One sleepy Sunday afternoon in late November (23rd to be more precise) gathered all post dot com breed of citizen journalists (lately to be labelled as Bloggers) to discuss what is so special about what they do.
Audience at the Lahore Bloggers Meet-up
Google Pakistan and
CIO Magazine hosted a meet-up of
Lahori Bloggers and wanna-bees to discuss everything related to the phenomenon of ‘Blogging’ in
Pakistan.
LUMS proved to be an excellent venue (Internet connection apart) for the event providing all of us with the space and opportunity to interact, network and personally meet people that we usually know only through their blogs. Suprisingly, more than a hundred people turned up without any formal invitation still the response and the attendence was impressive.
Badar Khushnood, Country Consultant, Google Pakistan
The three-hour session started at 3:00 pm with Badar Khushnood, Country Consultant for Google in Pakistan as well as the main host of the afternoon, talked about Blog basics and provided a beginner’s guide to effective and profitable ways to share your mind through Blogosphere.
Saad Hamid (Sizlopedia) sharing his success story
It was followed by Saad Hamid (Sizlopedia) and Maryam Nasim (Pinkwool) taking the stage sharing their personal success stories in this field. Maryam, although does not calls herself a blogger, provided an excellent insight into the wonders networking through Internet can bring in terms of work-from-home kind of profitable business models. A dedicated housewife, she designs electronic greeting cards and free printable graphics to sell through her website while earning very lucrative returns in the process. The person that we really missed was Haris Nadeem (Sizzledcore), a very young and dedicated tech. blogger who actually couldn’t attend because of his exams.
The Professionals
Although the main theme of the event was networking, discussion easily moved towards more advanced topics of original content creation, revenue generation models, cash collection channels (many bloggers cursed
Paypal’s absence in
Pakistan), search engine optimization techniques,
Adsense mechanics, and Internet security to mention a few.
Just before the end of the session, some of the main professional bloggers stepped on-stage to introduce themselves, share their insights and answer all kind of questions from the audience. In addition to
Saad and
Maryam, these included
Touseef Ikram (
Stop.pk), Ahmed Bilal (
Soccer Lens),
Abdullah Saad (
WCCF Tech),
Mr. Shirazi (
Light Within),
Aamir Attaa (
Propakistani),
Mohammad Khan (
Life etc.),
Adeel Ahmed (freelancer), and
Tajdar Chaudhry (PR Specialist).
Khurram Amin did an excellent job of giving
Google giveaways to all the right people in addition to successfully taking care of the audience as host throughout the event. All in short, the credit for bringing us together goes to the organizers and we really hope such events keep up coming more often.
