he half-a-kilometer trek uphill in the hot afternoon sun from Gate 5 to Gate 3 of the Microsoft Campus on the road which has tons of construction trucks plying (there is no side walk on the road) and after negotiating all the security formalities to enter the campus we finally arrived at the hall.There were only about 10 of us even though 75 or so registered on the website but in the next 30 min or so the hall was packed with more than a 100 blogger/wannabe bloggers. Having never been to a blogging meet and it was the same for many of those that came the introverted nature of Indians came out and everyone stuck to their own groups.
The meet started with introductions from Balaji who organized the meet and Renie from Indiblogger about Indiblogger and then they had the "1 min of fame" ice-breaking session where each one had to introduce themselves and their blog and we quickly realized that there was a good mix from students to business men from the young to the middle aged, bloggers with varied interests from mosquitoes to psychology to recruiters to people who blog about everything and anything. It was a wonderfully funny and interesting session.
Microsoft then ensured that all our hunger pangs were satisfied before they started with their session on Windows Live Writer. The discussion very quickly turned technical and the Indiblogger team had to step in to moderate it to save all the non-technical bloggers which was quite a sizable number.
Once the session was over we bid adieu exchanging business cards and URLs and then we had to go through the ordeal of exiting the campus - signing out in 2 places, trek in the dark from gate 3 back to gate 5 and then the long drive home but at least this time I had 4 fellow bloggers to keep me company and we just continued the discussion in the car.
On the whole it was nice to meet many of the people who commented on my blog and make new friendships and relationships. Hoping that there will be more meets like this in the future to build the blogging community in India that is sure to explode onto the world stage. Thank you Indiblogger, Balaji and all the folks from Microsoft for making this meet happen.
7 comments:
nice & great blog thanx for subscribing at my blog how we can talk each other
Hi Sudeep, could you email me your number? Thanks!
Can you send me your email id at sudeep.dsouza (at) gmail.com and we can keep in touch. I tried getting it from the indiblogger network but didn't succeed.
great job sudeep!!! was nice meeting you there..
sanjay
http://www.sanz4u.blogspot.com
Really cool. Maybe I should sign up for one of these soon. I'm in New York, is there any directory you know of that has information about blogging meets?
@Sanjay : Nice meeting you too. Hope we have more meets like this.
@parth : I read a lot about such meets in the US. I come across some of them on joelonsoftware.com and other blogs. At the meet one of the discussions was around whether there were other meets like this in India and no one knew of any such meets.
@parth - perhaps you can organize a meet at New York for Indian bloggers. Our directory would be a good place to start. :-)
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