Andrew LaVallee

The Web is full of content that only its creator could love. Witness the office-party photos, blogs about people’s pets and bad lip-synched videos that turn up in a few minutes of Google-fueled procrastination.

To Guthrie Lonergan, however, Web junk is the basis of his most popular online art. “I’m sort of interested in that boringness,” he says.

“Internet Group Shot” is one example. The collage, cobbled from dozens of group portraits, shows how people adopt the same huddle when they’re saying “cheese.” For “MySpace Intro Playlist,” Mr. Lonergan looked for the self-made videos that young people post to their personal pages, then strung them together to show how teenagers tend to act similarly and say the same things when they’re introducing themselves.

“There are defaults in our culture,” Mr. Lonergan adds. “MySpace doesn’t set up something for you to create an introduction video, but kind of like a telephone answering machine, you assume a certain kind of voice and say certain things.”

The 23-year-old, who lives in L.A., is one of many artists mining Internet culture for creative inspiration. They make videos out of email spam and multimedia projects from MySpace profiles, and make a case for Web surfing as an art form in itself.

Read Even Boring Blogs Can Be Things of Beauty

Amazon.com Inc.’s new e-book reader, Kindle, has only been on sale for a few hours, but the blogosphere already has a lot to say about it.

Gadget blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo are buzzing about the device’s free wireless capability and odd design. Media and publishing bloggers, some responding to Newsweek’s nearly 5,000-word advance look, are discussing what Kindle means for the e-books industry and reading itself. Other tech bloggers are hashing out its price tag ($399) and the notion of having to pay for blog feeds.

And everyone has an opinion, mostly negative, about how it looks. A sample description: “like a prop from an old sci-fi horror flick.”

Amazon customers have weighed in, too, with more than 100 reviews already online. Kindle, so far, is rated 2.5 stars out of 5.

Read Bloggers React to Amazon’s ‘Ugly Duckling’

Bette Ghidotti had hoped to spend some time on the beach while at her Sarasota, Fla., vacation home, but fatigue from her cancer treatment was keeping her indoors. Though she could have brought up her symptoms with her doctor, her semimonthly appointments are focused on chemotherapy and prescriptions, she says, leaving little time for discussing anything else.

“My doctor, once in a while, will say it’s depression, but I don’t really feel depressed,” says the 73-year-old retired nurse. And support groups, where others find information and solace, are of little interest to her.

But Ms. Ghidotti, who lives most of the year in Columbus, Ohio, has found help from a Houston nurse practitioner who recommended a mouthwash for her mouth soreness — a common side effect of chemotherapy drugs — and prompts her to discuss some of the gastrointestinal problems she wouldn’t bother her busy oncologist with. She has never met the nurse, but reads and often responds to her message-board entries every day around 6:30 p.m.

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(Also appeared in Belleville [Ill.] News-Democrat, Napa [Calif.] Valley Register, Naples Daily News and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)