On Blogs

I've come across a lot of articles recently on blogging and mainstream media. Mukul Kesavan has written about this in the Telegraph and Amit Varma, whose blog and writings in the Mint I greatly admire has added some very good perspective on the subject.

In addition to those, I believe blogging is about expressing points of views, discussing and having conversations. It’s never meant to replace mainstream media as we know it. Any media will have its own commercial constraints and thus not be able to do justice to the information needs of millions of individuals. Blogging steps in and offers information and perspectives which are by nature niche, appealing to a smaller number of interested people. To that extent communities tend to form around blogs and though each individual community may be too small to be serviced by a dedicated mainstream news magazine, it could be substantial enough to nurture a lot of blogs which feed off each other while dipping into the mainstream media. Exactly, the way this blog references two mainline newspapers and a blog, which in turn references many others.