Blah Blah from The TeaBreak Team.

Yesterday about 200 bloggers met at the Royal Rodele in Karachi for the Karachi Bloggers Meetup. The event was organized by Google Pakistan and CIO-Pakistan with support from P@SHA, TiE and Bloggers.pk.

I had already missed the Lahore Bloggers Meetup the week before. Somehow I think it’s a conspiracy that all these cool things are happening during my absence from Pakistan :).

Anyhow, I thought I would participate the best way I could - even though I am in Hong Kong - and a number of young people made it so much easier for me to do that. I logged into:

Saad Hamid’s live video stream from the event.
Fariha Akhtar’s live blogging from the venue.
Imran Hussain twittering.

It was the next best thing to being there. I watched and listened as Awab and Sabeen talked about why and how they set up their blogs and answered loads of questions related to ethics, political activism and how to get past the language problem by using audio and podcasts. Someone (I don’t know who) mentioned a Nastaliq font that was available for blog. That will be interesting for a lot of people who have been wanting to write but have let the necessity of having to use English stop them.

Then Badar Khushnood did his thing - spoke about the blogosphere, talked about how the population of bloggers was growing and how people were finding ways to generate revenue through their blogs. He gave examples of a housewife from Lahore who has set up http://www.pinkwool.com and of course Haris Nadeem (18 years old) and Saad Hamid (20 years old) who generate traffic totaling 10,000 and 25,000 unique visitors a day.

Haris and Saad were up next. They talked about how they had started blogging and what it had taken to achieve the level of success that they have. It came down to a few key things - interest/passion, research, good content and consistent blogging. Good going kids! We can all learn a thing or two from you. More about these guys on the CIO site.

I had lost the video stream a little earlier (but not before I spotted Rabia moving people from side of the room to the other and giving away a goody bag or two) and continued following the twittering and the liveblogging so ably done by Imran and Fariha.

There followed a panel discussion and a lot of sharing of information. I think that was possibly the best part of the entire event - the fact that people got together to network, to get to know each other, to share information, celebrate each other’s success and show newere bloggers the way. Way to go Badar, Rabia and Salaina for putting this together. And don’t you dare have another such event when I am out of town! I know I know - I believe my blog and I were mentioned but guys, that is nowhere near good enough.

For the video stream, click here.
For Urdu coverage, click here.
Jamash’s photos

This cup of tea was served by: In the Line of Wire