Roadside Crosses

text and click on it and that takes you someplace else.
    “Linking is called ‘hypertext.’ The H-T-T-P in a website address? It stands for ‘hypertext transfer protocol.’ That’s the software that lets you create links. In my opinion it was one of the most significant aspects of the Internet. Maybe the most significant.
    “Well, once hypertext became common, blogs started to take off. People who could write code in HTML—hypertext markup language, the computer language of links—could create their own blogs pretty easily. But more and more people wanted in and not everybody was tech savvy. So companies came up with programs that anybody, well, almost anybody, could use to create linked blogs with—Pitas, Blogger andGroksoup were the early ones. Dozens of others followed. And now all you have to do is have an account with Google or Yahoo and, poof, you can make a blog. Combine that with the bargain price of data storage nowadays—and getting cheaper every minute—and you’ve got the blogosphere.”
    Boling’s narrative was animated and ordered. He’d be a great professor, she reflected.
    “Now, before Nine-eleven,” Boling explained, “blogs were mostly computer-oriented. They were written by tech people for tech people. After September Eleventh, though, a new type of blog appeared. They were called war blogs, after the attacks and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Those bloggers weren’t interested in technology. They were interested in politics, economics, society, the world. I describe the distinction this way: While pre-Nine-eleven blogs were inner-directed—toward the Internet itself—the war blogs are outer-directed. Those bloggers look at themselves as journalists, part of what’s known as the New Media. They want press credentials, just like CNN and Washington Post reporters, and they want to be taken seriously.
    “Jim Chilton is the quintessential war blogger. He doesn’t care about the Internet per se or the tech world, except to the extent it lets him get his message out. He writes about the real world. Now the two sides—the original bloggers and the war bloggers—constantly battle for the number-one spot in the blogosphere.”
    “It’s a contest?” she asked, amused.
    “To them it is.”
    “They can’t coexist?”
    “Sure, but it’s an ego-driven world and they’ll do anything they can to be top of the heap. And that means two things. One, having as many subscribers as possible. And two, more important—having as many other blogs as possible include links to yours.”
    “Incestuous.”
    “Very. Now, you asked what could I tell you to get Chilton’s cooperation. Well, you have to remember that The Chilton Report is the real thing. It’s important and influential. You notice that one of the early posts in the ‘Roadside Crosses’ thread was from an executive at Caltrans? He wanted to defend their inspection of the highway. That tells me that government officials and CEOs read the blog regularly. And get pretty damn upset if Chilton says anything bad about them.
    “The Report leans toward local issues but local in this case is California, which isn’t really local at all. Everybody in the world keeps an eye on us. They either love or hate the state, but they all read about it. Also, Chilton himself’s emerged as a serious journalist. He works his sources, he writes well. He’s reasonable and he picks real issues—he’s not sensationalist. I searched for Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in his blog, going back four years, and neither name came up.”
    Dance had to be impressed with that.
    “He’s not a part-timer, either. Three years ago he began to work on the report full-time. And he campaigns it hard.”
    “What does that mean, ‘campaign’?”
    Boling scrolled down to the “On the Home Front” thread on the homepage.
    Http://www.thechiltonreport.com
    W E’RE G OING G LOBAL !
    Am pleased to report that The Report has been getting raves from around the world. It’s been selected as one of the lead blogs in a new RSS feed (we’ll call it “Really Simple Syndication”) that will link thousands of other blogs, websites and bulletin boards throughout the world. Kudos to you, my readers, for making The Report as popular as it is.
    “RSS is another next big thing. It actually stands for RDF Site Syndication—‘RDF’ is Resource Description Framework, if you’re interested, and there’s no reason for you to be. RSS is a way of customizing and