WEB LOGS: INTERNET'S PENNY PRESS SECESSION A HOT TOPIC.

Byline: Mariel Garza Staff Writer

The day that the San Fernando Valley secession vote won a spot on the November ballot, Bryan Fernandez went online looking for information.

From his dorm room at UCLA, the political science sophomore from Arleta surfed for Web sites or Web logs (blogs, for short) that compiled the type of secession news and facts that would sum it all up.

Fernandez didn't find anything that quite fit the bill. So the next day, he created the Arletan (motto: ``Valley Secession Fever. The Best Fever. Ever.'').

In so doing, Fernandez became a ``blogger'' - a growing online phenomenon that is sort of like a modern-day penny press where anyone can start his own paper and sound off on whatever subject comes to mind.

Secession is a hot topic locally, with a site under the pseudonym Valley Boy carrying the motto ``How blog is my Valley,'' and others merely linking to various articles and blogs with commentary on the subject.

Fernandez's blog - arletan.blogspot.com - is among the most up-to-date, with new links and Valley trivia going up several times a day when he has a few minutes between finals and watching World Cup matches.

As a bonus (and one of the hallmarks of a blog), Fernandez frames it all in a running commentary on the zany goings-on of both anti- and pro-secessionists and the media coverage, from a distinctly Northeast Valley/college student/on-the-fence kind of perspective.

``I'm not a sage,'' Fernandez said. ``When people come here they know it's my opinion. It's not going to be objective stuff. It's just me.''

Fernandez is part of a revolution in self-publishing and mass communication that has exploded recently. Called blogging - think of it as a hybrid of instant messages, Web sites and personal diaries that virtually anyone can do - it's the hottest online trend, with Los Angeles on the forefront.

Bloggers say emotional events have fueled the growth of the new communication form, particularly the Sept. 11 attacks, which took blogging from the obscure realm of technogeeks to the mainstream.

``I started my own blog after Sept. 11, and so did a ton of people,'' said Matt Welch, co-creator of L.A. Examiner (laexaminer.com), a blog that skewers Los Angeles media.

His personal site morphed into a war blog (mattwelch.com/warblog.com) in the days after the attacks last fall as he found a need to compile information that put it all into perspective for him. He wasn't the only one.

``There was an explosion of these things,'' Welch said, ``who knows how many. I've seen figures of 40,000 and 450,000. It's really hard to tell.'

In a small way, the looming possibility of secession caused a similar, if smaller, local boom.

``It's a crossover of technology and a very emotional issue,'' said Larry Pryor, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California and executive editor of the Online Journalism Review. ``The two sort of found each other.''

A handful of recently launched local blogs such as How Blog Is My Valley, Polizeros, Resedaweb and the Arletan join the growing list of Los Angeles-based blogs that seek to scrutinize politics - particularly secession politics - and the people who power them.

``The question is how much impact they will have'' on the secession vote, Pryor said. ``Will blogs attract people who come to learn about it and will it change minds? Or will it just be people who feel the same way talking to each other?''

Pryor isn't willing to speculate on how significant blogging will be on either the secession movement or on the history of mass communication; it's just too early in the trend to see which way it will go, he said.

Blogging has its roots in the early days of the online revolution - in the bulletin boards of the 1980s, years before the World Wide Web would open up the Internet to the general public.

The next step in the evolution was Web sites like mattdrudge.com and instapundit.com, with links to disparate news sources and commentary. Sometime in the last couple of years, easy-to-use blog software was developed and people began using it for online journals.

Bloggers create their sites for a variety of reasons. Los Angeles-based tonypierce.com uses his to hold forth about the Lakers, his former girlfriends and tennis pro Anna Kournikova.

Other sites offer updates about the club scene in Los Angeles, what former child actor Wil Wheaton is up to on any given day and the minutiae of their authors' daily lives.

``I spent most of today sitting on my bed going through my giant bin of magazine clippings,'' is a recent entry at one personal blog, typical of many blogs.

Bob Morris, a Web designer in Encino, created his blog, polizeros.com, (Politics in the Zeros) ``mainly to have a place to rant and rave about politics,'' he said.

Morris didn't expect fame, fortune or even much traffic, so he wasn't surprised on the launch day in March when he got exactly zero visitors.

But through word of mouth and links from other pages - the way most blogs get known - his traffic increased. After the first week he started getting one or two people per day.

``Now, after three months, I'm getting 150 people a day,`` Morris said. ``It's not enormous, but getting bigger all the time.''

Morris, a Green Party activist who serves on the political party's county council, has the advantage of being a Web designer, but what makes a blog markedly different from a Web site is that it doesn't require any specialized tech knowledge - just a computer, an online connection and some free time.

``I am not computer literate,'' Fernandez said. ``I can boot up a computer, but I cannot do HTML.''

The free dissemination of blogger software (such as Blogger or Moveable Type) allows a user to follow simple directions to launch a blog in a few hours.

It's clear to Morris that blogs open up access to information channels that typically are reserved for major news outlets, thus democratizing the news. As an example, he points to the recent ``coup'' in Venezuela.

``A lot of our newspapers were saying this was a real revolt of the people done by the people,'' Morris said. But those in the know of a certain Venezuelan blog heard different stories from people on the scene who were e-mailing out their own accounts. The newspapers followed a few days later, he said.

Jim Hames, creator of the Reseda blog (resedaweb.blogspot.com), launched his site not as a personal reflection page but because he was looking for a way to create a forum for the Reseda neighborhood council, which is still awaiting certification.

``It's a computer application of something that already existed in a way,'' Hames said, ``like the Utne Reader'' - a digest-type magazine.

He used a blog format because it's the technology that's hot right now.

``If it were all wireless cell phone messages, it would have been that,`` said Hames, a copy editor at Variety and formerly of the Daily News, who lives in Reseda.

Whether blogs become the savior of democracy or just another small mile marker in the evolution of technology and communication is anyone's guess.

``It's so new, and it seems to be changing,'' Pryor said, ``so it's dangerous to draw any conclusions.''

Welch expects the field of blogs to continue to grow, especially as important news breaks.

``Any issue from now on is going to get its own blog,'' Welch said. ``That there's a Reseda blog, I think, speaks for itself.''

And if there's not a Hollywood secession blog yet, well, he expects there will be at any moment.

L.A.-BASED BLOGS

Here are Internet addresses of some Los Angeles-based web logs, or blogs. (This is a partial list. The total number is unknown, but is thought to be in the hundreds or more.):

arletan.blogspot.com

valleyboy.blogspot.com

polizeros.com

resedaweb.blogspot.com

lablogs.com

laexaminer.com

tonypierce.com

mattwelch.com/warblog.com

kenlayne.com

littlegreenfootballs.com

bluehoodie.com

wilwheaton.net

patiopundit.com

davidgagne.net

laokay.com

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L.A.-BASED BLOGS (see text)