I went to a gathering of blogging and Facebook friends in Bukit Jelutong last week. I was invited to the gathering, hosted by a well-known ceramics designer, by a friend who is back from London for some work and some down time in Malaysia.
The London friend was in fact the guest of honour at the gathering. I’ve met one or two of the bloggers invited to the gathering while the others were relatively new to me; I know them by name, having read their blogs and also their comments on the London friend’s FB page.
The gathering was held at the ceramics designer’s showroom. The driver dropped us (the London friend and I) at the wrong showroom. “Why don’t you give her (the ceramic designer) a call and ask her for directions to the store?” I asked the London friend. “I don’t have her number,” she said. “Then how do you communicate?” I asked. “Through Facebook,” she said.
In fact, she told me she had never met the ceramic designer before this.
Yes, I believe we all started like that; knowing each other by name at first (even then, some bloggers write anonymously, using pseudonyms), reading and writing comments on each other’s posts and over the years, making physical contacts.
“We started interacting with each other on the topic of cats,” the London friend said of the time she and the ceramic designer first hooked up on the blog.
That’s one of the benefits of blogging. In fact, that is the best part about blogging. You can have friends from all over the world, be they Malaysians who have set up home elsewhere or foreigners who have read and liked your blog posts.
The London friend told me she was in Istanbul, Turkey, prior to Kuala Lumpur and had stayed with another blogger friend there. “I met her for the first time during the trip. She had been asking for me to visit and since I was on transit there, I decided to stay with her,” she said.
Blogs started in the late 1990s as the Internet introduced web publishing tools that could be used by non-technical users. Blogging was, back then, a social networking service as visitors to the blogs could leave comments and could even message each other. As at February 2011, Wikipedia said there were over 156 million public blogs in existence.
I started as an anonymous blogger in 2006. Over the years, the number of my blogging friends has risen. I have doctors as blogging friends as they followed posts I wrote on a cancer-stricken friend and later, on a friend who had lapsed into a week-long coma due to a brain infection.
I also count politicians as blogging friends who found my blog a reprieve from their dog-eat-dog world as I blogged on everyday life.
I attended just one bloggers’ gathering sometime back but over the years, I have been in touch with some of them through other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Blogging has many other benefits, too. It can improve one’s writing skills as there will be some kind soul on the worldwide web who would leave comments on your grammar and writing style.
You’ll get free advice from readers when they think you need them. There are some bloggers who have made their sites money-making machines.
But over the years, I noticed that some of my friends have slowed down on their writing while others are no longer blogging.
In fact, some marketing gurus have said that blogging is dead. Well, my London friend did try to rally some dormant bloggers to revive their blogs in May last year. I must say it started off quite well but the enthusiasm wavered along the way. I participated in that blog revival initiative. I had since made private my old blog and started a new one but had since posted only 24 times, with the last one in January this year.
Personally, I have found it tedious to blog. You have to sign in and open alternate windows to post text and photographs unlike on Facebook or Instagram where you can literally post the text and photographs with only a click of the button. Furthermore, you can reach a wider audience through your network of friends on the other social media platforms rather than the blogs. More bloggers, political and non-political in nature, are increasingly looking at Facebook and Instagram to post their opinions and updates.
It has, like the blogs, become our online personal diary, too. One friend in Germany, who used to blog, told me she is now on FB and also Instagram to keep her family back home informed of their wellbeing. “If I do not post anything for more than two days, I’ll get phone calls from Malaysia. My parents want to keep track of us and the grandchildren and similarly, my family members have their own accounts where we can track them,” she said.
In whatever form they may be — blogs, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms — they serve the same purpose. They connect us with each other from wherever we may be. Old relationships are renewed and new relationships are made.
And they give us friendship that could possibly last us a lifetime.
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