The blogosphere is a meritocratic space

Home > Edits & Columns > COLUMN Welcome to the Free World Amit Varma Indian Express: Saturday, February 23, 2008 at 0030 hrs

The blogosphere is a meritocratic space. Each blog finds the audience it deserves. If you like economics, you’ll find tonnes 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. Amit Varma, winner of the 2007 Bastiat Prize for Journalism, blogs at indiauncut.com amitblogs@gmail.com Also read: In Defence of Blogging

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Office Spouses, The Internet, and Other Marital Dangers
from Desicritics by Deepti Lamba ... When we start getting emotionally attached to people, even though the interaction is non-sexual, it is that much emotional investment that we take away from our marriages... People find themselves forming deep friendships in the online world...More and more individuals with partners not interested in the online world find themselves gravitating towards like-minded netizens and their spouses feeling lonely and vaguely betrayed. Some call them symptoms of couples already growing apart but I see them as causes that lead otherwise unwary couples finding themselves unable to bridge the gap due to the duplicity. The rules of protecting one's marriage have changed. It isn't the physical presence from home that goes missing, it is the withdrawal of emotional and mental connections that cripples the marriage. It is like fighting a bogeyman that exists all in the mind.