Beyond the notice of all but the most ardent Pittsburgh Web surfers, bloggers have crept into the city, linking to this story or that, posting updates about their night on the town, uploading photos of their young daughters and espousing their political views to pretty much anyone who cares to read them.

	Matt Freed, Post-Gazette Richard Engel, who works at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, has been keeping a Web log since 2001. Click photo for larger image.

Web loggers, or bloggers for short, are that new breed of armchair documentarian, chronicling the day's events -- politics, sports, music, arts, family, dating life, anything -- on Web sites that are updated daily, or several times a week. But unlike a newspaper Web site, which brings a new front page with new stories each day, yesterday's blog musings generally aren't wiped out by the next day's postings. Scroll down, and see what was on the blogger's mind yesterday, last week and last month.

Across the country, bloggers are emerging to a greater degree in political and journalistic circles than elsewhere. Reporters with their own blogs tracked the war in Iraq, and they will no doubt be dispatched to Haiti shortly. They are monitoring the Democratic primaries and the coming general election. Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post's media watchdog, recently began posting his Web column in blog format, updates stacked one on top of the other.

Politicians, led by one-time Democratic front-runner Howard Dean, have in the past year embraced blogs as a way of cheaply spreading their message without it first being filtered through traditional media outlets. They've also used them to raise money -- much of the former Vermont governor's advertising cache was raised online, through the Web log. Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards have their own blogs, too.

Among Pittsburgh's diverse group of writers -- a software designer, a freelance photographer and, most recently, a law professor -- blogs tend to serve as personal diaries, or focus on regional issues and events, linking to stories posted at other newspapers' and magazines' Web sites. No Pittsburgh blog has gained the national notoriety of, say, Andrew Sullivan's "Daily Dish" or Jim Romenesko's "Obscure Store."

But the bloggers have been here longer than we suspected. As a community, they tend to get their start among young hipsters with technological savvy, and there are few places in the country with more young, tech-savvy hipsters than Carnegie Mellon University.

"I would guess that, because of Carnegie Mellon's presence, they were here as early as they were anywhere else," said Richard Engel, one of Pittsburgh's top bloggers. He keeps the "Iron City Web Log," a site that started out as a family headquarters where relatives could retrieve photos of his daughter, now 3.

Now, it's morphed into an online diary where Engel tersely discusses John Kerry's primary success, local film festivals, his wife's new short story collection, Pittsburgh's new Ethiopian restaurant, Al Franken's new radio show and Bill Murray's pouting fit at the Oscars. Engel rarely elaborates on any one item, instead linking to related stories on other Web sites.

He's been keeping his Web log, with varying levels of enthusiasm, since summer 2001. Before he landed a job with Pittsburgh Filmmakers six months ago, he was jobless for about a year and didn't spend much time in front of the computer as a result. "It's easier now," he said.

His blog gets about 70 visits a day, half from friends and regular visitors, and the rest from folks who stumble across the site after doing a Google search for Iron City beer. Mostly, his blog links are topical -- "news, some stuff about film, some stuff about media, some stuff about music," said Engel, 34, who lives in Friendship and did some freelance writing and photography before the filmmakers gig.

"I'm not writing about my sick dog ... I don't really know people who do that."

Except for Madge, otherwise known as Megan Dietz, a Mount Oliver software programmer by day and a blogger by night. In her free time, she makes handbags out of laminated album covers and sings Neil Diamond tunes with her band, "Louie and the Humans."

She does not, for the record, own a dog, never mind a sick one, but her "madgeworld" blog is personal, rather than topical. "Here's what I did yesterday, here's how much I drank," the 31-year-old said. "Everything I put out there has to pass the mom test -- my mom needs to be able to read it and not be freaked out."

A typical "madgeworld" blog entry reads like this: "I myself am quite happy today because I got my new (used) guitar! It's an Epiphone Riviera, sheer red and very beautiful. I played it a little at lunch and it sounds really lovely -- crunchy or smooth depending on how you like it. You can feel the neck resonating as you play, too, almost like when you're humming and your lips buzz and get all ticklish."

Her Web site started as a promotional tool to show off her handbags, but last year she started recording her business adventures -- and plenty of other adventures -- on the Web. Like lots of other personal bloggers who avoid political issues, Dietz struggles at times to make her life seem interesting to complete strangers.

"You go through phases where you're really, really productive, and you go through phases where you're waiting for something to happen," she said.

Pittsburgh's "blogosphere," as it's called, is a tightly knit group, and most of the authors visit each other's pages at least occasionally. Mike Madison, a technology law professor at Pitt who moved to the city from the San Francisco area five years ago, began blogging just at the beginning of this year, and two months into his gig he's familiar with most of the Pittsburgh Web logs. "It's a relatively compact group," he said.

His site, "Pittsblog," deals with regional politics, academic issues, funky new art openings and anything else that interests him. "For me, it's experimental, discovering how people find you, how people react to you," said Madison, 42, of Mt. Lebanon. "It's a feedback process."

It's also a process of discovering precisely what niche Web logs can fill in the local media arena, guiding discussions on issues of personal interest that perhaps are glossed over by television, treated briefly by daily newspapers and ignored altogether by the city's alternative weekly mags.

He acknowledges that what he's doing can't be classified as journalism -- his mother and a grandfather were both reporters -- but you don't have to be a journalist to offer your two cents.

"The idea that someone could come to my blog and read it is maybe naive optimism on my part," Madison said.

"But if it's worthwhile, people will eventually find it, and people will talk about it."

Politically, he said, he expects that blogs will eventually have a greater impact on state and local politics than on national contests. If you want a daily dose of John Kerry, you don't have to visit his blog, even though he has one -- you can simply read the paper. But if you want to get the latest on U.S. Rep. Pat Toomey's campaign to unseat Sen. Arlen Specter, you might be better off visiting toomeyblog.com.

John Riegert, the man behind the "Yinzer Mullet" Web log, steps into local politics on a daily basis. Unabashedly anti-Tom Murphy, Riegert and his log keep a daily countdown of the days remaining until Pittsburgh's next mayoral election. Just over 600 days to go, for those wondering.

"Well, you gotta think ahead," Riegert, 35, said.

His blog was born two years ago, after he made a questionable fashion choice. "I grew a mullet just to grow one, and I wanted to showcase it," he said. The daily hair updates turned into regular briefings on Pittsburgh's arts scene, social issues, political figures and offbeat stories. Riegert, a stay-at-home dad from Lawrenceville who studied art at Carnegie Mellon, redesigned the site after his first child was born.

Recently, he returned from a trip to San Francisco, whose blogging community is more sophisticated than Pittsburgh's.

Which is just fine, he said. "I don't know that Pittsburgh should try to emulate other cities or trends. They should create their own Pittsburgh voice."