The Blog And The Blogger

My blog is worth $ 9,597.18. Want to know the value of yours? Scroll down, and at the bottom of the sidebar you will find a button. Click on it and enter your URL. You will get a figure, which could even be zero. The value of 'Journalism', the blog where I bung in stuff that I write for my paper, is $ 0.00. Clearly, it is the translation of the traffic on your website into money.

So the buggers have turned even your thought process into a commodity. A thought crosses your mind, you write it down, people read it and comment, and now suddenly, the process is being measured in virtual money. Virtual friends, virtual girlfriend, virtual sex, and now virtual money. So I have nearly 9,597.18 dollars in the virtual bank. That is about Rs 4.5 lakh! What will that get me?

Ah, a lot. A virtual holiday in Paris. A virtual collection of Mont Blanc fountain pens. A virtual car. In other words I will be in Paris but still won't be in Paris. I will be writing with a Mont Blanc but nothing to show on the paper. I will be driving a car but holding only an imaginary steering and sitting on an imaginary seat -- in which case I would fall on my butt and get real. Yes, fuck virtual. Get real.

And the reality is the ugliness of consumerism, which stands on the principle that everything can be sold as long as you market it well. Personally, I have no objection to this principle as long as it is confined to things material -- such as food and clothes and household stuff. You can sell Pepsi or Coke: if people like the drink, they will drink it. You can sell underwear: if people find them to be durable and not find holes in them within weeks, they will buy it. If they find holes, they will discard your product, no matter how sexy the model who peddles it.

In other words, if you want to sell something, you need to have not only quality but also a face that can sell it. But this principle does not apply to writing, particularly blogs, even more particularly, personal blogs. Personal thoughts, and the way they are expressed in writing, are subjective -- someone might find the writing breathtaking, others might find it to be crap. So who decides what is good, what is bad? The traffic on your blog?

I don't think so. The traffic is hardly an indicator of the quality, though it might be an indicator of how active you are as a blogger, which means 1. You write a post, 2. You get comments, 3. You dutifully reply to those comments, thanking them and all, 4. Having read those comments, you go to the commentators' blogs and leave comments on their latest post -- if not out of appreciation, but at least out of obligation, in return for their favour, 5. Go to the blogs of people who have already commented on the recent posts of your commentators and leave a comment their latest posts -- if not in genuine appreciation, at least in the hope of attracting them to your blog.

If you follow this five-step acitvity on a daily basis for a few weeks, chances are you may end up having 30 to 40 comments for everything you write. Even if crap. It is a different matter that if you continue writing crap, the number of comments would eventually dwindle to say, 15 or 16. The figure is unlikely to dip further because there are a lot of people who comment on crap. Ample evidence of that is available in the blogworld: silly post, but 20 commentators -- all finding the post to be "heartfelt".

But the truly heartfelt posts usually have -- sadly, but very often -- "0 comments". The blogger -- be it man or a woman -- pours his or her heart out, but he or she is totally unaware of those five steps to achieving the celebrity status in blogdom. Maybe he or she is aware, but does not want to go through it. For people like them, the blog is an utterly personal space not meant to be sold: if readers come, fine; but they are not going to go out of their way to attract commentators. I can, off-hand, name at least half-a-dozen bloggers who write mind-blowing stuff but who have never bothered about who reads them or who comments.

I was like one of them when I started blogging in October 2005. I wrote a lot of verse which, in the assessment of a professional poet, might not be perfect poetry. But I was pleased with what I wrote. But the number of comments? Zero! Only one woman, an ex-flame, read and commented, which boosted my morale. That was the time when, soon after creating my blog, I had gone on a vacation to Kanpur, my hometown. There, I would often wake with a dream that that I have gone to the nearest cyber cafe and I find my post attracting "35 comments". But in reality, I saw only "0 comments" or "1 comment": all I did in the cyber cafe was to transform my latest poem from long-hand into the typed-word.

But soon I learned the rules of the game. I followed the five-point something. Moreover, the journalist inside me told me: "You always write for the reader. So write well, and write in a manner they understand." It began to work. And then I decided to go the whole hog. I registered with Indian Bloggers and Blogstreet and a few others (whose buttons I lost because of the template change). I take Indian Bloggers rather seriously: till recently, it ranked me among the top 15. Today, if you scroll down, you will notice my position is no. 31. (It could be 32, or no. 30, depending on the unique hits on my blog). Nothing wrong in the ranking as long as you take it playfully, but when it becomes inversely proportional to your blood pressure levels, it is a cause for alarm.

A cause for alarm for who? For me, of course -- the stupid fellow who takes such illusory things seriously. I won't get drowned in the gutter if Indian Bloggers does not show my rank as no. 10 or no. 11, but then, the journalist inside me argues: "You write for your readers, and you belong to them. If you have no readers, your blog is a waste of time." So I would rather fight my way up from position 31 to position 13 -- I have dirtied my hands after all. And since I have dirtied my hand, I have no shame in flaunting that my blog is worth $ 9,597.18.