This sure is going to give blogging in India a fillip by raising awareness and stature. Thanks Indian Express for this story - Join the Dots. 

What a pleasant change that this article in the Indian print media takes blogging away from the kiddie diary tag it has been associated with, among the few that know what a blog is.  It presents blogs as a great space for conversations in real voices and real time, for sharing exchanging and building ideas, and for building communities across geographical borders. 

Some comments from me that have been quoted there :

"Dina Mehta, 38, meanwhile, says blogging harnesses collective intelligence across continents."Email is dead," says the qualitative researcher, "and e-groups are outdated". Twenty-two months old in the blogworld, Mehta is already talking of the next step - a combination of blogs, wikis (shared blogs), Social Network Systems like Orkut or Ryze, and online presence indicators like Skype. "Through my 80-person friend list on Orkut," she explains, "I have a linked network of nearly 35 lakh contacts. Imagine the potential for collaborative communication, to share and develop ideas, technologies."

But its not all cyberpunk, globe-spanning futurespeak; blogging is also individualistic: "There's a lot of trust - after reading a journal for months, you know a lot about the person. You can't be consistently fake, right?"

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