By Burt Lum

Around a campfire in the middle of the night, I find fascination in the gathering of people to tell stories.

The warmth of the fire and the crackle of the wood offer the right setting. The interaction between those elements and the people create the magic.

It might not be as romantic, but similar events are taking place in the Internet. One such place is at www.hawaiistories.com.

The fire behind Hawaii Stories did not start over night. Almost three years ago, I wrote about Ryan Ozawa and his project called the Diarist at www.diarist.net. This led me to his blog site at www.lightfantastic.org/imr/. His latest Web incarnation is Hawaii Stories, in which the concept of Web-logging is extended into the community.

For the newly initiated, blogging is a term for Web log or Web journal. Usually this is managed as a personal journal that preserves the writer's daily scribbling.

With the growth of the online blogging (from Web-logging) community, Hawaii Stories offers an environment for bloggers to now interact with each other and the broader Internet at large.

As Ryan describes it, "Essentially, Hawaii Stories is a a talk-story spot for the Information Age, a gathering place where Web-savvy Islanders and Islanders at heart share their thoughts — be they random epiphanies, poignant observations, anecdotes, rants, questions, lyrics, poems or anything else."

I find interest in the coming together of people to express themselves. Here, the topics of conversation run the gamut from the trivial to the profound. You can follow threaded discussions on Andy Anderson's pineapple lottery and Jeremy Harris' troubled political life. Ther's a thread on why some digital cameras don't have off switches and an upcoming picnic gathering.

I am curious if these folks are as verbose in person as they are online.

A note about the software that makes this online community blog possible: At www.movabletype.org, you'll find full-featured enabling software that is freely available for personal use. Is that great or what! ;-)

Burt Lum is one click away at burt@brouhaha.net.