Justin Hall is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 freelance journalist

Journalist

A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

 who is best known as a pioneer blog

Blog

A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

ger (internet-based diarist), and for writing reviews from game conferences such as E3 as well as the Tokyo Game Show

Tokyo Game Show

The , commonly known as TGS, is a video game expo / convention held annually in the Makuhari Messe, in Chiba, Japan. It is presented by the Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association and the Nikkei Business Publications, Inc...

.

He graduated in Chicago's Francis W. Parker High School

Francis W. Parker School (Chicago)

Francis W. Parker School is an independent day school serving students from junior kindergarten through grade twelve of high school. Located in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood, the school is based on the progressive educational philosophies of John Dewey and Colonel Francis Wayland Parker,...

 in 1993, and in 1994, while a student at Swarthmore College

Swarthmore College

Swarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....

, started his web-based diary Justin's Links from the Underground, which offered one of the earliest guided tours of the web. Over time, the site came to focus on Hall's life in intimate detail. In December, 2004, New York Times Magazine referred to him as "the founding father of personal blogging." At present, Hall lives in San Francisco, California

San Francisco, California

San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...

, where he recently moved from Los Angeles, California

Los Angeles, California

Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...

. He graduated from the USC Interactive Media Division

USC Interactive Media Division

The University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts's Interactive Media Division first accepted students in 2002. In addition to coursework in film production, screenwriting, and animation, students in the division study across three disciplines within interactive media: immersive...

. He is also a regular attendee of the Indie Game Jam

Indie Game Jam

The Indie Game Jam is an effort to rapidly prototype video game designs and inject new ideas into the game industry. Started in 2002 by a group of game designer-programmers, the event features a shared game engine technology worked on by other designer-programmers for a single long weekend...

. Hall's project The Nethernet could be found at www.gamelayers.com The Nethernet failed to thrive and closed shop in August 2009. A discussion of that event can be found on tnnrefugees.ning.com Gamelayers.com has since been put back online with a different business model.

Selected works

• Passively Multiplayer Online Games - Thesis Defense 70mb MOV video from 20 February 2007
• Playing a Life Online - an audio recording March 11, 2006 (speech at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas USA)
• "The Fantasy Life of Coder Boys", April 2003, Wired
• "Where the Geeks Are", August 19, 1999, Rolling Stone
  Rolling Stone
  Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
  
  
• "Today's Visions of the Science of Tomorrow" , January 4, 2003, New York Times op-ed
  Op-ed
  An op-ed, abbreviated from opposite the editorial page , is a newspaper article that expresses the opinions of a named writer who is usually unaffiliated with the newspaper's editorial board...
  
  
• "The Gaming Wars", May 18, 2001, Salon.com (review of E-3)
• "Hire This Boy To Play Your Video Games", October 12, 2000, Rolling Stone
• Just In Tokyo, 2002, Garrett County Press. ISBN 978-1-891053-50-4

Contributor

• J. Goldstein & J. Raessens, Handbook of Computer Game Studies, MIT Press, 2005: Chapter on "Future of Games: Mobile Gaming"
• T. Fullerton & C. Swain, Game Design Workshop, CMP Books, 2004: Sidebar/chapter on "The Indie Game Jam."
• V. Burnham, Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age, MIT Press, 2001: Essays on the Apple ][, Burger Time and Spy Hunter.

Films

• Hall was featured in the documentary Home Page
  Home Page (documentary)
  Home Page was a 1999 documentary by Doug Block on the genesis of weblogs and the lives of early independent content producers on the Internet. It was filmed between 1996 and 1998...
  
   http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0144969/.
• He appeared nude as an actor in Blood http://www.ifilm.com/filmdetail?ifilmid=97396&cch=.
• He played Jamie in Bringing Up Bobby
  Bringing Up Bobby (2011 film)
  Bringing Up Bobby is a 2011 drama film written, directed and produced by first time director Famke Janssen. Milla Jovovich stars as a European ex-con artist and single mother in the United States...
  
  .

Further reading

• Justin Hall on passively multiplayer online games, Annenberg Center for Communications - November 2006
• Yahoo Internet Life, May 2001, "Who let the Blogs out?"
• New York Times Magazine, December 2004

External links

• Justin Hall's official website
• Justin's Blog at USC
  University of Southern California
  The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
  
  
• "Dark Night" video clip of his breakdown
• July 2010 Photo of Justin Hall by Howard Rheingold
• The Evolution of Blogging: From Justin Hall Onwards