Gauravonomics Blog

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I  was quoted recently in Indian daily Mid Day in a story on blogger anonymity, in the context of the NightJack Richard Horton case in UK.

My view is that the case isn’t really a significant setback to blogger anonymity, as only a few anonymous bloggers will be affected by it and even they can protest their privacy by using circumvention tools like Psiphon and Tor.

Here’s the full text of the story –

We want to know who you are
By: Bhairavi Jhaveri
Date: 2009-07-06

After a UK-based journalist unveiled the identity behind award-winning blog NightJack, that gave behind-the-scene insight into frontline policing, detective Richard Horton chose to appeal to the court to stop the newspaper from publishing his name. a ban on anonymous bloggers is being anticipated in the UK. What could that mean in the world of blogging? FYI finds out.

Thanks to its nature, the online world gifts everyone anonymity to be somebody you are not, to say things you can’t otherwise. This also makes it almost impossible to monitor, control and force laws that curb the outpouring; it would amount to creating an antithesis of cyberspace in cyberspace.  Read More

The facts first.

In February 2008, Lancashire detective constable Richard Horton started writing the anonymous NightJack blog, which shared an insider’s perspective on policing and politics in a small English town. By January 2009, he had a daily readership of about 1500, but grew tired of the blog and stopped writing. Then NightJack won the prestigious Orwell Prize in March 2009 and his readership went up to half a million visitors a week.

When Times reporter Patrick Foster found his true identity by triangulating the digital trail he had left behind, Richard Horton deleted his blog and asked for an injunction to prevent the Times from revealing it. Justice Eady rejected the plea. The Times revealed Richard Horton’s identity in an expose and Richard Hortonhimself wrote a piece in The Times explaining why he had started and deleted the blog.

For more details see Daily Mail, Financial Times, BBC1 and BBC2.

It’s important that we begin by trying to understand the complex moral ambiguity in the curious case of NightJack Richard Horton.  Read More

Here’s some interesting data on search trends for blogging platforms in India using Google Insights for Search data for 2008.

Apart from the three main blogging platforms Blogger/ Blogspot, Wordpress and LiveJournal, I have also looked at social networking sites Ibibo and BigAdda that are promoting themselves as blogging platforms.

The data from 2004 to 2008 shows that the top three blogging platforms have shown consistent growth: Blogspot since 2004, Wordpress since 2005 and Ibibo since 2006, even as Both BigAdda and LiveJournal have failed to grow. So, Sampad’s assertion that blogging is on a decline in India isn’t really substantiated.

In the last twelve months, Blogger and Wordpress have shown slow but consistent growth, LiveJournal has stayed stagnant, while the search traffic for Ibibo and BigAdda has fluctuated significantly, probably based on whether these platforms were running big ad campaigns at the time.

In terms of relative search rankings, Blogspot is at #1, Ibibo and Wordpress are close together at #2 and #3, BigAdda is #4 and LiveJournal is a distant #5.

This data is inconsistent with the Alexa traffic data for India which ranks Blogger/ Blogspot at #7, Wordpress at #16, Ibibo at #58, BigAdda at #274 and LiveJournal at #282.  Read More

Here are five fail-proof ways to totally turn off your blog readers –

1. Host your blog on Blogger.
2. Insist that readers use a Blogger ID to comment.
3. Enable word verification.
4. Offer partial feeds.
5. Do not display your e-mail ID anywhere in the blog.

There are 71 million blogs out there. You have to be a very good writer if people are still putting up with all that.

I started blogging at gauravonomics.blogspot.com and found my voice at gauravonomics.wordpress.com. However, when I moved to my own domain at gauravonomics.com, I realized that I had stayed at gauravonomics.wordpress.com for too long.

But, first, why should you move to your own yourblog.com domain anyway?

– Because you can do much more with your blog in terms of aesthetic, functionality and monetization.
– Because your blog is perceived as more professional and authoritative by both readers and search engines.
– Because it costs little in terms of time and money, so why not?

What happens when you move your Blogger or Wordpress blog to your own domain?

– You lose your pagerank and have to build it all over again. Even after three months, gauravonomics.com is still to get a pagerank while gauravonomics.wordpress.com has a pagerank of 5. Even Amit Varma – widely accepted as India’s best known non-techie blogger – made the same mistake and indiauncut.com has a pagerank of 3 while indiauncut.blogspot.com has a pagerank of 6.  Read More