“It’s been almost a decade since I started my website, www.jackieshroff.com. It’s packed up now, but it was a daily diary entry, not a one-upmanship forum,” for actor Jackie Shroff, who will soon start another website, www.jackieshroff.tv, the bloggy warfare is a brand-new stunt to get maximum hits. “Even if it’s at the cost of hitting someone else! It’s nothing but a publicity stunt, to remain in the limelight and give people their tea-time talk,” he laughs. Jezzebelles and Gossip Girls, back off, it’s the men who know how to hit below the belt. “Well, I can tell you that the men are more of gossipmongers than women, and this one was mean,” Raveena Tandon enjoys this one. Wonder what will happen if the Bollywood billies log on? “If it were up to the girls, they’d rather spend their time and money on Manolo Blahniks and Jimmy Choos. Whereas men, now boys have their toys and the latest is the laptop. They carry it everywhere, their world is on it, games, internet, information, database…it’s their life and they are using it for communication,” says actor Gul Panag, who’s perhaps the only gal in the industry to have her own website, www.gulpanag.net, one which reflects in her thought process. For Gul, blog is a form of expression and no one can censor it but yourself. “Everyone’s thrilled with the idea of self expression, we all want to air our thoughts and beliefs and be heard, but at the end of the day, it’s the written word, and no matter how strongly you feel about a particular thing or subject, sometimes you have to hold back. I am a small fish and have no scores to settle.” However, she adds, it’s a democracy, and we have our right to freedom of speech and expression. “And we have at least ten years before we can reach the Hollywood level where these things are done with. Actors there are far more professional, whereas it’s an Indian thing to attack and blow it out of proportion. There’s already this reservation thing, then Ramadoss attacks the industry, Bombay’s being changed to Mumbai…how much policing do we need? Surely not on the blogs!” she makes herself amply clear.

Sometime back, there was, and still is, the Intent Blog, and it had pieces penned by netizens Rahul Bose and Rahul Khanna that got us interested. Although these two haven’t been regular in the updates, the language and the choice of subjects had us up and blogging.