my online journey......

Do we live a dual life today?? One real and one virtual? Most of us will have real and online identities.. blogging is an important part of our lives. What does best represent me online?? My email id?? My orkut or my space account? A website? My blog?

ten years back, internet was not a necessity. Today.. one who does not have an online presence is considered unsmart. Today people use the service to voice their thoughts, to solve their problems, and to create a network of frens and acquaintances.

If i talk about my online journey, i have been using one or more of these services since i was in my teens. More than ten years down the line i have become adept at using them and i think if today i am asked to delete my online presence, i would be very uncomfortable. Back then internet at my place used to cost me 100 bucks per hour. At first i did not even know what an address bar is.. and i was so proud i had my own email id—my own virtual address!! i remember an uncle at the cyber cafe used to open the websites for me.. Still i had dreams of hoisting a website of my own.. (ofcourse! On a free domain!) yahoo geocities was hep and happening. And i even created a few pages. Rediff iland was launched some time later and i was eager again to create my “online identity”.. Its a different issue that i have not visited those pages since a long time. But they are still a part of the net culture and very much available. And i used to marvel at my “journalist skills” ‘cos i actually used to get visitors and comments... And then came gmail... i found it a novel concept and wanted to be a part of the google network cos it had an invite feature.. and heck.. there were so few gmail users then.. ! !

i moved to more creative blog services like wordpress Oh.. not to mention the charm of having screen names like frozen.dessert, sundae and rythm_here!! I still use some of these “hep” screen names...!! variants of blogs today are “microblogs” and “tumblrs”. In micro blogging ppl blog with contents in less than 150 words ( 140 words is teh limit for twitter) and a tumblr has very short posts.. wen i created my tumble logging page i started with alot of my fav quotes. And people round the world “blippr” where they are able to post “micro reviews” for movies and services they have used. Not to mention the social book marking sites where u can organize ur fav bookmarks rather than using the old and monotonous “mark as fav” option of a browser....

of course u dnt update all these services regularly... and hw do u inform ur frens if u have updated a particular blog or ur home page? websites like soup.io and storytlr take care of these.. soup is a combo of tumblelog+lifestream and storytlr tells ur update history in form of a story... lifestream is a collection of ur fav pictures, videos, online status etc etc.. online status has become a fashion statement..

for that matter, i enjoyed using various explorers like IE, netscape, mozilla, opera, safari etc etc over the ten year span on my virtual life...

wen i needed data for statistical calculations, i referred to stock exchange websites, i subscribed to the likes of BNET and techedge for research papers and informative stuff.. my online journey has been with me like a teacher taking me to various realms.. its even helped me with some of the "not so interesting class assignments" with the "cut/copy-paste" functionality.. ofcourse later i had to correct this habit 'cos of the "plagiarism" checks..

our elders complain we commit so many grammatical mistakes wid our English and our vocab is nt that strong.. it can be attributed to our frequent and more general use of the slang language.. who cares to type “which” or “someone” if u can simply do away wid “wch” or “sm1”??? not me....huh!!