Hey Shouter,
Welcome to the day 2 of our journey to do something back for the blogging community. If you are new here, ShoutMeet is an initiative by ShoutMeLoud to encourage blogging in the country & help upcoming bloggers to get the right direction. You can read our day one journey here.
Day2/15 – started from Udaipur for Ahmedabad at 6.45 AM, got our Car tank full.
Before we reach Ahmedabad, we met Naga Rajan, who is a friend & a co-speaker at WordCamp Baroda in 2014. He gave a tour of his initiative to uplift the rural area of Himmatnagar. He gave a tour of his state of art Data Centre & I had a lovely time chatting on his great ideas with him. I was surprised with all the smart things he is doing to fight the corruption & utilizing the tech to ensure rural development happens without fail. I hope his initiative is replicated by other cities & it would make a lot of difference for the country.
Later on, we all moved to Ahmedabad chapter venue that was taken care by Jaydip Parikh. We reached just on time & got a warm welcome by energised bloggers of Ahmedabad.
For 2 hours, we all keep talking about blogging where many bloggers shared their journey & some of the tips like Guest blogging, content editing & publishing strategy.
All the ideas were coming from the experience & you can imagine the enthusiasm of bloggers by countless questions they asked in the whole session.
Like Jaipur chapter, we ended up the Ahmedabad chapter with a group photo.
Later on, few of us went to have lunch together which was again interesting, as never had an unlimited buffet at a Pizza outlet. (The Pizza Hub Prahladnagar.)
At 4.30 P.M, we started for Vadodara chapter via NE1. Jimit Bagadiya also accompanied us in our car for this chapter.
I always get excited to drive on this expressway (NE1), as this highway is pure bliss. Imagine 80Km of straight road where you can cruise at any speed. Anyhow, I didn’t go more than 140Km/hr as was very tired & feeling little lethargic due to lack of sleep. Finally, Jimit took over the driver seat & we reached the Vadodara destination at 6.30 P.M.
Thanks to Rahul Banker who organised this chapter into his office, & Pranay Patel took care of all the arrangements. Few bloggers were already waiting & we started as soon as we stepped in.
The start was little slow probably I was little tired but within half hour we picked the pace & started discussing various stuff related to Blogging, SEO. The most interesting part of this chapter was a long discussion on community building & many of them shared how they are doing it using Slack & few other tools to keep the community communication on.
One of them also suggested to develop a smartphone app for keeping the community close & bloggers can stay in touch with other bloggers in their city. Over the discussion, I realised that there are many missing pieces which is hampering the growth of individual bloggers in many cities. Mostly the lack of proper support & their ambition of making quick money. A lot went on to discussing how to fix it & I believe this discussion will carry on as we move to next chapter (i.e. Pune).
Finally after 3 hours of non-stop interaction, we all bid goodbye & we moved to enjoy the famous Gujarati thali. If you ever visit Gujarat, ensure that you have a Gujarat thali as your dinner, & it would be a meal of lifetime. Thanks to Pranay for hosting the dinner for us, and ShoutMeet team went to get much-needed rest.
Seems like rest was not in mind, as I wanted to upload today’s moment with everybody & finish today’s write-up. This is 1.07 A.M. & signing off for now! Will see you in the next post after Pune chapter.
Harsh