven. Angst, ennui, self-doubt and the pendulums of interpersonal relationships largely characterize the postings, even if the target of these emotions changes radically. (Insert boyfriend/girlfriend/stepmother/sociology professor/best friend/other Diaryland member here.) Different people, familiar feelings, communal templates. Plunging into Diaryland can be a lot like reaching into your closet in the dark: You might not get exactly what you want, but it's probably close enough.

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