IIT Mood Indigo Blog Camp - II

As the O Henry short story Gift of the Magi (the whole story on this link) goes "...Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating." Sniffles predominated the last few days as I became a victim of the sudden cold that seemed to sweep the world. I went for morning walks without enough warm clothes and that must have aggravated the situation. The back of my throat still feels like it has been rubbed by sandpaper, but still. So I have been irregular. Sorry. I have erred. What it must have done to my ranking, I have no means of knowing.

 

So here goes. The cold is abating, but when it was at its height, I was reminded of this saying, "When you are well, you don't remember what it is to be sick, and when you are sick you don't remember what it is to be well." Well, not exactly, something similar.

 

Hm.

 

So inside the Blog Camp, before the sessions began the IIT-ians (Aside: I am a bit scared of these "double eyes" you know, they psyche me out. Yes, completely. Something I can't just figure out is how these frail looking girls and boys [some of them looking as if they hardly sleep from all the mugging they do] can make it to the top of the 20,000 who qualify for admission in the IITs. And every year there are another lot of 20,000 thrown up into the IIT vortex. I think it's a government conspiracy, keeping the "double eyes" swotting all the time and leaving the country soon as they finish, without causing much damage to the land that gave them birth. If they stayed back you can imagine the trouble they can do with their intelligence and graphical memories. God forbid! They could make governments fall like nine pins. That was a huge aside.), were setting up a wide area network (WAN) and one IITian kept goading the other by saying, "they say we are the best, man, so do it."

 

So much for the "double eye's" legendary confidence.

 

Before me was Meetu Kabra who spoke about her movie review blog "Wogma" which gives impartial reviews and rating for movies; it seems she is doing a great job from her page rankings (She has a page rank of 5, while I have only 4. Good showing.).

 

What I wanted to get across in my talk was that regular blogging pays and it's also a way to flex your writing muscles. Besides it can also be a medium of your activism, your free expression (artistic, writing, painting, drama whatever) and also your frank and uncensored opinion of what you recommend and what you don't. Almost all good writers set themselves a target of daily writing. And if they do it on their blog, it can only get better and good writing can be achieved over a period of time. I have absolutely made the transition from a sloppy writer (see some of my old posts, ugh!) to a rather careful writer (I hope, I hope.) who goes and re-writes if he sees a lot of mistakes.

 

Wrongly interpreted it could also mean that if a blogger posts anything in a hurry to get it on the blog, it would create work for Google and thereby would the internet space with garbage. However, however, Google doesn't send its spiders to index all websites and doesn't rank all of them, only the ones they think are important. Garbage will remain garbage! So, maybe, this thing of burdening Google and the internet space doesn't hold water, in my humblest opinion. And also, moreover, if the writing is crap then nobody would visit the blog and over a period of time the writer would get bored and give up.

 

Reasonable?

 

That's why most blogs end up in dead ends, because the writer decides that only the best and deathless of his prose will go on his blog and ends up writing nothing. Alas, another voice dies in blogosphere. That's not what I intended to say. I said be quality conscious, fine, but don't be anal about it. Blog regularly, write about yourself, revel in the life around you, we could make it a learning experience until the time bloggers get wider acceptance and bloggers would even be given accreditation cards as a source of providing information.

 

Don't want to sound anal, but just clarifying things and in the process clarifying my own thoughts.