I have been a blogger for almost 4 years now, and in that journey I have seen several ups and downs, high points and low points and more.

When I first started out with blogging, it was really fun, there were incentives to write, most of them not related to money. However, over a period of time, you start to innovate and do things which not many people like. It is more of a personal decision keeping your readers in mind.

In the same way, I have innovated things with Techie Buzz, turning it from a single-author blog to a news site where 25 authors write. Now, this change was not instant and there were several transition periods in between, some of the changes were not easy to come by, and we as a group have consulted several times on the changes and how it would affect our readers.

But in the end, change is not always accepted and people will eventually adapt to it. It has been almost a year now and I see people accepting the changes and that has shown in the growth of readers and regular traffic. In addition to that, there has also been an increase in content sharing by users.

Now, there are a few subset of people who come up and say that we are a shitty site, however, I tend to disagree on that, agreed that we source news, but we rewrite it and publish it giving our own views. In the last few months, I have come across bloggers and readers from India who have a certain wrong mentality when it comes to blogging or news.

I will lay down the pointers below and give my explanation as to why that thinking is wrong.

People come up to me and say that your posts are always linking to other blogs or new sites: Well, first of all that is not always true, there is so much content on the site which is well researched and brought to the fore front. We do blend our content with news and write our own take on it, and do not just simply copy paste stuff from others.

Secondly, we are not ashamed to tell readers about our sources. We are in-fact proud to do that, even if we use images from an outside site. I have seen several bloggers who do not do that, I mean what is the point of passing off news as your own when you have not spent time researching for it, other than seeing it on another site and slapping it as your own. It is the single biggest problem I have with many bloggers.

And thirdly, what is the point of adding via links so small that it shows you are ashamed to credit your sources. Change your mentality, grow up and learn that the Internet is build on inter-webs and linking, credit your sources and don’t be ashamed if you are writing news which was originally broken by someone else, add value to it and make it your own, rather than passing it off as your own.

Open your eyes and see how news sites in US work, most of the one’s in India are ashamed to credit sources, which is really a down market thing to do.

We do a good job of bringing news to our readers and will continue to do so, our team is capable enough of writing good content, so the thought that people have about us linking to others does not hold value to me.

We post too much content: Another complaint I got from few people was that we post too much content, however, let’s face it we are a news site and will post content as it happens and not wait for it to stale out before posting it.

Again, we put our own views into the posts we write and do not just copy paste snippets from other sites. Thirdly, our reader base has almost tripled since we started writing more content, so that goes on to show that readers like what we do.

We are a Crappy blog: Well, we are not a blog anymore, we are more of a news site. Most Indian users are not used to news sites. Most of the Indian blogs out there are really good, there is no doubt about it, I thoroughly enjoy reading them, but for me doing the same thing was like stagnating growth, I grew up from that mentality, and it looks like it is hard for many of my Indian friends to digest.

The Indian mentality is that tech blogs have to be about how-to, social networking, software etc, the adaptation of news sites as blogs is still a long way to go. I am not saying that it will never happen, but stop calling blogs which make a transition to news crappy.

Since I moved the main theme behind the site, we have seen tremendous growth in both regular readers and traffic. We are one of the few Indian blogs which make it to global tech resources like TechMeme and are also linked by high quality news papers, high quality tech sites and more, including by Huff Post. If we were crappy we would not have achieved global recognitions by these news papers and sites.

Summarizing: I follow some very high quality blogs from India, and they are no doubt very good. I transitioned my site to be something which is recognized and known globally, many of the news we write is breaking news which no one has covered.

I am not saying that I am doing something big, I am doing something I have focus on and have planned out. We are no longer a blog and I am not trying to change people’s mentality towards that, those who read us know about it, which is why they are still there. I am proud to have achieved so much with this blog and will continue to strive hard to make it a Indian news site, which focuses on both Indian content and global content and is recognized as one of the top sites in the world.

Being one of the Indian sites, which is recognized as a trusted news resource across the world will give me more happiness than anything else. We are halfway there, the rest of the journey will continue. However, I still denounce they way people are stuck with a narrow-minded approach towards blogging in India.

This post is not complete, I might add more views to them later.

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