May 20, 2004
Astoria, Flushing Lead Queens in Blogging

But what’s blogging, who are the bloggers and why should you have any interest?

By Doug Chandler

Imagine riding to work in a bus or subway train and, at some point, looking at the people around you. You begin to focus on individuals, wondering what the gray-haired gentleman three seats to the left of you does for a living, what the young, red-headed woman standing in the aisle is reading, how the bearded guy who comes into view might vote in the next election.

It’s a pastime in which all New Yorkers engage: wondering what their neighbors might be thinking or doing. And now, according to some people, the Internet offers a way to find out -- or at least to follow the lives of people, many of them your neighbors, who post their thoughts and reflections online on a regular basis.

The word for what they do is called blogging, and some definitions might be in order.

A blog -- the word is a shortened version of Web log -- is basically “any Website that’s frequently updated,” said Mike Everett-Lane, an expert on local blogs. A blogger is someone who maintains a blog, or online journal, and blogging is the act of writing the entries and placing them on the Web.

Most of these sites are interactive, allowing readers to post their own comments on a page devoted to responses. In addition, many bloggers have formed their own communities in which they link to each other’s sites, host or attend special gatherings and, in general, spread the word about blogs.

“It’s sort of weird how you get sucked into the whole culture,” said Kambri Crews, 32, a blogger from Astoria. “It’s a new thing, and you meet new people, and it does become addictive.”

Everett-Lane likened the experience of keeping a blog to being “at a cocktail party without the cocktails and those tiny umbrella things.” He began his, he recalled, as a way for he and his friends to share information about the books, movies and music that moved them. But soon enough, the site, Ishbadiddle, started drawing other people, many of whom posted their own comments.

The 34-year-old Brooklyn resident, interviewed recently at a Manhattan diner, is a founder of NYCbloggers.com, an index of New York City blogs that has captured the attention of several daily and weekly newspapers. The site uses the subway map as its organizing tool, listing blogs station by station and adding new blogs each day.

If you visited NYCbloggers Monday afternoon, you would have found 513 blogs in Queens, behind Manhattan, with 1,689, and Brooklyn, with 1,045, but still ahead of the Bronx and Staten Island. Within Queens, the two stations with the largest number of blogs are the Ditmars Boulevard stop in Astoria, with more than 40, and the Main Street stop in Flushing, with nearly 80.

The city’s blogs are among many thousands -- perhaps even a million -- now on the Web, said Everett-Lane, who joked that estimating their number would be similar to counting “stars in the sky.”

Everett-Lane recalled that many people in the past tried to design personal sites, the ancestors of blogs. But building those sites requires a knowledge of the Web’s computer code, HTML, and many of them are rudimentary affairs.

That began to change four years ago with the introduction of new software, usually offered free, that allows people with little or no knowledge of computer code to design their own Websites.

Like a lot of bloggers, Crews entered the world of blogging after creating a personal site, KambriCrews.com, which she said was “basically an online resume.” But two years ago, she began using Blogger.com, one of the main blogging templates, and her site “morphed” into Intimate Confessions.

“I actually passed around a couple of words” to readers, including the possible title “Spicy Tales of a Wanton Woman,” Crews said, explaining how she chose the blog’s name. But, in the poll of readers she conducted, the site’s current name “got the most votes.”

The blog, illustrated with artwork of a blond pin-up girl from the 1940s, is, by turns, playful and serious. The site discusses the highs and lows of her life, as well as the lives of her boyfriend and family, and often refers to shows and musicals she has seen and enjoyed.

Although the blog now receives about 500 “hits” or visits each day, up from 200 or so when she began the site, Crews said she writes the entries mainly for herself.

“I want a fair representation of who I am,” she said, adding that another goal is “to make myself laugh.” The site, updated almost every day, is also a “rest stop for family and friends,” she continued. And the language, she warned, can get rather “salty.”

But if you are wondering how personal entries can be anything but dull and boring, consider the life Crews has led. “My Dad is in jail,” she said during a phone interview, offering the information with the same honesty and directness that characterizes her blog. “He tried to kill his girlfriend.”

Crews, who grew up in a “tiny town” north of Houston, said she avoided discussing the subject on her site for a long time. “I was mortified and embarrassed and concerned,” in addition to being sad, she noted. But she does now, and her mother, who still lives in Texas, “goes through the gamut of emotions” while reading Crews’ entries -- sometimes gasping and, at other times, laughing.

Crews and her brother, four years older than she, are the only members of their immediate family who can talk and hear, she said. Her father was born deaf and mute; her mother can talk but does not hear; and her maternal grandparents are also deaf and mute. Her father, imprisoned two years ago, will remain an inmate until he is 75 -- “18 to go!” Crews shouts over the phone -- and has spent much of his time in solitary confinement, a punishment for fighting.

Crews, meanwhile, has led an upbeat, often fascinating life since leaving Texas, where she and her parents lived in tents and, later, a tin shed. She came to New York after several years in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and Chicago, where she worked mostly in banking. She now works as a paralegal and owns a company, Ballyhoo Promotions, that produces events and handles publicity for creative clients. She has also worked as an actress and a model.

Tall and blonde, as the pictures on her blog indicate, Crews said she treats even the harder aspects of her life humorously. “I’d go crazy if I didn’t,” she added.

Blogs reflect the interests and passions of their creators, Everett-Lane said, and the best of them give a real sense of the blogger’s character and point of view. Many people keep blogs as “an extension of their social life,” while others are devoted to the subjects that interest them ¾ anything from gossip and the lives of celebrities to politics, science, art and books.

Browsing through the sites in Queens illustrates Everett-Lane’s point.

Thought-Provoking Soup, a blog maintained by Grace Cheung, a Brown University senior who grew up in Forest Hills, is entirely personal, much like Crews’ site. But hers is a world seen through the eyes of a 21-year-old Chinese-American, born in the United States, who hopes to enter medical school in the fall. Meanwhile, she still faces final exams and deadlines for academic papers, all of which she writes about in her blog.

One of Cheung’s entries looks at the pressure she has begun to feel, but in an upbeat, funny style, the manner in which most of her site is written. She is “starting to panic,” the passage says, “and my coughing has gotten exponentially worse from intermittent sleep and shots of caffeine.”

Another entry discusses being indoors for hours, studying and surfing the Web, while the sun is shining. But she discovers another blog and is greatly inspired, the passage says. “Sure, it’s gorgeous outside, but sitting in front of this computer isn’t so bad.”

Interviewed by email, Cheung said she created her site a year ago, during several months of study in Vietnam, as way to “keep in touch” with friends from college. But the site “exploded to much more than that,” now drawing about 350 hits a week.

Cheung, a literature and culture major, likens the blogging “phenomenon” to the public’s growing interest in memoirs and calls herself “a big proponent” of the online journal.

“Blogging,” she wrote, “encourages people to be more philosophical, to dialogue with each other about mundane things … or to discuss why the war occurred in Iraq.”

While Cheung’s site is filled with pictures, quotes and the entries she posts nearly every day, Edith Bellinghausen’s blog has a plain and simple look. The blog, created as a personal Website about a year ago, is titled EdithBellinghausen.com ¾ no Intimate Confessions, no Thought-Provoking Soup.

“It’s about my life in Queens, and if other people find it interesting, that’s a bonus,” said Bellinghausen, 30, a native of Kew Gardens and a resident of Forest Hills. “I think that’s really the basis of blogs -- they really start from personal interest.”

The site also reflects the blogger’s love of Queens, an area she feels is “underrepresented online.” Much of the space is devoted to observations about current events “with a kind of Queens tilt to them,” as well as links to sites related to Queens.

Recent entries on the site have focused on the new pedestrian-safety measures for Queens Boulevard; Bellinghausen’s hopes for the Mets, who opened their season last month; and a new restaurant in Kew Gardens.

The vice president of a direct-response company, Bellinghausen pays little attention to the number of visits her site receives, perhaps 20 or 30 people a day. But she appears to be dedicated to the site, posting new entries several times a week.

The “blogosphere,” as bloggers often refer to their world, also includes many people who earn their living as writers.

Jose Ralat Maldonado is the editor, by day, of a neuropsychiatric journal owned by a small publishing house. By night, he writes short stories and poetry, some of which he has published, and produces Left-Field Lengua, a blog he began about a year ago at the urging of a friend.

Left-Field Lengua -- a name that refers to Maldonado’s love of baseball and language -- features word games, observations about literature and “smatterings about my own life.”

Parts of that life must have been tough for Maldonado, 28, who was born in Puerto Rico, came to the mainland at 3 and lived “all over” the country as a child. He also has a pronounced stutter, the result, he said, of epilepsy.

Regarding that condition, Maldonado recalled a recent reading he gave at an event for bloggers at P.S. 1, a cultural institution in Long Island City. “I was so frustrated because of my stuttering that I left the stage shouting, ‘That’s why I blog,’ ” he said.

Maldonado also believes he has a “unique voice.” His entries, posted nearly every day, often “have a nervous energy about them” and are sometimes “caustic,” he said. But all are “tongue in cheek,” and some of his more recent postings have considered the romantic side of life, said Maldonado, who is now engaged and hopes to move soon from Brooklyn to Jackson Heights.

The one point on which Everett-Lane and the four Queens bloggers agree is that the very idea of Web logging is a worthwhile endeavor, creating an outlet for many people whose voices have never been heard before.

“One of the common criticisms of blogs is that it’s a bunch of people saying things, but they have nothing to say,” Everett-Lane said. “But that misses the point. What’s important is that people are writing -- expressing themselves -- and that’s ultimately a good thing.”