Celebrity Blogging or Just a Fad?

INTENT is a venture of Deepak Chopra and Shekhar Kapur, well known Indian names. Their IntentBlog has quite an impressing list of bloggers. It includes Shah Rukh Khan, Anupam Kher, Rahul Khanna, Deepak Chopra, Milind Deora, Shekhar Kapur, and many more Indian personalities from various other areas.

But these are not bloggers like one would expect them. Okay, they use a Blog tool for publishing the content with all the Bells & Whistles like RSS feeds and Comments, but tools are just the means. For one thing, you may notice that most of the authors are not active (or in some cases zilch) in their interaction with their readers and commenter.

Yes, it is good to hear, as INTENT says, Original Voices from Asia. But Original Voices (or let me call them Celebrities) always had various media for communication in form of Traditional Journalism, Interviews and Television appearances.

Blogging is a new age medium which had allowed not-so Original Voices or Common Man from every field to put forward their experiences and expertise. It also provided a medium to readers to reach out beyond traditional media and hear the people who, in their own unique position and which in my opinion, provides the most Original Voice.

One can now read bloggers like Twig. This is a amazing compilation of travel notes from his journeys he made during the whole 2005 year. Wherein he visited Fiji, New Zealand, China and India. While in India, he even did a Firang role in some Bollywood movie.

The Living in Gaza is a worth reading experience of a Swedish woman with Palestine connection, trying to relocate and settle in Gaza. After months of stay in Gaza, she gave up and is back in Sweden now.

Or check out Nidahas.com, a Sri Lankan blog on Web Standards, Design, and FOSS.

These are the Original Voices that keeps the Readers engaged with frequent posts, response to comments, and cross links to other related and worthy blogs to build a community. This way a new Reader or Blogger with similar interests can easily become part of the whole.

I am not against celebrities blogging, but isn't it easy enough to start their own blog and do blogging in a true sense?

Otherwise how different is it reading Shah Rukh Khan on INTENT or in an article on Rediff?