Before Amazon, before MSN, before Starwave/Go, and even just a little bit before Word.com (RIP), the Web was largely a collection of writings by hobbyists and geeks and other lively folk. And the Web was called a new publishing medium and a mighty voice for the people, and it was good. I myself had one of the earlier personal Web sites, and it was considered most interesting and I quite the doyenne, and for my ego that too was good.

Then came the content providers. Then came the (compared to basic HTML) complicated gewgaws of Shockwave and Java and their ilk. Then came the portals. Then came the megasites, and before too long four-fifths of all Web traffic went to the same very few corporate URLs and nowhere else. And that was not so good.

The small personal pages continued to exist, of course, though mainly in that twilit world-out-of-time that is the static Web page. I’m as guilty as anyone of letting my site go stale. Putting up just one fresh page in a world where thousands of Web sites come and go daily—how pointless. How wearing. Easier just to avoid putting a date on the thing and tell the invisible user under one’s breath that it’s new to you, buster.

Then came the Web log, and though I hold no hope that this magical device won’t somehow be co-opted to the infernal machinery of corporate Webdom, I could be wrong.

I’d like to be wrong. I’d also like to be among the most interesting folk to currently be keeping a Web log, but it’s too late for that. So much for the next revolution; I was home trying to learn Flash. Silly Angela.

There exist any number of Web logs, but I’m a Blogger chick, in part because in the Web-logging subculture the term “blog” has assumed the dimensions and usage once enjoyed by the term “smurf.” (Smurfing was smurfy, and blogging is bloggariffic—you get the idea and are now infected thus.) The idea, loosely framed, is that a blog owner opens a form on the Blogger site and types in . . . well, something, often accompanied by an interesting link. The blogger form, properly set up (it took me around 20 minutes), puts whatever it is you typed on your Web site or wherever else you tell it to transfer the file. The idea is that it provides other folk a log of interesting Web sites you have visited, thus making your site itself more interesting in that the-Web-is-a-hall-of-mirrors way.

Loosely framed—and it gets no tighter—there’s a great deal of latitude in blogging. If you’re a lazy solipsist such as myself, you can keep a little journal of random thoughts and observations on your Web site without the terrible, terrible pressure to write a whole worthy page of stuff (and debug the code after). If you’re social, you can set up a blog for multiple users, and it will act as a sort of archived chat. If you’re funny, you can set up a Survivor-style blog in which 10 Web-loggers “outwit, outlast, outwrite” each other to win a $75 gift certificate (from, by the way, a well-known local unbookstore). If you’re a 19-year-old girl battling leukemia, you and your mom can set up companion blogs on the same site and with a straightforward chronicle of days break my heart.

And if you’re a reader, skimming the blog universe is like walking down a residential street and seeing, if not what’s going on in each house, what’s happening on the front porches where people are hanging out.

Over the years, as that street widened into a (brace yourself) superhighway (forgive me), we started going faster and faster down it to an ever-smaller set of destinations. More of us consumed the Web and fewer of us created it. Pundits told us the whole contraption was betrothed to the TV anyway so we might as well settle into comfy chairs and just soak it in. And damn, has it all gotten boring.

Blogs and the people who keep them put the lie to the idea that a Web site has to be fancy, or flashy, or fresh all over daily to be worthy of our time; it even belies the idea that time (large amounts of it) must be sacrificed to the Web gods to create something compelling online. As the man said, only connect.