Ice Cream With a New Friend

The world of the weblog just got smaller-about five inches wide on this monitor, to be precise. In the Flash-animated World as a Blog, launched recently, you can watch little red lights pop up with the first couple of lines of the latest blog entry from someone in Finland, Australia, Seattle, or Davis. You need to enter your geographic coordinates correctlylittle red lights way north of Siberia are undoubtedly errors-but it’s fun to watch this almost real-time unfolding of newly coordinated bloggers.

A Brazilian neighbor spotted us in just this way: sent us a quick note saying “it says here you’re zero miles away! Do you live in Aggie Village?” The Chatterbox, Fernanda’s blog, has been going for 2-1/2 years now. It’s in Portuguese—I was pleased that I could understand so much of it with my Spanish.

Fernanda, Numenius and I all met at Ben and Jerry’s yesterday afternoon during several torrential rainstorms. It was fun to hear from someone who’s been doing this so much longer and faced the early heartbreaks of unstable blogging software. Plus it’s a wonderful way to stay in touch with family and friends who are so far away.

Someone asked me earlier in the day what the difference was between a blog and a website. I gave the “frequent entries, links to other sites and blogs” answer, but I think the real answer is this: a website is not necessarily an invitation to community; a blog really is.

We’re going to try to identify other Davis bloggers!