Origin of a blog

"Cool!I should try this..." - my first reaction to blogging

"Nay, not now - too busy..."

"Well, let me see, maybe some other time..." - some of my excuses over the past three years for not trying it out

"Ummm, maybe I should now..." - a few days ago

And the cause for this sudden transformation?

An attack of lexical diarrhoea coupled with a masochistic tendency to invite Repetitive Strain Injury (as if I don't do enough keyboard tapping for that)?
Nothing so serious.

Falling in love?
Please! Then I should be writing poetry and it will be the end of the world before I do that (I mean the 'writing poetry' part ;-)

Then what?

Nothing outlandish or romantic involved here. Actually it was my friend Mithun (I suppose he is presently in Nagpur). Now, don't run away with the idea that he coaxed me to get started. I recently found him on Orkut, or rather he found me, considering that his online avatar is called Motte Boss, which I naturally assumed to be one of those friendly spammers who graciously send me unsolicited mails with attachments containing viruses potent enough to make my computer give up its ghost many times over. He had included a link to his blog on Blogger in his profile. I checked out his blog where he had elaborated at length the origins of his virtual identity which involved metaphorical comparisons of the scores on his marks sheet to 'motte' which is Kannada (a South Indian language) for egg. (Get more of these from the horse's mouth at http://whatisdamottekoncept.blogspot.com ).

After doing so, being the inveterate surfer that I am, I checked out Blogger's main page which talked about creating your own blog in 3 easy steps and so on. Ordinarily I would have appreciated the aesthetic interface of the site and its usefulness to its users and moved on. But the final year spirit caught up with me and before I knew it I had become one of the multitudes who either have or maintain a blog. The wonders of technology! (or should I say the magic of final year? Quite a few of my friends seem to be bewitched, but that's a different matter altogether)

Did you know?

• The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997.
• The shorter version, "blog", was coined by Peter Merholz in 1999.
• As of March 2003, the Oxford English Dictionary included the terms weblog, weblogging and weblogger in their dictionary.
• There are over 7.8 million blogs in existence today with more being added every 5 seconds or so.
  

Disclaimer
All the content here is correct and true to the best of my knowledge (unless this is my alter ego, in which case I stand absolved of any moral responsibility for the content here).

P.S. And no, the disclaimer isn't an April 1st wisecrack, if you can call it that.