As a buzurg, i.e., someone who has been around in the infancy of what is now know generically as "blogging" - my first "post" was over at Diaryland, on 2001-10-10 @ 18:37; Blogger then was still an independent startup in beta; I also have a year's worth of Dairyland archives on Blogger but I think it is best not to release such self-conscious, mostly angst-y, yet much more hopeful jottings/droppings upon the world - I was wondering if I should throw my hat into the ring for Zigzackly's contest for the first Indian blogger?

This, however, brings up a fundamental question for Zigzackly: how to decide if something in the dark ages is a "blog"? Does it have to be paginated, and have the dated log format popularized by Blogger? What if someone then, instead of bothering to mimic a dairy, simply kept a webpage based on themes (or what we now know as tags)? Will it qualify as a blog?

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As a skeptic, I am doubtful of fads & revolutions, including this blogging revolution (while I admit on this issue, my views are more tempered and qualified) that seem to periodically show up, mainly because for me the point hinges on quality. And on that measure, most blogs, including this one, are makeshift at best. This is what I was trying to discuss with a very literate friend - he sees little or no value in reading blogs compared to reading a book - a few weeks ago.

I proposed to him that he might see the value of blogs if he viewed them a collective ongoing gossipy conversation. While blogs may or perhaps don't care to discuss ideas at the depth as a book does or can (A statistical aside: what is the average length/word count of a blog post? I suspect it is around 200-500 words, i.e., roughly half a typed page), they are neverthless very useful in the hyper textual sense, i.e., they enable us to discover and form mental maps; mental maps that can be thought of as snapshots of the collective golbal mind. Of course, it did help that we now have some very superlative literary blogs (eg: The Middle Stage) to which I was able to point him to to examine their value for himself. Since he wants morph into a writer, I also told him that yakking imperfectly on a blog is as good as asking a circle of semi-strangers (who usually become friends) to read and critique his work.

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Blog celebrity, and the correspondih envy, is another recent (in most part, main stream media generated) odious phenomenon - I am all for serious hobbyists for whom play remains play. And thanks to programs such as Google's Ad-sense, some of these celebrity bloggers can now make a living off their blogging. Aside: I for one prefer to call is Ad-Nonsense; I semi-loathe blogs that feature this brand of textual clutter floating around, and like Doc. Sarvis in Edward Abbey's "The Monkey Wrench Gang", I feel like taking a blowtorch to them - maybe this would be a worthy Firefox add-in; one that serves up webpages sans Ad-nonsense.

Why you ask? I feel such commercial concerns take away from the feeling of community (even though Wendelly Berry would mock me for using the word community to refer to 'people' so geographically dispersed) that can be engendered by blogs. I don't mind people receiving financial benefits if they produce something that other people find value in but I rather not see them getting these benifits from an faceless corporation. So what kind of reward model do I want to see in place? That, kind reader, is a topic for another rambling post :)

Visiting after a while, from orkut..

It’s a mystery to me what makes men compare blogs and books. Blog is a fling while book is amour. I’ve always regarded them as two completely different ink spills both in personal identity and temporal consciousness. Except perhaps for the reader,there is no one common thing. PS- What in blogging is more important? writing posts or reading indiscriminately? I have more to tell, but time... sucha bitch. uber

You have been around for long, my friend!