Blogging Workshop at Saarang

It has been six months since I updated my blog.

So yeah, I better have something to say :).

Why the sudden change of heart? I attended a blogging workshop at Saarang today.

For those of you who are not in the know, my college, IIT Madras, has a cultural fest (aka excuse-to-finally-gaze-upon-hot-chicks), called Saarang, at this time of year. We don't really do anything 'useful', as in, upgrade our CVs or learn new job-related skills, but it's an excellent platform to develop our social skills.

Most of us are nerds who dream that all women are shy virgins and that our dream girls will experience love-at-first-sight when they look at us, so yeah, it serves as a reality check. And no, I did not make that up, that's what the guy next door thinks. Really.

And yes, I went to a workshop on online networking at an event designed to increase my interaction with real people.

Ouch. Geekiness can really hurt sometimes.

So, back to the blogging workshop. We were all asked to bring laptops, and assemble at 9:50 am sharp, so that we could begin at 10 am sharp. We never used the laptops (I never brought one, so yay for me) and we started at 10.30 am because they couldn't get the projector to work (our IST = Institute Standard Time. InsST = IndST + x, where x can vary from half an hour to forever)

There were two speakers present at the workshop: Krish Ashok and Kiruba Shankar. Krish spoke first,... and last,... and in between too. Which means that he spoke first and then interjected occasionally while Kiruba made his speech, before joining him onstage so that they could conclude together.

They were both very captivating speakers, had a lot of charisma and absolutely no inhibitions. To illustrate:

Kiruba: (Walks up to stage after Krish is done) How many of you are from the insti?
Audience: (Lots of hands in the air)
Kiruba: F**k!

See what I mean?

Now I'm going to summarize whatever they said. I bulleted everything, 'cause that's how I usually write.

And here are Krish's slides. You can verify that they follow my notes and not the other way around:

Blogging Workshop Saarang

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: iitm workshop)

• A blog is usually a personal diary, a reflection of who you are. It can also be technical, or career-related.

• Why a blog? Making a loud statement generates a reaction. You’d like to know what other people think.

• What Krish writes about: “Nothing in particular, everything in general and mostly about nonsense”

• Don’t worry too much about saying something meaningful. No matter what you write, people will always find meaning it or interpret it in a whole new way. It’s like modern art.

• Krish has no niche audience. Quite a few of them are Madrasis/Tam, but that’s about all that can be said.

• How do you increase traffic?
o Have something to say (This is actually optional)
o Initiate mutual back-scratching processes with other bloggers

• When you have an opinion, the trolls WILL come. They are a part of the scheme of things.

• Trolls refresh your blog repeatedly to see if someone disagreed with their designed-to-provoke statements

• Your blog’s audience will influence you. Deal with it.

• You will become addicted to stats. Web traffic will haunt you.

• Don’t write any sort of bulls**t on your blog. Your audience is always smart enough to notice it.

• Don’t take your blog seriously, but be passionate about it (Passionate Non-Seriousness is a unregistered trademark of Krish Ashok’s. Feel free to use it wherever you please)

• Be visual, aural (he Rick-Rolled us here), artistic, mathematic. Be Web 2.0.

(Enter Kiruba, exit Krish to a front-row seat. Krish returns from time to time, so just treat the rest of the stuff as a mix of their ‘advice’)

• Blogs can have an enormous impact
o Kiruba narrates a story of how a blog denouncing Club Mahindra cost it crores in revenue
o Narrates another story of how corporate arm-twisting cost a man his job, after he blogged about IIPM, cribbing that its degrees were not recognized in India.

• It increases visibility and pseudo-importance. In insti terms, it is a potential equivalent to a Secretarial position; It increases employability. Krish believes that the day your Google footprint supplants your resume in importance is soon coming.

• Features of a good blog:
o Does the reader feel it was worth it?
Even if you’re expressing your opinion on something, or narrating something mundane, the reader should be able to identify with what you have to say.
o You can leave it open for the final say or be strongly opinionated. You will generate reactions anyway.
o Maintain a regular writing pattern. Update regularly. Ideally, daily.
o Respect your readers. They’ve taken the time to come to your blog. Not updating it when you should means that you’re turning them away.
o Don’t spend too much time thinking about what you want to say, just say it!
o If you’re waiting for something to happen, or generally jobless, get out a pen and paper and make quick notes. They’re very useful when you’re stuck for ideas.
o Pictures are important. Take a lot of pictures, use a lot of pictures.
o A great blog is a good combination of video, audio, pictures and text.

• If you’re aiming for a niche segment, you can try collaborating with/contacting experts in that field.

• Traffic should not become an end in itself. You can always generate vague traffic from people who will merely glance at your blog.

• Never say that you don’t have the time to blog. We all waste loads of time. If you don’t have enough time, just look for it.

• Get your own domain name
o It shows that you’re serious about your blog
o You can have an email id that says me@mywebsite.com and subtly promote your blog

• If you’re really stuck for visitors, you could always blackmail your friends and family :)

• Group blogs are a good idea too. They can serve as stepping stones to the creation of your own blog.

• Give Twitter a shot. It may just be the ‘next big thing’.

• Online success stories:
o Dr. A. K. Venkat is another career blogger. He offered his patients lower service charges in exchange for videotaping everything he did, and blogging about it. All his videos are up on Youtube.
o Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails went with the flow and gave away albums for free, using BitTorrent and Direct Downloads, while simultaneously selling ‘higher quality’/’more exclusive material’. Guess what? They made loadsa cash.

• There are 'unethical' ways to get traffic by using someone else's content (Does this post count? :) ). It's up to you to use/refuse them. If you’re worried about copyright issues, you can try Copyscape.

• Legally speaking, everything on your blog belongs to….. you. And that includes the comments.

• Use Audacity. It’s a sound editor. A mike and a webcam/camcorder are all you need to make all the media you want.

• Good Blogs: Indexed, Maami’s Blog, Baby Vaijayanti and Puppy Manohar, Bikerdude’s Blog

• Making money from blogging:
o Be an expert on something
o Ads don’t make you much money
o Link farming, Link Jacking don’t really work. Google will get wise to them someday.
o Never blog with money as your motivation. It will not work out.

• Page design is not really a big deal, unless your work itself is in design. Content always rules. Design only plays a role at a much higher level. That does not mean you should shirk on designing, even if it’s just with inbuilt themes.

• Be safe: Divorce your work from your blog. Your employer CAN come after you.

• Tools to use to type in other languages:
o Quillpad
o Apparently, there’s a Google chat bot that can translate for you. Haven’t confirmed it myself, though.

And that sums it up (pretty well, IMO). I really did learn a lot at this workshop, and I’m looking forward to putting a lot of what I learnt into practice real soon.

My impressions of the speakers:

Krish Ashok:

Humour is what drives him. He exploits humour everywhere. In his slides, when he’s talking, in his body language,… He struck me as being pretty sharp, i.e. street-smart, cultured and intelligent. Overall, I did like him.

(Krish, if you’re reading this, I don’t like your hairstyle. And that french beard is so cliché :P)

Kiruba Shankar:

Hmm. Certainly an ‘odd’ chap, where odd is the set of people I’m not used to meeting/dealing with. He came across as a successful entrepreneur, who’s managed to turn blogging to his advantage. I really don’t fancy his blog much, though. His articles are pretty everyday, and his English could use a bit of work. Still a nice chap. Like I said, he’s ‘odd’ :).

(Kiruba, no offence whatsoever. No, really.)