"A person who publishes a book appears wilfully in public with his pants down," wrote Edna St Vincent Millay. By taking the publisher out of the loop, the Internet makes it much easier for anyone to parade around semi-naked.
The start of a new year is when many people take up diary-keeping, but why would people decide to publish chronicles of their inner lives on the Internet for millions to read? Online diarists want readers. If they wanted privacy, they would keep their journals under the bed.
The homepage of the Open Pages webring, one of the Internet's first groups of online diaries, explains: "No-one's life is insignificant, no matter where they are, what they do, how old they are . . . anyone's experiences can bring something to our lives - thought, perspective, laughs, tears".
According to Kymm Zuckert, the site administrator, people like reading about others' day-today existences, especially if their lives are different. "Oh, so this is what it's like to be an American woman living in Italy with your Italian husband. This is what it's like to be an architect in New York."
Describing itself as a community, the Open Pages webring has over 900 online journals, linking "diverse lives - geeks, artists, believers and survivors, parents, addicts and more". Diarist.Net indexes more than 1,900. Open Diary, set up as a project for people to keep public but anonymous journals on the Net, developed into a vibrant community (claiming over 14,000 diaries) when readers began to post their comments on the entries.
Relationships develop as readers respond to journal entries. Readers support the mother who is waiting to hear if her son is going to jail, comfort a woman whose husband has cancer, and laugh sympathetically at a young man's failed romantic exploits.
One Open Pages diarist is Steve, who says he is "an ordinary man, husband and father, always on the look-out to catch simple things being extraordinary". He writes a journal called Late Night Snacks at the end of each day.
"I feel more compelled than I would otherwise to explain clearly the events and feelings that are subjects of its entries. The result, of course, is that I gain a much better understanding of myself and why I reacted to the day as I did. For reasons I've never understood I don't think that would happen for me with a private paper journal."
"Keeping a diary on paper means being in a dialogue with yourself, but keeping it on the Internet means being in dialogue with others," says Robert Shrag, professor of communication at North Carolina State University.
Steve enjoys receiving email comments on his entries: "Knowing that my writing made someone laugh, or caused someone to remember something dear but long-forgotten, creates a hard-to-describe but very good feeling."
John Bailey, a 60-year-old English writer ("strictly amateur at present") puts short stories, photographs and poems on his diary website. "I enjoy telling stories of my small world and audiences don't come much wider. The life of a writer tends to be solitary. You work in isolation and it may be months before you'll get a reaction. My online journal generates a reaction within hours and that's nice."
Privacy can be a problem. Some diarists don't seem to care who reads, use their real names and probably censor a lot of their entries. For many, though, it's the stranger-on-a-train syndrome - you can confess all to a stranger, but would feel embarrassed if your family, colleagues or friends knew your innermost thoughts.
Maggie None, whose digital diary, Lucid Dreams, includes a cast list and photos of her friends, commented, in the US magazine Personal Journaling: "If someone I know found my journal and started reading it on a regular basis, I'd feel uncomfortable about it and ask them not to read it." Another journaller, Blue Raindrops, somewhat strangely, asks people who know her not to read the diary, and if they do so, not to talk about what they have read.
For a break from personal angst, try the online diary of Linux kernel hacker Alan Cox. "Fed Linus a few 2.3.x patches but mostly spent the day either in bed or in the company of human beings eating pizza and talking. . " (December 18th) is about as personal as this one gets.
In Why Web Journals Suck, a lively essay criticising the quality of writing in web journals and offering guidelines for potential scribblers, long-time journaller Diane Patterson points out: "If you put a disclaimer on your pages like, `Friends and family: stay out, this is private,' you have just put a big `You better read this!' on your page."
Open Diary: - www.opendiary.com
Open Pages: - www.hedgehog.net/op
Diarist.Net: - www.diarist.net
Why Web Journals Suck: - www.spies.com/diane/Diary/websuck.html
John Bailey: - www.btinternet.com/john.bailey
Steve: - www.late-night-snacks.com
Maggie None: - www.lucids.com
Blue Raindrops: - www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Pointe/3685/journal.html
Alan Cox's diary: - www.linux.org.uk/diary/
For more online journals and information, go to www.webring.com and enter "journal" in the search prompt