MEG AND JASON.(The Talk of the Town)

About six years ago, this reporter was advised by a friend who happened to be an Internet entrepreneur about a curious new activity that was being taken up among his circle of acquaintances. "It's called blogging," the friend said. "You should look into it." The term initially seemed to suggest something faintly indecent. Further investigation revealed the existence of a beguiling new medium, one in which the paradox of the public private life (best captured, as many things are, by Oscar Wilde, one of whose characters speaks of her diary as "simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication") was being explored anew. The result, in November of 2000, was an article for this magazine entitled "You've Got Blog," which chronicled the courtship, on blog and off, of Jason Kottke, a Web designer and pioneer blogger, and Meg Hourihan, a co-founder of the company Pyra Labs, which had created Blogger, a product with which even the technologically inept could expose their inner musings to the world, should the world care to look upon them.

The explosion of the blog medium in the years since--including Google's purchase of Pyra--hardly needs retelling. But what of Meg and Jason, who, by the article's conclusion, had progressed from instant-messaging each other across half the continent (Meg lived in San Francisco, Jason in Minneapolis), through veiled flirtation on their personal Web sites, Megnut.com and Kottke.org, to a nascent offline romance (as the article ended, Jason was driving across Wyoming, en route to a new job in San Francisco)? Neither Megnut.com nor Kottke.org is a particularly confessional site, but regular visitors were invited to read between the lines.

First, there was cohabitation in San Francisco, then, in December, 2002, mutual relocation to New York. The summer of 2003 sounded like fun--trips to Copenhagen and Paris--but disenchantment followed: when Meg took off for Nantucket in the summer of 2004, the move was conspicuously undertaken in the first-person singular. In December, 2004, she wrote a post entitled "A Sad Breakup"; and while its subject was Barbie, whose boyfriend, Ken, had sometime earlier been sidelined by Mattel for a new beau, Blaine, attentive readers wondered whether a more significant allusion was being made. Confirmation of a sort was provided in January, 2005, when Meg revealed that she had moved to New Hampshire--and, in an even more stunning ...