8 years of blogging

When I started blogging 8 years ago, I had a simple 2 point agenda

1. Improving my writing skills esp. in English (which is not my mother tongue)
2. Better articulation of thoughts and refining them through sharing

During April 2005, Blogs were nothing more than personal diaries. Penning down the thoughts was important and assuming a pseudo-pen name allowed us to share at a deeper intimate levels. Online was a perfect medium, as it allowed people who would probably never meet to connect and exchange ideas.

No wonder, I had always refrained mentioning any names of people I am writing about, shared my picture/location or shared information about my work-place etc. I also refrained from using any meta-tags or SEO needed to make the post prominent. The blogs were followed through RSS readers/weekly website visits by fellow strangers (again whose name and identity I did not knew)

However today the very definition of blog has changed dramatically today. Google Reader was shut-down a couple of months ago and today’s blog is rarely about following the reader, but mostly about searching for a topic.

It’s all about SEO, Digital Marketing, tag-words. Most popular blog sites have more pictures/multimedia and less text. Blogs are used to generate traffic and create a buzz.