Indiblogger

Flipkart gift vouchers poured like the soothing showers in Delhi’s July. That was the heyday of Indiblogger. Apart from the plentiful gift vouchers were the blogger’s meets organised in many cities and all the hectic activity at the community’s digital site itself. My blog won hundreds of readers.  Indiblogger built my reputation as a blogger. I earned many friends.

Gone are those days. Indiblogger has threatened to wrap up because “the industry’s requirements have changed.” Did Indiblogger fall into a trap of its own making?

It is an arduous task to maintain standards when anything is popularised. Indiblogger popularised blogging like no other blogger community did. It brought thousands of bloggers together without any discrimination whatever.  Into that quaint marketplace of immense commercial potential jumped quite a lot of traders for obvious reasons. Gift vouchers as well as occasional bumper prizes rained like manna from a featureless heaven.  

Manna cannot continue to fall from any heaven incessantly. Commercial heavens are the least benign anyway. The gods who supplied the manna realised sooner than later that they were on quite a wrong turf. Commerce and writing seldom go hand in hand.

Indiblogger tried to evolve into video blogging. I cannot judge the outcome of that since I never ventured into that field. Nor did I take interest in those bloggers who did. My passion has been writing and I chose to stick to it. I have been lucky to retain the same number of readers for years now. I admit humbly that the number has not increased much from the daily average of 200 plus views of my blog in the last many years. But in a world where the habit of reading seems to be on a slippery slope, I consider myself blessed to be able at least to retain the numbers.

 

Happy Numbers: Page views of my blog posts

Popularity and personal integrity are at loggerheads with each other in today’s social media including blogging. I choose integrity. The political situation in India has undergone such a sea change that personal integrity is perceived more often than not as prejudice or even antinational stance. Many bloggers chose to abandon blogging. Some others avoided political themes. Quite many embraced expediency.

It is not quite feasible to run a commercially viable blogger community in such an environment. Indiblogger may not agree with my assessment. Many bloggers won’t too, I know. I’m used to witnessing peripeteia and anagnorisis.

I started blogging at the turn of the millennium. The platforms changed a few times until I stuck to the present one, namely blogger, a couple of years after Indiblogger took its toddler steps in the virtual world. I have travelled with Indiblogger quite a long way now. Merrily. If Indiblogger does wrap up, I will be a big loser. I hope that the community will find a new way ahead instead of wrapping up. I’m grateful anyway for whatever Indiblogger has been for me so far.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 278: #Indibloggerforever