Blog Meet: Professional Blogger Keeps Secrets

By Nidhi Dewan

The BlogCamp at Chennai on Sep 9-10 was a revelation of sorts. Bloggers in India take their blogging seriously. Before I am crucified for that statement, let me say that I did not doubt that before I attended the unconference as I had realized what they could come to mean in our instant, digitally powered times. As a platform for freedom of expression, as consumer generated media, as varied genre of literature, as a powerful means of citizen journalism. As a symbol of our own coming of age. But yes, reinforcement of the belief came at the unconference, which was India’s first.

My perhaps unsound perception of the blogging state of affairs had grown out of reading too many American grown blogs and the mass influence they wield. Compare that to how the scene in India is now finally shedding its ugly duckling garb to come into its own, it is with a bit of diffidence that one brings forth one’s opinion aloud.

Then again, the Oktatabyebye experience coupled with the dismal corporate blogging scene also makes me think twice before taking a stand on the scenario in India.

First the good part,
A blogging conference took place in India, for the first time. Bloggers came together and talked about what they do and how to do it better. Testimony that blogging isn’t a few thousand ego massages anymore.

The relief operation that collaborative blogs launched bringing together some of India’s most read and if I may say so tagged bloggers in the wake of the 2004 tsunami disaster. It was one of the most effective channels of relief during the aftermath.

The same community, even stronger this time around, lent critical support when Mumbai was flooded and its people helpless. The faith in the usefulness of the medium as more than a ranting board was established for good.

The proliferation of Indians blogging on wordpress. Relatively new development if one notices the mass consumption of the blogger platform here.

The Indian government in a display of hitherto unseen buffoonery manages to block the entire blogging community. Which in turn rises up in arms and gets the ban revoked. Slew of international and national media picks up the story. Hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned.

There is a new found identity and respect among mainstream media and audiences for those who blog and their opinions, ability to take a public stand and stick by it. The nerve, even if singular is respected.

The part, which doesn’t bode well,
I am not sure how seriously blogs are taken by people who do not blog. The conventional media has realized the good faith of doing blogging related stories but what I am concerned about is the interest of the common people. The folks who are equally opinionated and cued into the world but do not want to have their say online. Mass audience is made up of this demographic and if they are not interested, then save a few who do not care if no one is reading, the potential of the everyday intellectual who is online just goes to waste.
Again, I can come under some serious threat for this but this is in my humble opinion, the plain truth that needs acknowledgment before progress goes boink.

We look forward to the day when bloggers wield the kind of public influence they do in other communities. The US presidential elections saw prominent bloggers affecting strong opinion on every facet of the process, which is indeed a very radical development to take place. We, in India may be a bit behind schedule but that is the kind of presence and activism that bloggers here are capable of.

Also, the feeling creeps in that maybe, just maybe, the freedom is beginning to be misused. And to a certain extent already is. It is very liberating to be able to criticize, pander, plug and generally be vocal about sloppy services, bad brand experiences and the like but when did throwing caution to the wind become fashionable?

Spiderman’s grandpa told him with great power comes great responsibility, which was an important lesson then and now. Agreed, we are not yielding the greatest power on earth through our collective blogging bandwagon but the future could see us doing that as well. And it is wiser to do that responsibly. If your mobile service does not serve you well, how about a call to customer care attempting to get to the bottom of the matter rather than complaining on your blog and decreeing the service? Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?

This particular argument came up during a heated exchange in one of the final open sessions during the second day of blogcamp. Kiruba Shankar of
well Kiruba fame, in true confessional style told the audience that he had yanked off a post about a popular bank's freak ATM's which allowed money withdrawal without a PIN number after being directly threatened by two of their executives. Kiruba then threw open the discussion about the holding on to the responsibility of the written word and the ethics involved in it. What followed was an effective free for all. People flung opinions all around ranging from one's blog is one's right to say anything, being morally responsible for what you say and its effect on the those talked about, taking the safer option and first talking to the company about the faulty product/service, freedom of expression and the right to exercise it and many
such.

A certain gentleman who was a leadership trainer, and with whom I had the pleasure to speak later did the hullabaloo in when he said that every action has a consequence and that is what we should always keep in mind. Don’t those words ring true with dead certainty, especially in free nature of the online conversations? Wise words indeed.

This open session which was also the concluding one of the unconference also saw talk on why comments were the Achilles heel of the blog kingdom and do bloggers really need to be so concerned about how many comments they get. This one definitely got sour with the “yes I love comments because they make me feel good” patrons and the “comments? I couldn’t care less” subscribers dishing it out in a mighty blow out.

This open session also witnessed conversation on whether bloggers face the risk of being addicted to their blogs and if not blogging yields a consistent itch on the soles of their feet. No fireballs in this one though.

Sessions I attended and enjoyed were not many due to some psychosomatic tendency to be missing when the most interesting ones were in progress. However, I was there for most attended ones, which included Amit Agarwal’s talk on professional blogging and how to roll in riches by just doing that. He understandably would not reveal how he does it but we did learn that his income as a professional blogger runs into several lakhs a month. Even as eyeballs rolled and vehement calls on the impossibility of such a thing popped up from the audience, he did not budge from his stand and offered to take all queries offline. He offered the basic gyan (hints and tips) to boost your blog’s earnings and vice versa,  but I don’t think any of those were unknown to the audience already.

Scripts have been already written about this one but I will also go ahead and declare that Sunil Gavaskar’s talk on podcasting was an insightful one. For a maverick of the cricket field, that too one of the old school, he has, with brilliant ease taken to the digital platform with his podcasting sessions for Yahoo Cricket. He most patiently and with a wry sense of humor elucidated the audience on how he began to podcast after realizing that during overseas assignments amidst games, commentary and analysis, writing longhand had become painful. Using the web to write columns turned him into a two-finger typist and podcasts allowed him to sum up an entire game for an audience hard pressed for time in 5-6 minutes. He had clearly figured that communicating through the online medium made his job easier nut not without the complication of how to summarize an entire game in that short a period of time. He sounded like he enjoyed it. Mr Gavaskar speaks with such effortless ease and grace that it is not hard to pay attention.

The corporate blogging session which saw furious participation including mine was one of the better-focused discussions. Of course,  I had to miss a fair bit as I dashed up to the other conference room where I spoke about oktatabyebye.com, the online travel community project, run by Webchutney. I returned to catch Sriram Krishnan talking about corporate blogging inside Microsoft. I mostly concentrated on how corporates should be more bothered about offering their consumers a good offline experience before starting a corporate blog and declaring eternal love for consumers online. Dina Mehta followed it up with two specific brand stories, which I was unfortunate to have missed.

Rajesh Shetty, who authors the very popular, lifebeyondcode blog enlightened the audience with a talk on how to blog for a global audience. The gentleman started off with something so essential and yet so ignored that his very first comment startled me out of my unconference reverie mode. People visit your blog. They invest time in it. What is the ROI(Return on investment) you offer? Value their time and they will keep coming back. He followed it up with a bunch of best practices for making your blog shine. His comment that Indian bloggers are also ‘just bloggers’ hit the bull’s eye. It is imperative to think like a blogger without a nationality, writing for an audience, which is global. I thought it all made perfect sense but did lend a mild purist touch to the practice. If one does not have fun on his/her own blog, then why bother at all?

Scott Carney who writes for Wired among other publications offered an impromptu but very interesting talk. While presenting the case of a one eyed baby born in a Tamil Nadu hospital and his efforts to track down what caused the child to be born with that condition, he raised debate over why bloggers could not actively practice open source journalism and come together to find answers to issues concerning us. In my short career as an attendee of conferences, I have not viewed this kind of genuine spirit of a presenter and it was indeed a pleasure to hear him speak.

A star attraction in the event was the virtual presence of Robert Scoble, the former Microsoft geek blogger who has recently decamped to another startup. He talked live over Skype video about his new employer PodTech, blogging for Microsoft and making sure we all knew how thrilled he was to be with us. It wasn’t very easy to hear him owing to the connection and the sound system, which did not live up to their duties for the entire period while Scoble talked. However, they have it on video so damage wasn’t all done.

A word about the event as a whole. No podium, no pretty ladies accompanying speakers to and fro, no gracious presenting of flowers, no hushed silences. It was an unconference and it proved to be just that for all of those two days. A paper wiki board stood at the entrance of the huge auditorium in the monstrously huge Tidel Park. Anybody who has read 1984 by George Orwell will get my sentiment over the venue. People who wished to speak could stick post-its on the board and were allotted time a short time before the session commenced. Two parallel tracks ran for most of the two days except when the entire gathering converged into the main auditorium for hearing Sunil Gavaskar speak and then following to mob him, the final open session which brought up many issues worth pondering over and the internet quiz which saw frenzied participation initially and a tough contest by the time it ended. I have a suspicion that most people, during the quiz, sat thinking, “Dude, this whole internet thing should now be put into history textbooks!” because I sure did. Such rapid development has happened in the industry that it was mildly astonishing to get all that insight into the way the web has grown in the last decade in a matter of an hour.

Most of the geek sessions, there is simply no other term for it I am afraid , were conducted in a separate space but saw enthusiastic participation, many times a more involved audience than the one in the main auditorium. These covered podcasting, Wordpress know how, inserting music in blogs and others which arouse alacrity if you happen to be rather serious about your blog. One could not help but notice that there was far too much to talk about than time to do it but the effort was a sincere one anyway.
 

Both spaces were wi-fi zones, people surfed away during sessions and after with abandon. The sponsors, big-ticket names all, stood their ground without plugging themselves much. The Nokia booth did see participation rivaling that of any given session during the meet as their N-series phones were up for display and trial use. Which people did. A lot.

People stuck to their free goodie/gift bags with barely disguised glee, the contents of which would make the most reluctant of conference goers happy. Good job there, one wishes to tell the organizers. Kiruba being one of the most recognizable one of those was ably aided by a group of Chennai based student bloggers all similarly attired in black and looking darn proud of their conception. I even saw a couple of them walking up to the clueless looking souls which inhabit conferences and offer help. Sprightly is the word that comes to mind. Several exceedingly well known Indian bloggers were present and in all avid observer honesty, were not hard to miss. To be fair, they had helped around in the organization throughout the period before the event took place and seemed to be soaking in the produce to the hilt.

I had fun, mostly as there were a number of bloggers present that I had written to for oktatabyebye and it was enjoyable to put faces to blogs and their technorati ranks. I met numerous people with fascinating jobs, which almost relegated mine to boredom but that feeling quickly left me in peace! Sessions did pan out and build engrossingly but no conference or for that matter unconference can ensure the consistent longevity of that. BlogCamp Chennai 2006 did get its due amount of attention and for those who attended it, it will always be an experience they will love to reminisce in blogging circles.  More are needed and should follow or this huge effort may not be enough to spawn the kind of blogging culture India deserves to enjoy.

(Nidhi Dewan works at one of of India's hottest web companies - Webchutney.In the spirit of the blogging world,  her article is being run as submitted, unedited by Techgoss)