Editorial

Editorial

I would like to begin with a revealing statistic. Technorati, the blog search engine, was tracking more than 106 million blogs as on September 2007. As Matthew Haughey, co-author of "We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs" rightly points out - "blogging is losing its underground image". Blogs have now gone mainstream in a big way. In September 2005, UK’s leading newspaper The Guardian introduced a daily digest of blogs on Page 2. In June 2006, BBC News launched a weblog for its editors following other news companies. This format is now followed by Indian news channels, NDTV 24X7 and CNN IBN.

Culture Curry, the Blue Lotus newsletter, has undergone several makeovers in the past one year – in terms of design, content, format, and presentation. The idea, each time, was to appeal to you and to engage you in discussion. It didn’t work out that way though. Even the feedback that came in, came only as a faint trickle. One can only hazard a guess as to the readership.

Now a few of us in the Ed. team felt that perhaps the format in which we were sending out CC had serious limitations. People would have to first read, then resort to email to either send feedback or initiate a discussion. It occurred to us then that maybe there was a strong case for transferring CC onto a weblog platform. It would make it far easier to post feedback and comments, perhaps leading on to discussion threads. Moreover we’d benefit from the other features of a blog – like being able to add links, post videos, conduct polls, not to mention an automatic archival system.

So we’ve gone ahead and done just that. CC will now come to you in this new blog format. Hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed putting it together. Also we’ve enabled the "Comments" feature and would love to hear from you.

I’d also like to announce the names of those who’ve agreed to be a part of the CC team. Piyush, Grishma, Prabalika, Mayuri and Archana S, have all contributed in a big way towards the making of this edition. So a huge round of applause for them all. I’m positive that with their continued participation, CC is going to go places.