Rohit aka Confused lives in Florida and is a doctoral student in Health Services Research. He discovered blogging through online debating forums and now blogs with the passion of a neo-convert. He is interested in Indian politics, current affairs and of course in news which can be best characterized as just plain weird. He blogs at Retributions and Life is a street car named Desire and is a contributing editor for Pragati. Rohit was also part of the Jury at Indibloggies 2006 event.

he Indian media’s reaction to blogging has been marked by two divergent trends. On one hand, almost all major Indian media houses, especially television channels, have embraced blogging by hosting blogs on their site while many top journalists utilize popular blogging platform like Blogspot and WordPress. No doubt, some of the blogs are merely a placeholder for columns; nevertheless, a few of them, at least, carry genuinely interesting articles.

Despite this reluctant embrace, the mainstream media remains unapologetically hostile to blogging as an independent concept. Columnists in the Times of India and Outlook have dismissed blogging as a passing fad; a giant talking shop by people who have little knowledge about real India and who seem perpetually on the offensive. Leading media luminaries like Barkha Dutt have made sweeping generalizations about bloggers as if they are a monolithic voice with no disagreements or divergence of views. While bloggers would be the first to accept the importance and relevance of mainstream media (MSM), it would be hard to find an Indian journalist who would praise bloggers, even in the passing.

Prima facie, the MSM’s unwarranted hostility to blogging is surprising. The number of serious Indian bloggers can be counted in thousands and those who comment on current affairs, MSM’s bread and butter, constitute a miniscule minority. Bloggers remain dependent on MSM for hard news and no serious blogger talks about replacing the MSM, rather, they see blogging as complementary to newspapers and television channels. Yet, it appears as if the MSM thinks that blogging is a serious threat to its future especially by a certain class of bloggers who have the temerity to comment on current affairs. MSM has many times featured personal bloggers or technology specialists, but I am yet to come across an instance when a blogger was quoted on politics, strategic affairs or economic development. An entire one hour episode of “We the People” on NDTV featured only bloggers who write about personal experiences, mainly sex, as if that is what the blogosphere is restricted to! Why?

India has been a proud democracy since its independence in 1947. Yet, it is only in the last two decades that true democratization of Indian society has taken place. Economic reforms have increased the number of Indians able to live above subsistence levels. Old power structures have crumbled, in politics, sports, and business, replaced by those whose achievements are a nod to their hard work and ambition and not family names. Knowledge in this globalizing, modernizing India, more than at any point in her history, is power. The rapidly increasing reach of internet has challenged the traditional limits and controls placed on acquisition of knowledge. Future generations may remember Wikipedia, despite its flaws, as the largest and most successful democratic experiment in the history of humankind. Information is no longer the monopoly of the privileged or solely a function of geographic location.

The MSM however has retained its monopoly in influencing and shaping opinions, the real source of its power and privilege. It may or may not influence electoral performance but it definitely affects public mood. Bloggers have challenged this intellectual hegemony by relentlessly questioning, probing, and critiquing journalists and columnists. In many cases, they have offered alternative stories and policy formulations. The intellectual dinosaurs who continue to cling to a set of archaic beliefs find it extremely unpalatable to be challenged by a group of passionate upstarts.

In the high stake medium of MSM, it would be rare to find a columnist who directly challenges the ideas of a fellow journalist. In this cosy world, The Hindu can sell it self a liberal voice while furiously editorializing in support of the brutal and repressive Chinese regime. It is hard to imagine a Barkha Dutt or Rajdeep Sardesai or even the self-proclaimed classical liberal newspaper calling its bluff; they have plenty of skeletons of their own. Bloggers have no such inhibitions; N. Ram is not likely to be too pleased with Nitin Pai’s brilliant exposure of his intellectual dishonesty. That many such bloggers might be specialists in their own field as opposed to journalists who, at least in India, tend to be generalists simply adds to the discomfiture. It is hard to pretend to be all knowing when arguing with someone who may have years of experience in a particular field. Granted that many such critiques are over the top and the language employed may be too colorful, a fact which the MSM has cleverly exploited to dismiss the dissenters as dysfunctional ranters. Yet, the stridency of the tone cannot subtract from the message. Bloggers may not have won this battle of ideas, that has never anyway been the intention, but there is little doubt that they have mounted a serious challenge.

As the blogosphere continues to grow and develop, the MSM faces two stark choices: It can either continue in its present state of denial or it can accept that bloggers have managed to carve their own niche and are unlikely to disappear. It is a choice between confrontation and cooperation. We can only hope that, for once, MSM would display wisdom and humility.

Bee and Jai (nicknames) live in the northwestern U.S. She has a background in media, he in strategy development in the technology field. They’re amateur photographers and have serious fitness goals. “We seek to foster a more conscious approach to the food we consume, the thoughts we harbour, and the environment that sustains us. Jugalbandi is our means of reasserting our commitment to a natural, healthier lifestyle, and to a less toxic world.”, the couple clarifies.

n her article in the Hum Blogistani series 2005, Charu Ramdurai made an interesting observation about the limited impact by Indian blogs in the global arena because of the lack of specialisaton “in terms of content or focus”. Fortunately, in the food blogosphere, Indians have made a noticeable impact. (We use the term ‘Indian’ in terms of ethnicity rather than citizenship status, as a good number of popular Indian food blogs come from expats in the U.S. and Europe.)

This validates the importance of ‘specialisation’. Almost all these blogs have a narrow, but deep focus on Indian cuisine/s – traditional and modern. Indian food bloggers start out with three distinct advantages:

1. The language of food is universal, and lends itself to a global audience. Besides, there is a lot of interest in and curiosity about Indian cuisine(s) – recognized and enjoyed as one of world’s “mother cuisines”. If nothing else, everyone has heard of “curry”.
2. Indian regional and micro- cuisines have depth and variety. There is plenty of space for each blogger to express his/her uniqueness by showcasing family heirloom recipes, regional specialties or personal creations.
3. We Indians have the advantage of being able to communicate easily in English, helping us reach a global audience.

Most Indian food bloggers are multilingual, and some have regional language blogs in addition to their English ones. Indian food bloggers have, in a short time span of three or four years, changed perceptions about what Indians eat – drastically and for the better.

Those who equated Indian cuisine with Mutter Butter Paneer Splutter at Bombay Garden can now see and try out quotidian fare from a Kashmiri, Telugu, Marathi, or Bengali home kitchen.

Blogs acquaint us with the culinary and cultural artifacts of India that are uniquely regional and outside the “mainstream” – with a side of mongrel fusion fare from Indian-Born Confused Americans. Indian food blogs have a global readership. In terms of the quality of content, they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the best. They host blogging events on a regular basis highlighting south Asian ingredients, regions and a variety of themes. Our blogs have helped us bridge oceans, nationalities and linguistic barriers to form friendships with fellow foodies who have a deep curiosity about our customs and culture. They have yielded insights on cross-cultural culinary influences and similarities – like the Bihari influence on Caribbean cuisine.

Over the past three years, a host of independently published culinary histories have fared exceptionally well. They owe this, in large part, to the visibility and positive reviews generated in Indian food blogs. Some celebrity authors like Suvir Saran and Ammini Ramachandran are bloggers too. See this article describing the symbiosis between Indian food blogging and publishing. In the past, one area where we seemed to lag behind our global counterparts was in the quality of our photographs. They don’t call it ‘food porn’ for nothing. The draw of a food blog often (but not always) depends on how narcissistically it stages and struts its ‘stuff’. Of late, the standard of food photography in the Indian foodie universe is to be reckoned with. We, at Jugalbandi, host a monthly theme-based food photography event with participants from across the globe. In the January edition, the first four spots went to Indians.

How many desi food blogs exist? We can state, without exaggeration, that there’s a new food blog by an Indian every day. We tried to list them all on our blog roll, then gave up after a while, ‘cos it’s exhausting. There must be a large number of Indian food blogs in regional languages too.

How important is the role of writing or presentation style in food blogging? How does the description of one ‘dal tadka’ differ from the other?

To us, writing and presentation are everything in food blogging, precisely because recipes give not much scope for ‘literary expression’. What sets one space apart from the other is the blogger’s personal narrative, unique take on the dish, and how it came about. Dal tadka can be simply be a recipe (as here), or can be accompanied by a glimpse – not so flattering – of how desi bachelors live.

Is blog a suitable format for a recipe-site? It may sound bitter but only non-food bloggers tend to look at food blogs as “recipe sites”. While the latter (like Bawarchi-com) have their value, food blogs are much more. Many of our posts do not have recipes at all. They are photo essays, discuss how food is grown, or its history. Blogging gives a forum for culinary, literary and photographic creativity that a ‘recipe site’ doesn’t.

When roti is glamorous, can plagiarism be far behind? It is an occupational hazard with all types of blogging, but particularly rampant in the Indian food blogosphere. With individuals, a lot of it boils down to lack of awareness. While copyrights laws do exist in India, they are not strictly enforced. Many folks do not understand the distinction between “plagiarism” and a “copyright” violation, and that a picture can be “open to the public” and have “all rights reserved” at once, or that “hotlinking” is a cardinal sin. With corporate thieves, it’s a different story. As a lot of English and regional Indian newspapers go online, they add on a food section. What better place to quickly populate these spaces from, than blogs? Any attempt to contact them is met either by stony silence, or by explanations of how their staff is not conversant with copyright laws. We’d learnt to shrug and move on. Until last year. Yahoo’s new language portals in India were brimming with content from Indian blogs. Some voiced their displeasure. Yahoo’s response: “Not our problem. Talk to our Indian subcontractor.” On March 5, 2007, more than 100 Indian blogs ran an anti-Yahoo campaign. They apologized and accepted responsibility for the stolen content. Shakespeare’s work is too old to be copyrighted, but quoting Shakespeare without giving credit to him is plagiarism. Yahoo was guilty of both. They stole pictures, reproduced verbatim whole chunks of posts, monetized work that was not theirs, while asking bloggers to “negotiate” with their subcontractor. If you buy something from Walmart that ends up being defective, they don’t give you the number of the guy in China who made it and say, “Talk to him.”

Now, some Indian food bloggers send out invoices if their pics show up elsewhere. They contact advertisers to report content theft. They flag service providers. What they don’t do is put up with being asked to stop whining and get back to the kitchen, already.

Indibloggies is pleased to announce the 2007 edition of its annual essay series “Hum Blogistani”, where various Indian bloggers share their thoughts about the Indi-blogosphere, evoking its journey so far, probably doing a SWOT analysis and predicting the road-ahead.

Fellow Indibloggers, I am sure you will like to share your wisdom on the subject of blogging and would like to share your thoughts on the nuances of Indian blogging. I am honored to invite you to this year’s essay series and request you to pen a short essay on the subject (or any other subject that revolves around the India blogging scenario).

We will also have some modest reward for the best of the submitted essays, chosen by known names of the Indiblogdom. I thank you in earnest for sharing your insights with the world and look forward to receiving your contribution.

Suggested topics (feel free to suggest more in the comment area):

• Rise and Growth of Indic Blogging (aka blogging in Indian languages)
• Blogs’ anti-establishment nature have ruffled many a feather in the corporate world. Brands fear them; companies treat their posts with caution. How are companies, corporations and governments dealing with this new menace? How are the Business & Corporate blogs faring (remember Mazda’s “Kid Halloween” debacle?) in using blogs to their advantage?
• Is blogging really meaningful? Have blogs made any difference to a society like ours? How is blogging relevant to the third-world and developing nations where internet penetration itself is an elite phenomenon?
• MoBlogs, VLogs, Photo blogs, Microblogs so many formats, but which one works the best, which are the most popular formats in India? What are the trends, which blog platforms are most popular? What kind of blogs are widely read? What’s the ASL of Indibloggers?
• Celebrity bloggers are here, from Shekhar Kapoor to Aamir Khan, so many have jumped into the blogging bandwagon, but how many of them are taking it seriously? Why are they blogging? And why are the politicians shying away? What’s the story here?
• Banning is a popular deterrent in India, just raise a hue and cry about anything on religious and caste grounds and it would be banned. India has seen a stupid blanket ban on Blogger.com on the behest of national security. In our neighboring countries situation is worse. Trace the path of democratic tyranny in your essay, how do we deal with such bans? Is pure slander free-speech? Self-censorship, regulation, blogging laws etc.
• Is there is any differences between blogging techniques, usages, foci, etc, depending on the different cultural landscapes ie, how is Indiblogging different than the rest of the world? (suggested by John Saddington)
• Your suggestion comes here…

hy, you wonder, is this chap writing a piece in this series? He isn’t a pioneer blogger, or an A-lister, he doesn’t have legions of adoring fans (or even the type that love to hate him). He doesn’t even make it for Best Tagline. Fercryinoutloud, the loser doesn’t even have comments disabled.

It’s pretty simple, really. Debashish only knows I exist because of the collablogs I have been part of. Very probably for the South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog (SEA-EAT), which finds itself nominated in two categories this year. (And while I’m at it, consider this a plug for your vote.)

So, not to worry, I won’t test your patience with my usual boring pronouncements on the state of the blogosphere. Instead, I’ll just waffle on for a bit on the stuff that Debashish asked me to write about: collablogs and disaster relief blogging.

I’ll start with some excerpts from an essay I’m writing on the experience. It will make its appearance on my blog in due course, and it sets the background for the preachy bits afterwards.

SEA-EAT was, for me, a life-changing experience. I had experimented, with moderate success, with collablogs* before, with Caferati, set up for my online writers’ community, and as a contributor to what was originally Desi Media Bitch and then became well-known as CSF.

Just prior to the Christmas of 2004, Rohit Gupta had this great idea of growing Desi Media Bitch beyond the ‘desi’ label, and we had set about inviting bloggers from neighbouring countries to join in on what we had planned as a sort of media-bashing without borders fortnight (hence Chiennes Sans Frontieres). So you might say I was rather evangelistic about collaboration by the time the earthquake and tsunami happened.

However, the size of the disaster shocked all of us, froze us (well, I guess; it certainly paralysed me) as those terrible pictures flooded our screens. It was only the next day that my brains unclogged enough to be realise that a blog could possibly help. A few SMSes and phone calls later, I set up the template, Rohit made the first proper post, and we had begun mail bombing our address books with pleas for help. Dina Mehta was one of the first names we both came up. Thanks to her and Rohit being contributors to Worldchanging, a highly respected group blog, they were able to write about what we were doing there. Which was noticed by BoingBoing. And the traffic to our site surged almost immediately. (It is pertinent to note that Rohit, Dina and I had never met face-to-face at that point.) Around the same time, I had mailed Prem Panicker, Managing Editor at Rediff in the USA (yet another online-only friend) and almost immediately, all Rediff’s coverage began to feature a link to our blog. Our viewership boomed from the few hundred people we had mailed directly to thousands every hour. We were flooded with offers to help from all over the world. People who wanted to blog with us, others who sent us information, linked to us, promoted us. And, of course, people asking how they could help directly.

There were news organisations who had the infrastructure to do hard news better than we could. What was missing was information about the NGOs and aid organisations working on the ground. That helped us hastily define what we were going to do: “News and information about resources, aid, donations and volunteer efforts.” We set some ground rules: no politics, no opinions, steer away from controversy, just find out about and link to aid efforts.

The next day, the New York Times and the Guardian in the UK had written about us, and put our URL in their articles, shortly after, the BBC linked to
us too. These, and many other news organisations across the world cited us as an authoritative source for information. Including – high point! – the search giant Google itself, who not only linked to us from their dedicated Tsunami page (which, in an unprecedented move for Google, was linked to off their search home page), but also, through the efforts of one of our members who had friends in Mountain View, guaranteed us unlimited bandwidth, thus ensuring that the site wouldn’t go down. Traffic was overwhelming – a million plus visitors in the first week.

I won’t continue with the blow-by-blow (you can read these eloquent descriptions by Din Mehta and Bala Pitchandi, and as I said, I’m writing about it in detail myself), but I will tell you that SEA-EAT model has been used, with modifications, and varying degrees of success, in the other disasters that have hit our planet this year (MumbaiHelp and Cloudburst Mumbai, KatrinaHelp and RitaHelp, QuakeHelp had many of the same core group behind them; ChennaiHelp did an excellent job of self-organising too). And I’ll also confess that I have seeded a few other collablogs, some with less, erm, humanitarian goals.

Anyway, what did I, not the smartest cookie in the jar by any stretch of the imagination, learn from all this?

• One, that blogs can make a difference. That blogs can be more than the medium of choice of the self-obsessed. That the linking and research that the better bloggers all do, the ethics that guide them, when powered by a huge need to make a difference, to just reach out and help, can make for a pretty powerful vehicle.
• Two, that collaboration rocks. That a group of people with common cause can do bigger things together than they could do separately, even in a world as staunchly individualistic as the blogosphere.
• Three, that bloggers (or at least the ones that I have had the privilege of working with) are very creative people. Even without inventing anything new, the team made some pretty damn innovative use of existing technology. Not just the “blog as collaborative disaster relief tool” bit. Stuff like using Yahoo IM chat as a war room cum conference room, SMS as an information system when other communication is shot to hell, Flickr tags as missing persons notifiers, a Skype number staffed by people in three continents as a virtual call centre. Obvious in hindsight, like so many of the best solutions are, but hey, we did it first.
• And four (this is the really preachy bit), that people are essentially good, though it can take a disaster to make that clear.

That seemed like a good place to end, but alas for you, Debashish also foolishly asked me to include a section on where I saw the Indian blogosphere going, and which red-blooded blogger can pass up an excuse to pontificate? I have no rocket science to offer you, but here goes anyway.

I think a few bloggers will be able to make a living off their blogs. They will largely be, I’ll wager, truly superior writers, specialists who have built up and nurtured an audience. And collablogs might make some Ad Sense money too.

And there’s a flip side. There will be more and more attempts to turn blogs into cash cows. More corporate blogs, more splogs, more comment spam innovations, more paid-for blogging.

Blogs will not replace big media. They will complement it, they will help keep MSM honest, and in return, after all the hype is over, be an invaluable resource for gauging the pulse of the community.

And here’s the big one. It is inevitable that computers and net connections will become more affordable, and that will bring more people into the blog world. But when user interfaces in Indian languages become ubiquitous, that, my friends, is when you will see a boom in the Indian blogosphere that will make the explosion we saw last year look like a wet firecracker.

So, in a few years, you will find me leaving comments on this site when the categories are announced, demanding that one be set up for
Best Indic Blog – English.

*That’s a term I believe I kind of invented, in an article in the magazine GT.

xpressions. You find it everywhere. At a cool corner of a collage café, at the Bus adda, in a train compartment, at a Party, at your work place and, may be, even during those intimate moments with your beloved. Everybody out there is trying to forcefully convey his or her feelings. At times, you have to shout, make faces and even shove elbows to make yourself heard. Try fathoming a conversation within a group and you will quickly realize that nobody actually seems to be listening, yet every one of them is in a great hurry to express opinion.

You also want to express yourself eloquently. However, you don’t get yet get an audience. You shout. Damn it, nobody cares. What do you do now?

Just Blog it!

Blog, an alternative medium to express one’s expression, can change things upside down for you. Even if you whisper in your blog, you will be noticed. In your blog, you can express yourself without any interruption, without an argument, and without an express permission from anybody else! To add to the beauty, you and your audience can share views in real-time through the blog-comments.

Blogs have proved that they can be effectively used as an alternate medium for personal publication. There are tens of thousands of writers in any given language. At the same time, writers do not get enough opportunity to publish their work due to high costs involved. Blog can be used as no-cost publication medium where you can publish unlimited contents for free, or almost free. Many blogs have proved this. By site counter reports, my personal blog attracts much less attention than my literary blog.

When I started writing my blog in Hindi, there were barely half a dozen Hindi blogs around. At that time, I had decided to blog regularly, at least for a year, even if it attracted only a few hits in the entire month! Hindi blogdom is still in its infancy, barely counting to 150. Except for Tamil, situation is grim for all other Indian language blogs. Nevertheless, I strongly feel that with computers reaching every nook and corner of the nation, vernacular language blogging will spring up.

A few months ago, at an Indic developer meet, some one complimented me, “When I search Internet for something in Hindi, it always displays either BBC or your blog”. It may have been a bit exaggerated, but perhaps not entirely false. It may be too early, still I can risk saying that blogs in Indic languages would soon be regarded as the mirror of their respective linguistic culture. In addition to that, blogging in Hindi lets me feel like paying back to the community to which I belong.

Saket is a recruiter-headhunter in the technology domain, working for the executive search division of a major Indian job portal. He has been blogging since June 2004, better known as Vulturo in the trade. Saket is an avid reader of Indian blogs and a contributor to the team-blog Desipundit.

riting an article, pursuing the course of the Indian blogosphere through the times can be an exciting experience. Despite not having been an ‘early bird’ blogger, I still have a lot to remember. The past year and a half has been a period, where I learnt a lot about myself, and the world around me.

When I started blogging, I had this notion of blogs being ‘personal diaries’, which are maintained on the web (Sadly, a part of the Mainstream Media still has that notion). I had a lot to discover. I began my journey writing about absolutely mundane things which were happened with my life, and some wacky ideas that came along. I didn’t follow many blogs, per se. The ones I read belonged to the people whom I had known previously, or of those people who had discovered my blog and commented on it. During my workday, I once came across a software professional’s resume, which mentioned his blog address. I keyed it into the browser, and I was amazed with the quality of that guy’s writing. His blog also carried a mention of the Bharateeya Blog Mela, with a link to the latest one. Reading some of the posts featured in the Mela made me muse to myself, “Heck, this is really good stuff”. I was hooked to blogsurfing. And I still am.

I have this theory that almost all of us have a writer within (no matter how good, or how mediocre the writer is). I’m sure a lot many bloggers, like me, must have had a subconscious passion about writing – something that they may not have even known themselves. It is only when you discover that passion through a medium so amazing such as blogs, you realize how thrilling it can be. A lot many people claim to ‘write for themselves’. But effectively, everyone who writes also wants it to be read by someone. The mere fact that someone actually reads what you write, and likes it, is a huge ego booster for ordinary people.

Mainstream dailies may have subscriptions running into millions. A lot of people may read them, and end up reading what individuals have written, be it news, or opinions. I’m sure, at some point of time, every journalist derives pleasure from seeing his name in print and thinking about the fact that a million people are reading it. But trust me, relatively powerless bloggers can get derive the same pleasure when they know that a small number of people (even 20 odd bloglines subscribers) read what they write, and that they do so purely because they like reading it, and not because it appears in a newspaper. Blogging, in the truest sense, is empowerment for the masses.

Blogging enables ordinary people to find their voices, and also voices which belong to others but concur with their own. There are so many times, when you have strong convictions about something and feel that nobody would appreciate what you have to say. Not at least in your family, work place or peer group. When you are empowered with a tool such as a blog, you can fearlessly say what you’ve desperately wanted to say. And not only that, you can be heard. You can be pleasantly surprised to find that you aren’t alone. And that there are several other people who think like you, and agree with you. The beauty of blogging is, that it allows you to actually help the ‘frog in the well’ situation created by your immediate environment. Blogging allows you to express your individuality and be a truly global voice.

Blogging is not only about personal views being heard. Looking to the bigger picture, blogging facilitates social change. Educational Institutions, which have been engaging in unfair practices, have never had public opinion against them in such a great magnitude as a result of individual action. Today, you can make noises about things, which matter. And if enough people make the same noises, they have to be heard. By the mainstream media, or the powers that be.

Newspapers can’t get away with plagiarism, as easily as they could before. For that matter, any entity can’t engage in unethical practices and be confident about stifling dissent today. Dissent is expressed. Wrongdoing is exposed. Whether any action is taken by the government, or whomever that matters against the entity engaging in wrongdoing is a secondary issue. What matters is, people who are connected to the Internet can now know what is happening. Skeletons tumble out of closets.

A parallel can be drawn between free markets and the blogosphere. Both of them regulate themselves. And it is profoundly better, if they aren’t actively ‘controlled’ but are left to control themselves.

When it comes to social change or blogging, India has a long way to go. Despite all the excitement, blogging still remains a largely urban phenomenon. It is restricted to the ones who are literate and Internet savvy. But it is early days yet, and at least the results so far are encouraging.

An area where I would like to see blogging pick up is the corporate sector in India. At least the IT sector, to begin with. A great many corporations abroad have been extensively using blogging to communicate to their customers and the market in general. That is yet to happen in India. But then Internet literacy as of today isn’t as high perhaps to make it look worthwhile to the people who matter to start company weblogs. We’ve just made past it the phase where every sensible company at least has a website. Corporate blogging will take time.

I see every reason to be optimistic about the future of blogging in India. Be it personal blogging, viral blogging or corporate blogging, we have a long way to go, I admit. Nevertheless, I daresay we are on the right path.

ong ago, so long ago, there lived a great person. Herman Ebbinghaus. Or not so great. I ain’t debating that. Nevertheless, this person did exist. And he did do something in life. What, you might ask. Well, he came up with some thing called the Ebbinghaus Curve of Forgetting.

Big, big words. Very simple thought. No matter what the subject matter is, a given piece of learning is forgotten by more than half its audience in one hour.

Remember this very carefully. In exactly one hour, I will give you folks a surprise test. And we’ll prove Herr Ebbinghaus wrong.

That, folks, is the subject of this rather rambling piece. That blogs defeat the Ebbinghaus Theory. A blog, by its very nature, tends to keep issues and learning fresh in the mind of its readers, and by extension the society.

Back in 2003, when I began my own blog, the issues mostly discussed on blogosphere were to do with Congress, BJP’s succession plans, politics, scams, Iraq, corruption, death penalty, and bad jokes and PJs. In 2005, we, the blogosphere, are still discussing Congress, BJP and its leaders, politics, scams, corruption and PJs which kill more people than the death penalty. And that can only mean one thing. That we bloggers, rarely, if ever, forget some thing of importance. Or even something trivial.

The reasons for that are many. One; is the bloggers themselves. We all blog or write for we are passionate about it and not because we are paid to do so. Which means, we will only write what we strongly believe in. And where there’s belief, there’s conviction. Which ensures that the subject we write about don’t die a quick death. Second, is the nature of the web and the way blogs are interlinked. Ravikiran Rao has the answer. To quote him,

The blogosphere through its technology and culture gives me a way to find good blogs. The technology part consists of the hyperlink, permanent archives and permalinks. The culture part is the bloggers’ bewildering habit of talking about each other, criticising one another and building on one another’s posts. The technology and culture support each other. One would not have been possible without the other. Because good blogs link to each other, even ones they disagree with, I have but to find one decent blog and it tends to open the door to a great number of other good blogs for me.

Which, translated to every day English, means that we are an incestuous bunch of people and will keep picking on everybody’s thoughts.

Which tells you why we hardly, if ever, forget an issue.

Take the recent IIPM issue. Over 4-5 months passed since the original JAM story came out, but one blogger didn’t forget the issue. Gaurav took up the thread on his own blog. And got slapped with a ridiculous case. Rashmi was libeled. But the blogosphere retaliated. It’s been close to two months since then. The topic has anything but died down.

And neither will it ever. We bloggers, and the networks we establish, both offline and online, will ensure that enough people are made to know of the tall claims and arm twisting ways of IIPM.

Enough has been said about IIPM. Take the case of Pradyuman Maheshwari and his Mediaah! The first thing I told myself when the IIPM issue was current was that it had the exact same features as that of Mediaah! That of big business trying to squeeze the underdog. And if I, a person prone to memory loss, can remember an issue well into the past, I am sure all of you can do much better.

The other thing that comes into play is the power of syndication and RSS. Whatever you write, you can be sure, will find an audience somewhere. And will stay permanently in one form or another. My own blog is read mostly through the RSS feed I provide. Most of yours too. The XML feed ensures that your words and your convictions are easily syndicated and transmitted. Helping to carry your message across a wider pool and keeping it current.

The way the average blog is structured also goes a long way in making sure what you write stays permanent. At least, as permanent as current technologies allow it to be. I am talking of course, about archives.

Everything you write is neatly tagged, sorted and put on permanent display. Mummified, even. And when the time comes, just one click is all the magic spell you need to revive your mummy and let it wreak havoc on those who want to get away with whatever they are trying to get away with.

Finally, I would like to mention the power of the collective conscious. ‘Tis a tricky thing, the collective conscious. Much like god, it is very difficult to prove either it exists or not. But it sure wields, again like the godhead, an interesting and important influence in our lives. If enough people make enough noise about a subject, you can be sure it will be heard even on the far side of the moon. And that’s what blogs do. And the more you repeat a certain something, the more you commit it to memory. Also, being part of this nebulous CC helps if you are prone to memory loss. Somebody, somewhere, always knows exactly what it is we all are shouting about and that will only jog your own memory back to life.

So here’s to the fantastic ability of blogs and bloggers to take up causes and keep the flame burning bright.

Amen.

(Seven words more needed to reach 950. So tiddly, tiddly um poom. Tiddly oo)

Charukesi Ramadurai is a Mumbai based independent qualitative research consultant and one of the popular female bloggers of Indiblogdom. Her blog “A time to reflect” was adjudged the best new Indiblog at the Indibloggies 2003 and is one of the widely read and respected blogs. Charu also blogs at Mindspace and Mediamusings, a collablog on the Indian media scene.

post reminiscent of the Indian blogosphere’s journey so far – the idea struck home immediately. For, I am forever reminiscing about the “good old days” of Indian blogging. The good old days, meaning a couple of years ago when there were fewer bloggers, more personal interaction between the bloggers, and certainly lesser nastiness. I guess, with size comes other complications.

I have been blogging for over two years now, and these two years have been extremely rewarding. From being a space to park my random thoughts, my blog has now become a space that triggers many new thoughts and ideas, mainly through the comments and discussions around the posts. I have met some wonderful people, online and later offline, people who otherwise would never be part of my life. And I am sure it is the same for most of us bloggers. At the same time, I can sense a definite change in the space over this time. My feelings as I see the Indian blog space expand so quickly and so much are mixed. I watch with a somewhat amused and fond look (if that sounds pompous, I admit it but I take my “old blogger” status seriously!); I see the space grow larger than I ever thought possible, and feeling a little perplexed by it too.

Perplexed because despite the growth in terms of numbers, Indian blogs and bloggers have not been able to make their mark in the larger space out there. And I often wonder about it. In my opinion, one of the reasons for this is the lack of “specialist” blogs coming out of India. Every day, I discover new blogs, new thoughts and new styles of writing. Most of them are good, and a few exceptional enough to make me want to go back. However, rarely do I come across a blog that stands out from the rest in terms of content or focus.

I think the future of blogging lies in such specialist blogs. The world over, blogs that are making an impact have a clear focus. They may be about a social cause or about a technical subject or professional interest, but they maintain that focus throughout. In addition, it goes a long way in establishing their “expert status” in that space.

In India, I know there is a lot of concern about blogging about ideas relating to one’s work and profession. However, I think bloggers need to come to terms with this concern and attempt to reach out to larger audiences across the world. Sure, writing about local politics is fun, reading about it too, but for how long? In that sense, the way “weblog” is defined by most of mainstream media, as “personal online journals” still holds true.

Blogs have a lot more potential to reach out, to make an impact, to attract global readership, but that potential has not been realized by most of us here. I see the way ahead opening up for those who use the blogosphere as their space to create differentiation for themselves; in advertising terms, a USP that marks them apart from the others. A space to whet their ideas and hone their skills in their specific areas of interest and / or expertise. And not just, a little of this and a little of that, a blog bhelpuri. Then, and only then can bloggers make a difference in that larger space out there, the internet, and not just in the blogosphere.

hen I started blogging at Gautam Ghosh on Management, more than 3 years ago it was to use it as a tool of personal knowledge management. I was a hopeless contributor to some HR and KM e-groups and first approached a blog as a repository for all the mails that I used to send out to the groups.

Soon I discovered that people were linking to me and since my writings were related to HR and Management, I was getting some little traffic from other HR related blogs. These were not desi blogs and I started interacting with other bloggers outside the country. Of course, I came across Dina and Rajesh’s blogs as both are interested in KM and we interacted a couple of times. My blog has followed my career interests, so going through the posts from 2002 you can see how my interests have changed.

My interaction with the rest of the desi Blogosphere started after I was nominated for the IndiBloggies last year. I really discovered India based blogs then and was really blown away by the quality of depth and insight that some of them have. I’m really hooked on to a lot of Indian blogs now and you can see the mix of my reading list on my blogroll I set up my blog on blogger.com and am quite content and don’t want to confuse readers by changing my URL anytime soon.

Although I am a blogger on business and management issues, I think the day is still very, very far away that big Indian business will start blogging. May be more professional services firms, specially the small and medium ones that do not have the money power to mass advertise their expertise and whose clients have access to the net would start blogging to showcase their expertise. But often, they lack the technical expertise to blog. So, all you technical blogging gurus, there might be a big business proposition for you. Mid sized advertising, law, architecture, real estate, market research, designers, consulting, training, recruitment firms are all potential clients. You just have to show them the benefits of blogging vis-à-vis online marketing (better Google rankings, global reach). It’s not going to be easy, but the focus of India media on blogging as a ‘phenomenon’ make the settings quite ripe for the rise of blogging consultants.

On the point of when a Tata, Birla, Ambani would blog…my guess is not anytime soon. The payoff (and that is the yardstick that businesses use to judge any new investment) for large organizations is not clear.

I am also hopeful that translation services on the net will become a lot more ubiquitous and we’ll be able to read any content on the net in the language of our choice – that would really fuel the growth of social and business blogging. Right now, the non-English blogosphere is a dark web to us in India, while I feel we have more in common with the Persian or Filipino blogosphere than the US blogosphere. The growth of such translation interface/service would also trigger a boom in the growth of Indian blogosphere.

Coupled with speech to text softwares such services will help to make social software “really” social. Imagine a farmer in Kannauj in UP being able to talk and thereby blog his thoughts and farming methods and interacting with an Agricultural professor in Japan, another Farmer in Austria, and a fertiliser company in Karnataka. How many possibilities does that open up? It boggles the mind.

In fact, I can safely predict that blogging will evolve into something that won’t even seem like blogging anymore. We won’t access the net through PCs, notebooks or cyber cafes alone. So all the discussion around permalinks, trackbacks, google ads, comment spam will be redundant then!

couple of days ago when Debashish asked me to write this piece, the first of this series called “Hum Blogistani,” I was intimidated at the thought. The subject – the Indian blogosphere – is rather vast, and I wouldn’t know where to start on a piece of that sort. One can’t contain an ocean in a thimble, and so on. Also, I’ve been blogging for little more than a year now, and India Uncut, my flagship blog, is not even a year old. But it has been an enormously enriching time for me, and I thought I’d write about some of the things I’ve learnt, from a thimble point of view.

When I started surfing Indian blogs, the first thing that struck me was the diversity I encountered. Most non-bloggers think of blogs as just online diaries, which is a ridiculously narrow view of blogs. I often have to remind such people that “blogging” is as wide an umbrella term as “writing.” A writer can write novels, short fiction, political tracts, history, opinion pieces, reportage, travellogues, poems, promotional fluff, erotica and diary items. Bloggers can blog their way through the same areas, though with more flexibility (as I’ve elaborated here, in the context of journalism). And Indian bloggers cover all these areas and more.

There is one huge difference between writing in the traditional sense and blogging, though: anybody can find an audience by blogging. Many talented writers who have the potential of building relatively small, loyal audiences cannot do so in print because the costs of publishing are high, and publishers are averse to taking a risk with them. But there are no such entry barriers for bloggers. It costs only the cost of internet access to blog, as there are plenty of free hosting sites and user-friendly blogging software available. I’m pretty hopeless at tech stuff, and Blogger and Blogspot work really well for me.

As a result of this, many writers who would otherwise not break through into print manage to publish themselves and find an audience. These audiences may often be relatively small, but so what? There is a satisfaction to having a readership that may be geographically spread out, and that you wouldn’t have had access to before blogging was born. Blogging helps people reach out, and I can’t emphasise enough how rewarding that can be.

While blogging is thought of by many as a solitary activity – one person and a computer – it has enlarged my social life in ways I never expected. That is something that many other bloggers have experienced as well. As we write our blogs and read those of others, we get in touch with people we share interests with, and mutual respect often turns into friendship. I have made friends I haven’t yet met in the flesh, who are a continent away, and this would not have been possible to anything like the same extent ten years ago. As I wrote here, this is quite the most rewarding aspect of my time as a blogger.

But blogging is about a lot more than social networking: it can also be a tool for social change. Blog readerships in India are too low for that now, but as internet penetration in India grows, more and more people will become aware of blogging, and more and more people will blog. Readership will expand massively, and blogs will actually be in a position to influence events in the real world, or meatspace as some of us call it. In addition to the prediction I’d made in this post, I’d like to make another one: the most influential Indian blogs of the next ten years will be those written in Indian languages.

Most of India does not speak English, and for too long the elites have condescended to them. This will change. As internet access becomes ubiquitous, more and more people will want to read content in their own languages. And while the regional papers, set in their fixed ways, will largely disappoint them, bloggers will not. Language software today is easily available and easy to use, and a whole generation of free thinkers and fearless writers will emerge. They will write in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati, Urdu, Oriya and every other language and dialect of this country. They will reach out to an audience of hundreds of millions of people, not the mere tens of thousands we bloggers in English have access to right now. They will truly do what some us vainly and bombasticly speak of sometimes: they will change the country.

It will take years, but it will happen.