With the proliferation of life-streaming occurring all over the Internet, an increasing number of people have embedded their lives online via videos, pictures and words, creating an alternate Universe in which to connect. Armed with tailor-made online personas, we find community and discover a sense of belonging where once we felt isolated; we collect tribes and secure friends that span the globe where once we were reliant upon the neighborhoods we lived in. The explosion of online interaction has led to great success for marketers and advertisers engaged with these aggregated communities as well as the artist, simply sharing for the sake of it.

For Raymond Johnson, prolific blogger and freelance writer living in Chicago, IL., what once began as a way to document a major life transition, a gender transition to be specific, his blog Recommended for libraries serving a trendy population has turned into an encyclopedia of a life captured in cyberspace with enough posts to fill 45,000 pdf pages, as he recently discovered when compiling nearly 7 years of his blog.

“My blog entries have been quasi-clips, so I've landed a few small writing gigs too, like book reviews, “ he shares one Sunday afternoon via Gchat from his Logan Square apartment in Chicago. “Or even adult movie reviews for a brief time! But that got tedious and time-consuming, actually. My blog nowadays is not solely about my gender, of course. After the first year, I started to write about everything else in my life too.”

Johnson has parlayed his blogging efforts into writing gigs with several independent and national publications as well as landing jobs authoring book reviews and movie reviews. The blogs and daily submissions paved the way for Johnson to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in 2002; the serialized story became the manuscript which awarded him admission to graduate school at Antioch University in 2004.

In between sips of coffee with his favorite Stevie Wonder album playing in the background, Johnson reflects on the evolution of the blogosphere. “I think one thing that makes the Internet a different phenomenon is that the amount of space is nearly unlimited. It’s not like movies, or even TV, where there are finite numbers -- of movie studios, of money, of channels. But with the Internet, it takes $50 to create something and throw it on the wall and see if it sticks.”

The increasing social aspect of online activity has proven incredibly efficient for independent artists - musicians, writers, photographers, actors - to reach an audience they may otherwise have never have touched. The expected number of members on various social media sites will be over 230 million by 2008. The caveat is to create something people will be interested in. This huge potential for any given application to deliver cost-effective audience aggregations has led advertisers to commission blogger-for-hire to create authentic voices with which to engage these large communities.  

“I think sometimes when a blogger voice is commissioned by a marketing campaign it runs the risk of feeling distant from the reader, because they can somehow pick up on the construction of the voice.” Johnson reveals that bloggers-for-hire work the best when they have the same thing that regular blogs have -- vulnerability and the reveal of the personal and of life in general. Authenticity and originality are integral to the success of artists as well as marketers and advertisers; we are all vying to capture the attention of “eyeballs” gathered around any given cyber water cooler.

For Johnson, his audience feels more like a tribe of fellow scribes. “I think the majority of my blog readers are all bloggers themselves, so it’s hard to think about vying for eyeballs. That feels like advertising speak.  I don't really think of my readers as fans or consumers. I think of them as...fellow bloggers, I guess. It’s more like a community rather than a product….”

The fluency with which Johnson uses the Internet to lifestream is not solely for celebrity gain but rather as an means to sharpen his craft and connect with people; he believes most those who are "Internet-famous" have been at it awhile, establishing a certain amount of presence and talent that is required for legitimacy. 

Has the Internet made Johnson a better artist? “Sure. I think especially being a writer. My access to things to read, to topics of research, to an audience even, has all shaped and sharpened me. I get immediate feedback on things I write. It also motivates me to know that the things I'm excited to write about are the same things people are excited to read.”

The growing community orbiting around Johnson’s blog may be an indication of a future book deal but he remains humbly unattached to that outcome. “Over the years there have been a few people whose blog I read, who got a book deal out of it, and suddenly their blog was taken down, to be cannibalized and reworked for a print edition. -- But I want my fiction to do that, not my blogging. I kind of like my blogging where it is, as a moving time capsule. Of, course, I’m sure if there is a high enough number on the check…”

For now, Johnson is satisfied to serve a trendy population, capturing moments of his life online everyday for those to relate to, connect with and discover.