Posts: 1
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Blogging that for me started as a leisure pursuit has now become part of my job, creative activity and way of socialisation. We are still a less connected country of 165,803,560 people (according to the June 2006 estimates) with only a few bloggers, but the users’ base is exponentially growing.
I started my first blog sometime ago as a showcase of my published work. Later, I also took up blogging for a foreign NGO working on self-help projects in rural areas, besides some others where I co-blog. My employers also asked me to run a blog for the organisation where I work.
Falling prey to the hype around generating additional income online, I started running ads on my personal webblogs. Small amount cheques started pouring in and this became yet another incentive for me to blog actively. Though, in this part of the world, online advertising trend has yet to catch the attention of the corporate sector; online marketing culture is not mature enough yet.
Weblogging has become a reliable resource for my writings, as well. More often, I blog informally, sharing impressions, generating ideas to see how they invoke reactions, keeping track of others’ work in the fields of my interest, or simply ranting or pointing out things that come to my attention. Also, blogging is great platform to prune ideas.
A few things keep blogging on the go: valuable feedback that clears my outlook for whatever I happen to be thinking of writing. I post different projects and invite bloggers to participate.
My posts usually carry embedded questions that ask for answers. Readers come and some of them write valuable comments, shooting down my ideas outrightly, or substantiating them with their own experiences and knowledge. Sometimes, people also e-mail their replies. Besides ego-boosting, this helps me to explore the subject at hand from different angles and perspectives.
Secondly, the blogging fraternity is like my real life social community. We ask each others’ well-being through emails and keep ourselves abreast with what is happening to blog friends. Technorati and other online services promptly point out when any of my blogs or posts get mentioned by others bloggers. Like-minded bloggers from all corners of the world gather at each others’ blogs and share life and work experiences that I can learn from. On my blogroll, I have blogs from far and away including China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Puerto Rico and Bangladesh and more.
Lately, I feel, bloggers like me can help in promoting blogging in this part of the world. I have subscribed to different alerts that keep me updated about technical developments and what people are talking about in the ever-growing blogsphere. Through my multiple blogs, I keep pointing out to new blogging platforms, new blog search engines and directories and other “cool” things bloggers like to have on their sites in addition to urging my friends and students to start their own blogs.
Blogging is, in some ways, a reciprocal phenomenon. Numbers of comments I have on my blogs are directly proportional to my commenting elsewhere. Same is the case with links exchange, with a few exceptions. In my view, if people want to comment on blogs, they can (and they should), but they should not feel pressurised to do it simply because they have had a comment from someone.
One good way to expand the circle of friends is to reciprocate by visiting back and or through e-mails because this is how one gets to know other bloggers. This method provided me an opportunity to encourage and appreciate fellow bloggers who took time to read what I had written and shared their thought and ideas on the subject of my interests. If a visitor catches my interest and value, I keep going back regularly.
As any regular blogger will reiterate, the best blogging time is at night. By the end of the day, I know what I will blog about. On my home workstation, I log on to my tracker to see how many hits I have got and who all have been to my site. I also see if my Adsense meter has moved, before I start visiting back and replying to comments and emails. Then I write my own blog posts.
“I am neither geek, nor nerd, I am not a hacker, a phreaker, a programmer or any variety of technoid dweeb,” aptly puts an avid blogger. Blogging is easy and can be self-taught, and so, anyone can do it. You only have to take a start.Thursday, March 8, 2007
Blogging that for me started as a leisure pursuit has now become part of my job, creative activity and way of socialisation. We are still a less connected country of 165,803,560 people (according to the June 2006 estimates) with only a few bloggers, but the users’ base is exponentially growing.
Since blogging is yet to be thoroughly explored by an average person, it has remained a novelty among most people. One question that I am frequently asked is, how I blog?
I started my first blog sometime ago as a showcase of my published work. Later, I also took up blogging for a foreign NGO working on self-help projects in rural areas, besides some others where I co-blog. My employers also asked me to run a blog for the organisation where I work.
Falling prey to the hype around generating additional income online, I started running ads on my personal webblogs. Small amount cheques started pouring in and this became yet another incentive for me to blog actively. Though, in this part of the world, online advertising trend has yet to catch the attention of the corporate sector; online marketing culture is not mature enough yet.
Weblogging has become a reliable resource for my writings, as well. More often, I blog informally, sharing impressions, generating ideas to see how they invoke reactions, keeping track of others’ work in the fields of my interest, or simply ranting or pointing out things that come to my attention. Also, blogging is great platform to prune ideas.
A few things keep blogging on the go: valuable feedback that clears my outlook for whatever I happen to be thinking of writing. I post different projects and invite bloggers to participate.
My posts usually carry embedded questions that ask for answers. Readers come and some of them write valuable comments, shooting down my ideas outrightly, or substantiating them with their own experiences and knowledge. Sometimes, people also e-mail their replies. Besides ego-boosting, this helps me to explore the subject at hand from different angles and perspectives.
Secondly, the blogging fraternity is like my real life social community. We ask each others’ well-being through emails and keep ourselves abreast with what is happening to blog friends. Technorati and other online services promptly point out when any of my blogs or posts get mentioned by others bloggers. Like-minded bloggers from all corners of the world gather at each others’ blogs and share life and work experiences that I can learn from. On my blogroll, I have blogs from far and away including China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Puerto Rico and Bangladesh and more.
Lately, I feel, bloggers like me can help in promoting blogging in this part of the world. I have subscribed to different alerts that keep me updated about technical developments and what people are talking about in the ever-growing blogsphere. Through my multiple blogs, I keep pointing out to new blogging platforms, new blog search engines and directories and other “cool” things bloggers like to have on their sites in addition to urging my friends and students to start their own blogs.
Like all bloggers, I have favourites too. I use Google’s Blogger, free platform mainly because tempering with its template and innovating design are easy and Blogger allows hoisting ads. Last year (February 2006) all blogs hoisted on Blogger were banned here so I moved some of my blogs to Wordpress, another free and efficient blogging platform. For the rest, I figured out how to bypass the ban through anonymous surfing and some other tricks. (The ban is off for now.)
Blogging is, in some ways, a reciprocal phenomenon. Numbers of comments I have on my blogs are directly proportional to my commenting elsewhere. Same is the case with links exchange, with a few exceptions. In my view, if people want to comment on blogs, they can (and they should), but they should not feel pressurised to do it simply because they have had a comment from someone.
One good way to expand the circle of friends is to reciprocate by visiting back and or through e-mails because this is how one gets to know other bloggers. This method provided me an opportunity to encourage and appreciate fellow bloggers who took time to read what I had written and shared their thought and ideas on the subject of my interests. If a visitor catches my interest and value, I keep going back regularly.
My invisible site tracker Statcounter keeps telling me that I get more visitors from keywords and searches and not from reciprocal visits. Ironically, I get more visitors from abroad who search specific queries like Thar Desert, Rohi Poetry, Waris Shah, earthquake economic effects. But one does not have to blog for specific keywords. On the other hand, my personal blogging has only a loose focus on different things: social application of changing technology and power of social media.
As any regular blogger will reiterate, the best blogging time is at night. By the end of the day, I know what I will blog about. On my home workstation, I log on to my tracker to see how many hits I have got and who all have been to my site. I also see if my Adsense meter has moved, before I start visiting back and replying to comments and emails. Then I write my own blog posts.
“I am neither geek, nor nerd, I am not a hacker, a phreaker, a programmer or any variety of technoid dweeb,” aptly puts an avid blogger. Blogging is easy and can be self-taught, and so, anyone can do it. You only have to take a start.
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