Barry Williams knows how to rock the blogging world.

Since August of 2006, I feel that I’ve been on the front lines of what some would say is an unwinnable fight to support and sustain the celebrity power ranking of 70s icon Barry Williams. With my periodic and fascinated sojourns through the massive backlog of the “Ask Barry” section of the barrywilliams.com website, I discovered a Hollywood celebrity who not only freely engaged his fans, but was warm, encouraging, friendly and delightfully self-promoting all at the same time.

I’ll also be the first to admit that Barry Williams’ website, seemingly frozen in time with its whimsical 1992-era HTML layout, was a large part of my fascination with the teen heartthrob’s celebrity longevity. Here was a man on one hand embracing a new world of celebrity-fan interaction, while at the same time doing it in a way that felt obsolete and quaint all at the same time, much in the same way that The Brady Bunch itself now feels when one watches it, say, late on Sunday nights when the only entertainment alternatives are the 78th weekly showing of one of the Bourne movies on TNT and the brain-destroying depression of contemplating the beginning of another work week.

But as fate and the blogging revolution would have it, Barry Williams has surprised us once again. Allow me to introduce you to The Greg Brady Project.

Gone is the antiquated HTML and clunky-looking site navigation. Jettisoned are the old-school FAQs and “photo gallery” pages. The Greg Brady Project is a full-on blog site with multiple contributors, a social network interface, a media section, RSS feed, a shopping page where - oh by the haunting wails of Sam the Butcher’s ghost - you can actually purchase a Greg Brady action figure, and much more. He’s got a frigging Flickr site! And the best news - at least for my selfish needs - is that it looks like Barry Williams will incorporate future submissions to the old site’s “Ask Barry” section into new posts that will feed my RSS reader with fresh, brilliant content from now until doomsday.

It is intriguing to me, however, that the site’s been built on an entirely new URL - thegregbradyproject.com - as opposed to simply using barrywilliams.com as his old site did. It suggests an even deeper commitment by Barry Williams to embrace his pop culture alter ego, a stronger immersion in the brand identity that will continue to define and sustain him. Of course it also suggests that some web-squatter owns gregbrady.com and wasn’t willing to part with it cheaply enough.

Such is the price of life on the cutting edge of the bloguverse. As for me, I’d just like to say, “Welcome to it, Barry Williams.”