by Salvatore D'Agostino
From the beginning of the Web, the theme of writing has been predominant: the Web was born as a digital blank page to be filled with content, and many pioneering network writers immediately envisioned the digital page as a diary. Initially, it was fifteen-year-old Justin Hall, then thousands, and later millions of writers began to create their own online diaries, interacting with each other, increasingly populating the web, inhabiting it with their daily reflections. Web diarists have inhabited and continue to inhabit all the different platforms that the internet has generated: web logs, forums, MySpace, Second Life, Facebook, Twitter-X, and many others. Among the diarists are also those who make a profession out of writing and use the Web log to exercise their narrative skills. If the first can be called diarists; for the second, writers aware of the linguistic canon, the term diarist might be inappropriate. In this case, for convenience and disturbing Leopardi, we will call the writer's Web log a Zibaldone:
«A notebook of notes and sketches recorded without order: the evolution of Leopardi's thought can be reconstructed from the notes of his 'Zibaldone'.» (DEVOTO OLI)
Among the Web zibaldones, to cite Italian examples, we recall that of the writer Giuseppe Genna (with his historic eponymous blog, the new one opened these days letterutura e pensiero and his Facebook page), Tiziano Scarpa (on the collective blog il primo amore), the architect-writer Gianni Biondillo (on the collective blog nazione Indiana), Wu Ming (an imaginary writer born and created by a collective of authors, active on several blogs including giap) or Michela Murgia (the first blog Il Mio Sinis no longer visible). Their online writings, in part, have been edited by various publishers.1
«I am a blogger,” writes science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, “and a fan of snippets of narrative associated randomly, but it has always been clear to me that the content of a blog has a short life. It's like performing stand-up comedy.»2