Robot Wisdom

An interesting blog from several perspectives: Robot Wisdom The epitome of a linker -- this guy makes Glen look positively logorrheic. A couple of entries from today: Virtual IPO for virtual real-estate company (2ndLife)
Quietly professional poem: Was it those unexpected / words of thanks (Poems.com)
Virtual cross-burner gets 13-day ban (2ndLife-no-pix)
Michelle Pilecki is HuffPo's greatest discovery (HuffPo-NellieB)
EthanZ's subdued response to G8/Africa hoohah (AccraBlog w/links)
GetYourWarOn gets serious (mnftiu-no-links?!?) The blogger in question is Jorn Barger -- he was the person that coined the term Weblog, never made a cent from this and is currently homeless in San Francisco. Wired Magazine has a nice profile of him:

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.

Fascinating...