With almost half a million visitors a month, the Web site New York Social Diary has become one of the city’s most popular attractions, rivaling the Guggenheim Museum and the Statue of Liberty.

Who logs on to the day-to-day narrative of New York’s social marathon? All kinds of people, from all over the country and all over the world. Men, women, old, young – all of them are attracted to the lively personal scrapbook of David Patrick Columbia and his partner, Jeff Hirsch.

As a result, the Web site is turning a profit, finally, after five years spent building a following and finding advertisers who pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a month to reach the site’s high-end readers.

Last week, the site was festooned with ads for an employment agency in the Hamptons, a style consultant, a horse show, a DJ, an art gallery, and a company called OmniPresents, which sells gifts ranging from alligator-bound notepads to personalized cutting boards.

The site also presents a social calendar, where fund-raisers for nonprofits are listed for free, but where others can pay to publicize an upcoming event.

What does the site offer? According to Mr. Columbia, the main diarist, people log on to partake of the “romantic fantasy” that is New York’s social life. Some want to see pictures of themselves or of their friends, but many more want the thrill of vicariously attending elegant black-tie soirees and openings amid glittering celebrities and glamorous settings.

Many also want to read Mr. Columbia’s clear-eyed take on the chaotic and cluttered lives of the socially prominent. While never mean-spirited, his commentary is often perceptive, and not necessarily flattering. Compared to others who chronicle New Yorkers of note, he is the Mother Teresa of social charity.

A recent piece on the social rise and fall of Sandy Hill (Pittman) is a case in point. Fans of Ms. Hill were happy to see her name back in print, while her detractors – those who found her ambitions simply too stark – were delighted to have those traits frankly revealed.

For Mr. Columbia, too, it is a romantic fantasy. Mr. Columbia was not raised to be comfortable in black tie mixing with society hostesses. In fact, though he is charming and chatty, it is not clear that he is totally at ease in these settings.

He started life in a working-class town in Massachusetts, attending public schools and coping with a troubled family life. He worked hard enough to receive a scholarship to Colby College, but flunked out after his junior year.

The high point of his youth was winning a playwriting contest with a piece called “Twelve Picassos and a Green Rug.” After college, he took various jobs to support himself and found digs at the luxurious apartment of a friend’s mother at 740 Park Ave., but often harked back to the memory of that fine moment. All along, he thought perhaps he should be a writer.

Instead, over many years he became an actor, married, worked for movie magazines, became a stockbroker, and in 1971, ended up, oddly, owning a “head shop” in Scotts Corners, N.Y. He is the first to admit that all this searching was symptomatic of an unhappy and unsettled person.

During these years, Mr. Columbia started keeping a journal as a sort of therapy. He tried to develop an ability to write honestly, and revealingly; he wrote three or four times a week. These efforts were evidently more rewarding than his experiments with EST or Silva Mind Control, faddish courses that were popular in those years.

In the early 1970s a friend convinced him to sell off-price designer sportswear out of his shop, replacing the faded jeans and drug paraphernalia. Suddenly, Mr. Columbia began to hit it big. Revenues jumped tenfold overnight, and before long he had opened another store in Greenwich, Conn.

Even this flirtation with commercial success did not satisfy him. Mr. Columbia divorced and moved to Hollywood in 1978 with his five cats and two dogs, aspiring to write screenplays.

It was not a nonsensical impulse. He had been encouraged by Sherri Lansing, who was just starting out at the time but eventually rose to helm Paramount Studios. Also, he had a good friend who happened to be the son of legendary director Otto Preminger and the brilliant Gypsy Rose Lee.

Even with those contacts, it was tough sledding. Eventually, Mr. Columbia agreed to pen an “autobiography” of Debbie Reynolds, which was published in 1988 and enjoyed considerable success. As a result, he was offered the chance to write a book about Bobby Short, which ultimately brought him back to New York in 1991.

Accidentally, Mr. Columbia happened upon the work that has made him a welcome figure all over town. He met Heather Cohane, who had started publishing the magazine Quest. She asked Mr. Columbia to write a couple of pieces for her about notable society people.

Then she asked if he would like to write a social column – an ambition that had occurred to him as he drove across the country. Today, Mr. Columbia is the editor in chief of Quest and writes a social column for the magazine.

He also writes almost daily on the New York Social Diary Web site. To produce all this copy, Mr. Columbia is constantly in motion. He attends luncheons, launches, book-signing parties, and arts festivals, and openings of stores and galleries.

He goes to dinners and cocktail parties, sometimes more than one each evening, trots off to Palm Beach when society JetBlues south, and visits nonprofits that want to introduce him to their programs. Naturally, he knows practically everyone.

With his privileged perspective, how does he think New York’s social life has changed over time?

“It is more frenzied; people are more anxious,” he said. “No one is in society her whole life anymore. People disappear – it’s a new phenomenon. People wear everything out faster.”

The preoccupation with being in the public eye is not new, but for those terrified of being lost, it can become an obsession. This desperation is good for publicists, and it is not all bad for New York Social Diary.