I added a few weblogs to my blogroll a few days back:
Economy
Brad Setser: If you are as obsessed as I am - about the macroeconomic issues revolving around the US twin deficits, the resultant instability in the currency market and the role that the Asian Central banks are playing, Setser's weblog should be a daily read.
Some people feel that it is Apocalypse Now for the current financial order. Bushies think they are orchestrating a soft landing for the dollar. Setser introduces a strong sense of proportion into the debate.
India
Jabberwock: Via Kitabkhana, I recently discovered Jai Arjun's weblog. Check it out ...
Photography
Durgi's's photoblog: As I keep telling Durgesh, if only he were not spending most of his waking hours in the services of the Evil Empire, he would probably have a couple of exhibitions under his belt by now ...
Conscientious: Jim Colberg runs the kind of weblog about photography that I would have liked to run if I were as knowledgeable and as focused. (although I do not share his enthusiasm for Chomsky)
In case you did not notice, William Gibson is back.
Gibson and Neil Stephenson are the only two science fiction writers that I try to keep up with (unless you count Douglas Adams and Asimov. But Douglas Adams doesnt write fiction anymore and Isac Asimov is dead). I should note here that neither Gibson, nor Stephenson are strictly science fiction writers. Gibson in 'Pattern Recognition' was skating very close to what can be reality.
In other news,
Mobilives is back too.
Alex Ross, the music critic of the New York has a wonderful weblog called The Rest Is Noise.
Insidegoogle is just that; a weblog for for googleheads.
Interesting article on yesterday's NYT magazine on blogging and its impact on the American political landscape (I am not finished reading it)
Billmon (who used to run a prominent lefty weblog) has a critical piece on the mainstreamization of blogs in LA Times. I am not very sympathetic to his viewpoint on this subject and this post responds to some of the charges.
I think the idea that the prominest blogs stop being subversive and/or suck the Oxygen out of blogosphere is old, justified and in the nature of things. Way back, before the left oriented blogs like DailyKos or Whiskey bar were as prominest as they now are in North America, before the conservative warbloggers like Instapundit became so popular, bloggers in North America used to handwring over the prominence of what went under the name of "A list bloggers".
Clay Shirky wrote an interesting article on power law distribution last year. What he wrote and what I said in my commentary then, is still valid.
However, there are some caveats. I think single topic weblogs are still a powerful idea. Internet (thank you google!) makes it much easier to find sites catering to your interests. If you are not trying to tackle something as broad as North American politics, there is still enough space for interesting niche weblogs.
If you do want to tackle a broad enough subject, the only way to do it now in a way that attracts a large readership is to provide a diversity of original voices
In fact, as Billmon's own experience showed, it should be the preferred option if the motivation is fame or influence.
I feel slightly squeamish about linking to kiss and tell stories or to stories about the workplace misfortunes due to blogging indescretions. But Blog Interrupted by April Witt, in today's Washington Post, is particularly well-written and raises interesting questions about the broader sociocultural changes.
Vinod hosted this week's Indian Blog mela. Dina is going to host next week's. It is an interesting idea. I am getting to know a lot more interesting Indian blogs through these than I did through idle surfing.
Incidentally, 'Mela' means festival in Hindi and many other North Indian languages.
This thread on Nielsen Hayden's has interesting suggestions about RSS readers available on the market. Bloglines sounded interesting.
As I said in an earlier post, I am currently test driving FeedDemon, which is very cool, if a trifle slow (that could be because I am on a beta product). I also heard very good things about Newsgator.
In case you are an India newshound, Indian Express is now available through syndications (via Mahesh). I hope Rediff follows suit.
Mahesh Santaram is hosting the 'Bharatiya Blog Mela', a rich showcase of Indian bloggers. I was very pleasantly surprised by both the presentation (the design is a spoof on Indian Express) and the content.
Lately, there has been a bunch of interesting new blogs and zines from the Indian community
Om Malik, a journalist with Business 2.0 and the writer of Broadbandits: Inside the $70 million telecom heist has started an interesting new weblog called 'Not really Indian' . It seems to cover Indo American cultural kitsch and what he calls 'un NRI like things'.
I also noticed another interesting weblog called Prayatna on Typepad (via Emergic).
Former NDTV producer and anchor, Smita Maitra and Amrita Ghosh, English lecturer/PhD candidate in Drew University are starting a new Indian literary webzine called 'Cerebration'. It is currently hosted on Geocities which is rather fragile. It is moving to this location. They are also looking for interesting submissions.
Dialognow, Satya Circle and Mantram have already on the map for some time now and have acquired quite a bit of traction among those looking for news and views from the Indian community on the net.
Anita Bora has an article on site counters in Rediff on the net. I am quoted in it :-).
Let me take a moment to thank Prashant Kothari for including me on his blogroll.
Prashant writes interesting, pithy commentary largely on current US and Indian affairs. I thought his remarks on my last month's article on Satyacircle were on the mark.
It was also nice to rediscover two of my favourite Indian commentators (Gurcharan Das and Swaminathan Aiyar) through his links. Both write very well on Indian business and economy; though Das's Optimism Unbound can sometimes grate on people more cynical than him.
Got arrested a few days back.
There are details in MSNBC. (I am chary about linking to anything on MSNBC. They keep moving this around and break my links. )
( via Buzzmachine)
There is a big flap about Hartford Courant, a newspaper in my neck of the woods (Connecticut) asking its travel editor to stop publishing his weblog.
Denish Horgan's politics seems to be the polar opposite of Courant's. Courant also recently changed his position from the position of a columnist to that of the travel editor. So the editor's argument doesn't really wash since the kind of opinion he expresses in his weblog is no longer published in the paper anyway. This action really shuts him up for good. Sad.
Cosmo Macero has interesting observations on the subject.
(Links stolen from Romenesko's)
SARS Watch by Tim Bishop is an excellent resource. (via Brad Delong).
It's a zoo out there is a weblog by an unidentified Singaporean doctor trying to cope with the crisis. (via Linkmachinego)
It is now official. Blogs save lives. (via Electrolyte).
Ajit Balakrishnan now has a blog. (via Kiruba). I enjoyed reading What next for Indian design and Am I cut out to be an entrepreneur. But I do wish that he would check for typos before he uploads his stuff.
Balakrishnan is the chairman of Rediff.com and was the co-founder and principal owner of Rediffusion advertising agency. Rediff's aggressive and elegant advertisement campaigns for Congress-I in 1984 and '89 campaigns changed the way political campaigns are run in India. Today, Balakrishnan is better known for Rediff which changed the rules of the game for web publishing in India. Apparently, he is also well known inside Rediff for practicing his golf swings in the corridors with an imaginary golf club.
I suspect a major part of the credit for Rediff's web initiative also goes to Anita who from inside Rediff has been a tireless promoter weblogs in India.
Clay Shirky has the definitive essay on the subject; spurred partly, I suspect, by the discussions following Steve's post. Jason Kottke's weblogs and power law covers the same ground and has an interesting reading list. I also enjoyed Mark Pilgrim's post.
The whole thing about why isn't my weblog becoming more visible comes up from time to time and let's face it, exercizes most of us at least occasionally.
As someone whose weblog is not by any stretch of imagination setting the Atlantic on fire, here is my take. If you are weblogging, it is going to be very frustrating if you have the expectation that this shit is gonna make you well known. I read somewhere sometime back, that a weblog is a very good way to sustain your existent brand equity through the web. But it is not a medium ideally well suited for developing your brand equity. I tend to agree. Outside of being very, very good, you also need to be very regular in your posting and in the vast majority of cases, have a lot of PR Savvy. Now, you probably already need to do that at work, right? This stuff is supposed to be fun, a creative outlet. Once you start taking it easy, you would realize that it is contributing to your self development in myriad small ways that you did not anticipate earlier.
The other thing that the weblog world rewards is giving back to the community. If you are doing stuff that is useful/helpful to the netizens, it spreads the word. e.g. people like Mark or the boy genius came to the party later and had not gone out of their way to spread the word about their weblog. But they give back a lot and people appreciate that.
But there simply are way too many weblogs out there. And if you let your self actualization needs ride on your weblog, that may turn out to be frustrating. Go out. Enjoy the sun (or the snow, if that is the case..we are expecting 5 inches by the evening). Have a drink. Spend some time writing that book you always want to write.
Interesting blogs
- Noah Shachtman has a weblog on defence technology and national security issues. (via Talkingpointsmemo)
- William Gibson now has a weblog. Gibson is the writer of Neuromancer and is widely credited with introducing the word 'cyberpunk' in English vocabulary. (via mefi)
- Maciej Ceglowski writes a weblog from Vermont and may well turn out to be the "Verlyn Klinkenborg of weblogging"! He writes very well. (via Anil)
Update: NYT review of his new book 'Pattern recognition' is here.
Kiruba published an interview with Anil Dash last weekend. I have long admired Anil's quality of writing and worked with Kiruba on some of the questions. (I meant to post this earlier, but had been very preoccupied with trying to wrap up work etc. before the holidays).
I am probably the last weblogger on earth to have noticed that blogdex now has a great look complete with track backs. I am sorry that they haven't brought back search as I had hoped, but trackback is a very welcome addition.
Two of the key reasons I I migrated from blogger to movabletype are a) a better comment system and b) trackbacks. Every time I clicked on the comments on this page, I could feel YACCS groaning under the collective weight of all of us. I think the premise of a remotely administered comment system (specially free ones) is inherently faulty. Any Content management system that aspires to be a serious contender ought to have its own native comment system.
The other thing which really, really excited me was the idea of trackbacks (See Gallagher for a detailed treatment). I think trackbacks as an idea is going to find widespread adoption on the net and MT is the pioneer in this area.
I don't care much for the whole RSS brouhaha.
From a big picture perspective, I don't think weblog management systems will take off as independent large business entities. There will probably be significant enterprise interest in weblogs as a tool, but it will be a functionality in a CMS or a portal product, a market that the biggies like Microsoft are much better placed to serve. The really good weblog products will be bought out by the large CMS vendors.
But while I don't have much faith on the large scale enterprise adoption of weblogs as standalone entities, I do believe in the increasing popularity of weblogs as a net culture phenomenon. Weblogs have democratised web based content publication and can help realize a global conversational commons. From that context, Blogger is probably the most visible and highly trafficked product out there.
The less talked about thing about MT is that some of the best minds using weblogs have either migrated or are migrating to movable type. I quite think that at least in the foreseeable future, most innovation in the weblog space will happen in or around MT.
One of our favourite poets, Rabindranath Tagore wrote the following poem in early parts of twentieth century. It is hung in a lot of school premises in India. In 1977, when Mrs. Gandhi declared emergency, there was heavy censorship of newspapers. Lots of people were sent to jail, tortured. There was fear in the air. Apparently this poem started vanishing from the walls. Don't know whether it is just myth.
I can not find it in me to provide a reasoned, nuanced post about this. I obviously don't have any sympathy for the LGF comments crowd. I also like Anil's weblog and keep going back there. But in the larger debate, when you get beyond things like LGF's target audience, I feel alienated by the stridency and fundamentalism of both the left and right. I found Nick Denton's post on the subject dignified. But I dont think there is any political umbrella anymore for people like me.
Instead I give you this poem. It says what I believe in:
"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake"
Mitch Ratcliffe made a very good point about recent ethical lapses in blogging and it was good to see Doc Searls making amends.
For what it is worth, I do think that many professional journalists also have strong conflicts of interest. Ratclife kinda blurred that. But what for me differentiated blogging was that the majority of bloggers with a large following seemed to have a strong sense of integrity.
Update: In this context, I really liked Mark Pilgrim's post and Dorothea Salo's post that he referred to in his.
Stayed on my mind:
"When I turn 55 or 60 my children will be grown and I will give up on technology as a pursuit and write only stories and poems, and I will give the time when I am not writing stories and poems to my wife, who will be my first and only wife, thanks, and who will probably have had enough of me by that point - so I'll give the rest of my time to helping poor people however they need."
Paul Ford in ftrain
"how much of your life is actually private when you start maintaing an online Journal and start writing about your day to day events. ?.....I have decided to hang up my gloves. Retire. Stop blogging, atleast for a while now. And before I did that, I wanted to tell you why I am doing it, and also open your eyes to the ramifications of what you might yourself be playfully indulging in."
Theshiva in Immigrant song
".. You'll probably grant that multiculturalism is to some extent a shorthand for the peaceful coexistence of people of different *races* rather than different cultures. A more accurate name would be "multiracialism". ....multiculturalism is predicated on the idea that different races can coexist and communicate, and a prerequisite for cross cultural/racial communication is an acknowledgement that differences exist and can be inquired about..."
"Godlesscapitalist" in a comment on Anil's site
I wanted to take a moment here to thank Anita and Sathish. Anita's creation of the Indian blogger ring is probably the first and only organized work in this area. Before that I did not even know that there are so many Indian bloggers out there. This morning I was pleasantly surprised to discover a list of Indian bloggers that she has put up. It is a great resource. I wish there was some way of categorizing the weblogs by subject. But no one has as yet figured out how to effectively categorize weblogs. (There was an interesting discussion on Blogroots on this subject sometime back). Most of the cool Indian blogs that I know of, I have discovered through Sathish's links. This morning it took me to Kishore Balakrishnan's weblog. It looks quite interesting.
Noticed:
Sajit Gandhi's weblog. It tackles some of the more intractable issues plagueing south Asia. His analysis of mainstream media's coverage of South Asia is incisive, scathing and well written (via Random Thoughts).
The news, uncensored: A commentary of Israelis killed in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Partisan, informative and scary. You feel terrible reading this chronology of death.
xmlhack: I have been looking for an XML resource which will clue me in on all that is happening in that space. With my current level of XML literacy, trying to read it hurts my brain. But I think I am getting up to speed. (The Language of Semantic Web by Uche Ogbuji provides very good reasons for getting to know more about XML)
This absolutely hilarious e-mail exchange that one lady had with one Nigerian scammer.
Why do you keep a weblog? The question keeps popping up in all weblogging forums from time to time. This is probably the closest to my reason for starting to weblog. RandomNotes started off as a placeholder for my links, reflections and thoughts. However, over the last 5 months it has become become a drafting board for various ideas that I am working on, a place to keep my hiking logs, the place where I like to fiddle with markup languages. Nevertheless, Cory has best described the motivation for keeping a weblog for me. When I am looking for a specific link, I often search my weblog rather than my bookmarks.
Incidentally, I noticed that weblogs are increasingly becoming a platform for activism or evangelism. And I don't mean the warblogs. The best and the most recent example of evangelism is that of Mark Pilgrim (and some others) for the adoption of RSS auto discovery by the weblog community. Zeldman's championing of web standards is another example of good evangelism (though that did grate on some people!). He got the ears of even people like me who are outside of the web design community. Googlebombing as activism has been gathering a lot of momentum. I do have reservations about googlebombing. In spite of most googlebomb's essentially good intent, it is vigilante justice of the kind that I can't somehow identify with.
Collectively, the weblogging community seem to have attained the kind of critical mass that makes meaningful change possible.
On a different note, John Hiler listed some of the large media companies that have jumped into the blogging bandwagon. It's an impressive list.
Dan disagrees with my charectarization of his writing on my last sunday's post. I guess you think of people in the context in which you know them. Metafilter does have a strong tilt to the left. The fact that he is often considered part of 'The conservative cabal' in mefi, may had influenced my thinking. I would definitely not call him 'far right' in mainstream American political context. Also, since I hate it when anyone presumes to label me, it probably wasnt right for me to try to categorize his writings.
Noticed:
Dan Dhartung's weblog, lake effect is back up again. I first noticed his weblog through his posts on mefi. Dhartung's politics and writing are much further to the right than what I usually read. But his posts tend to be very erudite and well reasoned.
A Google Weblog: I suppose this was bound to happen. (via tools).
A lot of mainstream media attention on weblogging this month:
Newsday's take: A good read.
Time Magazine Nice, but has nothing new for the weblogging community. So, I am kinda surprised that its on top of Daypop. Another example of navel gazing by us.
John Dvorak in PC magazine. A little condescending, but has some hometruths too.
BBC News: Seems more balanced.
Guardian on Eve and Blogger.com. Very cool. Guardian is one of the most clued in in among the mainstream media (check their international news weblog).
CSM on Metafilter. Nice, complimentary article. People are already feeling for the warm halo around their heads :-).
(via mefi, blogger)
I have been tinkering with the template. So the site is in a bit of a mess right now. The archives had disappered last night. This afternoon they miraculously reappeared. Blogger has been wobbly of late and could have been showing attitude. The comment box doesnt look too happy either. Anyway, I have been planning on adding some stuff on this page. But the last few days have been hectic and the rest of the week isnt expected to be any better. May be over the weekend .......
I have also been spending more time than could be good for me in Mefi (I have always had a problem with prioritization. The interesting always won over the important). Lately, I have gotten better. But that could have more to do with the cashflow than with actual intent!
Dave Winer's Scripting News Weblog
AWESOME weblog about tech stuff in general and scripting in specific. Winer seems to define scripting rather broadly. Links to some other very cool weblogs. Actually most people probably know this site already. I just felt like linking to it.Not many people take off on Lessig just like that!
This log is primarily to showcase interesting links on the net that I come across. And when I have the time, energy and inclination - my scintillating commentary! ..Since I spend a lot of time on the net, I do run into lots of interesting stuff. Its a little tiresome going back to hotmail and sending out e-mails. So, from now on - whenever I have a good link, I would post it here. And whenever you guys get bored - you can check out this page :-).
For those of you who have been monitoring the travails of my previous weblog - the account on server101.com was a trial account. The account lapsed and the log got deleted. This one - hopefully - is for keeps.