Talk about shameless self-promotion. Adele Nicholas, Mary Jones and Anne House ventured down to the Q101 Jamboree this past Saturday with intentions besides seeing the Strokes or Dashboard Confessional. Armed with fliers advertising their joint Web site, they stopped about 100 people, “who looked rock and roll,” and told them to check out their site online. “Fear the Capitalist Mafia,” the handbills read. They told future perusers their site was about rock music.

But that wasn’t exactly true. Really their site is a Weblog where each of the girls publishes her thoughts, her worries, her rants, her daily happenings. Rock music is included, sure, but basically, so is everything.

That’s the beauty of the blog. It’s yours. You can write what you want. And people all over the world can read it if they so desire.

In a nutshell, Weblogs, more often called blogs, are frequently updated Web sites that anyone can have. Blogs hit the Internet in the mid ’90s but didn’t become popular until the end of the century when build-your-own-Weblog software came into play.

Sites like www.blogger.com made it easy. All you had to do was set up an account, type in an entry, and bam, you had a blog. If you wanted, you could pick a theme and only comment on global warming, “Star Wars” gossip or, like most people nowadays, you could use your blog as an online journal. But there was a catch: It would be a journal with an audience.

That’s why Medill sophomore Nicholas and friends started their blog. Sure, posting daily messages would help clue their friends into what was going on with them, but more importantly, it would ensure them an audience. They craved attention. And a blog could give it to them.

“It’s helping us develop the cult following we’ve always wanted,” Nicholas said.

Mainly friends read the girls’ blog, but sometimes they’ll get e-mails from random strangers. After the Q101 Jamboree they received a few e-mails from new readers. Many of their messages, though, just said that their site was stupid. Nicholas didn’t really care.

“I think we write what we want,” she said. “We don’t have much regard for who our audience is. We write it for our own benefit.”

Medill senior Lindsay Muscato has a different take on her blog. Her intro page welcomes readers: “There is your context. I’m happy you’re here. Now explore. This is for you, not me.”

“I found that a lot of people really need someone else’s thoughts to connect to to make their thoughts valid,” Muscato said.

Muscato began blogging when she was in high school, long before the craze hit. She was always a writer and liked it when people read her work, so it seemed logical to publish her words on the Web where her audience could be infinite. Some people, she said, think it’s odd that she’s offering up such personal, “insider information,” but she doesn’t see it that way.

“I know what I put there,” she said. “It’s not like people are cracking the lock on my diary or anything.”

Education sophomore Aaron Dibner-Dunlap definitely treats his blog as an online diary of sorts.

“I’ve gotten really personal in revealing the kind of person I feel I am or in revealing fears that have come about because of dreams I’ve had,” Dibner-Dunlap said.

There is the potential to be ridiculed for what you write, he said, but that’s a risk you have to take. “On a small scale, it’s a tiny validation of your feelings, that what I’m feeling is normal and that other people feel this way, too,” he said.

Speech junior J.D. Shultz doesn’t write any personal entries on his blog. Shultz uses his Weblog as an outlet to explore writing styles, to challenge his narrative voice. He writes stories, creates characters and posts poetic thoughts. He doesn’t feel comfortable writing about his day-to-day trials. Even when he kept a journal in high school, he wrote in the third person. “It was just awkward for me to write in the first person,” he said.

Like his fellow Northwestern bloggers, Shultz enjoys getting feedback from his readers, but when he’s writing, he’s not thinking about other people reading his entries. “I’m thinking about myself, as dumb as that sounds, considering I’m putting it on the Web,” he said.

But that’s how it is with most bloggers. Though blogs can benefit other people, no one gets more out of a blog than the creator. This, of course, is where bloggers get a bad rap. Others often think they’re self-centered for keeping an online diary. Muscato even said she’s had friends tell her that she’s arrogant for having such a me-centered site.

“But it’s by you; it’s your production,” Muscato said. “Of course it’s about me. It’s my page. It just is.” nyou