Join the Dots

It8217;s as public as you can get privately. In an age where sensory bombardment is continuous and invasive, a blog gives you a chance to have your say. Occasionally, blogs are a unique source of information8212;like the 24-year-old Iraqi girl known as Riverbend, whose Baghdad Burning blog provides one of the most powerful accounts of the ongoing Iraq war from a non-8216;embedded8217; point of view. At the other end of the spectrum, however, a blog may simply offer up the detail that its owner is down with a fever, likes strawberry jam, or has a crush on a neighbour.

But what is increasingly apparent is the power of this network. After the tsunami, Gupta turned over his blog to providing live SMS updates from affected areas. The response from across the world was tremendous, and combined with his contributions to SEA-EAT, the one-stop tsunami blog started by fellow blogger Peter Griffin, Gupta lost a week8217;s sleep and his girlfriend keeping the information flowing.

8216;8216;People are looking for an emotional connection,8217;8217; says the IIT grad and author of Play On Edward, who got into blogging just three months ago. 8216;8216;A blog is personal, direct and immediate. It8217;s more human.8217;8217; When leading newspapers and TV channels sourced information from Gupta8217;s site, he knew blogging had finally flexed its muscles in India.

Dina Mehta, 38, meanwhile, says blogging harnesses collective intelligence across continents.8216;8216;Email is dead,8217;8217; says the qualitative researcher, 8216;8216;and e-groups are outdated.8217;8217;

Twenty-two months old in the blogworld, Mehta is already talking of the next step8212;a combination of blogs, wikis shared blogs, Social Network Systems like Orkut or Ryze, and online presence indicators like Skype. 8216;8216;Through my 80-person friend list on Orkut,8217;8217; she explains, 8216;8216;I have a linked network of nearly 35 lakh contacts. Imagine the potential for collaborative communication, to share and develop ideas, technologies.8217;8217;

But it8217;s not all cyberpunk, globe-spanning futurespeak; blogging is also individualistic: 8220;There8217;s a lot of trust8212;after reading a journal for months, you know a lot about the person. You can8217;t be consistently fake, right?8217;8217;

Neural networks and technologies sound like a plan, but from a cluttered workroom in Delhi, one man is offering cyberspace8217;s equivalent of laidback pleasure8212;a cosy reading chair and an adda. And he prefers to hide behind the anonymity of 8216;Hurree Babu8217;, a name borrowed from Kipling in an elliptical tribute to that grandfather of 8216;Indo-Anglian8217; writing. kitabkhana.blogspot. com, with 60,000 page views in its one and a half years, is probably the country8217;s most accomplished literary blog. The Babu preferred a blog over a website because, 8216;8216;a website is like delivering a lecture, a blog is more like a conversation. The tone changes, it8217;s less formal. And free8217;8217;.

And, says The Babu, since most litblog contributors are literary insiders, they massage out the hype and put out stuff about books that 8216;8216;wouldn8217;t run in the Guardian or the NYT8217;8217;.

8216;8216;It puts you in touch with a variety of subcultures,8217;8217; he says, 8216;8216;today I have about 30 close friends, all of whom I communicate with through their blogs or mine, none of whom I8217;ve met and some of whom write to me asking how I am if my blog says I was unwell.8217;8217;

The Babu8217;s blog, berating as it does the fact that author Susan Sontag never got a much-deserved Nobel or informing you that Jane Austen8217;s genteel world was a major influence on the work of Irvine Trainspotting Welsh, can be viewed as a self-contained, indulgent space. Which is the last thing one can call emergic.org, entrepreneur Rajesh Jain8217;s two-year-old web log on emerging tech, enterprises and markets.

Jain, founder of Indiaworld, the country8217;s first portal that was sold to Sify in 1999 for 115 million, prefers terse e-mail replies supplemented by appropriate links than one-on-one meetings. He says everything one needs to know about him or what he has to say about technology is there on the blog, real time. In fact, the blog is Jain, in HTML.

8216;8216;Today, I can imagine being without an email or a cellphone for a day, but not without blogging,8217;8217; says Jain, who blogs every morning for 30-40 minutes, 8216;8216;with one column, and about 4 to 5 links with abstracts to other articles/blog posts8217;8217;.

The blog reflects his latest thinking, 8216;8216;built on the minds of many others8217;8217;. 8216;8216;The comments that I receive from many of the readers and other bloggers help in refining and getting the best from a community smarter than any single individual.8217;8217;

S Anand, a Mumbai-based management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group, also stresses on the individual privileges of being a community member. 8216;8216;My blog s-anand.net has got me a couple of useful business leads, but I could, if faced with a problem, just post it on a good blog. In 24 hours, I have the answer to it8212;from how to set up a petrochemical plant to how to optimise computer performance in a carpenter8217;s workshop,8217;8217; says the 30-year-old, who eschews personal ramblings for mostly 8216;8216;tech-centric or interesting8217;8217; articles he fishes off the Net. While it mainly serves his personal needs right now, he plans to make it more of a community exercise soon.

8216;8216;Also, people I know8212;and not necessarily all bloggers8212;call me up after seeing something interesting on my blog, and we get talking. It works the same way for me,8217;8217; says Anand, a blogger since 2000.

While Anand is fairly tolerant of an outsider8217;s ignorance about blogs, economist Yazad Jal, CEO of NGO Praja Foundation, doesn8217;t suffer blog-illiterates lightly. Jal8217;s blog8212;AnarCapLib, short for the political philosophy of anarcho-capitalist libertarian8212;revolves, apart from policy reform, around a number of topics. But the trigger was his 8216;8216;journalistic pretensions8217;8217;.

8216;8216;In the West,8217;8217; says the boyish-looking 32-year-old, 8216;8216;the best blogs get as many as 100,000 hits a day. Often, good bloggers take the mainstream media to task if they err and plug gaps in the system,8217;8217; says Jal, who likes playing the 8216;8216;judgemental journalist without worrying about an editor8217;s scalpel8217;8217;.

Jal says that AnarCapLib is banking on constructive action from the real-time exchange of ideas. 8216;8216;Ultimately, and this is a romantic view, I want my blog and others like it to be a form of unbiased, alternative media.8217;8217;

Poetry is at a yawning distance from policy reform, but fellow bloggers across the world are helping law graduate Monica Mody, who works for Breakthrough, a human rights organisation, hone her poetry skills.

Her six-month-old blog, insmallpieces.blog- spot.com, is still in its diapers, but Mody is excited about the response the 8216;8216;bi-weekly, or perhaps tri-weekly, eclectic and ex-centric anthology of poems8217;8217; is fetching. 8216;8216;Once this US-based writer advised: 8216;Prune the adjective bush, and your poetry will bloom8217;. That made me realise I do use a lot of adjectives,8217;8217; says the 24-year-old.

Regardless of whether it8217;s about going easy on the adjectives, harnessing collective intelligence, or intensely disliking the system, in a sea of impersonal information, a blog is a personalised message in a bottle.

With inputs from Ashok Malik and Devyani Onial in Delhi