Sanity Insanity and Moi

The day before the session, Christine calls me up and asks me, “So how do you intend to start the session?”. Then it hits me that, all this time i was preparing for each of the workshop, but didn’t even think of how to start of the whole discussion/workshop. Oops now i need to plan. gulp!

Ok, i felt i was going to crash and burn during the session - 1. I had no idea how i’m going to start off 2. The slides looked very very boring. The slides were a disaster, i was planning a workshop and they wanted slides if the whole thing was to be approved by the management. As a last minute step, turned to Calvin and Hobbes for help. Boy! they helped. Now my slides looked wacky and who ever saw it smiled. Let it be. So i spent the rest of yesterday’s evening taking screen shots of Twitter, Kwippy, Muziboo, Tempostand, Mutiny.in, All things Pakistan and individual blogs of 2s, Amit Agarwal, Adeeth’s and Mine. I would have loved to show all the blogs that i read, but the company firewall just blocked’em off.

On the D-Day, I was 30 min well before time and met up with Christine. The first of the participants turned up and didn’t even hope to have even 10 people. With all the work and things around, chances are that something like blogging could take a back seat for people. I was mistaken. There was close to 25 participants.

So here we go, as an intro got all the people who were there and had a blog to have their blog-ids written on the board. Only 8!!! Great!!! So more people wanted to get into blogging and as i learned they were confused at some point or the other with many things.

As we started off, i made the fact clear that it will be a discussion/workshop as opposed to a session. Pushed for some user interaction and it just took off from there, jokes, experiences and facts. A fun filled session where the beginners are now serious on starting a blog. To the question, Should Al Qaida blog? YES was the reply, as they all believed no one should be stopped from blogging.

Interestingly, every one converged on the point that, blogs provide a fact / news in its raw format rather than the media, which they though to be fabricated. We moved on to show the newbies how simple it was to set up a blog. Interestingly most of the people who blogged used Blogspot and haven’t even heard of LiveJournal or TypePad.

The discussions drifted from some serious discussions on What to be done on profanity?, What formed the basis of Moderating a Comment?, The Do’s and Dont’s of Blogging..etc to some fun stuffs that i shared with them. Interestingly people didnt know what RSS feeds are. So got someone to explain the whole RSS funda to them.

What is MicroBlogging and why do we do it?, was a tough one to make them understand. Finally i feel that when i showed them Twitter and the indian counterpart Kwippy. They then got the whole idea of micro-blogging.

Finally i had to tell them about Google Analytics and showed my own Analytics graph as an example of the worst thing that you can do - being lazy. The downward graph showed it all.
I was quite overwhelmed by the participation i had and people said it was wonderful. Felt good.

The presentation that i made can be found here - Blogging Workshop (PPT)

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