Indiblogger meet at Hyderabad - What a fun!

Hyderabad Indibloggers Meet: 11^th April 2010

It was great fun to participate in Hyderabad based bloggers meet conducted by Indiblogger at Hotel Select Manohar today. The event was sponsored by the famous Cell Phone Selling Chain, Univercell.  The Indiblogger team members are young, vivacious, humorous, witty but business minded. They introduced themselves and asked every one of the bloggers present there (over 120) to introduce themselves. Most of us could do a very decent job in the allotted time of thirty seconds each.

From the hour long introductions, I could gather that popular topics for blogging are politics, sports (chiefly cricket), finance, investment & stock market, poetry, music, celebrities, gossip. Then come technical blogs, mostly IT oriented; this is easy to understand as IT employees have regular access to the net right from their work bench. Quite a few blogs were written to promote certain specific business interests: Jobs, fashions, real estate, stock market, recruitment are examples.  A few unique topic based blogs were: Chemical Engineering (Vineet), Retirees & Pensioners (read: senior citizens) (my humble self), Biotechnology (Raj), CGHS (Rajeev), Railways (Vijilesh), pollution. There was one photo blogger as well. A video blogger from Germany participated in absentia by presenting his rib tickling video clip, a parody on Hitler. Though many IT guys professed that they blog on IT related topics, only one (Varun) said that he is interested in algorithms per se. There was a blogger who had collected the Google Home Page doodles right from the beginning. One HR person (Menon ?) confessed that he wears many masks during working hours and blogging helps him unmask himself after office hours. Telugu and Hindi bloggers too have a huge audience.

Later, each blogger was given a large piece of chart paper to hang on to his back so that others could write about him. This was great fun and deeply engaging.  This facilitated interaction and F2F meeting. Very many recognized me as the oldest blogger in the group! When we were asked to raise our hands if there were any blogging for social causes, some half a dozen hands went up. Ads4good, a start up company linking bloggers and advertisers, which activity in turn results in donations to NGOs working in social sector, gave a brief presentation and fielded questions.

There was brain raking quiz program – all questions relating to blogosphere. I got zero out of ten. The only question I could answer was about Indiblogger team but before I could raise my hand some one else was smarter and quicker. The audience had so many intelligent and uptodate, well read intellectuals, it must been highly satisfying to the quiz master.  

High tea consisted of delicious Dahi wada, mini burgers and hot Gulab Jamoons followed by coffee / tea. During this tea time, the Indiblogger team provided a help desk and I was a beneficiary. Special thanks to Aliabbas for clearing my doubt. As I had another meeting to attend (AGM of Senior Citizens Forum), I skipped the last session. I left the venue with sweet memories, neatly packed in the form of a beautiful Black T shirt.  It IS a memorable event.

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