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Friday, January 19, 2007

Blogging for Value

Long Long time after what had been an eternity for me I am jumping into this whole business of publishing myself or more logically exposing myself to the world -- the world of internet.

Anyways now that I have jumped into this whole thing I need it to be appreciated and liked. Consequently I visited some of the apparently popular blogs and tried to find out a pattern in them. What I noticed was that almost 99 blogs in 100 popular blogs were not about the person who wrote it but some thing which he thinks is of interest for the people and entice them to read his/her blog for. Some thing which gives value to the reader of the blog, some thing which makes the readers' life much better.

Off late I went through two different types of blogs. One was of Mr. Guy Kawasaki (CEO of Garage Ventures) and another was a blog named - "Sleepless in Singapore". I must admit there was a helluva differennce between the two of them. And its not that I made a revelation here which you guys wont have made but the point is I got to know two different genres of blog-writing. Was really impressed by Guy's ideas and his effort for what he is trying to achieve and how he is adding value to the readers of his blog.
So I was wondering as to what value can I add to the reader of my blog. That seemed to me as difficult as opening a new venture. So then I pondered over the existence of almost 60 million other blogs which are there just for name sake. I wondered what drove these people to write their blogs. Lets be honest here.... apart from the obvious and apparent reason of dispensing information, another (obvious) reason is quite simply, ATTENTION. Obviously, I'm not providing you with some profound secret you didn't already know, but lets take the case of a good number of blogs written by vapid people like me who think that everyone wants to read about the minutia of their day-to-day lives. I'm referring to the millions of random Blogspot, MySpace, and LiveJournal blogs penned (typed?) by people who lead excruciatingly insignificant lives, yet think that their Friday night at the club, ordeal while coming to the office etc make for a compelling read.

Another creepy quality of such bloggers is that they'll happily write about awkward, personal things that they probably would never tell you in person. So if you wanna spy on that person you despise so much, read his or her blog! Creepy. right?

So in nutshell as the famous line by Abhishek Bachaan goes - "Iss Duniya main do kism ke bLOG hote hain".
1. Blogs that offer a service, whether it be information, tips, or tools
2. Blogs whose service is to lead you to your death bed with content that reads like personal diary entries.

While both types of bloggers yearn for attention,(theres a whole study about it here) atleast the former uses it for better purposes. Hence, after doing such an extensive research, you must have guessed which type of genre will my blog belong to. Of course the second one..... You see for writing a blog which add value and all that crap you got to have value in yourself. It seems rather implausible for me to be adding value for my readers.... But dont you worry... you can come here and feel a bit entertained. So, keep coming back to my blog but beware--- there is no value added... just some crap which comes to my mind every now and then...