epilogue

I started blogging way back in 2003 with Blogger. Back then, there were only a few thousand blogs. After writing a couple of posts on the Taj Mahal at Agra, I moved on to blurty, mainly because it’s policies allowed mature content. After two years of blogging on blurty, I switched to MoveableType. Soon enough, MovableType’s licensing policies started to get restrictive and my motivations to blog started to suffer. In a few months and a couple of false starts later, my blogging completely stopped.

A lot has happened and changed (mostly for the better) since then. In the early days, journalists shunned not only the medium, but also the format. Even technology companies looked at blogs as the hype du jour. Some old nuts hate the phenomenon even today. But simple features like categories, trackbacks, comments, ratings, tags and syndication ensured that blogs were not only written and cross-referenced but also increasingly read.

Opinions and conversations online always had an aura of honesty about them. These conversations were starkly set apart from whatever “they” would want you to believe using traditional media. And, these opinions were available to anyone at anytime. Thanks to search, honest conversations were just a click away. Afraid to miss the bus; journalists, publishing houses, television channels and even companies joined the bandwagon in hordes.

As of 2007, the World Wide Web had more than 15.5 million blogs. Most of them are maintained by the same institutions that were once against it. Quite naturally, the honest opinions that I was once accustomed to became hard to find in all the Marketing and PR noise.

Recently, while I was visiting Ashwin Dongre (a dear friend from college times); he introduced me not as a Programmer, Technologist, Manager or a Consultant – but as a writer to his wife. That single act of honesty set me thinking. I decided to start writing again. This first post is dedicated to him.

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