Thursday, 25th December 2008
To Blog or To Not Blog
At long last, i've decided to come out of hiberation and back to the blogosphere. Co-workers and friends alike have chided me for not blogging and the state of my website and i had to resort to lame excuses.
The blogosphere has come a long way since it becomes popular and almost everybody and their grandmoms have blogs which make it less of a novelty each passing day. Often I step back and wonder if there is too much information that is online. The recent historic election campaign turned us into news junkies. But how many blogs does the world need? In a presidential election dominated by the Internet where for the young chunk, the internet was their major source of information.
The opportunity for us to express ourselves is wonderful. Having to read all of those opinions isn't. Back when i first began my site (2004) there were more people reading blogs than writing them. It isn't quite the same anymore. And even if most blogs are skippable, there are one, two or couple dozen worth checking a couple of times - or maybe three or four times - a day just to make sure you aren't missing anything.
Capitalizing on the information overload, then there are sites that are supposed to help you sort the wheat from the chaff on all the other sides. They filter stores, aggregate ones that they think you should read and use some sofisticated computer algorithms to do their sorting. Other such sites rely on the readers to do the heavy lifting. So if sixty-three percent recomment a story about how twilight is a movie for the teenage soul, you better read it. Or that article about a Russian blogger who says that Obama might make Sarah Palin Secretary of State.
How many blogs does the world need when it already has a blog gridlock? The great thing about blogs, in my view, is that they share the same voice of e-mail. It is a new literary form that combines the best of immediacy of talking with reflectiveness of writing. But like everything else, too much of a good thing can be bad.
I wonder if i have reached the point with blogs and websites where i fire up my blog reader actively hoping there isn't anything interesting in there because then i'll have to take the time to read it!
Posted by Nikhil on Thursday, 25th December 2008 in Life in General | Fun | Humour