What should blogs do?
Generally, I like to read blogs that let you do more than just ‘read’ text the way you’d read a printed publication. Otherwise, I find it a bit of a pain trying to plough through a thousand words on a computer screen. Blogs that link to multimedia content, where you can click to see images or watch videos or even to other blogs and websites are the ones that I find more interesting, possibly because they make better use of all of the wonderful things you can do on the Internet.
Infosys’s boss, Nandan Nilekani’s excellent Imagining India blog is like that. He very often links to other websites and blogs. His April 1 post has a link to an article in the latest issue of The Atlantic where a former IMF chief economist, Simon Johnson, writes about how financial oligarchies are at the root of the current economic crisis in the developed markets (like they have been in emerging markets). Nandan’s a techie and very digitally savvy so it’s no surprise to find such links in his blog.
Like Nandan, member of Parliament and entrepreneur Rajeev Chandrasekhar is also an ardent blogger, though his posts are more like traditional columns. On April 2, he wrote an interesting one that takes off from the Supreme Court denying permission to actor Sanjay Dutt to contest the elections and delves into criminalization of politics, alleged nexus between investigating agencies and political parties and other very pertinent issues.
Chandrasekhar’s posts may not have as many links as Nilekani’s does, yet it does things that good blogs must: it makes a point and takes a stand on issues and also is very topical. Check out his post about whether independent politicians make a difference or not. Given a few high-profile indie entrants to politics—like Captain Gopinath, Meera Sanyal and Mallika Sarabhai, he raises some thought-provoking points.
BJP supremo and prime ministerial candidate L.K. Advani’s blog (as well as his website) is a well-marketed one, popping up on almost any major website that you surf to. His blog posts are also in the usual traditional print format that newspaper columnists follow—not too many hyperlinks or multimedia offerings. Yet, it gets loads of hits and, on occasion, is a good read. Only, it’s not as frequently updated as one would have expected.
His most recent post was put up on March 16. What works best as a blog? Traditional run-on text that you read like you would in a newspaper or magazine? Or, blogs that make full use of what’s possible on the website? I think it’s about time to make Indian blogs a multimedia experience. What do you think?
|
|
