A few months ago, I was at the Camden Pop!Tech conference, and the guy sitting next to me was typing incessantly into his wireless laptop, making notes on the speakers, finding relevant links and then hitting the send key-instantly updating his Web site. No sooner did he do so than he would get responses back from readers around the country. He was a blogger.

Bloggers are turning the hunting and gathering, sampling and critiquing the rest of us do online into an extreme sport. We surf the Web; these guys snowboard it. Bloggers are the minutemen of the digital revolution.

"Blog" is short for "Web log." Several years ago, heavy Web surfers began creating logs-compendia of curious information and interesting links they encountered in their travels through cyberspace. Improvements in Web design tools have made it easier for beginners to create their own Web logs and update them as often as they wish-even every five minutes, as this guy was doing. Blogs are thus more dynamic than older-style home pages, more permanent than posts to a Net discussion list. They are more private and personal than traditional journalism, more public than diaries.