About Blogs and Bloggers

by Salil Konkar

Monday 7th Jan '08, the Siolim team meets for an update. Besides catching up on the progress made on the project, the more important part of the meeting is to understand how blogs are created and how to post to the blog, since we'd already decided to use this method to document and share our thoughts and observations while working onthe project. Using a projector and a laptop connected to the internet, we have a look at the Siolim Diaries blog (this one) that I'd created a couple of weeks ago. I explain to the team how to post text and images to the blog and we spend the next thirty minutes or so penning our thoughts in our diaries, the idea being that we should be able to post one of these texts to the blog right away so that the entire blogging process is clear to everyone in the team. While the others write away, I spend the time taking some pictures that we can include in the text.

We choose Lorraine's introduction of herself as the piece to upload, and after I crop one of the photos that I'd just taken to get an image of her, Lorraine and Stacy post the text to the blog (the photo doesn't go through because of some connection problems - I upload it from home later).

We then discuss the future course of action for the project, and agree to chase a few leads that we already have and to try and create some new ones to document stories from the village. During our previous trip on 31st Dec, we had met a family in the village, one of whose members was an elderly woman about to turn hundred! Would she share her stories about the village with us? We decided to meet her again to find out on our next trip, which we scheduled for Wednesday 9th Jan to coincide with the day of the weekly market in Siolim.