Nerve Endings Firing Away

Very well said, P (as always!). Honestly, I had no idea you even had a tip-off policy(perhaps that’s because I access DP through bloglines and rarely go to the site). And I am surprised there are actually some people who would stoop so low as to push to have their posts featured.

You’re right – blogs shouldn’t tbe about hit’s and trackbacks and awards and all that nonsense. It should just be about saying what you want to say, something most of us couldn’t do previously.

I think you and Ash have a damn good thing going here, and I can imagine just how difficult, not to mention time-consuming, it must be. So here’s a big ‘Thank You’ to you and your team … carry on the good work!

… and from now on if there’s someone who insists he deserves a listing, tell him to bugger off and leave a link to his post in as many places as he can!

Cheers mate!

Well said Patrix. You and your team have done a great job with Desipundit so far. If you bar the complaints, most of us are thankful. Good job. Keep going.

SwB, I am fine with people sending in their own blog posts as hat tips but doing that for every post they make is what gets my goat. Thanks for your words of encouragement though.

Arzan, you are right about the coolness factor that got people blogging. While numbers can be good, the desparate urgency with which people seek tons of hits without quality writing irritates and I can’t say much because it’s their blog. But I sure can not feature them on DesiPundit.

Smiley, thanks dude. Courtesy people like you, the hope is still alive.

Shub, When I talk about blogging as fun, I mean that you should enjoy the process of blogging and interacting with your commenters. Sometimes, people just write on a current issue because everyone is doing so. Their opinions are neither original nor new; instead if they wrote about the quirkiness of their paanwallah I bet people would love to read that as much as they would love to write that. Sometimes small things are the best things to write about. Also, it matter for whom are you blogging and why? If it is for hits only, you aren’t going to get any…trust me.

Thanks, Bongo for the vote of confidence. How I wish that the people for whom this is intended actually read this and get it. Self-promotion is not that bad after all if you don’t wanna share what you write, why are you writing at all? But the extent to which some of them take it to makes me think why the heck are they blogging – to vent out their opinions and thoughts or to get noticed?

Regards my new theme, I admit that some images might not be well suited and I am trying to identify which are they (will delete them and add new ones occassionally). Actually, I am fine if the page buttons are not in your face. The ones who use the net frequently usually know where the sitemap buttons are.

Gosh, all those negative mails have triggered a riot here, and I now know that even a riot can be well reasoned.

I am not sure how many pesky bloggers let their fingers loose on their keyboards to send you those nasty e-mails. The larger their number, the more it says about how great and indispensable DesiPundit has become. If it makes you feel better, let me point to slashdot which has a similar problem too. You might want to look at their policy on accepting tip-offs — they call them ‘submissions’.

To me, DesiPundit is still the best place for discovering interesting posts in blogs that I didn’t even know existed. I think you guys have done a wonderful job. Thank you!

Now, can I nominate this post for a mention in DP? I hope you won’t send me to DesiPundit to put in a tip-off …

This was an interesting and at times infuriating read. I completely understand and empathise with your situation and your need to write this post, yet I guess personally speaking I am not sure whether to thank you for penning this. The post while claiming to address the issue of cranky emails, which you yourself admit to be ‘an extreme rarity’, passes some strong judgments on 80% of your contributors. I think it is unfair to cast the 80% contributors who self-nominate posts in such poor light.

You begin the sentence with we don’t judge you on that (self-nominating posts) and go ahead and do just that by talking about how you are getting irritated and drawing the line about how many tip-offs does it take to be categorized as irritating and ‘way too much self-promotion.’ You have opened up floodgates for people like SwB here who without having any association with Desipundit can suddenly take a moral high ground and say absolutely insulting things like “And I am surprised there are actually some people who would stoop so low as to push to have their posts featured.” Yea SwB, you rose very high in the minds of us stooping-so-low types with your comment! How does it alter a quality of a post if it is self-nominated or if someone else nominates it? Are you suggesting that somehow just because someone nominates somebody else’s post suddenly that post gets to feature in the haloed confines? Let’s assume tomorrow the blogosphere began behaving in the way you would ideally like it to function and people started nominating only someone else’s posts… You cannot feature all of the nominated posts obviously and will reject some of the nominations. Do you honestly think that there wont be people who think that they had nominated some excellent posts and get angry about this perceived slight and post you a cranky email? And this may not be such a hypothetical scenario as you think. Just two days ago I was speaking to a fellow blogger on the phone and he expressed frustration that posts from different bloggers that he had nominated were being consistently rejected and according to him this was because he thought he had criticized Desipundit and one of its contributors once upon a time. This is not to insinuate that this is true but to underscore the fact that whether you get 80% self-nominated posts or only 20% self-nominated ones, the occasional cranky email will still be very much a reality.

I had no idea that contributors who self-nominated posts were looked down upon so much. One doesn’t get an idea about this after reading the tip-off policy. The statement about restricting posts to 1-2 per day comes across more as a common sense and logistical issue rather than a hint that overall Desipundit don’t favour self-nominated posts. This is not a complaint but rather a frank admission about ignorance about Desipundit’s attitude regarding us. When I had begun blogging I had myself nominated 3-4 of my posts and they had all got featured. I was new to the blogosphere and had no other way to find readership and there are many like me. Today I have a dedicated set of readers and no longer feel the need to nominate my posts. Yet I will always thank those self-nominated posts of mine and Desipundit for my loyal readers. So why write such a post by making self-nominated posts as a central issue and dissuade/demotivate some new blogger from getting discovered. I had encouraged at least three bloggers I knew to nominate their own posts on Desipundit. Had I known about this ‘irritation’ of yours we would very well have come up with a ‘I scratch your back, you scratch mine’ sort of an arrangement and began nominating each other’s posts. Today I would feel so embarrassed if any of them read this post of yours. Inadvertently I have exposed them to derision from you, whose opinion they (including me) value a lot and also the opinion of the readers of this post, and all this simply because they committed the blasphemy of nominating their own posts.

Please also give due consideration to the fact that by rejecting someone’s posts you are in effect criticizing them, passing a judgment on their writing and their ability to understand the issue they are commenting upon. Just as you are sensitive to criticism, they are too. So if you get angry/irritated because they nominate too many posts, it is worthy of writing such a long post for public consumption and lumping 80% of contributors with the 10% who write such emails, but when these 10% get angry about your ‘criticism’ because of rejection of their posts, their writing private emails venting their frustration is somehow less equivalent and totally unacceptable. I am not justifying abuse neither am I taking sides with people who write nasty letters. But the format that you have adopted involves personal preferences being used as criteria for acceptance and rejection of such posts. And as such this judgment will always be subjective and therefore exposed to subjective criticism. Just as a blogger whose writing is part of a public domain and therefore open to comments and linking through Nilu’s pukefests, the format you have chosen is open to such occasional nasty criticism. Learn to live with it; just like thousands in the blogosphere have learnt to deal with trolls and Nilu’s nasty criticisms.

And why should criticism be looked upon so derisively? I am not writing this comment because I hate Desipundit or you personally, rather it is because I love the site and have invested in it so much as a reader and also because I know you are a reasonable man and will take this in the right spirit. Even those who write those nasty emails write them because they think so highly of Desipundit that they feel miffed when their posts aren’t featured. If they didn’t think too highly of it, they could care less if their posts were accepted or rejected. It is sort of a left handed compliment they are paying you guys and since such things are out of your control anyways why not change your attitude and brush off or laugh at their stupidity rather than be irritated by it. And finally, a sincere request could you avoid saying things like “But tell me, would I care if I have bothered to pen down my thoughts?” If you don’t care why invite comments in the very next sentence and also react to them in the comments section?

I hope this is taken in the right spirit and needless to say this was written with an honest intention of a dialogue and trying to present ‘us’ self-nominators side on the issue. I love Desipundit and always wish you well.

Hi

I never knew you guys run DesiPundit probably I dont go there much, basically because I have never been featured there…unfairingly I tell ye…just kidding man…

To continue from above(got posted by mistake)

I think all Pundits at the end of the day are a matter of choice. I might not like what you read or recommend and vice versa. It does not mean any of our choices are superior. Its just that featuring in DP is a sureshot of getting higher hits on your blog and it does matter to everyone(including me). Afterall, all said and done everyone wants readers.

My suggestion would be stop the self tips…its your site, you guys decide what you want to feature. Anyways, I find the idea of self tips a little bit arrogant. If I like it I will read it otherwise I wont. In time I am sure more such sites will come up and then there will less jostling for getting on DP.

later

Confused, scrapping self-nominations would be unfair because it is humanly impossible for us to keep tabs on new blogs and they need a kick start to get them going…I know I would especially if I wrote well enough. There are so many blogs out there (29.9 million at last count) that it is difficult to get readers even if you wrote excellent posts.

Aswin, probably the reason that all your posts got accepted is an indication of the quality of your writing (there were couple of Scian Melts in those if I am not mistaken). I haven’t yet analyzed what %age of our posts come from tip-offs but it would be a worthwhile exercise.

Chetan, glad that I could explain myself better this time around.

Chetan: What “moral highround” are you talking about? If you take the trouble to read carefully what I said you will see that I used the word “push” to refer to those people who don’t know when to call it quits; which is the very same thing Patrix is talking about in this post. And Desipundit’s tip-off policy notwithstanding, I still think asking someone to link to your own post is downright pathetic!