CHENNAI: Perhaps you will recall the guy who wrote "The travails of single south Indian men of conservative upbringing" or "Why we don't get any... " a few years ago?

He became the anonymous star of e-mail inboxes everywhere as all the Blossom Babykuttys and Ponnalagusamys realised they had found a spokesperson for their name-related woes. They forwarded the article to friends who suffered similar fates of monikers that fared relatively poorer than the Sanjay Singhs and Bobby Khans of this world.

Sidin Vadukut, the man behind the blog, recently launched Hafta Magazine, an online magazine (haftamag.com) "that brings together writers, especially bloggers, who have strong opinions, will stick by them and will smoothly adopt new ones when proven wrong. We will be cocky, yes, but not pretentious."

Sidin has also finished his first book, an act that seems to be a set pattern among celebrity bloggers who have gone on to snare lucrative book deals. But he says, "... If there are commissioning editors out there, trawling blogs to give out moolah, I haven't run into one yet!" However, he agrees that indirectly bloggers can make money. "I got a couple of freelance writing jobs and columns because of my blog... But we are still some time away from having advertisements on our blogs as in the US or Europe." Sidin has been blogging since 2004. In May 2005, a few of his posts became popular forwards. Traffic to his blog (sidin.blogspot.com) jumped and he says, suddenly, he was getting hundreds of e-mails a day.

High on the confidence of the blogging community that is known to have harsh critics, Sidin quit his job to write the book that he completed in May. "The book is poles apart from my normal style of writing. It is semi-autobiographical and funny in a very indirect way," he explains.

As for Hafta Mag, it is a novel endeavour that taps the talent of bloggers, some of them complete strangers ("just e-mail addresses") and brings out quality reading material. "Hafta Mag was a thought that was lying dormant in my head for a couple of years. Ever since I started reading a number of excellent general interest magazines on the Internet run out of cities in the US, I knew we could pull off the same here if we put in enough effort and pulled in enough writers," he says. All the Hafta Mag writers are bloggers transitioning to writing. And everyone has a daytime job, so research and thought pieces are infrequent. Nevertheless, Sidin says people should take the content seriously. "Most of the team members work really hard at their pieces and we do a lot of factual checking as well. It is not whimsical at all. Perhaps as we get better we will start getting noticed and respected more," he says.

He says that blogging radically improves access to opinion and perspectives. "You can call a spade a spade on your blog without fear of an editor slashing it. The same issue, say the reservation issue, was covered with every possible hue: humour, anger, rage, detachment, despair, fear..."

He says blogging will also kill the reverence to the published opinion.

He points out, "Many people still believe the printed word on newsprint or the uttered word on television to be infallible. Blogging is slowly beginning to change that. But will it change the world and make newspapers go out of business? I don't think so."

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