I came across the word in a certain blog as its title. Love that word, musings. Very nostalgic. It reminds me of 2002 when blogs were named as musings or rants or rambles or space or scribbles(like this one) and the bloggers wrote whatever they wanted. The good thing was hardly anyone read those blogs when compared to blog aggregators, feed readers and all the noise of these days.

I wish and hope that I could be as raw, naive and unfettered as those days.

It’s over. The revolution happened overnight and we didn’t even know it. We’re all now in charge, together, as one big group collective.

The a-list is dead.

As posted by Jim Kukkral on his blog, referring to the latest blogosphere burn-out Jason Calcanis.

I partly agree with Jason’s note that blogging is dead. That’s right, dead. Not in the literal sense. Evolved would be a better word to describe this. But blogging today has evolved too much from it’s original idea that it doesn’t qualify to be called evolution. Hence blogging, as we know it, is already dead. And so are the A List bloggers.

Any help on suggesting the present A-listers of Indian Blogosphere will be for the greater common good of….well…you and me. I promise to twitter this list, digg it, create a facebook group , bookmark it and finally, I will include it as a part of my friendfeed. But I wouldn’t blog about it, ’cause it’s dead.

Three sentences to describe the blogopshere time travel, back to 2002.

~ Went on a random tour of Indian Blogosphere through blogrolls, comments and other pointers.

~ Found some amazingly fresh blog talents which are more personal blogs[including chick-lit blogs] rather than show-offs, like this one.

~ Subscribed to the feeds of these newly discovered personal, neon-colored stat counter pasted, I-went-to-my-paati’s-house-yesterday type blogpost filled blogs.

I’m back in 2002. Yay !!

Should I sue Gizmodo and feed their publicity hunger or should I just take this naming of Lazy Geek Cushion as a compliment ?

Thanks GP for the pointer.

“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.”

Info Overload has been a recurring theme in this blog for the last 2+ years. Info overload is nothing but a heap of nonsensical stuff that you read/write(blog) online everyday.

NY Times has wake up call for bloggers and I’m sure it should also include blog readers and web wanderers.

Too many blogposts on a single blog makes no point. As the information gets more and more duplicated over the web, some one has already written about what you want to write about. The ad revenues or the number of people reading your blog feed is not significant than one’s health.

So as said before, don’t read this blog and more inportantly take it easy.

Anil Dash from Movable Type wrote a blogpost that took over its competitor, WordPress. He explained with pointers as to how WordPress upgrade is getting tougher by the day and not as simple as advertised. WordPress founder, Matt Mullenbeg responded on his twitter that Six Apart(Movable Type’s company) is getting desperate and dirty.

While it may be true that Movable Type has some of its users to the WordPress blogging tool, it doesn’t mean they can’t strike back, taking their competitors head-on. Anil’s post didn’t have a single loosely written line. While there may be factual errors or not, he did not behave like a cheapo. Matt did. And he is pissed.

Matt is pursuing Typepad Users(a part of Six Apart) like Seth Godin to move their own domains and install WordPress to run their blogs. When Matt is adopting public/no-so-public ways to attract users, shouldn’t he be ready for the same methods by his competitor.

BTW, I like WordPress as much as, and sometimes even better than, Movable Type. This blog still runs on Movable Type for the last 4 years. The irony is that it runs smoothly because of Akismet spam catcher which is a product from the WordPress company. Tells us that none of these guys are perfect yet.

The web market is still nascent. The perfect blogging platform creator is still playing soccer at Madison or Florida or Madras and hasn’t the heard the word, blog, yet.

WordPress.com has been hosting free blogs for more than 2 years now. With their sheer development effort and bringing the best features out to the users, I think they have already taken over the blogging scene.

They aren’t the largest blogging network yet. But they seem to understand the cutting edge of this technology and its going to only a span of few years for them to snatch the best content management tool award from Movable Type. Blogger ? Those guys are now history.

When Google took over Blogger, we were all certainly excited but nothing big has happened since then. Its a pity that they don’t even have a tool to import content from other blogging softwares. And people have been asking about this since 2004. I’m not sure why Google hasn’t been concentrating on Blogger as much as it has done to its Feed Reader.

WordPress.com started offering free uploads upto 3GB per account from this week. But that isn’t the big news. Check out WP site to see the blogging community that they are building. Even Tamil WP Bloggers are a strong community there. Just when Blogger.com is filled with spam blogs, I think these WP blogging communities are going to be WP’s lifeline in the days to come.

From WP blog -

Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get the same amount of space at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. Blogger only gives you 1GB. We’re doing the same thing for free.

Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.

A photograph for a tag.

Shot this from Alki Beach opposite to the Seattle downtown. I waited nearly three hours for the sun to go down so that I could get one such shot. This was one among the 15 pictures that I shot and only this came through slightly well. For some weird reason, it was also published in a seattle guide book.

More photos at lazylens.com.

This is a sticky post. Regular programming continues below.

If you encounter these lines in a blog, please close the browser and move onto the next one. That blogpost would be a pure collection of some mindless posts, which even the blogger who linked to it hasn’t read completely. Why in this world would you want to read something that hasn’t been even read by the blogger, in the first place ?

The more the number of updates to the post, the more it gets linked. It would stand a big chance of becoming the reference point for that whole issue. Plus it might get insta-pundited or mentioned in some mainstream media.

Apologize my swearing but what the heck is “regular programming” ?

Spirit of the Desi blogworld

Its amazing how quickly we’ve all moved on from the emotions of mumbai blasts which only happened a few days ago, its odd that none of have shed any tears for the Tsunami victims in Indonesia, its odd none of us have been reminded of the TN tsunami when reading about the recent Indonesian one. Its odd that all of us have now moved on to the Indian Government’s pathetic decision to stop people accessing blogspots within India. The in thing now for all us bloggers is to get on our high horses and scream at the top of our voices about freedom of speech and democracy etc etc until the next big thing hits the headline. Some might say that we are a stoic bunch of bloggers.

This post named, Spirit of the Desi Blogworld, isn’t a unique thought. But its the right way and the right time that WA chose to post it. I feel like locating the Wicked Angel and getting her/him a handful of Baskin Robbins. What say ?

* This is probably the most boring post ever written on this blog. So skip it, if you feel like *

The real change in the book market is not the big guy vs. the little guy, or chain vs. indie stores. Rather, it’s the reader’s greater impatience, a symptom of our amazing literary (and televisual) plenitude. In the modern world we are more pressed for time, and we face a greater diversity of cultural choices. It was easy to finish Tolstoy’s War and Peace when there were few other books around and it was hard to find them. Today, finishing it means forgoing many other options at our fingertips. As a result, we tend to consume ideas in smaller bits, a proposition that (in another context) economists labeled the “Alchian and Allen theorem.” Long, serious novels are less culturally central than they were 100 years ago. Blogs are on the rise, and most readers prefer the ones with the shorter posts. Our greater access to books also means that each book has less time to prove itself. A small percentage of the books published account for a large share of the profits, thus setting off a race to track reader demand. Many customers want very recent best-sellers, often so they can feel they are reading something trendy, something other people are talking about. Of course, that’s its own kind of affectationand not an entirely pleasing one.

Did you find yourself relaxed to read that entire paragraph ? Or did you skip few lines and went straight down.

The above paragraph was just a piece from a larger article. First, I wasn’t even comfortable to paste a huge quote because I felt no one would read this entire paragraph. Such is the speed of reading these days. The quote rightly says, how people are more and more interested in consuming smaller bits of information than larger ones.

This is due to the in-famous information overload, being discussed in this blog often. I’ve been munching my thoughts on this info overload for atleast 2 months now. Resistance if futile. I couldn’t resist the information overload. In this speedy world of internet and weblogs and podcasts, books are becoming a heavier by the day. The moment you shut-off from the world and go back to books, you tend to have withdrawal symptoms. By the time one completes half a book, there are a dozen novels to be read, a dozen Mission Impossibles to be watched, handful of blogposts to be written.

At the same time, here is another thought. To write a book, something thats published on wood pulp, takes a long time. The book has to be composed , edited and published. And it takes it’s own time to reach the hands of readers. Someone has to read the book and then write a piece of appraisal on it. Only after this, the author of the book gets the first comments from his readers. Until then, its like waiting political parties waiting for the vote count, a grave silence.

Blogs are from a different leaque. I’m now writing this blogpost. I will post this[even without editing] in the next few minutes. Most probably the first comments could be seen within the first two hours. Sometimes, when books are discussed here, there is a grave silence but that is a different issue. So I as a blogger know the comments for or against will reach this blogpost in the next 2 hours. Whereas imagine if someone wants to write this same stuff in a book. It would take weeks/months for him to get the bouquets or brickbats.

At the same time, Blogs are laudatory and ephemeral. Books stand over time. Sidin Vadakut had written the famous blogpost on single south indian men. That was probably the most famous blogpost ever written. Leave out the war cries on IIPM(which were again ephemeral), they just caused some hot air. Now do you think Sidin’s post will be remembered 5 years from now. But if only it was a book, it would reach out for years to come. That’s just my belief.

May be all the above is just trash. May be we are going through a transformation and blogs are probably the future books. We don’t know, atleast me. Neverthless, this urbanised world is rapidly moving towards something. And its causing a lot of information overload. I have no clue how I would survive the load but I wish I could sit tight and read Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. Donno if I could it. To hell with information.

The blog was the perfect bluff for a self-conscious writer like me who yearned for the spotlight and then squinted in its glare.

Blogging had been the ideal run-up to a novel, but it had also become a major distraction. I would sit down to start on my novel only to come up with five different blog entries. I thought of them as a little something-something to whet the palatebecause it was easier, more immediately satisfying, because I could write it, and post it, and people would say nice things about it, and I could go to bed feeling satisfied.

Practically every blogger I know has taken their site down at some point-for personal reasons, for business reasons, for boredom reasons. It’s no different from the way we have to turn off our cell phones or stop checking e-mail so that we can actually focus on something.

Sarah Hepola‘s article on slate, This Is My Last Entry, is a very honest reflection of what goes on one’s mind while bringing down the blog. Needless to say, its a must read.

There was an interesting discussion[uid/pass] between Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc and Alan Meckler of Jupiter Media on today’s WSJ.

While Jason was quoting some amazing stats on how people can make money through blogging, Alan was shooting back with some nice theory. I tend to agree with Alan for the most part. Here is what he had to say –

Take MySpace — I read yesterday in the N.Y. Times that they have 50 million in the community. Every member can launch a blog with little or no difficulty. Blog growth is and will be huge. But again, while a very select few of the blogs will make significant money, most will never be worth anything because their information is worthless and therefore they will garner few monthly page views.

Blogs are fun for someone who wants a pulpit and does not care about making money. Blogs are really the “diaries” of yesteryear. Social historians of the future will have a field day mining blogs for nuggets of the mores of present day civilization. But in terms of making money from blogs, I doubt they will be anything more than an interesting subset of Internet ad revenue.

P.S. Interesting to note that my spell checker does not recognize “blog.”

Blogs are really diaries or microcosms of what is happening in millions of ways in daily life — ranging from special interests to business specialties to whatever. Obviously there is money to be made with blogs, but very, very few will bring in more than a few hundred dollars per year.

I’m shouting here, I agree. I agree.

Hot Machi Hot. Yet another Tamil group blog on Election ’06. Mikeset Munusaamy leads the sarcastic lot. Funny.

With just 100 days of blogging[via], Guy Kawasaki could grasp and convey the I and the My feeling so well. Much much better than what was written here.

In his blogpost that celebrates the completion of 100 blogging days, Kawasaki shares his experience –

2. The more a blogger uses the pronoun “I,” the less he has to say. Many bloggers apparently believe that people not only give a shiitake about everything they say, but that these people are hanging on to every word.

And more –

9 a. I don’t get this “exchanging links” thing. IMHO, you should link to a blog if you believe it’s good for your readership. The other blogger should link to back your blog if she believes it’s good for her readership. In a perfect world, linking is about quality, not reciprocation, with all due respect to Dr. Cialdini. :-)

Are u still thinking, who’s Kawasaki ? Go figure.