I’ve spent the better part of this week wandering around in the alphabet-strewn, bits and bytes world of IT, software, hardware, all the stuff that techie geeks do sitting in front of a computer screen. It’s part of work, and I need to understand what’s happening in the Indian IT industry, what’s the buzz, or rather, where’s the buzz. So, here I am, low-tech, no-tech, floating around in blogs and websites, looking at mainstream news channels, obscure blog entries, babudom press releases, the works.
The big surprise are the blogs. There seem to be a million out there. Some scratchy, others a veritable feast of ideas, ideology, ramblings, rants, raves, insights and overviews. And not just on technology either. I stumbled upon one such Indian entrepreneur techie’s blog – Rajesh Jain’s www.emergic.org – and I’ve come across everything from articles on emerging technologies and Google’s turn as an inventor to a train journey and the reservation issue. Then there are the big international (read US) players like BoingBoing (http://www.boingboing.net/) and Scobleizer (http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/). There are funny ones, completely techie ones only concerned with the next big knot in Open Source, the pontificating ones that really think they have something earth-shattering to share with the rest of the world and the plain boring ones that have nothing to say, not even in the “About Me” window.
Big realization: it’s easy to start a blog. Keeping it alive and kicking is a bit like having a baby and then realizing that you have to stay up night after night changing diapers. You’d better love your blog (and your baby) to keep it going.
First published on July 8, 2006
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