Spheres of Influence

Not until I read that LazyGeek was rated the Best Media Blog by Indibloggers did I realize there was such an effort. What struck me was that most of the nominees and eventual winners were unknown to me. I visited some of them out of curiosity, and slowly realized that whatever awards were given out, I would never really develop a serious interest in most of them. Primarily (at least in my case) this would be caused by the fact that I didn't know them at all, or their areas of blog-interests didn't intersect heavily with mine. Also, subjectively speaking, it is not always possible to see what differentiates them so much from other blogmates of mine, so I would always prefer knowing the views and thoughts of those closer to me than these total strangers. In that sense, the blog community seems to be divided into groups that feed off each other (of course, the whole phenomenon of "I-scratch-your-back-you-reciprocate" is quite prevalent here), but on the whole, there are communities within the blog world similar to social spheres in the real world where my links i.e. my friends, relatives, neighbours, colleagues and fellow-hobbyists are emphasised. I want to hear what my friends feel about an issue of mutual interest rather than what some highly rated blogger has to offer. I also get a lot of news that I would tend to be interested in from them (these would otherwise slip through the cracks of more universal media like newspapers and television). Also, I would rate their choices in films, books etc. very highly which would directly shape my mind on the same : word-of-mouth has a remote avatar of text-of-blog. Of course, these are from the same circles that defined my life from a few years ago, so there is little loss in our communicative regions that distance would otherwise have caused. I suspect the same is true of my co-webloggers and it isn't such a bad thing to be aware of the responsibilities of opinion-expressions that could prevent a lot of the sometimes incontinent outpouring of useless pseudo-superior egotistical commentary that is presented on some weblogs most of the times. Of course, webloggers have the democratic liberty of choosing what to say, and it is their right to have a bad blog as much as it is our right to say so.