Blog Math

From the days when I used to hate blogging and feel lazy to read one, I have reached the stage where I manage to scribble some random musings, widely publicize my once a blue moon rantings through google talk status messages and feel elated when some of my good friends “say” they enjoy reading my blog too (green lie ?)

So what brought about this change? One of the reasons is of late, I have been reading some really interesting blogs of other fellow bloggers.

After every fifteen minutes of brain draining work at office (oxymoron?) which includes checking internal mails on outlook, latest news, I tend to read few blog entries here and there. Some of them are darn hilarious, while other denigrating. But after reading each one of them, I have the strong urge to blog. With all hoopla, I hop back home only to doze off watching vadivelu and vivek comedy.

These urges keep coming every now and then and are directly proportional to how less you are busy at work or at home. A boring day always motivates me to write blogs. But the content gets churned over days only to find its vent on that D-Day when you try fishing out the username and password of your blog on wordpress. I don’t believe that blog is like a personal diary, I am sure nobody would make notes on their hawala transactions on blogger or wordpress. Probably if that was the case, we could have caught a bunch of criminals by now.

Osama bin laden’s blog on Sept 10, 2001

“Today I enjoyed watching my child bulldozing two lego towers with his toy airplane.. You get some cool ideas watching these kids these days.don’t you!” and you know what happened on Sept 11, 2001

Telgi’s Blog (kingpin of stamp paper scam in India) early 2002

“Damn these court vendors..I bought a new pen and that oollu ka patta didn’t give me a blank stamp paper to see if that pen writes. This is shear discrimination….I will print my own, make paper rockets and launch them on his face”

Swami Premananda’s Blog early 2001

“My disciples managed to recruit one more female staff today….uuhh..haaa. ammm…I can’t wait…mangalam ..mangalam!”

Life of police and CBI would have been lot easier then and all that they have to do is recruit some laggards who manage to read all blogs on the world and leave a post on each one of them.

But the most compelling reason is internet connectivity. Back at my undergrad, we had to wait hours to get access for internet access when somebody was tunneling to download porn at college internet “room” and get charged, to unlimited browsing in L&T (we could install yahoo messenger but they banned it the day after i left ), but again limited internet access at Delphi, 20X5 ( 4 hours internet ban at hostels), 24 X2 (full access during weekends) at IITM and now between my latest company and home I manage almost 24X7 internet connectivity again. Also, other major factors include “are you employed if so how long”, “age”, “do you have a girl friend or are you married” etc.

Immediately I pulled up an excel sheet to do some major curve fitting equations that I struggled to learn during my engineering and MBA days to conjure an equation to determine the propensity to blog which I would call the “blogurge factor”. 1 indicates a perennial blogger while 0 indicates destined to hell blogophobic

Blogurge factor (“BF”) = function(internet access (IA), how long are you employed(E), length of engagement (with your girlfriend or married life) (LEN), Age (A))

where IA could take values between 0-1 (0 – no internet, 1 – you have broadband at home)

E should be in years (0 if you are a student)

LEN in months (0 if you are not married or not in a relationship) and AGE in years.

BF = α₁IA + α₂E + α₃LEN -₄AGE + error

Where

α_{1 =} 0.4567

α_{2 =} 0.075

α_{3 =} 0.0009

α_{4 =} 0.013

(Note that Length of engagement is in months because people get bored soon and feel spending time on a blog is lot more interesting than talking with the opposite sex and this factor is more prominent than length of employment in years)

So in case of PBWNOGF (Poor-Bachelors-With-NO-Girl Friends) like me, where IA = 1, E = 0.8 yrs, LEN = 0; AGE = 26 would give a BF = 0.5037 which takes me past 0.5 mark, but for a poor chap with exactly same parameters like mine except that he is going with his GF for past 8 months, the factor falls to 0.3957

(Disclaimer: People who are hell bent on proving the above equation wrong, mind you I will tweak the error value to get the BF that I want)

All said and done, suddenly blog has caught the attention of so many people that, it has become one of the most important element of eating up bandwidth and storage space..who cares! infact we bloggers are indirectly pushing the Moore’s law and other infinite laws on storage/bandwidth/computing power. For some, it brings the writer in them (many times an illusion for the blogger and not the reader) or the comedian or the revolutionary or for some the power of “anniyan/Aparchitudu/Aparchit”..the anonymous with power to slander/comment/pour out emotions.

So whats your BF ?

(PS: I have excluded corporate, tech, PR, media, Mktg blogs for the analysis. Its all about personal blogs — Note added to evade some serious scrutiny on the equation by geeks )

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