Skip to main content

From marvelous to mediocrity - Blogathon India

So, what does it take to turn a marvelous idea into an exercise of mediocrity? The answer, like in any other business, lies in loosing touch of ground realities.

The marvelous idea in question is Blogathon event, which is happening for the first time in India: not that India has any special significance on internet. Regional boundaries do not have any relevance on internet apart from bringing together people we can meet offline and closer to home.

So what went wrong? In my opinion, the trigger for this post as well as the 'wrong' is the chosen topics for selection. While the topics chosen are good from the social perspective, they are way off the reality of the blogging context. It is clear there are very very few blogs that actually deal with the subjects like traffic jams, alternate sexuality or politics at grassroots. Most of the blogs target topics like technology, finance, niche topics or just fun/ online diaries. A post on alternate sexuality on a technology blog would be totally out of place and this would hurt the readership of the blogger.

This is where I think Blogathon has failed even before it has started. For one, the topics chosen are regressive. There are million essays on these topics, I have no idea why we need to add to clutter.

Two, topics are not cutting edge in any sense. In other words, it is not forward looking. I think, Blogathon members seriously hurt the initiative by not looking at topics other than social themes.

Three, topics are meant to draw out opinions, probably looking at numbers of participation. And there are billion opinions out there. I do not know if any expert commentary would be given on traffic condition of the city apart from few city-planners or traffic authorities.

Four, since it is obviously not possible to include all the choices, the topics should have been "open" than dictated by Blogathon. By dictating the topic, they have effectively frozen out thousands of bloggers who would have like to participate. For example, when ProBlogger did similar event sometime back, the bloggers were encouraged to come up with articles of their choice and subject, just that it was written in a dictated format.

Ps: I am not aware of the entire extent of their "process". It is too cumbersome for anybody to follow. Perhaps, they should have followed the Toyota model - if the process/communication does not fit in one-page, don’t do it. I just hope they still have time to get good things done, as it is a good initiative. But the warning is everything on net is ephemeral.

Labels:

Comments

  1. Agent M16 April 2008 at 13:49

    Hey there,
    I'm Mohan, and I've been involved with Blogathon right from the start, so I thought I, as a blogger, would clarify a few points which felt might help you understand the concept better.

    You're well and truly right - there are right next to zero blogs blogging about topics like traffic and alternate sexuality. The topics are not cutting edge. True, there are a lot of opinions out there.

    BUT

    The basic concept of Blogathon India is this -
    1000 posts on 1000 topics makes no difference.
    1000 posts on 1 topic DOES make a difference.

    Of these 1000 posts, atleast 5 might be heard. And of these 5, atleast one might be worth hearing!

    We're looking for fresh opinions, and not additions to the spam clutter. Most of the time, people who are not shaped by the system can think out of the box and bring about awesome ideas for change. Which is what we are hoping with this event.

    You've said -
    "A post on alternate sexuality on a technology blog would be totally out of place and this would hurt the readership of the blogger."

    I disagree. I think all that all bloggers here can testify that they don't blog what their readers want (unless they are in it to make money), rather, their readers want what they blog about.

    I don't see any way in which the readership of a blog might be affected by putting in a few off topic posts - unless you are looking at blogging from a very advertisement oriented PayPerPost-ical view.

    Morover, why does it have to be offtopic? You can blend in any topic to the theme of your blog, albeit, a bit absurdly, but that absurdity may lead to innovation and genius! For example, in such an event named BlogActionDay, a code blog named polyGeek.com blogged about how cleaning up the code and algorithm could lead to less usage of servers, and thus less electricity consumption.
    http://polygeek.com/419_weatherglobal-warming_optimized-code-could-help-reduce-global-warming

    We couldn't make it "open" since that would destroy the whole purpose of the event. We aren't doing this just to increase blogging activity and have fun. That's pointless. We're doing it for a social cause, as well as to increase the awareness level about blogging.

    I still don't think that anything has gone wrong (other than a few technical things :P) and I believe that these are issues which needs better awareness. These topics will educate the blogger on the issues, and also inform the reader about the issue. The blog may come out with innovative ideas to solve the issue.

    Of course, none of this may happen. But is there anything wrong with giving it a try?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Falkor17 April 2008 at 12:23

    Hi Agent,

    Thanks for comments, but unfortunately, you are playing into the argument. Will write in more detail on that later.

    Hope you are tracking this, as I have no way of knowing you..

    ReplyDelete
  3. Falkor18 April 2008 at 10:24

    Hi mohan,

    Just dropped a comment at the main page. Check out

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cognitive rules of business presentations

In his recent book, Clear and to the Point, Kosslyn explained that the four rules of PowerPoint are: The Goldilocks Rule, The Rudolph Rule, The Rule of Four, and the Birds of a Feather Rule. Here's how they work. The Goldilocks Rule refers to presenting the "just right" amount of data. Never include more information than your audience needs in a visual image. As an example, Kosslyn showed two graphs of real estate prices over time. One included ten different numbers, one for each year. The other included two numbers: a peak price, and the current price. For the purposes of a presentation about today's prices relative to peak price, those numbers were the only ones necessary. The Rudolph Rule refers to simple ways you can make information stand out and guide your audience to important details -- the way Rudolph the reindeer's red nose stood out from the other reindeers' and led them. If you're presenting a piece of relevant data in a list, why not mak...
Post a Comment
Read more

Value of dollar - Part 1

A Simple Perspective Will Do The date is 2000-05-28. Don't you get tired of all the bad news bears reminding you of all these instabilities, excesses, and 'potential' tensions in the global economy? After all, hasn't it always been like that? Yes it has, but not in money it hasn't. Increasingly, investors find it harder to know where to put their savings. What about Government Bonds? Wrong. Their recent record of capital losses have wiped out your guaranteed yields, probably because the stock market keeps crowding them out, and this even in a strong dollar and low inflation environment. Furthermore, there is no reliable liquidity and potentially poor quality debt in the corporate sector. Foreign assets? Wrong. Most of the world's economies are riskier, have been under performing, and also, there is this thing called currency risk. Like how is the average person gonna cope with currency...
Post a Comment
Read more

Depreciation of British Pound 1900-2000

When the Bank of England was formed the powers to create money was finally transferred to private hands. The creation of Fed in US, was just a part of this cycle. Though it is a common knowledge US Dollar has depreciated nearly 100% since the creation of Federal Reserve, the same is the case of all the currencies across the globe. For example, below is the UK Parliament data that highlights the depreciating value of Pound.
2 comments
Read more