Blogs

It was shortly after 7 in the morning when police spotted the man on a bicycle, a smear of blood around his mouth and more dribbling from cuts on his forearms. But he had an explanation. An ex-girlfriend "turned me on to vampirism," he told the officers, but he was ready to put all that behind him. Was there somewhere he could find a priest?

Of all the new jobs created thanks to the great American food frenzy, the most astonishing has to be how-to-start-a-food-blog instructor. Charging for something so free and easy is like paying a restaurant for tap water plus a lesson in how to get it from glass to mouth. This is the golden age of do-it-yourself publishing, and the bar for entry has never been set lower.

It's not exactly true that As'ad AbuKhalil skipped into the meeting room at the World Affairs Council here recently. But there was a definite lilt in his step and a boyish enthusiasm about him that was, it must be said, unexpected.

Back when he built his Little Green Footballs website into a favorite of the conservative right, Charles Johnson liked to write about the "Loony Left" and "Bush Derangement Syndrome." He would pair accounts of extremist violence with sarcastic headlines about Islam, the "Religion of Peace." A 2006 anti-war rally in Washington went down as an "Idiotfest" and activist Cindy Sheehan "Mama Moonbat." Imagine the surprise among conservatives to learn -- in a series of postings over nearly the last two years, and then in an official declaration of estrangement a little more than a month ago -- that their darling did not love them anymore.

Mark Horvath, a documenter of homelessness who was once homeless himself, was touring a tent city in Sacramento when he raised his cellphone to take a photo of one man's ingenious shopping-cart storage system. Suddenly, another man rushed at him, screaming, with a knife. Horvath was terrified, he said, but not so scared that he stopped sending photos and text messages about what was happening.

IN a third-floor Flower District walkup with bare wooden floors, plain white walls and an excitable toy poodle named Simon, six guys dressed mainly in T-shirts and jeans sit all day in front of computer screens at desks arranged around the oblong room's perimeter, pecking away at their keyboards and, bit by bit, at the media establishment. The world headquarters of TPM Media is pretty much like any small newsroom, anywhere, except for the shirts. And the dog. And the quiet.

More than one U.S. senator endorsed him. So did retired Lt. Col. Oliver North and platoons of American fighting men and women. Actor Bruce Willis called him the only correspondent "telling the truth about what's happening in the war in Iraq." Michael Yon may not be a household name, but he emerged last year as the reporter of choice for many conservatives and supporters of the war.

It's hard to know whom to sympathize with in this fight. On one side: the paparazzi who stalk celebrities in their moments of greatest vulnerability -- at doctors' offices, with their newborns, when they are falling-down drunk. On the other: a blogger who helps himself to those photos, scrawls puerile comments on them, and posts them on his immensely popular and profitable website. The owners of one L.A.

THE white-hot center of the celebrity gossip world is currently a back table at a heavily trafficked Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Sunset Boulevard, just west of Fairfax. There, Perez Hilton, a slightly pudgy, recently blonded 28-year-old Cuban American blogger, has leveraged his reign as "queen of all media" to become a one-man celebrity outing operation, doing his best to uncloset as many gay celebrities as he can, because, as he sees it, they have forfeited their right to privacy on that point.

The gig: As the self-proclaimed "Queen of All Media," Hilton has become a pop culture phenom with his Hollywood gossip blog, which draws about 7 million page views a day. PerezHilton.com is filled with snarky comments and paparazzi photos and helped usher in 24-hour celebrity "info-tainment." Education: Bachelor's degree in drama from New York University. Former jobs: Publicist, actor and journalist at gay publications and tabloid Star magazine.

Back when he built his Little Green Footballs website into a favorite of the conservative right, Charles Johnson liked to write about the "Loony Left" and "Bush Derangement Syndrome." He would pair accounts of extremist violence with sarcastic headlines about Islam, the "Religion of Peace." A 2006 anti-war rally in Washington went down as an "Idiotfest" and activist Cindy Sheehan "Mama Moonbat." Imagine the surprise among conservatives to learn -- in a series of postings over nearly the last two years, and then in an official declaration of estrangement a little more than a month ago -- that their darling did not love them anymore.

Lisa Fung, who has overseen the Los Angeles Times' coverage of arts and culture for more than nine years, has been chosen to run its online entertainment operation. As online arts and entertainment editor, Fung will guide multimedia coverage including Calendar, the Envelope and Company Town. In addition to developing new online properties, she will oversee more than a dozen latimes.com blogs. "Lisa is as comfortable within the realm of social media as she is with Wagner, 'American Idol' and Warhol, perfectly preparing her for this challenging new position," Times Editor Russ Stanton said.

It would be easy to miss this newsroom of the future. It's disguised inside a graceful wood shingle home, just beyond the living room crammed with children's toys, tucked on one side of a modest kitchen. From this modest perch in a woodsy section of Altadena, beneath the towering San Gabriel Mountains, Tim Rutt has created a blog that has made him the talk of his community and the latest star of the kind of hyper-local journalism that is sprouting around America. Rutt's banner moment came a few weeks back, when the Station fire roared across the mountains above Altadena and his altadenablog.

The Internet is the world's front-row seat to fashion. You don't have to rummage through crowded store racks or pay for a personal shopper; the Web will do it for you. Aggregator sites and social networks give anyone insider status, offering up-to-the-minute news about sales and new merchandise. Runway photos are posted online minutes after the shows end, and style how-tos are not confined to the pages of glossy magazines; they are everywhere. The Internet's share of retail clothing sales has been well documented.

Mark Horvath, a documenter of homelessness who was once homeless himself, was touring a tent city in Sacramento when he raised his cellphone to take a photo of one man's ingenious shopping-cart storage system. Suddenly, another man rushed at him, screaming, with a knife. Horvath was terrified, he said, but not so scared that he stopped sending photos and text messages about what was happening.

"It's just before midnight and we just have been attacked by pirates." So began a not entirely atypical blog post by Kaye Caldwell of Hermosa Beach, who since last summer has been traveling the world with her husband and three children. The April 26 attack on their Italian cruise ship far off the coast of Somalia was but the latest installment in an adventure that has taken the family to the Australian outback, riot-torn Thailand and South African townships.

It's fascinating to look at the blog postings Wednesday from the Cannes Film Festival of the premiere of "Inglourious Basterds," Quentin Tarantino's WWII Nazi-scalping action fantasy (he has the Reich apparently coming to an end not in Hitler's bunker but in a Paris movie theater). To me, the postings reflect each blog's rooting interest in the film and the director, whose PR campaign is orchestrated by the Weinstein Co., which will release the film later this summer.

An activist in a police state should know when to sprint. Mohamed Abdel Aziz has bolted from trouble a number of times, including dashing from security forces closing in on a demonstration in the port city of Alexandria. His less mercurial moments have three times landed him in police stations, but upon each release he has returned to his computer, opened his blog and conspired in cyberspace to end President Hosni Mubarak's 27-year rule of Egypt. That's an unlikely prospect.

No sooner did Cuban American relations hit their warmest notes in half a century than former President Fidel Castro stirred from retirement to say: Not so fast. The 82-year-old Castro tossed cold water on U.S. interpretations of his brother Raul's overture to President Obama last week. His successor as Cuban president had offered to discuss "everything, everything, everything" -- from human rights to political prisoners -- with his U.S. counterpart.

An Internet blogger nicknamed Minerva was acquitted by a Seoul court Monday on charges that he spread malicious rumors about the South Korean economy that cost the government billions of dollars. Park Dae-sung was released after the court's ruling that he did not violate telecommunications laws with his popular weblogs, which regularly pontificated on South Korea's ailing economy, castigated policymakers and forecast dire scenarios that many investors took to heart.