Blogging & New Media Workshop Report
By Abhishek Kant
The room is full! Get us more chairs… that is how the blogging workshop at India Habitat Centre, Delhi, kicked off. We started out expecting 60 people to attend and ended up with around 200 instead. The interest in blogging is clearly increasing day by day. The workshop was organised by Indian Blog & New Media Society (IBNMS) in collaboration with their Delhi chapter – Delhi Blog & New Media Society.
The session started with Ajay Jain, president of IBNMS talking about society and how it is helping people adapt to blogging. The keynote speaker for the workshop was Narayanan Madhavan from Hindustan Times who shared his views on the whys and hows of blogging. He contrasted the organised march of the mainstream media with 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.
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 yuppies but also to more mature audiences. 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 Madhavan’s on ‘Introduction to Blogging’ by Abhishek Baxi. He laboriously went through the basics of blogging with WordPress 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 and photos – he just about covered everything.
The sessions went longer than expected till around 9:15 PM. In my humble opinion, the question of the day from the audience was – “After the creation of a blog post, how long before it is available on Google?” In some terms it meant that Google despite being no more just a search engine, has become the 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.
More information on the workshop is available here. If you are interested in event updates, you can do so at our Twitter channel.
Note: The full version of this post is available at Abhishek’s blog.
Author: Abhishek Kant is based in Delhi and is a technology enthusiast with professional expertise in marketing, community and relationship management.
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