Blogging a bubble

this is #201: okay, admittedly half of my posts are lame excuses for pushing whatever nonsense music I happened to be enjoying, usually under the influence of beer or wine.

But, damn it man, if Sachin can have his idiotic landmark - or would it be more correct to say people are willing to give it? - then why can't I. Agree? Okay. So. Next.

I'm not sure too many people have noticed it, but 90% (accurate statistic, that) of all blogs I used to follow can now be officially declared dead. Yet I go on. What lesson, beta, do we learn from all of this tomfoolery?

Let it be known, kind and dear reader, that this author believes this tells us something about the nature and existence of bubbles.
To an economist about to be trained in the degree of a philosophical order, nothing, I mean nothing, annoys more than the casual throw of the term 'bubble'. "But, but", you say, "the economist claims the term". Rubbish. Economists should know better, they do know better.

So, bubbles are often used to describe pricing behavior that forms a bubble. If this idiotic sort of definition doesn't already inform you of the intellectually poor foundations beneath the concept, then the usual definition handed around like Gatorade after a football game should: "bubbles occur when the prices diverge from the fundamentals."

Eh, what. Excuse me, sir. Exactly what are these "fundamentals" oh lord of the universe? Time to use a non-price-quantity framework to describe what people call a bubble.

Many Indian people, of English medium training, around the holy year of 2005 or thereabouts, decided that it would be cool to tell their friends through a website how happy/sad/boring/exciting their lives are; some more talented ones used it as a mechanism to enhance their writing skill, a minor few actually had some ability with words and phrases. One spoke about blow jobs, and got book deals. But this is beside the point (is it?).

Around 2010, many of these blogs stopped dead. It is really quite something. Almost everybody I used to read stopped writing, simultaneously. I maybe will even generate a dataset. Many world famous blogs came to an end. I was sad to see a couple go, because they provided much entertainment during long Sunday evenings. (Sunday evenings are the worst, in case you didn't already know).

Now, if we look back at this, we say "Ah! A Blogging Bubble! Clearly the price of writing diverged from fundamentals. Now, the actors suddenly wake up and realize - hello! My writing is not as valuable anymore! - and- I have more important things to do! Look the index of fundamentals, will you. Oh well, enough of this online stuff."

Of course this is not what happened. So, you say, smarty pants, what happened?

I can't really say. But I know it has nothing to do with fundamentals, because the story of man's existence has been of evolution, growth, adaptation and change. Dynamic, to put it in mathematical terms. It might be a bit rich to compare mankind's evolution to blogging by a few of the Indian babalog, but I think the analogy is basically correct, although quite stretched. "Fundamentals" don't exist, except in some warped notion of a stationary world, where everything must be in line, like what ma'am said.