This is an interesting piece of reportage:
Mithun would never speak out openly against Amitabh and fear incurring his wrath especially now that he has started blogging.
Ignore the grammar—that sentence confirms what I’ve always suspected: Blogging is a powerful tool in the hands of the powerful. That means little for the rest of us, who blog to indulge ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. What else is life about?
(Link via email from Rajeev Mantri.)
The quote of the day comes from Andrew Sullivan to Jeffrey Goldberg:
Calling you an asshole is just the blogosphere’s way of saying hello.
So what I thought was either envy or cussedness on the part of a few people was clearly just conviviality. Well, it’s not too late. Hi there! Assholes!
(Link via email from Arun Simha.)
The SMS of the day comes from Peter Griffin:
On the flight with Annie and Chandrahas. If it gets hijacked, you’ll get live blogging, news and reviews.
Heh. And if I may add to that, all three of the highest quality.
PS: They’re headed here.
“Google AdSense and Blogging Brought Me This Car,” reveals Amit Agarwal. It’s a Honda CR-V. It couldn’t be more well-deserved, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Congrats, Amit.
And why is this other Amit still a pauper? I can rationalize. Boo hoo.
I did. And that’s exactly what just happened to Stuff White People Like. Way to go, and all that. So much can happen in just a few weeks…
During my recent visits to the Amazon pages of books by Chris Anderson and Neil Gaiman, I found that those pages now carry their latest blog posts. If Amazon does this across all its books, then it represents a great way for widely read authors to become widely read bloggers, as chances are that many readers interested in their books will end up discovering their blogs. This doesn’t guarantee success, of course, as they need to convert those first-time visitors into regular readers with compelling content, but the fact that they’re successful authors indicates that writing is their core competency anyway—the rest is adaptation to this new medium, and the desire to adopt it.
And yes, I know, Amazon doesn’t actually direct traffic to the author’s blog, but to their mirror of it. But, as in Gaiman’s case, it specifies that the content is syndicated from his journal, and links to it. And once you get hooked to it, the chances are that you’ll go to the original site, not to its Amazon mirror. Of course, Gaiman’s blog already has a significant readership and doesn’t need to be promoted on Amazon, but that isn’t true of most other writers.
So all I need to do to expand my blog readership beyond current levels is write a bestselling book. That can’t be too hard!
I’d written in a column last week about how the internet has no entry barriers and is meritocratic, and how if a new blog is good, it will gain the readership it deserves on word of mouth alone. Well, here’s a blog that illustrates just that: Stuff White People Like.
The blog began about six weeks ago, and already has about 4 million hits. That’s no surprise—it contains satire and social observation of the highest quality, and I’ll be very surprised if a lucrative book deal doesn’t come its way soon. Just scroll through some of those entries, it’s super stuff.
More dope: Here’s an LA Times piece on it, and here’s an interview of the author, Christian Lander.
(Link via email from Sruthijith.)
This piece of mine was published in the Indian Express today.
“Where in the world are truly free markets?” a friend asked me the other day. “The kind of economic freedom you libertarians dream of just doesn’t work. Freedom leads to chaos. All markets need to be regulated by the government, which alone can safeguard the interests of the people.”
“Have you been online recently,” I asked.
“Don’t change the subject,” he said.
“I’m not,” I replied.
A couple of years ago, the libertarian blogger Warren Meyer was asked why there were so many, well, libertarian bloggers. His reply, in a nutshell, was that the internet is a libertarian space. “Libertarianism resists organization,” he wrote. Libertarians tend to be “suspicious of top-down organization in and of itself. Blogging is therefore tailor made for us – many diverse bottom-up messages rather than one official top-down one.”
In many ways, the online world is like the beautifully functioning free market that governments have never allowed in meatspace (the ‘real’ world). To begin with, the government does not pose an entry barrier to individuals who wish to have a presence online. You want to start a blog? It’ll take you three clicks to set one up. You don’t need a license for it, and you won’t have inspectors coming over and scrutinising your methods of work.
The blogosphere is a meritocratic space. Each blog finds the audience it deserves. If you like economics, you’ll find tons of good economics blogs, often much better than anything you’ll see in the mainstream media, because they’re written by specialists, not generalists. You want gardening? Literature? Technology? You’ll find content in any niche you can think of.
There is a lot of junk on the internet, but readers navigate through it easily, and soon settle on a few sites they regularly visit. Information percolates so quickly that a good new blog doesn’t take much time to build a readership. You write something nice, people who like it link to you, their readers check you out, and so it grows. Marketing and hype are generally wasted, and everything is viral. If you provide compelling content, readers come. If you write rubbish, readers go. Competition is the best regulation.
The blogger Ravikiran Rao once speculated on what would happen if the government decided to protect users from “bad blogs”, and regulate blogging. If government babus started deciding what content was appropriate for audiences, good bloggers would be intimidated away, not bothering to enter a space where there were so many hassles. Established bloggers would lobby for regulation to protect them from pesky newcomers. The quality of blogging would go down, not up – and readers would be shortchanged.
Far-fetched? Well, it works that way in many fields – such as, as Rao pointed out in his post, “private schools and educational institutions.” Indeed, in India at least, it is pervasive.
If only our government understood the power of free markets. I wish our bureaucrats read “I, Pencil” by Leonard Read, one of my favourite essays. It is a first-person account by a pencil of its genealogy – and by the end of it, you realise that a mere pencil is such a thing of wonder that no government could have put it together. It takes legions of people, possibly across continents, doing disparate things without knowledge of one another to make sure that when you need a pencil, and go to the shop to pick it up, it’s there. It’s a miracle, almost beyond comprehension, and certainly beyond planning or oversight. It takes a free market, not a benevolent central planner – economists call this process spontaneous order.
The internet benefits from this freedom. Consider Wikipedia, for example. It once used to be laughed at – how can a few volunteers produce better content than experts? – but is now a classic example of what spontaneous order can achieve. It is much broader than the Encyclopedia Britannica, and often deeper as well. It has its own self-correcting mechanisms, and its rules of use have evolved from the bottom up, and not been enforced from the top down. It shows that the voluntary actions of people working towards their self-interest is a far more powerful force than the self-important and sanctimonious supervision of governments. Online, we’re all free.
Supporters of free markets stress on the importance of the rule of law – and the internet is not a lawless zone. The laws of the real world apply to what we do online – sometimes to worrisome effect, as jailed bloggers in countries like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia have discovered. But on the whole, the internet is free of the kind of needless, suffocating government regulation and barriers to trade that bedevil the rest of the world. Long may it stay that way.
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Also read: In Defence of Blogging.
You can browse through more of my essays and Op-Eds here.
The Gawker formula’s been leaked.
