My 15 0 minutes of fame

A few weeks back, I got an e-mail from a NY Times reporter, Warren St. James.

Im doing a story for the NY Times on personal blogs…any chance I could interview you?

After double-checking on the guy’s name and the sort of stuff he’s written, I responded in the affirmative, asking if he wanted something written or by phone.

Hi Dave…phone is more efficient if you don’t mind. I’m at [snip] (call collect) or shoot a number and time and Ill call you.

Well, “more efficient” meant going back and forth with various numbers and times before I finally called him and got him on the line. He apologized, saying that after a slow response, he’d suddenly been inundated with e-mail. We talked — for about thirty seconds, as he checked whether I fit his thesis (see below) or not. Then he had to get back to another call. But he’d call me back.

Or not.

I did send a follow-up e-mail on what seemed to be his theme — that blogs set up individuals as reporters of their private lives, and this has a disruptive effect on their friends and family — and invited him to call back or ask any follow-up questions.

[cue crickets chirping]

The resulting article was published on Sunday. I am not, btw, mentioned, either by name or quotation or even by reference. I guess that’s because I didn’t meet his thesis.

Rick Bruner’s awakening to the power of the written word came by way of a throwaway line, typed one afternoon in the cerulean glow of his I.B.M. ThinkPad.
Mr. Bruner, a 37-year-old Manhattan marketing consultant, keeps a Web log, an online diary known as a blog. After coming in for some sporting abuse from a friend who told him blogging was a waste of time, Mr. Bruner wrote in his blog that the friend “was fat and runs like a girl,” adding that he was sure the friend would not be offended “because he doesn’t read blogs.” With a push of a button, the comment was published on Mr. Bruner’s site, www.bruner.net/blog, and accessible to anyone with a computer.
A few days later, though, that friend’s curiosity about blogs was awakened after all. He quickly found Mr. Bruner’s site and was “deeply aggrieved,” Mr. Bruner said. Their friendship barely survived the episode.
Mr. Bruner’s experience is typical of many who have waded into the thrilling and sometimes perilous world of blogging, a once marginal activity of Internet enthusiasts that has become squarely mainstream, with an estimated three million active blogs online, according to Nick Denton, the head of Gawker Media, a blog publisher.

Other examples follow, all centered around the idea that

“It’s personal etiquette meets journalistic rules,” Mr. Denton, the blog publisher, said. “If you have a friend who’s a blogger you have to say, `This is not for blogging.’ It’s the blogging equivalent of `This is off the record.’ ”

Except I don’t think that I’ve ever had someone state it that baldly — and certainly it’s been a rare thing. Maybe it’s because I normally present a certain degree of discretion — I don’t run around and gossip to all my friends about what another friend told me, I try to avoid dishing dirt on people, and I quite visibly restrain myself from discussing things here that would be, basically, improper to discuss.

I have had folks tell me, when it might not be obvious, that something’s not public knowledge yet — but it’s usually been a broad-based injunction: “Please don’t let anyone know” as opposed to “This shouldn’t go on your blog.”

I’ll leave it for others to discuss (a) a NY Times article on “journalistic rules,” given some of the recent scandals there, (b) whether anyone (even the company itself) actually puts periods between the letters “I.B.M.”, and (c) the proper capitalization of “Web log.” I’m just going to hang out and wait for the next reporter to call.

Or maybe I’ll turn my notes, one of these days, into a blog post. Whatever.

I never did find out how he’d found out about me.