Citizens of the New Digital Democracy

I know this article is HUGE... but it is a very very good one.
I believe you ll be as much surprised as I have been.
Sam

By LEV GROSSMAN

Leila
The Real Lonelygirl

Lonelygirl15 is one of the most viewed YouTube users of all time. She's young and pretty, with a complicated and absolutely compelling personal life. She's also a work of fiction—lonelygirl15 was created by two professional screenwriters and an actress from New Zealand, of all places. Well—to paraphrase Woody Allen—you can't have everything.

But that doesn't mean there aren't real lonelygirls out there. Take Leila. She's 20 and lives in Maryland, where she's studying to be a social worker. Her personal life really is complicated. Online she describes her ethnicity as Middle Eastern—she's half Lebanese—and her religion as Muslim. She struggles with depression and her crush on the guy at the 7-Eleven. You know—complicated.

Like lonelygirl15, Leila—she doesn't give out her last name—is a video blogger. Leila has posted 49 videos on YouTube under the user name pppppanic (that's five ps). She speaks directly into her webcam about her life, her opinions, her shifting moods, what she did that day. She says um and ah a lot. She has been known to drink and blog. Sometimes she doesn't speak at all, just runs words across the screen while melancholy singer-songwriter stuff plays in the background.

This isn't what YouTube was designed for—to be the public video diary of a generation of teens and twentysomethings. But sometimes the best inventions are the ones people find their own uses for. "You have people from all walks of life wanting to share a piece of their life with you," Leila says. "The feeling of togetherness is unbeatable. It's a beautiful thing."

There's certainly a narcissistic quality to video blogging—who doesn't love talking about him—or herself?—but the interest that bloggers take in their own lives is matched by their fascination with one another's. Leila no longer even bothers with TV. "I think people are bored with the mainstream media. I've been so caught up in watching other people's videos. I find it more entertaining. Much more real than the run-of-the-mill 'reality' show." Of course, in the post-lonelygirl15 era, there's always that question mark: How authentic are these faces on the computer screen? "I guess that's the only flaw," says Leila. "You can never really know the whole side of the story. You just get bits and pieces. You have to put blind faith in who the person is."

Lane Hudson

Lane Hudson first met former Florida Representative Mark Foley in a Washington bar in 1995. According to Hudson, Foley hit on him, unsuccessfully. He "made everyone, gay and straight, uncomfortable with his sexual advances," Hudson says. "Mark Foley's sleazy behavior was the worst-kept secret in Washington." In a different world, a less wired world, that would have been the end of the story.

Fast-forward a decade. On Sept. 24, 2006, Hudson posted on his blog Stop Sex Predators some amorous e-mails that Foley had sent to a congressional page. Other bloggers linked to them; soon the news networks were covering it, and some incriminating instant messages surfaced. Five days later Hudson was standing in line at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport when his cell phone and his BlackBerry went crazy. Mark Foley had resigned from Congress and dropped out of his re-election campaign. "My heart stopped," Hudson says. "I thought, Oh, my God, what have I gotten myself into?"

Now 29, Hudson is no political outsider. A lifelong Democrat from Charleston, S.C., he has worked for quite a few politicians, including John Kerry in his 2004 campaign. His feelings about what happened are complicated. "How can I not be so excited about how this turned the midterm elections?" says Hudson. He says he's surprised by the furor he started, although he has been around long enough to see the judo-like power even a tiny blog can have over a towering public figure—Trent Lott in 2002, for example, or Dan Rather in 2004. "Gotcha" moments like the Foley affair suggest the power of citizen journalists to root out hypocrisy in public life—Hudson isn't slow to point out that Foley chaired the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children Caucus—but also to create a kind of pseudo-Orwellian atmosphere of universal scrutiny. "The magnifying glass over people in public life is getting bigger and bigger," he says. "Politicians have got to start being themselves from the beginning, then they won't screw up so much. Stop pretending."

Hudson has become something of a celebrity in the Washington gay community, but the Foley affair hasn't exactly jump-started his career. He would love to end up as a political consultant or a political commentator. For now, he's started up a new blog called News for the Left. "Everyone told me, 'Oh, you're going to have so many opportunities now,'" he says. "'Everyone is going to offer you a job.' Well, nothing has materialized yet." If he sounds a little bitter, it's understandable. He lost his old job, with the Human Rights Campaign, when it came out that he had used company resources to blog about Foley. "I like to tell people that I'm the only person fired over this whole scandal," he says, "and I'm the person who told the truth."

Ali Khurshid

There aren't that many digital cameras floating around Karachi, Pakistan. Or computers, for that matter. Ali Khurshid started taking pictures with a disposable Kodak his parents gave him when he was 8. Since then he has graduated to fancy digital gear, but he has hung on to his low-tech attitude. "I love how the best pictures are usually taken with Holgas and other toy cameras," he says. "It just confirms my belief that the eye is supreme in taking a brilliant photo. The camera is secondary."

Khurshid, now 22, is an artist in a country that's known mostly, in the West at least, for its politics. He takes pictures "to make sure Pakistan's real beauty was put through," he says. "Not just the Pakistan that is shown in the media, always the center of attention for all the wrong reasons." Fortunately for Khurshid, he lives at a time when a solo shutterbug can have the same reach as a staff photographer at the New York Times.

Last year Khurshid began uploading his pictures to Flickr, a website where anyone can post his photos, view another's and swap comments and critiques. In all, there are more than 320 million photos on Flickr right now, about 200 of which are Khurshid's. He's a shy, polite man, but Khurshid is more than willing to wax romantic about the unifying, globalizing greatness of the Flickr community. "I love the world coming together in one place and just sharing all that's in it," he says. "I feel like I get to see the world like it really, truly is. Not by stereotyping a people or a country."

Even more than blogs or video-sharing sites, Flickr has the power to forge international bonds because it works in an entirely nonverbal medium. In fact, it works almost too well. Lavannya Goradia, a heavy Flickr user in Bangalore, India, finds it to be a bit of a lovefest. "I suppose it's a need to pat each other's backs, but that will always happen on a public forum," she says with a sigh. "I am still waiting for a day when I will get constructive criticism from someone here." As for Khurshid, he judges a picture's quality by its use of light and its spontaneity—"by the fact that one moment later it would have all gone," he says. "If someone can turn the ordinary into a dream, that person to me is a genius."

Megan Gill

When Megan Gill broke up with her boyfriend in November, it wasn't easy, but she gritted her teeth and did the inevitable: she changed her relationship status on her Facebook page. "I knew there would be a flurry of annoying questions about what happened that I didn't want to answer," she says. "But it was the fastest way for it to be over and done with. Besides, if these people are supposed to be your friends, and care about you, then why keep it a secret?"

Gill, 22, a senior at the University of Portland, has a lot of friends—708, according to her Facebook page. Facebook is a social-networking website that has become—for many people, some of whom are even old enough to see R-rated movies—a way of doing what people used to do by gossiping and talking on the phone, but a lot more efficiently and publicly. You can post photos on your Facebook page, personal information, news about yourself, anything at all. If you want to be Megan's friend or have pretty much any social interaction with her, you're going to want to go through Facebook. She's a double major in special education and English, so she's busy, but she checks in with the site at least twice a day, often 10 times that.

She'll post random updates to her profile just to let everyone know how she is: "Megan is so over first semester," "Megan is bummed about the election results," "Megan is tired of letting people down." As she puts it, "Facebook is my generation's way of picking up the telephone." It also does things the phone can't. "If you want to organize something," Megan says, "it's much simpler to send a message through Facebook than leave 20 voice mails." She doesn't know how anything got done on college campuses before Facebook.

Clearly, social-networking sites can create and maintain relationships that wouldn't have existed otherwise. But can they also attenuate relationships? Can Facebook be a way to avoid dealing with people face to face? Gill's answer has a whiff of intergenerational snobbism. "If anything, my friends and I are more in touch than was ever possible before," she says. "Older people had handwritten letters or called each other or whatever. I mean, really, we have a much more convenient way of doing things."

Lee Kelley

Captain Lee Kelley is 35 and hails from New Orleans. He spent 12 years in the Army without once being posted overseas, but that streak ended in June 2005 when he volunteered for service in Iraq and became a signal officer at Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi. He has always been a writer—he has noodled around with a novel, done some freelance journalism. But it turns out he had to go all the way to Iraq to find his voice.

Kelley needed a way to convey to his family—especially his kids—what he was going through. As he puts it, "something I could leave behind if, God forbid, something happened to me." That's why he started taking some nonstandard gear with him on patrol: a notebook. "Work could last either eight hours or 20," he says. "I began to look forward to sitting down to write at the end of it." When he went off duty, he would grab a shower and then bang out a story about what had just happened. "Even though I was writing down what had happened in Ramadi that day," he says, "this was sort of an escape from the violence all around me."

Kelley is a military blogger, or mil-blogger, one of at least 1,200 servicemen and -women who write about their lives online. So far his blog, Wordsmith At War, has logged more than 200,000 hits. Mil-bloggers are a different breed from the domestic blogger who keeps, say, a record of his cat's mood swings. Here's Kelley on driving in Ramadi: "You have to go around big potholes and chunks of concrete blocking part of the lane. It's not a good feeling, because all your training tells you that these are ideal sites for IEDs ... The threat is very real, and you can sense it in the air. You can't think 'it won't happen to us,' you have to assume it will. Yet we discuss it in the same tone we might talk about last night's football game."

If Vietnam was the first war to be televised, Iraq is the first to be blogged—and YouTubed. Kelley says he and other soldiers are disappointed by how the media portray the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. "If you looked at all the coverage, you'd think the whole thing is a huge mess waiting to blow up. I sometimes wonder where these reporters are. I guess it's not exciting enough to write about schools being built." Kelley and his fellow mil-bloggers aren't just writing letters to their families. Unlike generations of soldiers before them, they're writing for history. "If they are archived, blogs will give the best account of this war," Kelley says. "No one knows what's going on better than the soldiers on the front lines."

S.R. Sidarth

His full name is Shekar Ramanuja Sidarth. He usually goes by just his last name, or even just Sid. But most of the country knows him as "Macaca."

Sidarth, 21, is a senior at the University of Virginia, a double major in engineering and government. He spent the past few summers doing campaign grunt work, and 2006 was no different. He worked for James Webb's Senate campaign, tracking Webb's opponent, Virginia Senator George Allen, which means he videotaped Allen's public appearances. On Aug. 11, the tracker became the tracked. Allen singled him out in the crowd with a long, rambling riff. "This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca or whatever his name is, he's with my opponent," Allen said. And later: "So welcome, let's give a welcome to Macaca here! Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia!" The clip is on YouTube. One copy has been played more than 320,000 times.

It's ironic that Allen would welcome Sidarth to Virginia, since Sidarth has lived there his whole life and Allen grew up in California. It's also odd because until then, Allen and his staff had been nothing but friendly. "There's no way he didn't know who I was," Sidarth says. "He'd never addressed me before, and then to do so in this context�it was humiliating. That it was in a racial context made it worse." The crowd cheered, but Sidarth believes it was only because they had to. "It was an unfair indictment by Allen of the people there," Sidarth says. "They would have applauded no matter what he said." Later, some audience members went over to Sidarth to apologize.

It was definitely not Sidarth's idea to put the clip on YouTube. "Getting drawn out into the limelight was really surprising," he says, and he means it. He's an intensely private person, and he declined to answer quite a few of the questions put to him by TIME. He's focused on keeping his head down and getting into law school. "Ultimately I'd hope people wouldn't pay as much attention to things like this, instead caring more about who can serve the country or the state better," he says. "Of course," he adds, "character plays into that. And this event reflected on Allen's character."

Waz and Lenny

To watch Warren Murray, 34, and Leanne White, 32, make sponge cake is to hear the silent screams of Julia Child's dear, departed spirit. About 45 seconds in, they add two tablespoons of butter instead of two teaspoons, and it just goes downhill from there. Waz (as Warren is known) and Lenny (that's Leanne—it can be difficult to keep husband and wife straight) aren't professional chefs. They're copy editors at the Guardian newspaper in London. But their ham-fistedness in the kitchen is exactly what makes them great hosts.

Their show isn't a conventional cooking show. It's a video podcast called Crash Test Kitchen, and it's their sheer fallibility, their humanity, that makes the thing work. Waz and Lenny don't have the wizardly air of a Mario Batali or a Martha Stewart. "We have always tried to steer clear of the temptation to make it a Web version of a TV cooking show, with the old here's-one-we-prepared-earlier fakery and everything always turning out right," Waz says. Lenny says, "We try to be honest in our portrayal of cooking, so ordinary people feel brave enough to have a go at it." The sponge-cake episode is "probably the unintentionally funniest episode we've ever done," Waz says. "The thing was like trying to eat a sofa cushion." The episode ends with Waz furtively eating the ruined cake out of the trash. Even culinary daredevil Anthony Bourdain might have been scared to try that.

They don't sugarcoat the stresses of the marital kitchen, either. "The bickering and disputes between Lenny and me seem to be part of the appeal," Waz says, "so we mostly leave that stuff in." The Web is a two-way medium, and their fans offer both culinary advice and unsolicited marriage counseling. One viewer called Lenny a "nagging housewife." ("I took it waaaay too seriously and was really cut up," she says.) Some viewers are even more assertive. "There have been some not-so-subtle come-ons towards Lenny," Waz says, "and we've been asked whether we will be filming future episodes in the nude."

Harriet Klausner

Without the web, Harriet Klausner would be just an ordinary human being with an extraordinary talent. Instead she is one of the world's most prolific and influential book reviewers. At 54, Klausner, a former librarian from Georgia, has posted more book reviews on Amazon.com than any other user—12,896, as of this writing, almost twice as many as her nearest competitor. That's a book a day for 35 years.

Klausner isn't paid to do this. She's just, as she puts it, "a freaky kind of speed-reader." In elementary school, her teacher was shocked when Klausner handed in a 31⁄2-hour reading-comprehension test in less than an hour. Now she goes through four to six books a day. "It's incomprehensible to me that most people read only one book a week," she says. "I don't understand how anyone can read that slow."

Klausner is part of a quiet revolution in the way American taste gets made. The influence of newspaper and magazine critics is on the wane. People don't care to be lectured by professionals on what they should read or listen to or see. They're increasingly likely to pay attention to amateur online reviewers, bloggers and Amazon critics like Klausner. Online critics have a kind of just-plain-folks authenticity that the professionals just can't match. They're not fancy. They don't have an agenda. They just read for fun, the way you do. Publishers treat Klausner as a pro, sending her free books—50 a week—in hopes of getting her attention. Like any other good critic, Klausner has her share of enemies. "Harriet, please get a life," someone begged her on a message board, "and leave us poor Amazon customers alone."

Klausner is a bookworm, but she's no snob. She likes genre fiction: romance, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, horror. One of Klausner's lifetime goals—as yet unfulfilled—is to read every vampire book ever published. "I love vampires and werewolves and demons," she says. "Maybe I like being spooked." Maybe she's a little bit superhuman herself.

Wang Xiaofeng

"Chinese people don't do irony like Israelis and the English," says Wang Xiaofeng. "They don't have that making-fun-of-yourself gene." In China the blogosphere is dominated by the dronings of millions of earnest diarists, and there are still many things that can't be said in the mainstream media. Wang, however, enjoys making fun of art, culture, politics—everything that Chinese people are supposed to hold dear. Serious critiques of social problems or political leaders can still be dangerous in China, but serious isn't Wang's style. He might be the most respected blogger in China, precisely because he respects almost nothing.

Wang's site gets about 12,000 visitors a day. It's plastered with pictures of the Simpsons—Wang is a fan of the show, and he likes to think he looks like Bart—but there's also a bit of Borat in him too. He has posted fabricated interviews and deliberately misleading surveys. Some people call him a cynic or a liberal; some people call him names that are shocking even by online standards of incivility.

But labels don't really fit Wang. He doesn't like isms and movements and refuses to join groups or parties. He doesn't have some big, catchall solution. "There's nothing that can be done about a lot of things in China," he says. "Most of what people do on the Internet is complain. At least we have a place to blow off some steam."

Tila Tequila

Tila Nguyen was 1 year old when she moved to the U.S. from Singapore, but she's Vietnamese by heritage and blond by choice. As for what she does for a living, there isn't really a word for it yet. Nguyen, 25, who goes by Tila Tequila professionally, is some combination of rapper, singer, model, blogger and actress. But what she mostly is is the queen of the massive social-networking website MySpace.

Nguyen—or, oh, fine, Tequila—may be the least lonely girl on the Internet. She has more than 1.5 million MySpace friends. Her MySpace profile has been viewed more than 50 million times. Her self-published single, the profane and attitudinous F___ Ya Man, now playing on her MySpace page, has logged 13 million spins. (To listen to it is to hear the sound track of a million parents' dreams dying.) She gets somewhere from 3,000 to 5,000 new friend requests every day. She is something entirely new, a celebrity created not by a studio or a network but fan by fan, click by click, from the ground up on MySpace.

Before she hit it big, Nguyen had posed for Playboy.com—its first Asian Cyber Girl of the Month—and modeled for car shows and auto mags and formed girl bands. But her big break came three years ago when MySpace founder Tom Anderson invited Nguyen over to his new site. She had spent plenty of time on websites like Friendster, but her outsize, confrontational personality kept getting her kicked off. She says Friendster booted her five times. "I joined MySpace in September 2003," Nguyen recalls. "At that time no one was on there at all. I felt like a loser while all the cool kids were at some other school. So I mass e-mailed between 30,000 and 50,000 people and told them to come over. Everybody joined overnight."

Pre-Tila, your MySpace friends were mostly people you actually knew. Post-Tila, the biggest game on the site became Who Has the Most Friends, period, whoever they might be. "Once they saw how I worked it, everyone did what I did and started promoting themselves," she says. Not everybody would call this a change for the better; there are those who might even prefer a friendly community to a global popularity contest. Not Nguyen. Over the next couple of years she turned her online persona into a full-fledged business. "This is my job," she says. "That's how you maintain your popularity and keep it alive."

Nguyen clearly grasps the logic of Web 2.0 in a way that would make many ceos weep. She sells Tila posters, calendars, a clothing line of hoodies and shirts. She has been on the cover of British Maxim. She has a single due to be released online. She has a cameo in next summer's Adam Sandler movie. She has four managers, a publicist and a part-time assistant. It's hard to know how to read the rise of Tila Tequila. Does she represent the triumph of a new democratic starmaking medium or its crass exploitation for maximum personal gain? It's not clear that even Tila knows. But she knows why it works. "There's a million hot naked chicks on the Internet," she says. "There's a difference between those girls and me. Those chicks don't talk back to you."

Smosh

On Nov. 28, 2005, a video was uploaded to YouTube. It shows two American River College students, Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox, lip-synching to the Pok�mon theme song. Their lip-synching is completely earnest. They're really into it. They're gonna catch 'em all. This video would go on to be viewed more than 17 million times. For six months it was the most watched video on all of YouTube. It's enough to shake your faith in a new medium.

Padilla and Hecox go by the joint nickname Smosh, and they are the Saturday Night Live of YouTube. Their videos are insanely popular. Their genius, if that's the right word for it, is in their unswerving, unwinking commitment to idiocy. It may also be in their shaggy haircuts. (Smosh is some kind of inside joke that has something to do with some friend of theirs talking about mosh pits ... Never mind.) Since Pok�mon, they have done other theme songs, including those for Power Rangers and Mortal Kombat. They have branched out into sketch comedy as well. (Typical setup: a friendly game of Battleship gone horribly, horribly awry.)

So far, Padilla and Hecox haven't been able to monetize their viral notoriety on any significant scale, although they do sell ads on Smosh.com. In fact, for Padilla and Hecox, being Internet celebrities is a lot like being normal people. "Our girlfriends hate that we're so busy," Hecox says. "The videos take up a lot of time, and we're working on several projects simultaneously. Overall, it really hasn't affected our lives." The dream is to end up like Andy (Lazy Sunday) Samberg, who went from online comedy to the real SNL. But not everybody can live the dream, not even in the ultra-democratic YouTube era. "Our future is wide open," Padilla says. "There seems to be a huge potential in what we're doing, so we'll just keep doing what we're doing. And if nothing comes out of it—well, whatever."

Kamini

Kamini grew up in a tiny town deep in the French countryside called Marly-Gomont. He stood out, in part because everybody stands out in Marly-Gomont—pop. 432—but partly because Kamini is black. There aren't a lot of black people in Marly-Gomont.

Kamini (who keeps his last name private) wanted to be a hip-hop artist. It's a long way from Marly-Gomont to South Central L.A., but he recorded a song and shot a video with a friend. Total budget: 100 euros. The name of the song was Marly-Gomont, and in it Kamini raps about what he knows. "I couldn't rap about 'bitches' and 'hos' and do that whole gangsta thing," he says, "because it's not true. It's not my life."

Instead he raps about cows and tractors and soccer. "In Marly-Gomont," the song goes (it's in French), "there's no concrete/ 65 is the average age around here/ One tennis court, one basketball court." The video shows Kamini raisin' the roof with the village elders, who obviously think he's hilarious. But Kamini also raps about racism and being different: "I wanted to revolt, except that there, there's nothing to burn./ There's just one bus for the high school, same for the community center,/ Not worth going and burning a neighbor's car,/ Cuz they don't have them, they've all got mopeds."

On Aug. 30, Kamini and another friend put the video online and cold e-mailed some record companies to tell them about it. The response wasn't exactly a feeding frenzy. But an intern at one of the companies posted a link to the video on a bulletin board. "It's a site that sells custom-print T shirts," Kamini says, shaking his head. "It doesn't even have anything to do with music!" By the end of the day, nobody on the website was talking about T shirts. Everyone was talking about Kamini.

The video spread to YouTube and its French equivalents, WAT.tv and Dailymotion.com. Thousands of people watched it. Kamini started getting requests to appear on radio shows. In mid-October, without having toured or even played a single gig, Kamini signed a record deal with RCA for Marly-Gomont and two albums. He was a rap star by popular proclamation. He had paid his dues virally. "Everything has happened in two months," says Kamini, who hasn't quit his part-time job as a nurse. "Look at me, sitting here at a luxury hotel being interviewed. How did all this happen?"

The answer is that the people can make their own stars no—no auditions, no promotions. It's like American Idol, but everywhere, all the time. Though it's worth noting that the bands that have broken through online—OK Go, the Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Gnarls Barkley—are a lot more interesting than the bland standards belters on American Idol.

Some rules haven't changed. People respond to talent and authentic emotion, and Marly-Gomont has them. "I'm not the only one on the Internet with a video," Kamini says. "But Marly-Gomont is different. It shows my real nature, and people respond to that. Materially speaking, it's the Internet that made it popular. But behind that, emotionally speaking, are people."

Simon Pulsifer

There is a list on Wikipedia of who has written or edited the most entries, and for a long time the volunteer at the top of this list was a user known as SimonP. His real name is Simon Pulsifer. He is 25, unemployed and lives in Ottawa.

Pulsifer has authored somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 Wikipedia articles and edited roughly 92,000 others. "I've actually fallen to No. 2 in terms of edits," says Pulsifer, who's tall and a little overweight. "But it's a fairly meaningless measure, so I don't feel too bad." He first heard about Wikipedia in 2001, but it wasn't until 2003 that he got serious about contributing. That was the year he got a really, really boring summer job. At that point Pulsifer got "superinvolved" with Wikipedia.

Why would somebody donate so much of his time? "There's a certain addictive element," he says. Pulsifer was still in school, and writing Wikipedia entries turned out to be a handy way of studying for exams. While taking a Russian-history class, he wrote entries about the czars. He has chipped in pieces on African history and biblical studies. Some he wrote "off the top of my head." Others took research. "It's a combination of things," Pulsifer says matter-of-factly. "It's great to see your writing published online—it's not that easy to create things that are read by millions of people." He also liked the prestige that came with being a major player on Wikipedia. Granted, that prestige was mostly among other major Wikipedia players, but still.

Wikipedia isn't a paradise of user-generated content. It has plenty of errors in it, and omissions, although at this point it's considerably larger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Some people enjoy vandalizing it—erasing or falsifying entries. Earlier this year the entire staff of Congress was barred from Wikipedia for sabotaging one another's profiles. In a way it's as much a litmus test of human nature as it is a reference tool.

As for Pulsifer, he's quietly scaling back his compulsive Wikipediation. He no longer whizzes through 250 edits a day. "To a degree, I'm moving on," he says. He has had a couple of job offers; perhaps a well-paying gig will come along that will allow him to leave his parents' home, where he resides. No doubt a new Wikipedian will arrive to take his place. There are plenty of boring summer jobs out there.

Kim Hye Won

Kim Hye won doesn't look like a journalist, which is to say that she doesn't look like Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday. Kim looks like a 45-year-old Korean housewife, which is what she is. More and more journalists are starting to look like her.

Kim is a citizen reporter for a South Korean website called OhMyNews. There is nothing quite like OhMyNews in the U.S., or not yet. Imagine if the Washington Post were produced entirely by bloggers. OhMyNews is written mostly by a floating staff of 47,000 amateur journalists all over the country. The site gets 1 million to 1.5 million page views a day.

OhMyNews was founded in 2000, after decades of authoritarian rule had left the South Korean media deeply co-opted. The website was a revelation for Kim. "I felt the mainstream media was one-sided," she says. "But after I began to read OhMyNews, I found out there were different views and perspectives available." Kim read the site for about a year before she tried her first piece, about her son, who was studying for exams, and her husband, who was dealing with corporate burnout. The headline: DADDY'S DEPRESSED, SON'S TAKING TESTS, AND I'M WORRIED. She was a natural.

Over the past three years, Kim has written about 60 pieces for OhMyNews. The site awarded her Citizen Reporter of the Year for 2005. "Korean housewives become nameless after marriage," Kim says. "They are often just called someone's wife or someone's mother. I finally found my name through OhMyNews."

Blake Ross

When Blake Ross was 15, he moved from Florida to California to take an internship with Netscape. This was a rather quixotic thing for a 15-year-old to do, because Netscape was on life support at the time—its Web browser was getting the stuffing beat out of it by Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Netscape had one thing going for it: it was open source. Most software is developed exactly the way you think it is: you pay a bunch of geeks in cubicles to write it. Open-source software works differently. You release a rough draft onto the Internet, and anybody can open the hood and go to work on it—streamline it, fix bugs, suggest features, pretty up the interface, whatever. The people who write open-source software "aren't necessarily professionals," Ross says. "It gives you a breadth of experience outside of just computer geeks. It also means the people are truly dedicated because there's no payday." Open source is as much a community, even a subculture, as it is an approach to creating software.

In 2002 Ross and some colleagues decided to start up a new version of Netscape, one that would chuck all the fancy features and go for simplicity, stability and speed. They called the new browser Firefox, and it was a monster hit. When Firefox 2.0 appeared this October, it clocked 2 million downloads in the first 24 hours. Web surfers are switching to Firefox at the rate of 7 million a month.

There's something both very American and very anticapitalist about the open-source approach. It's about including everyone in the process, democratically, but it's also about giving away the product and sharing your trade secrets with the world; the more people who have access to your intellectual property the better. "I'm not in this for the money. I truly love it," Ross says. "I could never see myself sitting in a cubicle." Right now Ross, a world-weary 21, is taking time off from Stanford to work on a new project called Parakey. Parakey is top secret for now, but it will be an open-source project too. So Ross will make sure you hear about it.

Source: The Time
Citizens of the New Digital Democracy

Reported by Jeremy Caplan and Kathleen Kingsbury/New York, Susan Jakes/Beijing, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, Grant Rosenberg/Paris and Bryan Walsh/Seoul