Girl With One Track Mind

read her story here:

(see link here

Telegraph

and

Belle De Jour

You can search for the original blog – I’m not sure if its still active.

There was another recently but I cant seem to remember the name.

Blogs do have the weakness of lacking editorial oversight and possibly the public identity and therefore the responsibility/accountability that goes with mainstream media but some undoubtedly are influential.

There is also cross-polination from mainstream media. Paul Krugman (who has made his name as an economist/journalist) writes a blog and a number of newspapers including the Economist are allowing some of their columnists to write semi-authorised blogs – see this for example:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/

The format of the blog allows for spontaneous, opiniated pieces which have their place and which is probably what mainstream media is trying to capture.

The medium is still in a very early stage of evolution and we have to see how it develops.

I never called myself a blogger. I wasn’t.

I only did a sojourn to blogsphere and leaving too early because I realised overstay is not healthy.

Not that blogging is wrong. I identify the potential, power and nature of it than anyone else (see below) – perhaps that per se makes enough reason to quit. (Anyway, it has never been my bread and butter. Should I care?)

I have learnt some of the tricks and rules of the game quickly and some of my observations/axioms are below. (not all obvious today) I was testing some at the time of departure. Have no use of them any more. If they can be any use please feel free to do whatever. No copyrights.

(Please note I use the term ‘blogging’ in the absence anything better. I mean the larger phenomenon that is called by different names including blogging, citizen journalism, web 2.0 etc. None of these terms suffice and I expect a better term soon. Also it is not limited to PCs. Forget even mobiles. Soon you will find housewives doing ‘microwave oven blogging’ or motorists, ‘car blogging’)

1) There are few human activities as intricate and multifaceted as blogging, one being communication itself. (The two ‘concepts’ will converge by not later than 2050, but not in the way we think) Most of the adjectives we use today for God (omnipresent, omnipotent…) will be valid for blogging (taken collectively) before long. To rephrase what Clarke said, the only way to discover the limits of the possibilities of blogging is to go beyond them into the impossible – which is light years away. We are still in infancy.

2) Why someone blogs? This is one of the most difficult questions ever. Number of answers is infinite. Not different to asking why one communicates. (Why do some journalists/consultants/authours who never move a mussel except for the right price, ‘waste’ so many non billable hours writing stuff sometimes for an extremely limited audience of few hundreds?)

3) Like Thomas Friedman, I too sense the phenomenon of the flattening of power. (Read: The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century). Power will shift from its traditional bases to flat lands, like lava flowing from volcanoes. Blogging will be a tool that makes this possible.

4) Blogging vs. traditional media debate is useless. To meet the challenges of the day, both these streams will eventually evolve to a level that no demarcation is possible or necessary. (say before 2030)

5) Anonymity, one of the most important aspects of blogging is not digital but analogue. It is not 0 or 1 but quantifiable to something in between like 0.445 etc.(eg. ‘Voice in Delhi’ does not have a zero anonymity. His/her identity is known to a set of people, can be guessed with a certain degree by a second set, has a certain degree of possibility to be actually an individual from Delhi, can be traced by the times of blogging, IP numbers, by his comments and comments of others. Each of these factors decreases the anonymity from 1 downwards.)

6) If Anonymity = A, the scope of an anonymous blogger S = C1/(1-A) + C2 (C1 and C2 are constants depending upon the society – real and virtual the blogger operates in.) This means if A=1 or the blogger is fully anonymous, he/she can publish whatever he/she wants. (filth, insults, porn, you name it…) However, as explained in (5) A cannot be zero.

7) Blogging is blogging. There is nothing called good blogging and bad blogging. These are subjective terms coined for ones own convenience. Any ‘unethical’ nature of a blog will be taken care by the ‘market’. One cannot sell rotten tomatoes for long, even if unregulated. Still – if one can sell rotten tomatoes it proves there is a market for it. (not to eat – may be to hit a speaker) It is pure demand supply theory. So this very nature of this market makes terms like censorship, defamation, mud slinging, quality control etc irrelevant. (Assumption: Parents make Internet access decisions for their children)

8) Is blogging a personal thing? Should others (family/ employer/ state) have a control over one’s blog? No simple answers. A very complicated formula, depending upon a blog’s content, objective, audience, degree of anonymity etc.

9) Should blogs be regulated/censored by state? Let me put it this way. It will be more economical, more democratic, more logical and more beneficial the society at large, if the blogs (=Internet) are left untouched by the state in the long term – even if a certain anonymous blogger starts teaching how to make claymore mines at home. (Assumption: Parents make Internet access decisions for their children)

10) Can we live without blogs? Question rarely arises. We cannot live without air, but we never bother to see we get enough. If the question is rephrased to whether we can live without blogging, (active contribution) well I am not sure. Even if one loads an image for flickr, for video for YouTube it is blogging. Sharing a mail (like this one) is also blogging. So I do not know.

oxford defn
literature
noun
1 written works, esp. those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit
2 the production or profession of writing

i dont see why content in blogs cant satisfy the above definition

if someone printed content off a blog and published a book…
would you call it literature? like…
would you call election manifestos literature?
would you take such literature seriously?
:)

The power in blogging, and I don’t need to tell any of you this, is that it is NOT serious.
The power of the Internet lies in the fact that it’s informal. Rather than sticking to the norms of the structured world, it explores the infinite freedom which lies beyond crappy social stereotypes and social hierarchies.

It gives power to the individual. It gives power to the amateur. That’s why it’s so much better, juicier and down-to-earth than mainstream media. You hear the voices of the people, rather than the salespeople who are trying to sell their products. It’s consumer sovereignty in it’s finest form.

It’s hilarious that you bunch of people are trying to equate blogging to mainstream media.

What is it with you people? Are you getting old?