Nothing can stop it - the blog!

Thoughts on the ever-mutating Web life form

PostSecret.com describes itself as "an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard." Each week founder Frank Warren chooses 20 postcards from a thousand or more to post.

Blogging Heroes: Interviews With 30 of the World's Top Bloggers
Edited by Michael A. Banks
Wiley, 298 pp., illustrated, $24.99

Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks From the Wild Web
Edited by Sarah Boxer
Vintage, 343 pp., illustrated, paperback, $14.95

Second Lives: A Journey Through Virtual Worlds
By Tim Guest
Random House, 277 pp., $25

"Blogs are wildly imperfect, and therein lies their beauty, because they are wildly authentic," explains Wired editor Chris Anderson in "Blogging Heroes: Interviews With 30 of the World's Top Bloggers." He is echoed, pages later, by another "hero," Frank Warren of PostSecret.com, who marvels that "one of the true beauties and powers of blogs" is to "give voice to people who are not heard."

Web pioneer Robert Scoble is franker still: "You could say I spend every waking minute of every day thinking about my blog," he acknowledges, without much apparent regret, "and thinking what to put up."

What accounts for the effusion? Over the past year, a glut of blog-related books has hit the literary marketplace. Their purposes are varied. Some, like "Blogging Heroes," function as inspiration for would-be bloggers: There are bullet points, boldfaced chapter summaries, and luminous - and wildly imperfect - praise for the Web log.

But the best seeks to understand the next media frontier, in terms neither hyperbolic nor imprecise. As Sarah Boxer writes, fondly, in the introduction to the superb collection "Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks From the Wild Web," bloggers have become our "town criers, the chiefs, and the village idiots. They are irreducible egos containing multitudes. And thanks to the Web, they now have as much claim to our attention as television's talking heads."

According to the blog tracking site Technorati, there are approximately 100 million blogs. Of that number, 15 million are active. They chronicle bloggers' love lives, favorite recipes, and the minutiae of the political scene. They are critics, observers, diarists of the quotidian.

"Any time someone generalizes about the blogosphere, it eliminates them intellectually, as being unwilling to have a kind of nuanced discussion," Anderson tells Banks in "Heroes." "They don't understand a truly heterogeneous, unbounded marketplace of opinion, which is what the blogosphere is."

It was not always thus. Through the late 1990s, blogging was a fringe sport, the realm of self-proclaimed geeks and malcontents. Early blogs followed technology and software news.

Then in 1998, the collaborative community Open Diary was launched, allowing members to share their thoughts, often in messy, rambling prose. Seeing a wealth of potential, start-ups like blogger.com began to offer free, point-and-click blogging software. By the turn of the century, the doors had been thrown open to an increasingly wired world.

"When the blog boom came, the tone of the blogosphere began to shift," Boxer wrote last year in an essay in The New York Review of Books. "A lot of the new blogs . . . weren't so much filters for the Web as vents for opinion and self-revelation."

"Ultimate Blogs" is Boxer's attempt to parse that post-"revolution" blogosphere, from the snarky ("Eurotrash") to the serious ("Midnight in Iraq," penned by a 26-year-old Marine).

From Stockholm, an anonymous American teaches his readers "How to Learn Swedish in 1,000 Difficult Lessons." From Berlin, a British pop singer writes about Japanese culture. From America, an Iraqi expatriate describes journeys through Jordan and Syria. Boxer's achievement is to emphasize both the infinite potentialities of the Web and its strange ability to foster intimacy. The world of "Ultimate Blogs" is flat; it is also covered in myriad fissures, which break along political, emotional, and cultural lines.

As Tim Guest writes in "Second Lives," this postmodern "global village, populated by millions," is often distinctly introverted, which saves us from "suffering the company of the normal people nearby." The democratizing effect of modern technology, he concludes, paradoxically buries us "in the center of a kingdom of choice and self."

Guest is no neo-Luddite. In a jarringly personal aside, he confesses that he is burdened by "the sorrow my past had planted in my chest, like an old bruise." (Two years ago, Guest published an account of a hellish childhood in a UK commune.) He spends late nights at his computer, searching for a "way to transcend my solitude through an electronic connection."

His drug of choice is online gaming, where users have erected their "imagined heaven," and where "even death was conquered."

Last year, Gartner, a technology research firm, estimated that, by 2011, 80 percent of Internet users will maintain an avatar in a virtual world. World of Warcraft, the most popular game in the United States, attracts 8.5 million players; there are more residents of the South Korean games Lineage and Lineage II than there are residents of Ireland. The combined annual revenue from virtual worlds is projected to hit $19.3 billion within two years.

"Second Lives" is Guest's account of his war years - virtual lives spent wandering from island to island, and from tower to tower. For this, as Guest repeatedly notes, is what online gamers do. They fight, and drink "virtual Turkish coffee," and have sex, but mostly they wander, searching for a "new way to dream."

Matthew Shaer is a staff writer at the Christian Science Monitor.