"Championed" is overstating a bit, I think. I invited the folks who participated in 1999 to take part again and I kept up a list of sites, but beyond that, I didn't really do much at all to promote -- or defend -- the project publicly. I was as surprised as anyone, and a little overwhelmed, by the response. In 1999, there were 30 sites I knew of that participated; there were nearly 700 in 2000.

I should give a little history on this. In 1999, there were really just a handful of well-known sites keeping what they called "weblogs" -- pages which linked to other content on the web, web publishers who were actively seeking out unique websites and annotating their finds with commentary.

This was mainly before tools such as Blogger, Manila and Pitas came along and automated the process, and most of these sites were focused on links -- the term "blog" hadn't yet come along and the lines between journal/diary/newspage/ what-have-you hadn't blurred that much.

Anyway, because these "weblogs" were so few -- and established informal connections among themselves pretty quickly -- there were days or weeks when it seemed as if everyone was linking to the same site at the same time. While some folks were looking forward to the prospect -- as weblog sites grew in number -- of using these as personal filters for the web, there was a fair amount of criticism.

"Oh, these weblogs are a useless circle-jerk. They all link to the same thing all the time."

Now in 2001, when thousands upon thousands are keeping personal weblogs, we can look at that as at least a little silly. Topically speaking, weblogs have a built-in weighting mechanism; the more sites you see linking to a particular news story or web tool, the more likely its the "lead story" on the web that day, the thing the reader should pay some extra attention. And because each weblog serves a slightly different audience, they function as informal "repeater stations," passing along links (and sometimes

amplifying them with commentary or other contextual links). That's how ideas propagate and are given meaning or value on the web, through that weighting and repetition.

I started thinking, though: What if we lived up to that perception? What if, for just one day, nearly every weblog *did* deal with only one topic or link to just one thing? World AIDS Day was coming up and I'd been planning to do a lot of HIV/AIDS-related links in my weblog. I just invited some other folks to do the same -- by posting a message on just two mailing lists -- and A Day Without Weblogs was begun.