Few more aspects of Blogging

I discussed many features of blogging in my previous posts, and some of the interpretations have been agreed by other bloggers. Here I am writing about another interesting aspect of blogging - words used in comments and tagging, back linking.

Why choosing of words are delicate? It is sensitive because of the cultural difference and word interpretation by non-eng speaking bloggers.

We are not playing any world championship in blogoshpere, not competing to each other like liberal and conservatives. So, if you don’t like a blogger obviously you will not tag him/her and will not write abusive posts. Your rigidness can make you infamous, so everyone try to be polite in his or her blog.

But sometime it may happen that a comment, constructive criticism can be taken wrongly. Even a positive tagging can be inerpreted in different way. For an example I tagged one friend analyzing his/her blog “simple” .. and excellent. The word “Simple” created a mess and s/he interpreted it wrongly. I feel sorry for that. I like the blog and that the reason I tagged. This confusion happened because of language issue. I strongly feel if English is not your first language you have to be careful in choosing words. For an example last Friday I have seen one status message of one of my friend’s gtalk - “Again Friday”. It sounds like “oh no not again” – though what he meant was completely different. Basically he translated from his mother taungue and achieved this phrase.

But the most important thing is the cultural difference. Let me give an example, last year I wanted to invite one old colleague (she is older than my mom) in our house. We thought its better to go and knock her door, rather call her for dinner. That’s what we do in India, but not in Europe. Basically we disturbed her that we realized later, she felt offended and we apologized. There are many delicate examples like this where simplest behavior, small gesture matters most. These are nothing but cultural difference of different society.

Thus when you are commenting/replying any comment or tagging/back linking others its better to keep in mind about these factors. We have to appreciate each others culture. Words like thanks, nice weekend, Namaste matters. Try to reply the comments from other bloggers if s/he has given some elaborate feedback, coz s/he can expect your reaction against the comment. Even a small :-) smile can make us happy.

I have read some of the posts regarding Tagging. So we all know its importance and do not want to discuss it now. Similarly back linking is important (tagging a specific post is called back linking - You can track tagging or back linking by Technorati or by setting->comment->enable backlinks in blogger service). Don’t forget to back link if you are writing your post based on someone’s basic thoughts.

PS: this pic is the back view from our apartment.