Bloggers are the fastest-growing group of writers in the world. Every day, around 70,000 people - that's one person per second - begins a 'blog': a diary published on the Internet. Many are intensely personal affairs, essentially no different to pen-and-paper journals people have kept for centuries... except they're published instantaneously on the web for the whole world to see. But it isn't just young male geeks doing it - a sizeable proportion of blogs are by women and over-30's.
Proving that truth can indeed be stranger than fiction, playwright Oliver Mann has compiled a play entirely extracted from real blogs, premiering next month at Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He joins us now to talk about the blogging phenomenon.
'Bloggers - Real Internet Diaries', daily at 3.10pm, Smirnoff Underbelly, Edinburgh (3rd - 27th August)
What is a blog?
"The most straightforward definition is 'online diary'," Oliver says. "But it's really just a type of web-site which allows its author to update content very easily, with each entry showing a date and time. So it lends itself well to personal diaries, but blogs can be used for all sorts of things. The word 'blog' is an abbreviation for 'weblog'"
What is a post?
'Posts' are individual entries submitted to a blog
What is the blogroll?
The 'blogroll' is the column on the side of some blogs which links through to all the author's favourite blogs
What is the blogosphere?
Blogosphere' is the term used to describe the online community engendered through blogging
There are dozens of sites to choose from when setting up a blog, but amongst the most popular are blogger.com (owned by Google), livejournal.com, and wordpress.com - all of whom offer free accounts.
About Oliver’s Play
Bloggers - Real Internet Diaries is the world's first stage-play entirely extracted from real British blogs. In the script, 10 'characters', played by 5 actors (they all double-up) take turns in addressing the audience in thematically-interlinked monologues. Characters include an agarophobic sex chatline operator (!), a nymphomaniac mum of three, a woman who obsesses about her teenage son, and a predatory bisexual buisnessman.
Oliver first had the idea for the play after discovering the blog of a contemporary of his from school. "My flat-mate and I both went to the same secondary school," he says. "A newsletter goes round; alumni write in and say what they're up to. One day this guy who was a bit of a peripheral character at school, a nerd really, wrote in saying, 'I've got a blog, check it out'. And we had that sort of macabre curiosity- we had to look him up. Turns out he was having a rubbish time - he was at University, as a mature student, but he was depressed, and still a virgin and so on. And, the thing was, there was this girl he liked who clearly liked him, reading between the lines, but he didn't seem to know it! We got completely hooked, constantly checking back for updates to see how this relationship developed. We started reading it out to each other. And that's when I thought, 'hold on, this is just like soap opera. It would be fantastic to recreate this feeling of intimacy in the theatre.”
I think that will be a great play and i'd love to see it but it's to far away so unless it comes down here or on television i'll never see it.
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