Robot Wisdom on the StreetÂ
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/posts.html?pg=6
A bum in a Google cap. Now there's a sign of the times, I think as he
shambles toward me. He looks pretty much like any other tattered street
person in San Francisco - long, windblown dirty-blond hair with a beard
to match. Unbuttoned shirttails flapping in the afternoon breeze.
But he's walking with someone I recognize - Andrew, a dapper writer
I've known for years. We stop on the sidewalk, and Andrew introduces me
to the guy in the Google cap: "This is Jorn Barger," he begins.
"Another homeless blogger," his companion finishes.
Jorn Barger. It takes me a moment to recognize the name. Barger is an
online legend I've been following for a decade. He was the unstoppable
Usenet poster who could carry on simultaneous debates about Ibsen,
Chomsky, artificial intelligence, and Kate Bush. He was the keeper of
the James Joyce FAQ. Barger's prolific posting made him famous, if not
popular, in the proto blogosphere.
Barger crossed over from Usenet to the Web in 1997 and set up his own
site, which he dubbed the Robot Wisdom Weblog. He began logging his
online discoveries as he stumbled on them - hence "weblog." I barely
understood what he was talking about, and still I read him giddily.
Barger gave a name to the fledgling phenomenon and set the tone for a
million blogs to come. Robot Wisdom bounced unapologetically from high
culture to low, from silly to serious, from politics to porn.
But unlike today's blabby bloggers, Barger steadily honed his
one-paragraph posts into shorter and more compact bursts. By mid-2000,
he'd shrunk Robot Wisdom into a list of links centered on a minimalist
page. His style merged the ethereal brevity of haiku (another peculiar
Usenet subgenre) with the restless topic-hopping of Joyce:
Interesting pic from Spielberg's Kubrick's A.I.
Israeli settler gets wrist-slap for kicking 10yo Palestinian to death
Mount Fuji webcams jealous of popo's eruptions?
Variable-star mira's mysterious horn
My new theory of "information density"
Fiendishly clever spam pitch
Five years later, in the San Francisco afternoon, it's hard to
reconcile these energetic and intellectually omnivorous posts with the
anxious, awkward man on the sidewalk. Speaking quietly in sentences as
short as his blog entries, Barger seems ready to implode. It turns out
he has good reasons: Homeless and broke at age 53, he allowed the
domain registration for robotwisdom.com to lapse and can't afford to
re-up it. He has abandoned his Chicago apartment and is staying on
Andrew's floor while he tries to get back on his feet. He's looking for
work - sort of. After a few hands-in-pockets attempts at small talk, we
give up. I continue up the hill.
A few weeks later, I find out that Barger has recovered his domain -
and Robot Wisdom pops back up online. I hunt him down for a pint at a
local pub and he tells me he's moving on, this time to Memphis. He says
he avoids the need for a job by living on less than a dollar a day. "I
was carrying a cardboard sign when we met that day," he tells me. "I
wasn't sure if I should show it to you. I figured if things didn't work
out with Andrew I could pick up some change." On his panhandler sign,
Barger had written:
Coined the term 'weblog,' never made a dime.
- Paul Boutin
