Gossip columns have appeared everywhere from the local rag to the grocery store trash to the elite magazines. People love to talk about other people. Thus, it should come of no surprise that there’s a whole genre of blogging dedicated exclusively to gossip.

Once again, i have to ponder how digital searchability will affect the social impact of this new form. While we may one day forget the atrocious outfit of some celebrity as reported in Vanity Fair, how will we judge those famous folks as a collection of their appearance in gossip blogs? Needless to say, i imagine that most gossip is going to be slanted, and most likely in the derrogatory direction. What happens when most of our impressions are based on negative hearsay?

Blog certainly create fun new ways to screw with social dynamics…

A New York State of Blog
By WARREN ST. JOHN

“About half past 9,” one such account began, “my blurry vision suddenly snapped into focus on the pair of big, dark sunglasses on the small, immaculately dressed woman in the center of the elevator lobby. She removed her glasses and said `Hello, dah-ling’ to a well-dressed middle-aged gentleman walking into the lobby behind me.”

This is common fare from www.gawker.com, a voyeuristic, media-obsessed, gossipy and occasionally creepy blog that chronicles what Ms. Spiers calls “the darker Manhattan-centric themes: class warfare as recreational sport; pathological status obsession; and the complete, total, and wholly unapologetic embrace of decadence.” Don’t bother accusing Ms. Spiers’s site of being small-minded or superficial; she says so herself.

“Gawker is devoted exclusively to frivolity and excess,” she writes on the frequently asked questions page under the query, “Are you as shallow as you appear?” While Ms. Spiers confesses that she occasionally has serious thoughts, “You will never see these on Gawker,” she writes.

Ms. Spiers is the ringleader of a sort of New York School of bloggers, a group of Web writers who use the city as a backdrop for their musings, who link to one another’s sites and who gather occasionally to drink cocktails in the land beyond the keyboard. Jonathan Van Gieson, a 29-year-old theatrical producer from Brooklyn who blogs at www.jonathanvangieson.com, called it “a virtual literary clique.”

Other New York School bloggers include Lockhart Steele, who writes almost exclusively about the Lower East Side – he calls it “microtravel writing” – at www.lockhartsteele.com. Bazima, a 30-year-old graphic designer from Brooklyn, writes candidly about dating in New York at bazima.surreally.com. The Gothamist (www.gothamist.com) is a group blog about life in New York, and NYC Bloggers (www.nycbloggers.com) is a collection of more than 2,100 blogs about New York, organized by the writers’ proximity to the city’s subway stations.

Choire Sicha, 31, an art dealer and blogger (www.choiresicha.com) who describes himself as “the gay one in this posse,” said the city’s blogging craze has produced “a bunch of stealthy Joan Didions wandering all over downtown.”

“We’re professional reviewers,” he said. “I don’t just go to a restaurant anymore. I go with a critical eye.”

Ms. Spiers started blogging while an equity analyst for hedge funds. She wrote a personal blog for a few months, which had “maybe 10 readers,” she said. She quit her job in finance and started Gawker in mid-December 2002 as a first step toward a writing career. In addition to her “Elevator Chronicles,” based on comings and goings at Conde Nast, Ms. Spiers writes about celebrities – sightings are filed under the heading “Gawker Stalker” – and she occasionally coins words from famous names. On Gawker, to “zeta-jones” means to gorge oneself on large quantities of food; to “zellwegger” someone is to con him into buying you an expensive dinner.

Nick Denton, the head of Gawker Media, which publishes the site, said it generated a part-time salary for Ms. Spiers. By selling advertising around her tart prose, he hopes one day to earn a profit. He described her world view as “that of a slightly cynical but enthusiastic outsider.”

“She’s smart enough to plug herself in, but has the freshness and naivety of a good Web log,” Mr. Denton said, adding that Ms. Spiers was “still amazed by things that a traditional newspaper might think of as boring or repetitive.”

Ms. Spiers said her site averaged 30,000 hits a day – not exactly Drudge Report numbers, which topped 7 million on Friday – but when she has a joke that gets passed around the net, like her riff on zeta-jonesing, the numbers can climb to over 100,000.

On her site, Ms. Spiers writes that the goal of Gawker is to get her “invitations to better parties.” But there has been at least one unintended if mundane consequence: “It’s allowed me to have a freelance career,” she said.