mediajunk

Beck is the latest high-profile celebrity to have launched a bona fide blog. I've added him to my list of celebrity blogs (RHS of this page), but apparently I'll have to remove William Gibson's blog from that list in a few weeks. In an interview with Karlin Lillington, the SF author claims that maintaining the blog is "stifling his creativity", so he plans to discontinue it at the end of the promotional tour for his current novel. (Will Gibson be the first of many blog "drop-outs"?)

Nevertheless, the blog phenomenon continues to spread, reaching some of the remotest regions on the surface of the planet -- including Mt. Everest! Climber Lorenzo Gariano, currently tackling the great peak, "has been recording every stage of his momentous journey via a satellite phone which beams live audio blogs to a website run by the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute, (KMI), based in Milton Keynes," according to BBC News.

To remind us a) that blogs can be topical and b) the blog format can be used for purposes other than diarying, check out the SARSwatch weblog, which tracks the spread of the virus, along with relevant breaking news.

The SARS site strengthens my hunch that the blog format is more than just a fad, and may turn out to be a killer app of sorts -- perhaps even the "default" format for all web sites.