Human Portals
Brill's Content Magazine, May 2001

In the summer of 1999, during a mercifully brief (and wildly overcompensated) tour as an Internet consultant, I sat with executives from Go.com, Disney's Web portal, trying to understand who Go users were, what they liked to do online, and why these executives didn't know this kind of thing already. At the time, I worked for a subsidiary of Disney and had explored Go a grand total of twice before I was called into this meeting. For advice and answers, we conference called a Jupiter Communications analyst, which, if you know something about Jupiter and its Internet "analysis," means we were a very desperate group of people. Jupiter provides clarity the way a Magic Eight Ball divines the future: Could Work, Can't Tell, There's a Metric Here Someplace.

Mostly these days just Looks Dark. When Disney, after reportedly dumping about $150 million into Go.com, announced in January that it would abandon the portal, the news was as predictable as it was commonplace. Portals seem to be a dying breed. The raft of sure-fire ideas like ur-macho TheMan.com and Latino-targeted QuePasa.com-deemed "niche portals" until they realized their niche couldn't care less about them-are by now extinct. Online divisions of news-media companies such as News Corporation and NBC have slashed staff in an effort to bring their operations to scale with their audiences. By now, the expression "portal" has almost become archaeological, buried alongside "fire-hose of eyeballs" and "co-branding experience" in the midden of the past five years. The problem of Big Door portals such as Go.com, with its tools and news tickers fixed into every available inch of space, was self-evident. Internet developers (like those of us around the phone that day at Go.com) became so concerned with "personalization" that they forgot that personality is what attracted people in the first place.

The word "portal" might be out of fashion, but the impulse to create a living front end to the Internet thrives in a compulsively democratic form. Over the past two years, a wave of individual personalities-somewhere between editors and conduits-have emerged, curators of the world via sites called "web logs." These one-person human portals are cultural antennae, a vital part of the constantly shifting ecology of news online. By definition, a "web log" (or its contraction, "blog") is a diary, or a collection of links on a single page chosen by its author, but the analogy is only half right. Some blogs are incredibly introverted, just a hair shy of exhibitionistic, but others are as outer-directed and civic-minded as a newspaper. All are unpredictable, sampling the world with restless curiosity and personality to burn. In the social life of information, these folks are the merchants of buzz, and nobody makes a dime. No commercial site could afford to be so porous, pointing its readers off-site as soon as they've arrived; they make their money based on how long you stick around. But web logs succeed based on how relevant they become, how intellectually promiscuous they can be.

The blog form is as basic as HTML gets. In fact, Mosaic's "What's New" page began as a first-iteration log back in 1993. Using links creatively was one of the Net’s original styles — its grammar really -- and journalists hyping the blogging genre have been regularly reminded of its history by its practitioners. But web logs have undeniably accelerated and matured, to the point where there is one for innumerable idiosyncrasies and interest (and if yours isn't out there, what are you waiting for?). There are blogs for trial lawyers, graphic designers (lots of those), even Canadian aliens working in the U.S.. The authors tend toward the techie-side of life, if only because you’ve got to be comfortable with the Net — and committed to the possibilities of it -- to spray a good amount of your introspection online in daily bursts.

In part, blogs proliferated because of software that made self-publishing close to fool-proof called Blogger. Released in 1999 by a tiny San Francisco company called Pyra Labs, Blogger was initially a sort of side-light for Pyra, the slag from a business application the company was developing. But as they say, the street finds uses for things and over 100,000 people have since registered it. Blogger is, admittedly, one of many net-native fads — remember AmIHotOrNot or SixDegrees? — but I think Pyra touched on a deeper demand than just clever distraction.

Take Metafilter.com, created by Matt Haughey, who used to work as a developer at Pyra Labs. Haughey is a sedate, self-effacing programmer with the eye of a graphic designer. (He showed for our interview in all gray — gray pants, gray shirt, gray sheer jacket down to his gray sneakers.) Metafilter, the hybrid of his comp-sci and aesthetics background, is as its name implies, a filter of filters. It picks out items from the day's info-stream on the web-half news and half evocative ephemera-and offers links to about 20 stories or sites a day. In a random 24-hour window in February, for example, Metafilter offered such fare as an article (from The Washington Post) about a 3-year-old boy who tried to ape a stunt from MTV's show Jackass and got third-degree burns; a commercial (courtesy AdCritic.com) that was dropped from the Super Bowl; a short film about the inside of Amazon.com made by an ex-employee (courtesy of the filmmaker); a junkie's diary discovered on the sidewalk in San Francisco and transposed to the Web (from the person who found it); et cetera, with the emphasis on the et cetera.

At this point, the site gets about 50,000 hits a day, which translates into a regular readership of about 5,000. Compared to MSNBC.com’s 9.7 million monthly visitors or CNN.com’s 7.7 million (according to Media Metrix), Metafilter is, I’ll say here and slap me later, a droplet in that gushing fire-hose. But the comparison is absurd. Metafilter is not a television channel, employs no one, and never marketed itself. Haughey wrote the software and he runs it on a freebie server that his father built and then mailed to him. (Ah, the gifts of the gifted.) By the time you read this and media-exposure that will come with it, Haughey will have been forced to come up with something a little more sturdy, but only reluctantly. He’s not getting paid, after all, and does it in his free-time from work at a new start-up.

Metafilter’s 5,000 person-audience is a small number, but Metafilter’s readers are unlike any other. What distinguishes Metafilter from major media news sites is that it's created from its own audience — it is a "community blog." Haughey started Metafilter in 1999 as way saving himself the work of finding material, which is the real work of running a good blog. "At the time, there only 30 or so sites with blogs," he says, "and they were amazing, but I didn’t think I could do all that content myself. I thought I could find only 1 or 2 good links a day — but 4 or 5 people could create one decent log." The site’s "members" earn the privilege to suggest stories to the site after engaging in the conversations that spark from each link. Haughey himself doesn’t filter the posts — what’s on the page is the raw data of people’s ideas -- which makes Metafilter a rowdy, constantly amusing mix. It’s amazing, frankly, that the site is as good as it is considering how public it is.

There are no ads, no commercial ambition here of any kind, just the gossipy instinct to share news. And it’s not traditional "news" exactly. On Metafilter, the "news" can come in any form-reports of an anthrax threat alongside the newest release of MP3-player Winamp, bittersweet obituaries next to Dubya jokes. While traditional news outlets spend time trying to divine what constitutes news, Metafilter just runs with the unedited feed. There’s a critical design element here as well. Compared to mammoth media sites such as NBCi.com and MSNBC.com, mini-media blogs like Metafilter or Slashdot.org (a tech-news site for self-proclaimed nerds) are practically transparent, only a handful of pages deep. You don't come to muck around as much as leap off-to other sites or into the conversations that spark like stray voltage from the stories. The diversity of source material and radical shifts in tone, at first disorienting, are exactly why you keep coming back.

This ferocious collecting instinct long predates the Web. Blogs are often likened to Wunderkammer, the "cabinet of wonders" that Renaissance-era amateur scientists fashioned as a way of showcasing the superabundance of discoveries of exploration. It's an apt metaphor for how web logs help us map a vast and growing continent, arranging their lists with treasures and obscure curios. But it tells us little about their implications, which I think, for major news-media sites, are dramatic. As blogs establish themselves in the information hierarchy, the proprietary news media might themselves be competing with better-networked, smaller-scale parasites living off them.

The failures of portals like Go.com can't be attributed strictly to a lack of personality. (Otherwise, TheMan.com would still be selling thermal coasters for beer cans.) These portals' problem is that they have no idea how to build a front door. Sure, traditional news agencies like MSNBC, The New York Times, and CNN are still responsible for much of the "news" we read online. Metafilter and other web logs, like the recently launched Plastic.com-a self-billed "new model for news" that is effectively a commercialized Metafilter.com-depend on them to provide prime material. (Sometimes, they're too dependent. a February scan of the Plastic.com homepage, a few weeks after their launch, revealed that three of seven stories were from the Times). But, in blogs, the news agencies become strictly producers of the news -- factories of information, not arbiters or organizers. I can't remember the last time I actually went to the front page of MSNBC or CNN, which is precisely where they, as businesses, need us to go.

They know this and are working around it. Peter Dorogoff, spokesperson for online-news frontrunner MSNBC.com, admits that the majority of their traffic "comes in through links to individual stories and not through the cover at all. That’s the beauty of the web — to link from story to story." As Dorogoff points out, MSNBC’s response is to make every page a front-page, heavy with "rather sophisticated interlinking" to other articles on the site and, of course, advertising. MSNBC has started using interstitial ads — big graphics that appear and disappear before their stories come up — and ads that run in the middle of a column of text to capture these readers who go in sideways to the site.

It’s important not to underestimate how important interface is when it comes to reading news online. Major news sites are full of design compromises and clutter, the excesses of trying to hit every possible interest with one page. Strictly on an aesthetic level, the spare, streamlined blogs like Slashdot, MediaNews, and Metafilter are the antitodes. Jim Romenesko's MediaNews (a web log for journalists and other mediaphiles) gets TK visitors a month, and Slashdot.org garners 482,000 vistors a month. Both offer up big "buffets" of material, in Romanesko’s words, but there is little ornamentation there. Who wants to dig for stories in a mess of ads, graphics, and "sophisticated interlinking" when you the same information can be scouted and arranged by an editor as fixated on the subject matter as you are?

Fixated is about right. Romanesko’s site, which has become a staple in the New York media diet, has a particulary dedicated following. "I saw a graph today that shows that the number of people who visited ten times a day was equal to the number of people who visited just once," he says. On one hand this is because Romanesko gets paid a reported $80,000 a year to read 150 sites a day and work through 75 email-tips a day. (About two of those leads end up as stories.) He follows the subject matter as closely as you possibly can. But it’s also because MediaNews is the kind of site you can check ten times a day without having interstitial ads shoved in front of you.

MSNBC.com has a total staff of 200 people (another 460 on the TV side), and obviously, they have financial pressures that non-profiteers Matt Haughey and Jim Romanesko do not have. The foremost is keeping people inside MSNBC’s network. But in world so saturated with available information, those fences become an immediately liability. No reader wants to respect them, and why should they when the interesting material — the real discoveries — is often at the fringes. One of my favorite sites, TvTattle.com, is a particularly good quarry of TV news-and-opinion pieces from newspapers across the country. Curated (somewhat less regularly than you'd like) by a college student named Norman Betito Weiss, TvTattle ferrets out the interview that West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin just did with the St. Petersburg Times, or the thoughtful profile of E.R. producer John Wells from the Austin American-Statesman focusing on his frustration with the show's writing pool. The ideas and commentary from these regional papers rarely break upwards, into major media. Normally, you’d never hear about them. But Betito thrives off identifying them, like an A&R guy at a small-town open mike night.

For Weiss, "the fun part" is linking good ideas to attentive audiences, because, he told me via e-mail (the kid won’t answer his phone), "What some Texas-based TV columnist has to say about Dawson's Creek is of interest to somebody in, say, New Hampshire." He's exactly right: The news media have segmented themselves so much that they badly needs bridges like Weiss's blog. (Now, if only he could take care of his archives.) But more instructive, too, for journalists is how TvTattle validates the idea that good writing that can be found all over the media map. Blogs are evidence that insight can come from any corner.

Bloggers are, on the whole, living in those corners themselves. Romanesko’s MediaNews started in St. Paul and moved to a studio apartment in Evanston, Illinois. Haughey’s Metafilter operates from San Francisco and Betito does TvTattle from a college somewhere in Northern California (The media-shy Betito told me, "I don't want to reveal too much about myself because i'd prefer that the page speaks for itself.") Very few are situated in the media capitals of Los Angeles or New York, which frees them from following the industry's hierarchy and allows them a certain generosity of spirit and an unjaded enthusiasm.

With the right conditions, the eagerness can escalate into an investigative fervor. Last summer, I got hooked on CBS's SurvivorSucks.com, an outpost for fans of the show started by Houston web designer Paul Sims. Three years ago, Sims started out with a small community site, RealWorldBlows.com, about the MTV series. He followed the advent of reality TV in Europe and when Survivor hit the states, he launched SurvivorSucks as part of his "PlanetSucks Network." (What might sound like a business is distinctly not. He operates the sites with the help of volunteers from the community, and they are hosted by the same company he works for, 1-800-Hosting.)

Like Betito, Sims has a curious and almost ideological opposition to over-exposure in the media. At the height of the site’s popularity, Sims turned down interviews by the likes of CNN. "I didn’t want the site associated with a personality," he says. "You won’t see the word ‘I’ or ‘We’ on the site."

Nevertheless, SurvivorSucks.com broke stories: a fan cracked the CBS web site; A Zapruder-like frame-by-frame analysis by fans of the opening credit sequence revealed missing cast members from a Tribal council (thus prefiguring their exits). In December, a source tipped off Sims to nude personal snapshots that Richard Hatch had posted to dating service MatchMaker.com, and the names and identities of Survivor II competitors leaked out and appeared on Survivorsucks.com long before TV Guide printed them. At its most fevered pitch, Survivorsucks.com attracted an audience in the hundreds of thousands (including an amused Richard Hatch and producer Mark Burnett according to Sims) because a swarm of small-time sources created a hive of good information.

But as with many generosities, blogs aren't indefinitely sustainable. After all, these are people running them, not businesses, and hype doesn't pay bills. As Paul Sims told me of SurvivorSucks, "It’s a colossal amount of work running this and it’ll make you crazy." As of the end of January, even Pyra Labs, despite a campaign to raise money for a new server, went from having six employees to one. TvTattle sometimes goes to sleep for a week when Weiss takes exams. And nobody seems to want to do the thankless work of creating decent archives. Long-standing personal blogs have dropped out of operation from exhaustion or when romantic heart-break interrupts the creator’s posting cycle. Community blog Plastic.com is a commercial venture and may prove more durable than its unfunded competitors (disclosure: I used to work for Feedmag.com, one of the sites in the Plastic.com network), assuming it's possible to commercialize the blogging instinct at all. The decidedly noncommercial Metafilter.com now runs a tagline on its front page: "the Plastic.com it's OK to like."

Major media will undoubtedly take consolation in the vicissitudes of these operations. As long as it's just Jim Romenesko behind MediaNews, it's just Romenesko you're dealing with, and the guy will get bored at some point. By then, however, audiences may have adjusted to dowsing for their wells of information elsewhere. They'll be expecting different stories at a different scale. Part of the allure of blogs is how their creators share themselves and what they know spontaneously, outside of a profit motive. Blogs are a loose reflection of their readers, which is how we got hooked in the first place; they're small, intimate, and enormously wide-minded. In other words, people-sized.