Zen and the art of blogging

about Motorcycle maintenance despite not knowing the

difference between a spark plug and a silencer

Krish AshokDoing Jalsa and Showing Jilpa

Star Date -314058.67

2 parts to this workshop

• The Not-so-Useful

• The Useful

This is the not-so-useful part

Always listen to the skepticsBlogging

Noun. The act of taking a dustbin, and emptying it on top of a steaming pile of uncollected garbage

It’s deforestation with an extra letterBlogging

It’s burdening with an extra letter. Rather literallyBlogging

Why did I start blogging?

I originally started blogging about atheism because I wanted to parade my ignorance loudly enough for someone to care enough to correct me and inform me.

and

= Guaranteed comments/traffic

http://warpedperspective.rediffblogs.com/

But..

No one cared.

Turns out

There’s way too many uninformed people on the

internets

Lesson 0

N = Number of poorly informed people

T = Net Time available

T/N 0

So..

I decided to blog about nothing in particular, everything in general and mostly about nonsense

PS: It’s hard to find fault with absurdity

PS: DJSJ is not the Tamil pronunciation of Doing Salsa and Showing Shilpa

Jalsa = Illicit gratification

Jilpa = Expounding on matters one is ignorant about

BooksSuperstar Violin

Terry Pratchett

Some dude playingthe guitar

Chennai 600028is a cult movie

Jusht For Your FYI

ScienceMath

Basic Ingredients

Hitchhikers Guide

Carnatic Music

Madras Bashai

Festivals

TravelWeb 2.0

Shakespeare

Pour in Sumeet Mixie, blend and serve

Each of my posts is an exercise in how much

nonsense I can pack into 800-900 words and

continue to marvel at how people still say - “great post KA”

I don’t really know what my niche audience is

IndiansTamils

Engineers

Carnatic lovers

Douglas Adams fans

People who speak Madras Bashai

I am not a career blogger

And since I am uniquely unqualified to advise all of

you...

Krish Ashok’s Blogging Advice Gyaan Knowledge Sharing Instructions Enlightenment Commandments edicts rubric manual guide tutorial handbook counsel words of wisdom pointers hints tips Jilpa Fatta Hawa Phillim Mostly Peter

Have something to say

PS: Actually, that’s optional

Initiate mutual backscratching processes

with other bloggers

The moment you have an opinion....

EnterThe Trolls

ps: Blogging is no fun without trolls

Anatomy of a Troll

Name whispered into his ear at his naming ceremony Loves Gay people

Adept at identifying sexual preferences from

blog post content Incredibly real Email id

Top secret site not indexed by Google

Usual hangout: Rediff comments section, but comments on

blogs once in a while

Trolls refresh your blog a million times a day just to check to see if any one has bothered to disagree with their obviously-designed-

to-provoke comment

Highly Unethical Traffic tip

But DJSJ has been mostly troll-free

Why, I wonder?

I usually have no strong opinions, I mean, at least opinions that I cannot

quickly change. Weekly dose of absurdity is what I aspire to

Perhaps because

ps: It’s hard to troll absurdity

I am not wedded to positions

When I learn better, I am usually quick to

Posi

tionsDivorce

Papers

Your audience is almost always smarter and funnier than you

Some will like everything you say

Some will urge you to write about things they feel strongly about

Some will be nostalgic about the good ol’ days when you were a better

blogger

Your audience will influence you

There’s no escaping that.

Deal with it.

It’s just a damn blog (one in a 100+ million)

But

You will learn to value criticism from strangers

ps: Your close friends don’t count

You will become addicted to Stats

The parallels are obviousFriends introduce you.

You start checking it out.

It’s good fun

It becomes an obsession

You can’t live without your daily fix

Perhaps we need to save us all from this menace

to

I urge Scoble to not share his blog stats in public as it

sets a bad example for our blogging youth

My blog taught me to be intellectually honest.

My audience calls out any BS I try to pull

Over a period of time, I’ve learnt to question more,

research more and be a more rational person

ps: Even Absurdity has Standards, you know

Don’t take your blog too seriously

But be passionate about it

Passionate Non-seriousnessTM

A quick list of Good Blog Attributes

Be Visual

Be Musical

Be Mathematical

Be Artistic

Be Web 2.0-ish

And one last lesson..

and the most important one at that

All the things I told you so far

Bad Advice.

Listen to KirubaHe’s the real deal

= pseudo-intellectual amateur musician software-

type-boring-person who blogs about absurdity for fun

= an entrepreneur whose has built a career out of his

blog

And since I’m using Apple Keynote..

One last thing...

Where do you find the time?

Most Frequently Asked Question

According to Clay Shirky

Some perspective first

Effort (approx) to create Wikipedia

100 million hours

Time spent consumed by TV just in the US

200 billion hoursOR

100 million hours just watching ads on a weekend

Ref: http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

Playing pranks on my wifeLearning to playRondo Alla Turca, Prelude in C, and the Moonlight Sonata” on the PianoPrelude in C for Cello (Bach)A Ragam Thaanam Pallavi in Shankarabharanam on the violin

A Weekly radio show on Tech/Web on 104.8 FMWrite columns for newspapersPlaying the latest Prince of PersiaCoding an online version of Scotland Yard using Ruby on Rails and Google Maps (with real places) - called Maanagara

Kaaval

Updating my blog once a weekand oh...my day job at a large IT firm that involves

quite a bit of travel

List of things I’m doing right now

And still...

I’m wasting a tremendous amount of time every week

So..

The Krish Ashok Super-Mega-Secret Temporal Chromatography Technique

The scientific method of separating/extracting time

from things it’s hard to separate it from

So..

The patent-pending Time finding method..

Look for it

The next person who asks me where I find time needs to fix an appointment with Shankar

Nethraalaya

Thank you

If you have questions, Kiruba will be happy to take them