Day 1: Blogging Workshop at IHC, Delhi
The room is full! Get us some more chairs.. that is how the blogging workshop at IHC Delhi began. We started with expecting 60 people to attend and ended with around 200 instead! The interest in blogging is clearly increasing day by day..
The workshop was organised by IBNMS in collaboration with their Delhi Chapter – www.delhibloggers.in ..
The session started with Ajay talking about the society and how is it helping people adopt to blogging. The keynote speaker for the workshop was Mr. Madhavan from Hindustan Times who shared his views on why and how of blogging. He started by contrasting the organised march of the mainstream media to the blogs that are unruly in nature.. sort of army discipline versus civilian anarchy! his advice to the blogging rookies was to clearly define the objective they want to achieve via their blogs. The objective can be reached by providing content with a personality of the author. Learning the tools for blogging shouldn’t be an end in itself as it is just a pen through which one is going to be creating the content.
According to him, the success of a blog stems from providing a pattern and structure to your blog. While there are no rules for blogging, he advised adhering to social code of conduct. The author should feel responsible and accountable for the content they publish. The audience was eager to understand the copyright issues involved with blogging to which he answered that the content of the blog is owned by the author and author alone. He also noted that blogettiquette is still evolving..
An interesting anectode that Madhavan mentioned was when he approached author of a blog with a proposal to do a book for him, it turned out to be a friend who Mr. Madhavan knew already!
Now, one thing interesting to observe during the session was there were as many old people as there were youngsters. The interest in blogging is not only limited to the yuppies but also to more mature audience. The thing that surprised me most was the little patience that the mature folks had in listening to the speaker… while i would have expected older people to be more patient clearly their interest in blogging was much more than their ability to hold their horses :)
This was more evident in the session that followed Mr. Madhavan’s on Introduction to Blogging by Abhishek Baxi. He laboriously went through basics of blogging with wordpress.com as example. A new blog was created on the fly and each of the features explained in detail. From editing a blog, including tags and categories to the blog and including photos in the blog – he just about covered everything.
The session went longer than expected till around 9:15 PM when we had to end the session for the day. IMHO, the question of the day from audience was - “After creation of a blog post how long before it is available on google”.. in some terms it meant to me that google is no more just a search engine on the internet but it has become internet for a lot of folks. While winding up a few people came up to ask questions around the problems they had been having with their computers. goes on to say that the expertise level of people with their computers is still pretty limited.
The sessions on Day 1 were very well received by the audience and a lot of them had left with their interest in blogging piqued up a bit. Today and tomorrow as we continue with our workshops, we expect different audience profile to come but more engaging conversations to ensue. The sessions for today and tomorrow are:
Sunday, June 29th
Marketing your blog – Ajay Jain
Blogs to extend Corporate Branding – Sourabh
Monday, June 30th
Corporate Blogs and Monitoring Reputation Online – Abhishek Kant
So take your pick and come over to join in the discussions. More information on the workshop is located here. If you are interested in following event updates as they happen, you can do so at our twitter channel.
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