You are right, Hemal. There are such a variety of blogs out there from the very personal, to the commercial, to the informative to mega blogs with multiple writers..., so one size can't fit all.
You are smack on target also when you say a blogger contributes to the community in some way or the other.
I was only seeking to find out whether this contribution can be made more focused and meaningful.
This same issue has come up in the case of all human endeavours, whether it be art or literature or architecture. People have repeatedly asked should these be utilitarian?, should they serve a purpose? And answers have been mixed.
In the case of arts, particularly painting, painting had degenerated to absurd levels, particularly in the Paris school of painting. Painters claimed freedom to paint what they pleased and came up with such absurd art like cubism and abstract paintings which allegedly depicted their thought processes, but were such that the lay person could make neither head or tails of these paintings unless they were provided lengthy and convulted explanations by art critics.
There have been several jokes about this sort of painting, the most recent one being the ad featuring Saif Ali Khan, who bring in a music band to his room and starts flinging paint on the walls to the beats of the music and, hey presto, there is a breathtaking painting on the wall.
Another version of this story is about a painter who is about to start a painting and spreads his canvas on the ground preparatory to mounting it on the stand and keep a few tins of painting near it. He then goes away for some errand. In the meantime, his five year old son comes riding his toy bicycle, upsets the tins of paint on the canvas and in mischief rides his cycle over the canvas and on the spilt paint several times and go away.
When the painter returns, he is first angry at the mess that has been created, but when he looks at the result on the canvas, a brainwave hits him and he frames the canvas as itis and put it up for sale.
The painting is picked up in no time for a million dollars!
The same thing happenend in poetry too, poets demanded freedom to write on any topic that they came to their mind and ended up writing absured and highly personal poetry that no one except themselves could understand.
In contract, the major literary critics of India, whether they be Abhinavgupt, Mammat, Jagannath, Dhananjay, Dandi, any of the other greats, laid a great emphasis on communicating the ideas of the poet to his sahrudaya group. That is why rasa dasa emerged as the highest form of enjoyment of poetry.
This was taken a step further by Hindi literary critics like Ramchandra Shukla, by declaring that the ultimate aim of literature is lok mangal, that is the good of people. He further illustrated this by critiquing Ramcharitmans by Tulsidas and showing how this great epic has fulfilled this goal.
Blogging is also a literary genre if you come to think of it, and there should be clear cut yardstick for evaluating how good or bad a blog is, just as there are clear cut yardsticks for assessing the worth of a literary work, a film, a painting or a building.
Unless such a yardstick is place, there is bound to be anarchy in blogosphere.
Bloggers need to think about this and come up with measures to evaluate a blog.
I think this is untrodden ground anywhere in the world, and we with our rich philosophical traditions and logical thinking abilities can come up with set criteria for evaluating blogs.
Recently indiblogger has started a scheme for celebrating one blog a day. For this too a kind of yardstick will be immensely relevant for properly implementing this scheme, otherwise, their decision about blogs will be highly subjective and open to dispute.
Thinking quickly on this issue, I put forward here some criteria that come to mind which could be used to judge blogs, but more thought will be required. Do join in:
- aesthetics - the colour scheme, font aesthetics - type of font, size, colour, letter spacing, clarity, etc., layout - line spacing, spacing between paras, white spaces, the use of visuals, widgets, etc., to break visual monotinity, the overall impression on the eye of the page.
- writing - crispness of writing, grammatical correctness, elegance in writing, spelling errors, etc.
- content - relevance, utility, beauty of the content (such as in poetry or essay), originality, purposefulness, possibility of translating it into real action, clarity in the mind of the blogger about the purpose of his blog, internal cohesiveness of the various posts in the blog, whether the blog is focussed on one topic, etc.
- technical - navigational ease, page size, application of SEO techniques, smart or new technical features such as interesting widgets, code, etc.
- language - whether the language choice - Hindi, English, Tamil, Malayalam, etc., is appropriate to the target audience, whether it is a bilingual or multi-lingual blog etc.
- add more....
