Celebrity blogs

I was looking around tonight to check out some celebrity blogs out there. It seems to be a fad nowadays - celebrities blogging is now almost a statement!

Here are some that I found, and I will be adding more to this list when I find more:

• Aamir Khan: Aamir’s controversial blog which keeps making headlines. No blogging software used. The code looks like generated from some offline data. No comments on the blog page. No feeds. Some nice guy has tried to create feed for the blog by scraping it, but it seems a bit outdated. Interesting thing about the hosting of the blog. www.aamirkhan.com is hosted on a freebsd machine. However, the blog content is picked up from a CentOS linux machine elsewhere. Another weird thing - I can’t see any comments on the blog (I use firefox). But the page source shows comments by users.

• Amitabh Bachchan: Blog on bigadda.com. I hate blogs which insist on showing excerpts (i.e. not full-content blogs), and require you to click on them to read the whole story. This is one. The blog is structured like a diary with some kind of chronological post titles. Each post is about things which happened on that day. So this is more like a traditional diary rather than specific topics. Unless one is interested in knowing intimate details about the person, it might get tedious therefore. However, it is quite insightful about the man’s thinking. He doesn’t hold back on his thoughts about relevant happenings in the country (ramadoss being his latest monkey). One post even had a graph of popularity comparisons between his TV shows and Shah Rukh’s. And yes, hundreds of comments in each post. Mostly of people virtually genuflecting before him and gushing about how much they are crazy about him. The snob part within me keeps wanting to lump all such people into the category of “typical idol-loving Indians”. Amitabh writes extensively, and in a heartfelt manner. So I quite like this blog even though I might not always agree with his views.

• Kiran Bedi: The blog is appropriately named Crane Bedi. Probably abandoned, last post being dated November 25, 2006. She writes well, and her blog was quite interesting - one post was about how she imagined Gandhi to be a police chief, another showed the FIR of his assassination, one talked graphically about a domestic violence case. I wish she continued.

• RK Misra: The Lead India winner. Not too many posts. But detailed thoughts on problems plaguing India. No updates for the last three months though.

That is all for today. I will keep adding more to this list as I keep finding them. Would love references by others too.

• The gorgeous Gul Panag: I quite liked this blog, even though it doesn’t feature new posts too often. Gul writes very coherently and sincerely. She responds to stories about her in the papers (she has a long post responding to the media allegations that she is turning anorexic). The number and quality of comments in her posts are decent. The best thing I liked is that she responded severals times in the comments section itself to others’ comments. Wish she wrote more often! (Thanks for the reference, Thejesh!)