Face time
: Nick Denton has created a compelling gallery of bloggers.
It’s just like radio: You always want to know what the face behind the voice looks like.
Ditto weblogs: I always wonder what they look like. Now, I know.
I just have to say it
: I enjoy Richard Bennett. We should all be half as opinionated.
Coopt
: Oliver Willis argues that the Democrats should become the antiterror party.
Cool is still cool
: All hail Pyra/Blogger. It is Fortune’s coolest media company of 2002.
Nothing destroys productivity like blogs, the frequently updated online diaries that have exploded in the past year. Blogs, short for Web logs, run from the personal (dating life in St. Louis) to the political (views on Arafat) to the arcane (diseased bees in Virginia Beach). The company behind the trend is Pyra, a minuscule operation in San Francisco that runs Blogger.com, the most popular tool for hosting and posting blogs, with almost 600,000 registered users. Pyra’s CEO, Evan Williams, 30, talked to Fortune from his apartment-cum-office in San Francisco….
Q: Where do you see Pyra in five years?
A: I have a hell of a problem thinking five years out. The whole reason that I started a company was to build cool s–t that matters. I’d like to be a player in how the Web is evolving.
Ev should be in Hollywood. I’ve never known anyone (this side of Denton) who can get such great publicity. If only publicity were money.
But give Pyra credit: It is amazing for an Internet company today to be (a) alive and (b) growing. That is cool.
: I can’t resist a bit of proud-uncle bragging. In the entire Internet go days, I successfully touted three investments and I’m happy to say that they are all still alive and doing well: Pyra, Moreover, and Cassiopeia. Whew.
