Wyatt Fuller works on his journal.

He plays golf and hangs out at Metro A Coffeehouse on Broad Street. He works an ungodly number of hours each week (120-plus, at one point). He got a raise in May. He's a little concerned about his age - 28. You also know his birthday: March 21, 1973. He works in Enterprise Mill. His roommate's name is Allen, and his computer's name is Lolita.

At least, you hope Lolita's his computer because he has been installing RAM in her.

You know all this because Wyatt Fuller, an Augusta Web page designer, has chronicled these facts in his Livejournal (www.livejournal.com), an increasingly popular online diary.

''I just put it up there for friends and family of mine,'' Mr. Fuller said. ''A lot of my friends live in other cities, other states, and this way, if they want to know want's going on in my life, they can just pop in there and look. There's always something interesting going on.''

This is not your kid sister's diary. This is journal-keeping in an age of reality television and Webcams, when everyone is living life in the public eye. So-called ''escribitionists'' have plenty of company. Livejournal has 174,000 users detailing their lives on the Internet.

That knowledge makes Mr. Fuller, one of more than a dozen people with Livejournals listed as living in the Augusta area, more circumspect than he would be in a private, hard-copy journal. He doesn't get too revealing about his own life - and he took down one entry after rethinking its harsh words against an acquaintance, he said.

''I just make sure I don't rant on people,'' he said with a laugh. ''One day, I had a whole rant about a certain individual, and it could have made my life pretty miserable if this person had read it. After about two days - and e-mails from some of my friends - I took it down.''

Not everyone is as worried. Livejournal entries include people talking about how much they hate their neighbors, how they're struggling with depression or self-injury, how they're coming to terms with their sexuality. Countless teen-agers - using multiple exclamation points and capital letters in the Internet equivalent of girlish squeals - recount their angst, detailing fights with best friends or talking about the boy who sat next to them during lunch period. A twenty-something talks about his drug use and his breakup with his girlfriend.

Then there's the really bad poetry.

Fuller MICHAEL HOLAHAN/STAFF

''It was kind of a surprise for me that some of my friends have written really deep stuff in there,'' said Brad Fitzpatrick, the University of Washington student who wrote the computer program that Livejournal runs on. ''I'm reading it and thinking 'You wouldn't tell us that in person!'

''I don't really care about everyone seeing mine,'' he added, in a phone interview from Seattle. ''I just wanted my friends and family to be able to read it. I don't care if other people do or not - I don't put anything really deep in there: Had dinner. Went to bed.''

Like Mr. Fuller, Mr. Fitzpatrick - a 21-year-old computer science major - just wanted a journal for his Web site. He created the program in 1998, the summer before he started college, then made a copy for his roommate. Then his friends wanted to use the program. Then their friends wanted to use the program.

Now, Livejournal has 174,000 users from around the world, taking advantage of 10 servers. In a type of postmodern self-deprecation that's common on the Internet, the service's mascot, Frank, is a sheep, urging people to follow in their friends' wake.

''Baaaah,'' says Frank, on the Livejournal home page and T-shirts.

Livejournal is hardly revolutionary in giving people a chance to keep a journal on the Internet - online journals and Web-logs, called ''blogs,'' are nothing new. A category in the Yahoo! Internet search engine lists 235 sites for Web-logs. There's even e-mail list, DIARY-L, devoted to Web-journaling, with a homepage at diarist.net.

The phenomenon is increasingly popular not just because it gives anyone the chance to make a mark on the world, but also because it's increasingly simple, with programs that help even the most naive users point and click their way through the setup process.

And many are free. Livejournal goes even farther: the service is open-source, which means that the programming that runs it is known and available to everyone, not kept secret and copyright protected. Anyone can use it - including deadjournal.com, a site that parodies livejournal.com using its own source code.

To pay the bills, Livejournal offers paid accounts with extra bells and whistles for $2 a month, but they only constitute 1.6 percent of users, Mr. Fitzpatrick said. The other tens of thousands of users don't pay a cent to create and maintain their journals.

''It was something to do, more fun than schoolwork,'' Mr. Fitzpatrick said about the lack of monetary profit. ''The stuff we do in school is so simple and boring. ... This is more rewarding.''

Reach Alisa DeMao at (706) 823-3223 or ademao@augustachronicle.com.