My affair with blogosphere

I remember getting the first taste of Blogosphere in 2005. Before that I was not such a big enthusiast of the Internet in India because it was pretty slow and expensive back then. I never had enough patience to wait for pages to load on the browser. But after coming to Germany, I became more net savvy. I had to. There was not way out. It was because of many reasons. It was the only cheap way of keeping in contact with friends and family back in India. Everything in this new world was online. Even to book slots on the washing machine at the university hostel was via the local intranet. So, there was virtually no escape from it.

One night while browsing through the internet in my hostel room, I came across my first blog by chance. I found it pretty interesting since the author had literally written snippets from his life, online. Initially I felt that it was quite bold to do such a thing since there might be many of his friends reading them. Through the blogroll and the comments, I explored even more interesting blogs. And ever since, there has been no looking back. I had a few favorites and used to visit them everyday. In those days we did not had fancy tools like google reader to keep track of all the blogs and so I used visit them exclusively. Not only did some of the blogs kept me updated about the latest trends back in India, many of them even fulfilled my appetite of humor. There are some seriously funny people out there in the blogging world.

I used to religiously follow some blogs and the authors also regularly updated them. I even saw some friendships being built by some bloggers and used to enjoy their interactions with each other again through blogs. Sometimes, I even used to envy them. I had mostly been a silent spectator of the blogosphere, hardly ever contributing. I used to refrain from commenting and even when I did once in a while, it used to be mostly anonymous. I think since most of those authors were students at that time or fresh our of college, it gave them more time to blog. After a span of about 6 years, there are only a few of those who still blog regularly but many of them have moved on. Some have families now so they are not able to spare time, some became famous and published books and moved on to twitter, some maybe due to lack of readers lost interest.

Sometimes, I am surprised on myself how close I feel to some bloggers even though I have never met them, nor do they know me. A few months back, my favorite blogger did not post for almost a month which was not normal as per the author's standards. It genuinely worried me in the beginning but later I thought, maybe the person had some better things to do. And it motivated me to finally start writing my own blog. I always thought of starting it but never really put in any efforts. But now that I have started writing, I think it is not easy. It can be very easy to start a blog but it can take a lot of patience and efforts to continue with it. But even though there are many who stopped blogging, there are many who started blogging, like me. And I think that is the best part of this blogosphere, that it is ever so dynamic. After starting this blog, I have started following more people and found some really nice ones. But sometimes I feel guilty and scared that maybe this might dilute my admiration and love for the old ones I still follow. I hope not !!