1 year of Blogging, What I learnt

Wow! This was an amazing year for me. What started as a curiosity has just turned into passion for me. Before I started this blog, I used to read lot of other popular blogs and would always wonder; maybe I should write my version/analysis of the story. So it did take a little while for me to jump into the world of blogging. I have been having so many different thoughts/ideas and was looking for an avenue to echo these things and here iam talking to you folks. I have written around 115 articles so far, that is around 10 articles a month. (I will share some of my best articles for folks that have missed it)

During the course of my blogging came some big motivation. This blog was selected as Top 25 blogs of 2007, (thanks to VoIP News) within a short span of time. This was like a short in the arm. After this there was no turning back. This year, it was rated as one of the Top 100 telecom blogs by VoIP Now (Thanks VoIP Now). More than the recognition of the blog, I was thrilled by the fact that it was rated alongside some of the great bloggers i admire like Gigaom, Jeff pulver , Alec Saunders, Luca, Andy, Jon Arnold Jon Arnold etc. Worthy of mention is the Facebook voip statistics article that created quite a stir in the blogosphere and was quoted by many blogs and big news websites.

So here are something’s I learnt over the year of blogging:
• Blogging is fun when u enjoy it. It’s not fun when your blog drives you rather than u driving it. Ike has some good insight about this. Ike, iam following your words “So, for my fellow bloggers: don't let the blog run your life, and show the blog that you are the boss. Maybe your blog will even improve”
• It’s hard to keep up with writing articles everyday. From what I have observed, the traffic increases when i blog everyday. The question really is, do u blog to drive more traffic or you blog to share some valuable stuff to your blog readers. I am inclined more towards writing quality stuff rather than being a meme.
• Though I have been recognized as a one of the Top VoIP blogger, In the course of time I have realized that there is not much innovation happening in this space. ( Pardon me Phweet , wonderful mashup and sorry folks for not writing about this phenomenon)
• You need to be very clear on why you are blogging-- is it for extra money or just the passion. (I tend to write blog because of passion; don’t get me wrong for the Forbes and Google small adsense I have enabled. This is to experiment about the adsense and how it works. Will write more about the research later. Maybe I will enable hordes of advertisement when I needed money :-) )
• When I started blogging, I did not have a niche arena in mind, which is the basic rule of blogging. Nevertheless, I choose to write more of telecom related stuff, which could be because of my experience in the telecom and startup world. So my niche by default became telecom.
• It’s tough to be jack of all blog. Very few blogs have mastered and succeeded in doing so.

What you can expect in Future:
I have been fascinated by some of the emerging technologies and have decided to focus more on these areas as well. Doesn’t mean that I will stop writing about Voice 2.0; These new stuff shall be in addition to what I have been writing so far.
Some of the technologies I will talk about in future are:
• Lifestreaming
• Location 2.0
• Mashups
• Mobile applications

Iam very grateful to all my readers of my blog. Hope you are enjoying and learning something new and iam definitely learning a lot from you guys. Would love to hear from you guys, please leave a comment or send me a feedback to geekupate at gmail.com

Also, would like to apologies to all the PR agencies and startups that send me PR news that I don’t cover in my blog. The fact of the matter is that iam not a full time blogger and I get very little time for this blog, mostly late nights (Have to thank my wife and the little one for that :-) )