Modi Starts a Blog

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has started his own blog.

USAF Issues Rules of Engagement for Blogs

Here's an interesting article in Wired, about how the US Air Force has issued guidelines for its personnel when participating in debates in the blogosphere. The evolving infowar tactics and strategies seem better suited for ordinary citizenry to take up the fight rather than military servicemen, if you ask me. It sounds like 21st-century society wants to outsource or delegate even patriotism itself to specialized personnel, to leave the carefree masses unencumbered by such menial chores. In which case, why don't they just hire some Indian backoffice centres to post blog responses all day? I'm sure they'd be much cheaper.

YouTube Usurping Media Control

We've all talked about how blogs have been invading and liberating the space once monopolized by traditional print media. YouTube is a slightly later phenomenon, but one which has also shoved its way past traditional broadcast media and into the mass consciousness, along with cameraphones. Now YouTube is impacting the course of electoral campaigns. In a world where various messages are competing for attention, the vivid persuasiveness of video is now increasingly a differentiator that allows a message to stand out over others. Whereas in the past, excellence in oral and written talent have been recognized and immortalized by society, in the future it may be the best video editing skills which leave the biggest impression. We all need to consider this. After all, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then video extrapolates to a whole lot more. RSS needs to spend less effort on classes for holding lathis, and instead try to hold more classes on desktop publishing, video editing, blogging, etc. It's the only way to take on India's Left-dominated media.

let me welcome the new posters on this blog

mar 4th, 2007

readers may have noticed a few changes to this blog.

several regular participants have been invited by me to post stories to the blog rather than as comments to existing posts.

let me take this opportunity to thank these kind souls for their contributions. i have been waiting for blogspot.com to upgrade itself so that some of the popular contributors could be brought on board to enrich this blog.

the new blogspot also allows us to tag posts with keywords.

also, i will institute as of now a strict policy that no copyrighted material will be tolerated on this blog, whether in posts or in comments. this is to respect the rights of the copyright owners (and not incidentally to prevent them from taking punitive action.)

so my request is that all those who participate here should refrain from violating copyright by posting copyrighted material here in its entirety. here are two ways out:

1. provide URLs to the original material
2. only provide *excerpts*, not the entire content. often, you might just want to provide only the first paragraph along with a link to the URL

once again, thanks to the folks who said 'yes' to my invitation to participate. this will help the blog sustain itself and not be dependent on one person's time availability and access to interesting material.

thanks again, folks