Yes, the 5th birthday of this blog. Four years completed. What started as an extremely spontaneous reaction to a rediff article[Part 1 & Part 2] by Anita Bora and Nidhi ‘Sunshine’ Rathi, has lasted for four complete years. For the first six months, I was the only reader for this blog. And then it was noticed by a few. After that three years of sheer roller-coaster ride with lots of fun, excitement, learning and sharing.
Unlike previous years, I was determined not to forget Feb 25th and I managed to remember it today. One sunny afternoon, while browsing rediff, I bumped against this article, I, Me,My Blog by Anita. It was a time when I thought writing a short story for Sulekha was the shortest way of becoming a writer. But heck, to be very honest I was never thinking of writing/scribbling anything like this. The article was certainly well written and it introduced me a word, WEBLOG. Thanks to Anita. The ‘Also Read’ section of the article had a link to another column, Instant Journalism which caught my fancy. I went bonkers over that story which said, a guy named Mahesh Shantaram had 60 followers daily. 60 followers daily. Holy Cow !!. Those days 60 unique page hits to a blog meant stupendous success. And Mahesh Shantharam was called a BLOGGER. A Blogger ?. My interest level was peaking.
Without much hesitation, I went over to blogger.com and signed-up. So what should be the author name, I thought. Who cares, I told myself. lazygeek was a nickname I gave myself when I created a rediffmail ID, few days back. A brain wave for that struck me, at the stroke of a midnight session at office when I was racking my brains to come up with a pseudo name for myself. I was neither lazy nor a total geek. So how bout lazygeek, an aspirational pseudo name. So this blog was named scribbles of a lazy geek. I didn’t write a blogpost once I created an ID. I logged out and went ahead to see Mahesh’s blog. Mahesh was the Big B of blogging at that time. As a matter of fact there were only a handful of bloggers at that time. After glancing his blog, I decided that the blog should have stuff that I love to discuss about and those things about my place/movies/people which never found the light on the internet. So I scribbled something as a post. Not one but three posts on the same day. First one at 2:14 pm, second at 2:16 pm and the third at 6:53 pm. I had very little idea about a blog and things needed for being a blogger. And that’s how it all started. Rest of the story is available as four year archives.
As Dave Winer says, “This blog’s readers are collectively smarter than the author”. This ain’t true not only for this blog but for every other blog around. So its the readers who have inspired me to write. Even when I was the only reader it was the reader in me who kept the thing going. Plain six months, no one else to read the bloody blog. I had no clue where to go and whom to ask, on how to pull audience towards a blog. No one blogrolled this blog nor even bothered to drop a comment. However, I didn’t write anything great and that’s one of the reason why no one dropped in. These days, given the wide awareness of blogs, every other blog receives a good readership and enough comments(including spams) to keep the fire going. But just in case, if you have a blog like what was here four years back, you are one your way to strike Hatrick at Indibloggies. Keep Bloggin !!.
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