Archive for category blogs
Five years of blogging…
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.
Impact of Blogging?
After Ahmedabad and Bangalore serial blasts we friends were having this general discussion. Deepa tweeted about blogging about the incident and what can be done and this is what Nimish and I replied.
KV: @ddeeps what will blogging do? We will blog and few ppl will read and agree n nothing will change.
Ddeeps: @kv Oh never despair. We talk, we discuss, we think, re reflect, we are spurred to action, we support – all things happen.
Nb42: @kv 98% of the people are decent citizens. 2% are extremely stupid. But it’s us 98% who’s at fault for electing the other 2%.
KV: @nb42 exactly, but do you think we 98pc ppl can blog n change those 2% ppl?
Its almost 5 years since I have been blogging, but still I am not clear about the impact of blogging on general people, or how we can change the opinion about certain things?
I am not talking about the tech people, the people from our gang or bloggers. When we write about technology and tech news/reviews/bug fixes/hacks it is to be accessed by similar minded people and they find solutions online. Or when The Economics describes Robert Scoble as Chief humanising officer and quotes ‘he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world’ then I completely agree. Because people who had views about MS, hated MS or had no opinion, they all belonged to the tech world, the internet world. That was the place where Scoble was hero and everyone listened to him.
But once we try to apply same things to normal world specially in country like India where most of the people do not have access to internet, where politicians still try to get votes based on caste, region etc rather than what actually people really thinks, the situation is completely different. If we talk about people who blog or we interact on twitter we see most of them have rises above the level of these small issues and cannot be misled by politicians. But those are the people who are our target audiences too, they are already aware of what is happening around, they know problems and solutions too, they do not have power to change it. They can blog about things but who is going to read, not the politicians or general public.
There are these small incidents that happen in our daily life, for example when I went to get a medicine from medical store, most of them did not give me because I wanted to just have one injection. They wanted me to buy a complete pack of 10. These medical store guys act like a mafia and sell medicines in bulk only. Every medical shop I went to I got the same answer ‘buy 10 or don’t buy it’. Where do I raise my voice against it? Who should I complain to? In the end what did I do, I just wrote a blog post. [I never posted that because I knew that post will have no impact]
Push button publishing might have made everyone a journalist, but what good it is when the ideas can’t be propagated into real life. I have another question too, few months back we had a Blogathon India, and it was really a nice effort. I read all the posts and learnt a lot from them, I tried to change few habits too. But I don’t think it caused a lot of impact, its purpose was to increase awareness, but I think it just tried to help those who were already in better shape. We need to reach out to common people and authorities, but blogging isn’t going to help much.
So, I want to ask all the bloggers what is the solution? Do you really think blogs will have impact someday? In a country where 1/3 of population is trying hard to get two meals a day, we can blog and can change perspective of people? I have no clue on this. At this point I was thrown with another question, did you vote? What or how did you decide who to vote for? Maybe answer to this question will lead me somewhere.
Blogging
It’s some time now that I wrote my last blog. So many things have happened or changed. I started blogging with the purpose to improve my writing skills and I feel that some changes are there. Even if changes are not that prominent I am happy that now I am not scared of writing. I think this is good because one day it will help me improve.
“Linux – My side of story” was most happening blog. I got appreciation from few friends and team members. It had the maximum number of hits. Because of this blog I had a BIG fight with a friend. And for rest of people it is same crazy free software idea.
But I am happy that in this hectic life I am finding some time to write down my ideas. One friend told me once that if you are down just write about it, it will help and I think it helps. I used to write previously but those were all sad blogs and never posted them and whatever I posted I deleted. Now I think there is difference in my life, I feel much better, I write happy things. I don’t know the reason, but am sure few close friends will try to find out the reason but it would be all wrong.
I don’t know the reason for writing the blog, either few people has asked me why am I not writing blog or once again I am thinking, and when I do that I write down everything.
Few things have changed, I have started going to gym. I was part of a team which conducted workshop and for first time in my life I saw things from the other end. Till 2 days back I was always at the students end. But I think this side is much harder to be in. I have to learn a lot to be there.