A few days ago i wrote about the Perseus report on blogging – which reveals that most blogs started on free blog sites such as this, or xang, or blogspot – well are defunkt. people don’t come back after signing up.

My funda on this is fairly simple. writing anything is not simple. expressing yourself (and to hell with grammar, syntax and typos) is not easy. Everybody and his/her idiot cousin will not write – even if you made all the paper and pencil in the world free. So why would you expect everyone to turn to blogging.

I remember sitting on the strategy think tanks of a couple of portals in the pre dot com bust days – and hear comments like “mrs.rao from vizag will buy pickles from mrs.khan in mumbai now that the net is here”. We actually expected people to behave in the virtual world the way they would never behave in the real world.

Similarly with blogs. We expect 4.9 million odd people to churn out reams of matter on a regular basis simply because they have opted for a blog account. Emergent behaviour is all fine, but it ain’t going to emerge overnight.

today it takes less than 10 seconds to start a blog account. i just got a new account at tBlog- more to chk out it’s interface for something else I’m working on. All of 5 fields to fill. 15 seconds later i have a new account. i need to figure out whether i will use it or does it join my inert accounts on blogspot and xanga.