Join the Dots

Emailers Murali K Menon and Sachin Rao enter the blogosphere: "As Fadereu, his thoughts, activities and commentary are up for scrutiny, access and interaction on his web log, desimediabitch.blogspot.com.

Twenty-two months old in the blogworld, Mehta is already talking of the next step—a combination of blogs, wikis (shared blogs), Social Network Systems like Orkut or Ryze, and online presence indicators like Skype.

Neural networks and technologies sound like a plan, but from a cluttered workroom in Delhi, one man is offering cyberspace’s equivalent of laidback pleasure—a cosy reading chair and an adda. And he prefers to hide behind the anonymity of ‘Hurree Babu’, a name borrowed from Kipling in an elliptical tribute to that grandfather of ‘Indo-Anglian’ writing. kitabkhana.blogspot. com, with 60,000 page views in its one and a half years, is probably the country’s most accomplished literary blog.

The Babu’s blog, berating as it does the fact that author Susan Sontag never got a much-deserved Nobel or informing you that Jane Austen’s genteel world was a major influence on the work of Irvine Trainspotting Welsh, can be viewed as a self-contained, indulgent space. Which is the last thing one can call emergic.org, entrepreneur Rajesh Jain’s two-year-old web log on emerging tech, enterprises and markets.

Poetry is at a yawning distance from policy reform, but fellow bloggers across the world are helping law graduate Monica Mody, who works for Breakthrough, a human rights organisation, hone her poetry skills.

Her six-month-old blog, insmallpieces.blog- spot.com, is still in its diapers, but Mody is excited about the response the ‘‘bi-weekly, or perhaps tri-weekly, eclectic and ex-centric anthology of poems’’ is fetching."