What YOU missed at the BigRock Indiblogger WordUp meet

I cannot believe it has already been 5 years since my first ever Indiblogger meet. I can distinctively remember it was 15^th August 2009. This makes me feel old now. Back then blogger meets were attended primarily focused around
1. Free food
2. Freebies
3. As an excuse to nagging parents forcing you to attend your uncle's nephew's neighbour's son's mundan ceremony. Yours truly was no different and subsequently added to the list was Free Wi-fi. (I sense techies nodding their heads in agreement.)

So this was my probably my 5th blogger meet since I started blogging and I've been on and off. The Vodafone McLaren Mercedes Lewis Hamilton meet is the last I attended and so was looking forward to this meet. Location: The famous resto-pub The Blue Frog at Lower Parel and time of meet : 9 am. 9 am? Who goes to a fun blogger meet at 9 am?! However I went and the early getting up bit was made up with a rocking concert by the IndiBlogger band. Who would've thought a rock concert at 10ish in the morning! Awesomesauce.

Now the real fact this meet was more awesome – was I was gonna meet bloggers like me. The only difference was they had made a cool living by blogging. Back in 2008, when literally everyone had started blogging -yours truly included- one never imagined it to be a full time profession. Why, even the mere thought was incredulous. And then the boom of social media happened and suddenly Content was King. The meet started with IndiBlogger's Anoop as the emcee followed by Vinit Goenka delivering the keynote peppered with diplomacy.

Speaking next was Amit Agarwal from labnol.org, who was blogging since 2004, like the Jurassic era of blogs advocated using wordpress.org over blogger.com. His thoughts made a lot of sense as wordpress was more search engine friendly and had more analytics features. He also spoke about never giving away content for the lure of freebies.

Next up was the literal YouthKiAwaaz Anshul Tewari who relentless struggle and belief in his socially aware idea catapulted during the Arab spring of 2011. Cannot believe he does not have a single ad placed on his website.

Varun Krishnan, the founder of FoneArena.com gave an insight on monetization on blogging. He spoke about how important it is keep focus on the content while the money will follow.

Chai with Lakshmi Rebecca can give a KJo a run for his Koffee. Her tete-a-tete along with Sumit Singh of Cleartrip, was refreshing. Lakshmi advised hiring your own help for editing content for video blogging while Sumit gave due importance to maintaining a clean, easy to navigate and responsive template for Pcs, Tablets and mobile devices. Sensible. Harsh Agarwal of shoutmeloud.com highlighted more technical aspects of blogging with primary focus on SEO. Who knew search engines can be picky!
Uber cool Sherezade Shroff described her dislike for writing and love for fashion. She reminisced her experience when a brand approached her to review facewashes and rejected them outright because of her affinity to Medimix soap. Story ninja and Tea sommelier Snighda Manchanda narrated a sweet story of how she discovered her liking for Tasting Teas and weaving wonderful stories. 'Ideas come and go, Stories Stay' So true. Also, I truly liked her 7 basic story idea plots. CS Krishna highlighted their run in with the law for turning up the heat with Mrs Gandhi and Mr Singh video. Their video got a million likes, but the Sec 66A IT Act was breathing down their necks.

Overall the day long meet was supercharged and even better that it ended on time with a bang. Like literally, headbanging.