Today I complete five years of blogging and I feel happy about it, not because five years is a long period but this journey has been great, full of learning and meeting good people. Blogging was introduced to me by Cijal, but not as a way to blog but to get Gmail accounts. Gmail has launched on April 1, 2004 and as everyone else I was excited to get an account. Cijal who has been blogging for some time told me that he got beta invites because Google was distributing invites over blogger to popularize blogger. I did not get Gmail invites from there but journey had started.
I did not continue blogging for long because response was limited (extremely) and I used to run out of topics. I took a pause for some time and started back in November 05, this time platform had changed. I had begin blogging at InfyBlogs and the experience was great. We were very few people and once during system upgrade all blog posts were lost. System was setup again and journey continued. There were few bloggers if we compare it with outside world, but it was an advantage for us. Our blogs were easily discoverable and since all of us were working in similar situation and same kind of work, it was easy to connect. In one year, I had realized the importance of community, similar minded people were together and we started having bloggers meet. It was fun, a place where I could express myself and I found a friend in Cubicle jungle. At the same time, I was blogging on blogger also and response there was increasing. I had started enjoying the blogging. When I left Infy after 35 months of joining, I had written 500 blog posts for InfyBlogs. The second leg of journey had started with a purpose of improving written English and I had achieved much more than that.
Blogging not only helped me meet new people but also helped me rediscover myself, improve myself. First lesson was when I wrote, I had to organize my ideas, I had to refine them, simplify them and make them presentable. I could learn all that in some classroom but most people don’t, I learnt it from my mistakes, by seeing people work. Second thing was my interest in technology has developed tremendously. I was the Linux guy, used to work with C programming (nothing wrong with it) and unaware of rest of world. When you write blog, you read a lot too and that gave me a new perspective to look at thing, I started learning about new technologies, gadgets and neglecting junk on Internet. Third improvement was, I started admitting my mistakes. That was a huge boost in my learning. Fourth important things were suggestions in forms of comments and emails. I got a lot of suggestions and I tried to improve myself based on those.
As TWiT panel says, podcasting in the natural progression of blogging. Same thing happened to us too. Geo, Thej, Topa and I started YAP – Yet Another Podcast. We used to discuss technology and there was a small community built around it. Currently because of work load, we have stopped working on it. YAP had taken good path but I still feel there was a lot of improvement possible. I plan to launch it again with a new name, new structure and consistency by first week of June. Please send in the suggestions.
Five years have passed, we have moved from blogging to microblogging. Meaning of blogs is constantly changing and I would like to evolve myself with same pace. I have been happy, sad, angry, depressed and my blogs have been a reflection of me. I would like to thank all the readers, their encouragement and suggestions in form of comments/mails/IMs/Tweets have helped a lot.
