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The big blog world
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Most blog readers don't care whether the blogger is a law professor in Tennessee or a regular college-goer from Kozhikode. And come on, in the age of fake identities and nicks (for the uninitiated, that's short for nicknames), lying a bit on your blogger profile doesn't qualify as sin.
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Don't spend too much time jazzing up your blog site. Simplicity wins hands down. — AFP
WHAT DO you do when, bang in the middle of coding a life-changing software program, you begin to irrelevantly wonder why you once thought those orange pips you swallowed would become trees in your tummy? Mention this gnawing doubt to your superior, and you might get find yourself heading the next pink slip list. Whisper it to your neighbouring programmer, and he'll hiss at you for wasting his time.
"Alright, unfeeling world!" you think to yourself, "I'll start a blog and record my thoughts there!" But drums won't roll and angels won't sing at this seemingly path-breaking decision. Bangaloreans have already been there, and blogged it.
Those of you who are now thinking, "Yawn... another techie article. Let me turn to the TV programme listings", cease and desist!
Personal journal
A blog is nothing but an online version of anybody's personal journal. Instead of using a pen and diary to make random musings, you use the keyboard and the infinite space on the Web. Apart from the medium, the only difference is that your blogged thoughts won't be under lock-'n'-key, but accessible to the whole world of Internet surfers. But not to worry about invasion of privacy... people will only read what you wish to share anyway.
And you needn't even reveal who you really are. Hence the proliferation of blog names such as dragonfly, cogsystem, twilightglade, electricsheep, and H2Oboy. Most blog readers don't care whether the blogger is a law professor in Tennessee or a regular college-goer from Kozhikode. And come on, in the age of fake identities and nicks (for the uninitiated, that's short for nicknames), lying a bit on your blogger profile doesn't qualify as sin. If the writing is good, they'll keep coming back for more. So bizarre names of bloggers in this article must be forgiven for anonymity's sake.
Pleomorphous (See? You were forewarned.), a regular blogger, says: "I was very honest on my blogs initially... anonymity helped. But as I made friends through blogs, the lack of anonymity forced me to write about things that were not personal. So now it's just stories, poems, anecdotes, and the odd philosophising."
Personal experiences
Most bloggers draw inspiration from personal experiences, books, songs, and people they chance upon. If you want to know what ordinary, literate people are thinking and doing today, you can always wait to see it chronicled by History Channel or survey a random sample of strangers, but it's simpler (and more entertaining) to log on to blog-city.com, blogspot.com, rediffblogs.com, or livejournal.com and enter the minds of a million bloggers.
It has been seven years since Dave Winer launched his blog, Scripting News, and now we've got tons of blogs on every subject conceivable — from politics to stock markets and, of course, the Almighty. For some sort of interaction, most bloggers allow readers to comment on their pieces. Of course, this too has a private/public view option.
A rage
Weblogs have been around for years, but are suddenly a rage now. Because all you need to start a blog is a thinking mind and 24-hour access to the Internet (some actually go ahead without either). And because, as Harish, a grad student in Computer Science, says: "Keeping in touch with friends and family would mean making phone calls, exchanging e-mails, and visiting them. Blogging saves the time and effort of keeping in touch. I know every little incident, which would otherwise be considered trivial due to the distance. So, blogging is my daily doze of social activity!"
The new phenomenon of blogs is to go beyond the small community of bloggers who mostly ramble on about their daily lives, pets, heartbreaks, and tiffs with their bosses. But the number of personal diarists is still likely to outnumber those using blogs to promote businesses, educate, or discuss finer points of law. You can create public uses for a blog, but many Bangaloreans think that promotional blogs do nothing but annoy. All people want in a blog is humour, logic, and some useful info. Pleomorphous voices the general opinion when says he doesn't much care for semi-literate and ungrammatically written blogs either. "Also, I can take a fair amount of swearing in a blog. But if it becomes regular, I don't go there anymore," he says.
Simplicity wins
Some techie bloggers slave over jazzing up their blog layout too, spending hours implementing blog tool upgrades. But again, simplicity wins hands down. Embellishments, "click here for the rest... " links, fontbitches, trackbacks, running text, and multiple frames are definite no-nos if they impede readability. And if you did not understand any of that jargon, good for you. You will make an excellent blogger!
That mysterious call
Bloggers confess that many of them started because people raved about their "unique style of writing". And once they decided to give it a go, they were hooked. One marketing executive laughs that every blogger secretly hopes to receive a mysterious call from someone offering to pay an insane amount of money to publish his/her blog. Well, that would be an incident tailor-made for a widely loved blog entry.
Copyfight?
BLOGGERS OFTEN worry that their diligently written blog entries would be "copy-pasted" by readers in their research papers, essays, or other blogs.
What bloggers write for pleasure might be deviously used by someone in another continent under a different name to make money. Conversely, bloggers themselves could get sued for using photos or book extracts without attributing them to the authors.
The good news is that blogs haven't been hit too hard on the copyright issue so far.
One can assume that when blogs become bigger businesses, they will become bigger lawsuit targets.
Anyway, the answer to this dilemma is to do what has worked for scores of years in journalism: credit the original source of the image/text (for example, an online source), use thumbnail images only, and whenever possible, link back to the source somewhere in the image caption, body, or footer of the blog post.
Blog faves
Dave Winer
(www.scripting.com) : This software developer and writer's Scripting News blog is an astonishing seven years old. In that time, Dave has become one of the best-known names in blogging, not least for his role as the man behind the weblogging tool — Radio UserLand.
Meg Hourihan
(www.megnut.com) : Co-founder of Pyra, the company behind Blogger, the software credited with opening up weblogs to the masses. Meg started her widely respected personal blog in May 1999 and co-authored We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs in 2002.
Glenn Reynolds
(www.instapundit.com) : Law professor turned right-wing political pundit. His blog was launched in August 2001 then surfed the post-September 11 zeitgeist to spearhead a new form of weblog — the warblog.
Salam Pax
(www.dear_raed.blogspot.com): This anonymous blogger came to prominence as one of the only Iraqi voices to be heard during the war and its aftermath in the West via his blog. He was feted by the world press and landed a regular column in The Guardian, a book deal, and a film. Journalists regularly check out his blog for his wry writings on Iraq. In fact, the picture on the left show a Lebanese journalist reading his blog.
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