Interviewer- Justin, what is it that you would say you do?

Justin- As I became conscious of myself as a writer, as a storyteller, I realized everyone is a storyteller in his or her own. My uncle is a storyteller, he tells jokes and ditties. And everyone who comes back from travelling people say where did you go and what happened. And people are constantly exchanging some bits of stories and so...

I live with someone who is an artist and I found out about art movements in the past, and a lot of the excitement about art in the past has been when art came one step further away from the academy and towards belonging to the public and an integration into public life and so when I think about what does the Web mean to me as a storyteller is that the Web takes that step.

The Web takes steps away from being something that is a place where storytellers do what they do and more that people who are storytellers are facilitators and lead by example or provide spaces and templates for people to do it themselves and you see online that it is so easy for people to take email and paste them into Web pages, and take the Web pages and print them out and everything is so portable that its a line between when your a storyteller and when your not a storyteller and when your telling a story to someone else, those things are lot more fuzzy than they would have been in the past, and maybe they were just people that were always standing up and wanting to be heard.

That's something I have always done, that I was never conscious I was telling a story and a lot of times people will say tell me a story, Justin, but a lot of times I'm just willing to interrupt a conversation with a rather one-sided or irrelevant thing that happened some time before and I think that's easy to do on the Web because that can absorb all that lack of contextuality.

Interviewer- In a lot of these conversations, I am stuck between the difference between the level of storytelling in personal conversation in which the intimacy in which are doing it is assumed by everybody listening or engaged in the story versus public self, public storytelling, being published where people can hold you to the words, versus, "Well, I just said that." How do you deal with the move between public and private that the Web is inviting?

Justin- When I mention the casual nature of storytelling that takes place offline that my relatives and friends are doing all the time, so much of that is about the local community where its really gossip. This is the story of this relationship that this person is in, this is the story about how crazy that person acted that time. And you know and so on the Web when you are a publisher and storyteller in an electronic medium that enjoys broad distribution at a relatively low cost you have to pick and choose those stories because your community is defined by those who take time to read it. And the more sensational the things the more people would want to read them.

I am fortunate that I have a few events that have happened to me that are interesting enough that I can write about with some impunity because of some permission either from the participants or the passing away of the participants. So I have been able to base some of my more intense writings on events that are more in the public domain in that I am not treading on anyone's toes. The lines are drawn with personal relationships. I offended a company I worked for with an account of their environment and they asked me to take it down, and I wouldn't take it down. I took down personal names and so forth but I wasn't inclined to protect corporate identity. In the sphere of the Web, you have to draw a line, do you want to privilege your relationships or do you imagine yourself as some sort of crusading writer. I think Mat Drudge is the least personal of those people who does things that trod on other people's toes by telling stories that were not meant for the audience that he had.

For me, its been really rewarding to explore that tension because I have learned a lot about what my priorities were. Sometimes when I caught up in the romance of being a writer and I think the truth is the most important thing, and then I discover the truth is more flexible than you imagine. And it often happens best when you are talking to a group of people that you might otherwise offend, if you were trying to tell it as you see it, if you relax a little bit you can enjoy productive, creative collaborations that are difficult if you are alienating your peer group all the time.