[ukblogs] Blogging like it’s 2000 … Katy Lindermann On The Early Days Of UK Blogging … ‘Whilst the world may be a very different place, in some ways, our blogging style of shorter, more frequent & often link-based entries isn’t hugely dissimilar to the way we use Twitter or Tumblr – it’s just that we spread our microcontent over different platforms…’

[blog] Reflections of Fidel … Fidel Castro has a blog!! … On Kennedy: ‘I confess that many times I have meditated on the dramatic story of John F. Kennedy…’ [via Kottke]

[blogs] World War II Today … blogging World War II one post at a time.

[blogs] The Evolving Blogosphere: An Empire Gives Way … The Economist on the decline of blogging …‘Blogs are a confection of several things that do not necessarily have to go together: easy-to-use publishing tools, reverse-chronological ordering, a breezy writing style and the ability to comment. But for maintaining an online journal or sharing links and photos with friends, services such as Facebook and Twitter (which broadcasts short messages) are quicker and simpler.’

[blogs] He pioneered upskirt shots. Can we pay a bigger tribute? … Marina Hyde on Perez Hilton … ‘Yet increasingly, that old mainstream media/blogger distinction seems outmoded. It’s surely time to bury the lie that super-bloggers such as Perez are in some way outsiders. He may care to style himself as a renegade – the John Rambo of gossip – but the fact is, Perez is now as insider as they come. All pseudo-dissidents go establishment in the end. Once-idealistic rock stars buy country piles and whinge about paying tax, the likes of Perez start taking the freebies and decline to call Paris Hilton out for homophobic remarks because she buys him off with access.’

[books] What books are in the “MeFi Canon”? … interesting post on what books are mentioned regularly on the Metafilter blogs … ‘Twilight gets mentioned a lot. I’ll see myself out.’

[comics] Chris's Invincible Super-Blog on Batman and Superman: ‘Morrison’s Superman isn’t defined by his powers, he’s defined by his morality; the defining scene of All Star Superman isn’t Superman fighting Solaris or even Lex Luthor, it’s him stopping the girl from committing suicide. It’s that he cares. And in the same way, Morrison’s Batman is defined by one trait: He is, quite simply, the World’s Greatest Detective. No one, not even a god, can out-think him.’

[blogs] High Court: Moderate User Comments And You’re Liable … ‘A blog owner can avoid liability for user-generated content that appears on his site without being checked or moderated, the High Court has ruled. But fixing the spelling or grammar in users’ posts could lose him that protection, it said.’

[wisdom] Malcolm Tucker on Bloggers: ‘I read all the blogs because I’m an under-employed fat fucking loser with nothing better to do with my time than sit in my bedroom like a fat space hopper in a tracksuit reading inconsequential, un-spellchecked shit, fabricated by other fat fucking losers.’

[blogs] The Power Of Ten … Meg Pickard celebrates 10 years of blogging. Congratulations Meg! :) … ‘A decade feels like a long time in so many ways – when I look back at my early posts and think about what I was doing back then and where I was in life, I am amazed how far away it feels. But throughout those ten years there have been very few of the 3692 days (more or less) when I haven’t written something on the blog, or scribbled something in draft, or at very least thought about it and felt guilty for not having sufficient time to devote to doing it.’

[comics] Happy 10th Blogiversary Neilalien! … as far as I know Neilalien’s blog and Doctor Strange / Steve Ditko fan site was the first comic blog. Amazingly, after ten years he still seems to handroll his own blog pages, which proves he’s either old school or an alien – I can’t make up my mind which… Congratulations Neil!

[meme] I’ll probably regret this: Ask Me A Question … ‘no, I’ve never kept a secret blog…’

[blogs] ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web … we are all Jorn Barger now … ‘If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read – and doing it for free – I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share. More important, I couldn’t conceive of a world of news and information without the aid of others helping me find the relevant links.’ [via Moreish]

[blogs] Right-Wing Flame War! … on the rise and fall of Little Green Footballs … [via Metafilter]

Johnson has always had a geek’s penchant for self-education, and in that spirit he cultivated a side interest, and ultimately an expertise, in writing computer code. His Web log, which he named “Little Green Footballs” (a private joke whose derivation he has always refused to divulge), was begun in February 2001 mostly as a way to share advice and information with fellow code jockeys – his approach was similar in outlook, if vastly larger in its reach, to the guiding spirit in the days of ham radio. His final post on Sept. 10, 2001, was titled “Placement of Web Page Elements.” It read, in its entirety: “Here’s a well-executed academic study of where users expect things to be on a typical Web page.” It linked to, well, exactly what it said. The post attracted one comment, which read, in its entirety, “Fantastic article.”

[blogs] Look At This Fucking Idea For A Blog-To-Book Deal … generating ideas for the blog-to-book market one post at a time: Famous Architect Or Early 20th Century Pedophile Dandy? … Dinosaurs Dealing With Mortality … Everything As A Vintage Paperback … Reboxing. [via Metafilter]

[blogs] The Annotated Weekender … a blog of doodles all over the Weekend Guardian / Observer Magazines. [via qwghlm.co.uk]

[twitter] Tweeting Too Hard … a blog collecting the most self-important tweets from Twitter … ‘fan belt light came on in the 911 so now I’m driving the Cayenne Turbo S – the backup, backup car. Trying not to think about the Tesla…’ [link]

[bdj] For Whom The Belle Tells … another old-time UK blogger breaks cover and admits he guessed who Belle de Jour was … ‘The first blog to link to BDJ was in fact this humble blog, Parallax View. And the lead? An email from a fellow blogger casually asking whether I’d noticed on the UK Blogs aggregator a blog by a prostitute. The blogger? Oh, you’re ahead of me… Dr Brooke Magnanti.’

[bdj] How Belle de Jour’s Secret Ally Googlewhacked The Press … First personal post I ever do makes the front page of the Guardian. Never again … ‘The sympathetic online diarist, who gives his name only as Darren…’

[bdj] Add a blog to the updated list? … The original email Belle de Jour sent asking to be added to the Updated UK Blogs List.

Me and Belle de Jour – “Could it be Brooke?”

Let’s break out of this self-imposed link blogging format for just one post… it’s not every day the biggest secret you’ve ever kept gets revealed on the front pages of the national press.

I have an admission to make about Belle de Jour.

It’s time for me to admit that I solved the puzzle of her identity almost at the very start after she (as Belle) sent me the link to her new blog to add to the list of Updated UK Blogs. Sending the link to me implied somebody who knew quite a lot about how UK blogging worked at the time and I found it hard to believe that an escort that had starting blogging would use me to announce the blog to the world. Then, after BdJ proceeded to knock the ball out of the park in the blog writing department, I started to seriously consider if it was somebody I knew.

In late 2003 I was well placed to guess Belle’s identity. I’d been blogging myself for three years at that point, I had met many London bloggers and briefly read most of the UK-written blogs during 2000 and 2001. UK blogging was (and still is) full of young, smart people and anyone of them might have written Belle’s blog. I never believed that a professional writer could be BdJ – apparently effortless blog writing takes practice, and required an understanding of a new medium which not many people had at the time. So I asked myself: which blogger is it?

A couple of months went past, and after Belle de Jour won the award for Best Written Blog from the Guardian and the whole BdJ phenomenon kicked off, I had my eureka moment – I was sitting on the tube one morning and suddenly thought: ’Could it be Brooke?’

Brooke at the time ran a couple of blogs – A link blog called Methylsalicylate and another science blog called Cosmas. She also had done a few short, smart pieces of writing online – The Autopsy, What The Dead Remember and one called Malted. Malted was about whiskey and was the bit of writing that gave it all away. I remembered reading Malted a few months previously and realised the style and content was reminiscent of Belle’s and was suddenly convinced I had the answer.

I then spent the first three months of 2004 “internet stalking” Brooke Magnanti, collecting together a whole bunch of circumstantial evidence that Brooke was indeed Belle. I also slowly became aware of the heightened stakes, as Belle became increasingly famous and obviously wanted to maintain her pseudonymity.

For a while I believed that Brooke would get outed immediately – but it turns out the British press could not investigate anything not handed to them on a plate, and were never looking in the right place – the small clique of people who starting blogging in the UK in 2000/2001. Belle de Jour remained pseudonymous and the mystery remained intact even after two TV series based on her books.

During this time I published a googlewack hidden in my blog – the words “Belle de Jour”, “Brooke Magnanti” and “Methylsalicylate” were published and available in Google’s index on a single page on the internet – my weblog. This “coincidental” collection of links could in no way reveal Belle’s identity. But I wondered if anybody else knew the secret and felt that analysing my web traffic might confirm my strongly-held belief. If someone googled “Belle de Jour” “Brooke Magnanti”, I would see it in the search referrers for LinkMachineGo.

I waited five years for somebody to hit that page (I’m patient). Two weeks ago I started getting a couple of search requests a day from an IP address at Associated Newspapers (who publish the Daily Mail) searching for “brooke magnanti” and realised that Belle’s pseudonymity might be coming to an end. I contacted Belle via Twitter and let her know what was happening. I didn’t expect to hear anything back.

And then early last weekend I received an email signed by Brooke that confirmed that she was outing herself in the Sunday Times because the Daily Mail had discovered her identity.

It was finally over, the secret was out. I no longer have to worry about inadvertently revealing her identity. If I’m honest, solving the puzzle of the biggest literary and blogging mystery of the last six years has been fun and exciting. I’m just really disappointed I don’t get to dig up a gold hare as a prize!

One last thing: Good Luck Brooke, I’m very glad you’ve managed to maintain some control over how and when your real identity was revealed to the public. I think I probably owe you a bottle of your favourite whiskey. Let me know what you like and I’ll see what I can do. – Darren/LMG.

Update #1: Belle has confirmed the story in the comments to this post.

Update #2: Googlewack Screengrab Published

Update #3: How Belle de Jour’s Secret Ally Googlewacked The Press – the Guardian cover the story.

Update #4: The End

[bdj] Now that I’m Not Anonymous — Belle de Jour outed herself yesterday in the Sunday Times. Old time UK bloggers may remember her other blog Methylsalicylate from 2000/2001. The Times described it as a “science blog” but as I remember it was a link blog in the style inspired by Jorn Barger. That’s right… I’ll say it again: Belle de Jour was a LINK BLOGGER.

[weird] Take A Weird Break Blog … a blog collecting weird headlines from Take A Break style magazines. [via qwghlm.co.uk]

[comics] George And Lynne Explained … amusing explanations of the midly NSFW and sexist newspaper strip … ‘By the way one man is wearing a low cut back top and another wearing a vest and choker it suggests that they like her outfit for its fashion sense rather than the way it shows off her cleavage. So this is a gay super pub with its own multistory car park…’ [via Metafilter]

[movies] Matt Haughey on Julie and Julia: ‘There was this one scene. Julie is in her cube and she’s ecstatic that a post got 53 comments and she high fives her coworker, and moments later her husband calls and says he just noticed she’s #3 on the most popular Salon blogs list and her arms shoot up out of her cube in victory and I began to cry tears of joy. I sat in the theater thinking about my little blog…’ [via Robot Wisdom]

[tv] My Shags As A Whore – Mitchell and Webb on Belle de Jour … ‘Being a prostitute is brilliant.’ (more…)

[books] An Interview With Michael Lewis …

‘When I write a long magazine piece that gets attention I feel like it’s more widely read now than it was ten years ago, by a long way. In fact, it feels excessively well read. Twenty years ago I might get a couple of notes in the mail and I’d hear about it maybe at a dinner party. And that would be the end of it, and it would go away very quickly. Ten years ago it would get passed around by email, and it would seem to have a life to me that would go on a little longer. Now the blogosphere picks it up and it becomes almost like a book: it lives for months. I’m getting responses to it for months. And I don’t think the journalism has gotten any better. It’s just the environment you publish it in is more able to rapidly get it to the people who are or might be interested in it.’

[tv] Adam Curtis’ Blog … the BBC documentary maker behind The Power of Nightmares and The Way of All Flesh starts blogging … ‘This is a website expressing my personal views – through a selection of opinionated observations and arguments. I’ll be including stories I like, ideas I find fascinating, work in progress and a selection of material from the BBC archives.’

[blogs] Scott Rosenberg asks: Who Was The First Blogger? (and surprisingly comes up with a satisfying answer).

[blogs] Texts from Last Night Blog … ‘my mouth tastes like poor choices’

[polictics] Slugger O’Toole on Smeargate: ‘… if you pick a fight with someone who has nothing to lose (and you do), you’re the one most likely to end up on the floor. To quote blog sceptic Geert Lovint, ‘blogging is a bleed-to-death strategy’. Mr Draper is a PR professional floundering in a world he barely understands, allowed himself to be entranced by the (what Lovint terms) ‘banal nihilism’ of one particular type of blogging, and now finds himself being bled to death through his own actions.’

[blogs] Nick Denton Quote On Blogging from 2002: ‘People like Doc Searls and Meg Hourihan are to the weblog as Oppenheimer and von Neumann were to the A-bomb. Gentle souls whose creation will be used by others more ruthless.’ Nick was certainly right about that wasn’t he?

[twitter] Salam Pax is on Twitter … ‘and to add irony while I sit here listening to bombs going off left’n’right.. Iraqi tv is showing a report about how security is better.’ [link]

[blogs] A List of all BBC Blogs … surprisingly small list of blogs for such a large media operation.

[blog] Ask LMG: Does anybody know what happened to the Linkbunnies blog? It’s been unavailable for at least a couple of weeks and I guess there are a couple of readers scratching their heads wondering what happened… (Update: The Answer)

[blogs] Sad Guys on Trading Floors … ‘Turning the economic crisis into one of those clever internet memes.’

[blogs] What Makes for a Good Blog? … some interesting points from Merlin Mann … ‘I’ve come to believe that creative life in the first-world comes down to those who try just a little bit harder. Then, there’s the other 98%. They’re still eating the free continental breakfast over at FriendFeed. A good blog is written by a blogger who thinks longer, works harder, and obsesses more. Ultimately, a good blogger tries. That’s why “good” is getting rare.’

[ukblogs] Taking the shine off: Why blog publishing failed in the UK … a co-founder of Shiny Media looks at the state of blog publishing in the UK … ‘The obvious reason why UK new media companies haven’t achieved the same success as their US counterparts is down to economies of scale. US sites have at least five times more readers to aim at and that counts for an awful lot when most online advertising is still based around a CPM model (advertisers pay a between 50p-£20 depending on the campaign per thousand people who see their ad). What makes it even trickier is that most UK advertisers for obvious reasons only want their ads to be seen by UK readers…’

[bdj] Ask a call girl … Salon asks three American High-Class Call Girls: How Realistic is the Belle de Jour TV Series? (compare and contrast with the time the Guardian asked Cynthia Payne the same question) … ‘I guess as an ex-call girl, it’s fun watching the show and seeing what is real and what’s completely off. I think it glamorizes the business a bit. Being a high-class call girl is a cool life if you know what you’re doing, but a very hard life too, which I don’t think they depict well on the show — just how stressful it really is.’ [via Fimoculous]

[blog] One Post Wonder … a collection of blogs that only had one post or so … ‘Friday, September 22, 2000 I hate school, I hate all of my classes. Damn she’s beautiful. I wish I were drunk. posted by Stupid at 12:48 AM’ [via Waxy]

[blogs] Tumblr – The Documentary … ‘Reblog This Nerds!’ (more…)

[blogs] Sorry I Missed Your Party … random pictures of people at parties from Flickr. [via iamcal]

[movies] The Video Nasty Project … this blog will watch all 73 original video nasties so you don’t have to … ‘The plot is basic Frankenstein stuff. A mad surgeon replaces his terminally ill son’s heart with that of a gorilla, which transforms him into a half-man, half ape creature – or at least a man in cracked, slathered on makeup who makes silly growling noises.’ [via Metafilter]

[blogs] Sashinka: ‘It’s today.’

[life] Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far … blog postcard project similar to Post Secret … ‘Everyone is someone else’s Weirdo’ [link]

[blogs] Civil Serf blogger faces disciplinary action … ‘The unnamed civil servant at the heart of the controversy is said to be a fast-track civil servant who, on her blog, said that she was “just senior enough in my department to really know what’s going on, but not senior enough to attract suspicion from my blogging”. […] Followed closely by political observers, the blog attracted an influential following and was the subject of an investigation to discover its source. Last week the blog went off-line and a civil servant was reported to have been confronted and admitted authorship. She has been suspended, according to reports.’

[tv] Watchification — a sister blog to Speechification – curating the best TV from the BBC’s iPlayer, YouTube and other sources.

[london] All in a Day’s Work — the blog of a London Cab Driver … ‘A lady I took to Camberwell last night gave me a twenty and two tens for a £22 fare and I gave her one of the tenners back. “You’re honest” she said thanking me. “It’s the only way to be” I replied.’ [via Time Out]

[funny] The Fail Blog … ‘This is a site for sharing all things that FAIL with the world.’ [via Sore Eyes]

[blogs] What I Killed Today — the sad blog of a veterinary technician detailing what animals they had put down that day … ‘An emaciated ferret who had been fighting an auto-immune disease.’ [via Warren Ellis]