First I should give some

First I should give some shouts out to all my friends who blog. NickDenton.org is a stylish site run by my friend Nick, who was the first to introduce me to blogs. The founder of Moreover.com, Nick also helped create the First Tuesday, an international Internet professional networking society with chapters in dozens of countries around the world at this point. Nick and I knew each other in Hungary in the early '90s when we were both journalists there, him for the Financial Times, me for the Boston Globe and others.

PeterMaass.com is probably the most exciting blog among my friends, in that he continues to work as a jet-setting freelance journalist writing for great publications like The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and elsewhere. As of this writing, he's blogging daily from Pakistan, where he's back to the region after spending several months there and in Afghanistan recently. Try to compete with that from my Harlem apartment overlooking a McDonald's parking lot. Hmmm.

Yes, all my friends are famous. No, not really, but several of those keeping blogs do happen to be success journalists and ex-jouranlist entrepreneurs. RebeccaMead.com features the work of my eponymous friend, featuring less actual blogs than an archive of her articles in The New Yorker (she's a freakin' staffer, la-di-da), including her piece about blogging from November, 2000, coincidentally around the same time (or shortly thereafter) that Nick started carrying on about how cool blogs were to the whole lot of us.

Then there is my friend Steve Carlson, the Original Mac Diddy, who produces NowEurope.com, a blog-like newsletter and discussion list about e-business in Europe. Steve still lives in Hungary (like Peter did, too, when we first met him; Rebecca's never been yet, which the rest of us tease her about). Steve was one of my partners in founding the Budapest Week newspaper, but that's a long story better left to another time. Steve's also the guy who first introduced me to the Internet, back around 1993, when we were surfing through CompuServe in Budapest. Because the local phone company, Matav, charged by the minute for local calls, it later ended up costing me more than $100/month for the sevice, but in the early days they comped us all because we were journalists. That and a buck fifty now gets you a cup of coffee here in NY.

Another of my gurus is the brilliant, odd and mysterious DDT (the less said the better), who is heroically wracking up massive credit card bills in the service of the greater good for the world, running the CyrptoRights Foundation, a seriously cool outfit trying to bring the right of encryption to human rights advocates around the world. Sounds esoteric? D tell's stories of aid workers and journalists crossing borders from dictatorships and having their electronic address books confiscated so the secret police can pay a visit on all local contacts. No kidding. Okay, it's not really a blog, but he's a weirdo who deserves some props and has taught me a lot about both cyberspace and meatspace.

Okay, I know other people who have web sites, too, but I'll spare you all the gory details for now. Just thought this Uptown honky should show he's got his own posse.

Peace out. R-