Redefining the blog, live commentary and the column

Good morning, folks... New season, and it starts with Rahul Dravid opting to bat first, which in sub continental day/night conditions is invariably the safer choice. No morning dew to worry about, given the afternoon start... and with pitches typically slowing down as the day/night goes on, chasing becomes more difficult in the second session.
Off to make coffee for myself... see you guys on here when the game begins...

Quite an ordinary blog post, you might say. Another Indian with an opinion on cricket (: that's almost all of us :) babbling into his blog. But this post has, as of this writing, 1315 comments.

The blogger in question? Prem Panicker, former dead-tree jouorno, now Managing Editor of Rediff in the USA. Old Rediff hands will remember "Panix" and his ball-by-ball commentary in Rediff's chat rooms. This blog (well before blogs existed, of course) once had a minor run-in with Panix when we, bored, decided to start a little action in one of those chats rooms by dissing Tendulkar. Panix, instead of using moderator rights to boot us, pinched out the fire by quickly, quietly, stating a few Tendulkar stats and asking what we based our opinion on. Chastened - we'd never make a good troll - we stayed quiet the rest of that match.

But we digress. To find out why the post elicited so many comments, hit the HaloScan comments button. Panix, you'll be happy to note, has brought typed live commentary back. And with it, has stretched the concept of blogs as a dialogue between writers and readers into a whole new dimension. He answers questions, chats with them, and continues to talk about the game in progress. The post on the next game, India against the West Indies, has 880 comments.

In a previous post, he talks about blogs as opposed to columns:

I'm beginning to like blogs, more than the full-length columns I used to do earlier. Thing is, blogs give you tremendous flexibility -- there are times when an issue needs comment, but the comment itself needs to span only 100-200 words, tops. Trouble with column writing though is the form itself dictates a certain length -- and that means you end up stretching a good 200 word comment into an involved 1000 word column.
This form here gives me the best of both worlds -- I can throw up a link, when the story is worth reading but doesn't necessarily call for comment; I can link and comment in a couple of lines if that is all it takes; or I can if I want to examine an issue in greater depth. Perfect. :-)