Zen and the art of
blogging
about Motorcycle maintenance despite not knowing the
difference between a spark plug and a silencer
Krish Ashok
Doing 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 skeptics
Blogging
Noun. The act of taking a dustbin, and emptying it on top of
a steaming pile of uncollected garbage
Blogging
It’s deforestation with an extra letter
Blogging
It’s burdening with an extra letter. Rather literally

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
T/N 0
N = Number of poorly informed people
T = Net Time available

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
Terry Pratchett
Books
Superstar Violin Some dude playing
the guitar

Jusht For Your FYI
Chennai 600028
is a cult movie

Basic Ingredients
Festivals
Science Carnatic Music
Math
Shakespeare
Hitchhikers Guide
Madras Bashai
Travel
Web 2.0
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
Indians
Tamils
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....

Enter
The Trolls

Anatomy of a Troll
Usual hangout: Rediff
comments section,
but comments on
Name whispered into his ear at his blogs once in a while
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
ps: Blogging is no fun without trolls

Highly Unethical Traffic tip
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

But DJSJ has been mostly troll-free
Why, I wonder?
Perhaps because
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
ps: It’s hard to troll absurdity

I am not wedded to positions
When I learn better, I am usually quick to
Positions
Divorce
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 obvious
Friends introduce you.
You start checking it out.
It’s good fun
It becomes an obsession
You can’t live without your daily fix
to save us all from this
Perhaps we need
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
TM
Passionate Non-seriousness

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 Kiruba
He’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...

Most Frequently Asked Question
Where do you find the time?

Some perspective first
According to Clay Shirky
Effort (approx) to create Wikipedia
100 million hours
Time spent consumed by TV just in the US
200 billion hours
OR
100 million hours just
watching ads on a weekend
Ref: http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

List of things I’m doing right now
Playing pranks on my wife
Learning to play
Rondo Alla Turca, Prelude in C, and the Moonlight Sonata” on the Piano
Prelude in C for Cello (Bach)
A Ragam Thaanam Pallavi in Shankarabharanam on the violin
A Weekly radio show on Tech/Web on 104.8 FM
Write columns for newspapers
Playing the latest Prince of Persia
Coding an online version of Scotland Yard
using Ruby on Rails and Google Maps (with real places) - called Maanagara
Kaaval
Updating my blog once a week
and oh...my day job at a large IT firm that involves
quite a bit of travel

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