Diaries of teh Interwebs

April 5, 2012 3:24 PM

Suggest me some blogs to use for class. I don't read blogs so I'm looking for something interesting that has more of a personal touch. The class is "Diary as a Literary Genre" -- so it's the idea of blogs being a "diary of the computer age." I'm looking for any and all suggestions so I have some of the best to look through. If you're not sure it'll work for my assignment, please post anyway! Bonus: there was some guy who went off and lives in the wilderness for 30 days and blogged about it -- Anyone know who this is? I remember my someone telling me about it but can't for the life of me remember details or if that was even the scenario.
posted by DoubleLune to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Dooce is a popular blogger who has written about some deeply personal things, especially her struggles with depression and post-partum depression. She also got fired from a job because of her blog.

I know the firing thing seems quaint now with Facebook and whatever else the kids today are up to, but when it happened it was a little shocking.
posted by Arethusa at 3:52 PM on April 5, 2012 [2 favorites]

Admittedly geeky, but I've been a long-time reader of Wil Wheaton's, a big part of it is how accessible it seems, and how often it really is about what's going on with him, not just the world at large.


Andy Ihnatko is another (still pretty geeky, maybe that's telling).
posted by pupdog at 4:53 PM on April 5, 2012

Mimi Smartypants is a great writer who has been keeping her online diary for many years, through many life changes. She only posts once a month or so now, but there are years worth of archives, when she used to post every few days.
posted by SweetTeaAndABiscuit at 5:00 PM on April 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

Some of the long-term blogs suggested may be particularly interesting because they show the evolution of both the form and the authors over time.

In that vein, you may find the blogs of MeFi founder mathowie and moderator jessamyn of some interest. Both go back a ways. (Wow, did not realize that Jessamyn has been keeping an online diary for 15 years.)
posted by epersonae at 5:22 PM on April 5, 2012

I apologize for not linking, but there's a very personal and moving blog about a guy who, due to poverty and a lot of family and societal factors, has lived most of his life with painful, rotten, missing teeth, not smiling, adapting his eating, etc. The issue shaped his whole personality, and he finally launched a quest to raise money and get fixed up. If you search "smile, Paul" it should be one of the top results.
posted by Occula at 7:04 PM on April 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

Sore Afraid is the current best diary type blog on the Internet by far, I think. In its (fairly recent) heyday, the now basically defunct Pitchfork Reviews Reviews was also amazing; in this old comment I link to three great posts that I think college students in particular would really connect to and which would give you a lot to discuss w/r/t blog style.
posted by raisindebt at 8:39 PM on April 5, 2012

One of my favorites of this kind of blog is the Barmaid Blog. She doesn't update anymore, but for several years, she wrote a really wonderful blog about her life in NYC and the people she worked with at a bar. In fact, it's so good that I was often skeptical that it was nonfiction, but that's another matter.
posted by lunasol at 10:58 PM on April 5, 2012

Tequila Mockingbird was great (no longer updated, but the archives are still there).
posted by Catseye at 8:00 AM on April 6, 2012

These days tumblr is where all the kids are, posting ultra-personal diary-like entries as literary artforms. (and to some extent even as it's dying, livejournal) The main difference between the two is that livejournal still encourages long-form blogging to some extent, where tumblr is a mix of all sorts of media, short snippets of writing, and the occasional long post - which is a really interesting internet take on scrap-booking + diary + (for the ones I'm going to link) critical/literary theorizing. Another difference is livejournal allows for filtered posts, which means some of the more personal stuff with identifying information can be made private. Since tumblr doesn't have that function, it encourages a sort of tmi/overshare emboldened by relative anonymity/pseudonymity.

Some of my favourites:

livejournals:
sabotabby
yuki-onna (she's a science fiction author)
springheel_jack

tumblrs:
loneberry
blackamazon
isabelthespy
murdermetonymy
rgr-pop

There's lots more once you start to poke around. Reading internet diaries is one of my favourite things about the internet.
posted by dustyasymptotes at 11:27 AM on April 6, 2012

Belle De Jour eventually was published as a book.
posted by mippy at 7:47 AM on April 18, 2012