Last Saturday, Tribune staff reporter Nathan Bierma kept a Weblog, or "blog," for 24 hours straight for "Blogathon 2002," an annual online charity event. Here is a diary of his experience with an online format rapidly entering the mainstream. His full Weblog can be found at www.nbierma.com/weblog.

Entry for 8 a.m.: This is the first time I've ever gone to work in my underwear. I'm sitting at my kitchen table in front of my laptop, trying to shake the sleep from my eyes. Outside my 18th floor window, it looks like the gloomiest day of the week, perfect for being glued to the computer screen as though on a never-ending shift in tech support. Today, I'm one of 211 bloggers from around the world operating under the assumption that our Internet habit will actually make the world a better place; collectively, we have over 2,000 sponsors pledging more than $50,000 to various charities should we successfully blog around the clock. The rules are that we have to update our blogs at least once every half hour. We'll be relying on loud music, naps and every imaginable FDA-approved stimulant to keep us awake.

8:30: My wife is leaving to meet a friend for the morning, illustrating the uneasy merger of blogging and the life of a newlywed. Actually, I usually keep my blog at work, sporadically posting links to interesting sites and articles I find, slathered together with my two cents worth of opinion. I also post reader e- mail and anecdotes from sources I trim from my articles for the paper. At the end of the week, I have a useful collection of links and article ideas, and I find it an invaluable exercise as a writer.

This kind of mix seems typical in blogging. Some adherents offer intensely personal, autobiographical diaries, sometimes full of excruciatingly private details. Others are more similar to 19th Century journal keepers, including any textual snippets that strike their fancy, spouting opinion as it comes to them. Some now feature audio and video streams, and many bloggers enjoy e-mail exchanges, message boards and chat rooms to have a sense of e-community.

8:58: One hour in, I'm finding that blogging on a flimsy dial-up connection is a formula for a computer crash. The process is not phone-line-friendly--first I log into Blogger.com (the free server most Blogathonners are using), then I type my entry into a window, highlighting the words I want to link to another site and then typing the link in a popup window, and then hit "publish." It sounds as though it should take seconds, but that's one of the myths about blogging. The top and bottom of the hour are passing faster than I thought.

9:29: I resolve that I'll try to keep the mundanities of my personal life to a minimum in my Weblog today. The words of Dr. Quentin Schultze, my mentor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., and author of the upcoming book "Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age," are ringing in my ears after he e-mailed them yesterday: "The problem is that bloggers typically do not see their role as contributing to a shared public life. Instead, they tend to blog as a matter of purely personal and often self-disclosing venting of personal feelings. . . . The best blogging is truly journalistic --aimed at contributing to the public good, not to personal catharsis...."

For better or worse, the blogging wave is cresting; five years ago, there were a only a handful of blogs out there; two years ago, a couple hundred, and this year, Blogger.com alone hosts more than 300,000. The word "blog," a contraction of "Weblog," is starting to appear in technical and business glossaries on the Web, and one of the original bloggers, Rebecca Blood, has just published "The Weblog Handbook,"one of the first books devoted to blogs. Even the decidedly unhip William Safire wrote about blogs in this week's New York Times Magazine, seemingly a sure sign that blogs have entered the orbit of the mainstream media.

10:11: I just picked up today's Tribune outside my door; I've been online for two hours, scanning this morning's headlines and compiling links to blogging news on the Web, and hadn't gotten to the paper yet -- which may speak to (a) newspapers' struggle to stay relevant in a digital age, (b) my lack of a life today, or (c) both.

My system of writing several hours' postings at once--e-mail snippets from friends overseas, interesting articles I've found-- and returning to the computer on the half hour to publish them is allowing me to maintain some semblance of a normal life.

1:02 p.m.: A late morning shower and cereal for lunch--five hours in, and my body clock has already succumbed to blog lag. I just got an e-mail back from Cat Connor, founder and manager of Blogathon, who's trying to keep up with her own blog while running the Blogathon announcements page and keeping an eye on us Blogathonners under her wing. Cat's blog features serial pictures and descriptions of little-known wonders of the world. The Dropa Stones, for example, found in caves near China, supposedly report through hieroglyphics the ancient crash of a spaceship that stranded small beings.

I interviewed Cat several days ago by phone. She's 37 and lives in Portland, Ore., working as a technical specialist for the U.S. Probation Service in the District of Oregon. Cat says she doesn't remember how or why she got started blogging, but she does remember hatching the idea for Blogathon a couple of years ago:

"I had just been blogging for a few months, and I tend to stay up all night anyway, so I thought, `Gee, why don't I just stay up all night and blog, and we'll see what happens,'" she said. "I blogged every 15 minutes for 24 hours."

1:30: Trying to summarize how Blogathon is going so far is like explaining a mob scene.Most of the couple-dozen blogs I have scanned today are indeed being updated every half hour, and most are drivel. (Insights include: "When our dear Kelly drinks a bit too much, she gets what we have now affectionatly [sic] termed the `Vodka Voice'" . . . "My youngest kitty has hiccups. I didn't know cats got hiccups, did you?" . . . "And now, for your boobelicious viewing pleasure . . . ") If nothing else, Blogathon has to set the record for number of pictures of cats being posted in a single day. The crude word "blog" itself suggests, by onomatopoeia, the verbal disgorging it denotes. Doesn't it just sound like a synonym for "barf"? "Oh, no, the dog just blogged all over the new rug!"

But in the case of a few refreshing exceptions, the range of creativity is striking.One blogger is writing serial biographies of medieval monks, another is watching and reviewing 10 movies in 24 hours, and one is doing a 24-hour music Webcast, promising no repeats. I've been asking for e-mail responses to questions I'm posting on my blog, but so far I've gotten only two, although my site has gotten more than a hundred hits. I'm staying away from the message board and chat room in an effort to preserve brain cells.

2:02: I figure I should get dressed. My wife's still out and I should look somewhat presentable by the time she gets home. I need to write some entries ahead so I can intermittently be useful around the apartment today, but my editors told me to write about how Weblogs are used in college course, and I'm still organizing my notes. Right now, Weblogs are mostly a tool and not a subject in college courses--several literature courses, for example, assign students to keep a Weblog of written responses to readings--but the announcement of the first course about Weblogs this fall at the University of California at Berkeley's journalism school has been taken by some devotees as an apocalyptic sign that blogs are being co-opted by the Establishment. Conversely, Paul Grabowicz , one of the course's professors, told me yesterday by phone, that it's actually a sign that the academy has lost its mind. Either way, it is a sign of things to come.

7:01: Thank goodness for supper. I haven't eaten anything all day except cereal so far, although I haven't been that hungry, given that I'm burning calories at the metabolic rate of the average three- toed sloth. Now I'll be subsisting on frozen pizza, macaroni and cheese, and cookies -- today I'm a personal trainer's worst sedentary nightmare.

9:31: I just went outside for the first time since this started. I've been inside in the air conditioning all day and failed to realize how sweltering the day was. I went to Starbucks with my wife for a caffeine jolt, the first time I've been there after sundown. Then we walked back down Division to State -- a thumping block of bars and yuppies, some of the drunker ones poking their heads out limo sunroofs. Coming inside to our apartment never felt so cool, or so quiet.

2:32 a.m.: My wife, drugged on allergy pills, hit the sack a couple hours ago after we finished watching "Rain Man," but strangely, I don't feel tired yet. I figured the middle of the night would be a good time to ramble in my blog about the changing nature of words in a digital age. How do words themselves, and our relationship with them, evolve with new technology? The danger of blogging is that the easy ability to do it ad infinitum means we stop caring about words themselves, and about the craft of writing. Judging from many blogs I've seen today, that is exactly what has happened.

OK, time to write some entries ahead and start to edit some excerpts for my story, so I don't have to do it when I'm comatose tomorrow.

5:37: Hunger is clawing at my insides; I'm afraid to eat anything for fear of a stomach ache sabotaging my desperately needed sleep. I just looked out the window and did a double take as I saw the sky brightening with the hint of Chicago's sunrise. Many bloggers seem to have mentally surrendered, posting incoherent mumblings every half hour about sleep deprivation. I, too, need a nap, see you at 6.

7:55: That's it. My 24 hours are up.I was awake for all but the last two, when sleepiness slammed into me like a truck, and I napped through my alarm for one of my assigned posting times. Good night (or morning), and I won't be blogging again until I'm back on a normal sleep schedule, and can unlock my wrists.

1:02 p.m.: A late morning shower and cereal for lunch--five hours in, and my body clock has already succumbed to blog lag. I just got an e-mail back from Cat Connor, founder and manager of Blogathon, who's trying to keep up with her own blog while running the Blogathon announcements page and keeping an eye on us Blogathonners under her wing. Cat's blog features serial pictures and descriptions of little-known wonders of the world. The Dropa Stones, for example, found in caves near China, supposedly report through hieroglyphics the ancient crash of a spaceship that stranded small beings.