 Hi everybody good morning almost afternoon. I'm here and I speak to you about blogging today but listening to everyone speak before me I think I'm in the hobbyist kind of part as opposed to the expert blogging and I wanted to tell you a little bit about how I got started blogging. I do it part-time I don't do it professionally but I do it as part of shoring up what I do as a writer so I wanted to talk to you guys just about how it's possible to blog but not dedicate like all your time to blogging because I think we all have busy lives and sometimes it's hard to to do everything at once so I was just going to start with I started blogging a long time ago after I graduated from college I was really bored at work at the Wall Street Journal so I started a personal blog and initially you know I just went on blog spot just made up a name and I thought I was only going to be blogging to my friends and my family members and then it just really got kind of out of hand because so many people started responding to my blog just when you link to other people's blogs they find you and then it just goes from there and that's when I got my first taste of blogging for validation you know you blog to get to start that conversation but you're blogging because you want people to leave comments on your blog and and talk to you and you talk back to them but with a personal blog there's a pitfall to that in that you you start blogging things that maybe people wouldn't be comfortable with you sharing so I found that the more I blogged about personal things the more people came to my site so that was fine if it was just my life but you know I stopped doing that as much when I got married a few years ago because you know I have to respect like my family's wishes in terms of what I share with the world but I mean there's positives also to having a personal blog in that you meet a lot of people who are supportive of you if you're going through a hard time or who are congratulating you if something great happens like when I had my daughter in May so so and also one of the positives of having a blog whether it be personal or professional is that you don't have to be famous you can just be anybody is sitting in this room you can just start blogging and you could get traffic to your site from a variety of ways and I guess we'll talk about that at the workshop but it's a it's a great way to connect with people and you meet wonderful people also so I started the evolution of my blogging started a couple of years ago when I started my professional blog and as you can see like this was my personal one on blogger then I moved up to WordPress which I think was an improvement it's just a easier interface for me to use and a cleaner interface and on this first professional blog I post like the articles I write and it also has my Twitter feed on it which I'll talk about in a minute but this blog comes in handy because you know what in this age when everyone googles you before they even meet you this gives me an opportunity to establish myself my presence speak for myself and if people google me hopefully this is one of the first things that come up instead of you know some random link about something I did in college or or what somebody else wrote about me or something like that so this is a site people can go to if they want to know about me and it's it's information that I control so this comes in handy in that regard so even if you aren't a blogger but in your professional life like you need to go beyond a business card it's a good idea I think to start a blog and from there this has my resume this has my my articles on it I started microblogging which is in the form of Twitter and I run at Doha News which is like a public service that I just started earlier this year just keeping people up to date what's going on in Doha and I just do that as something I want to do I'm not paid by anyone nobody pays me to tweet anything in specific um and I love it because I get I met so many people in Doha this way and I've learned so much about what's happening in Qatar and I think it's something that I city cut there we should talk about with them in terms of there is no central website we can go to to find out what's going on in this country and there's a lot going on and people always complain that there isn't anything happening but that's because it's really hard to find that information all in one place um so the advantages of tweeting uh if you don't have time to start a blog for example it's great because it's 140 characters and you can do it anytime you can do it anywhere you can you can tweet on your cell phone you can tweet on your laptop um I mean but there's very connected wireless is in all the parks and at the Corniche and you know with my daughter I can hold her in my lap and and tweet or I can eat lunch and tweet or when we're walking outside we can whatever I want to say like uh recently I went to uh I had an experience at the hospital because my daughter was sick and I could tweet okay this hospital is better than this hospital just in our experiences and that was one way to share with people what's going on uh in Qatar because people are always looking for stuff like that like okay where do I go we're all most of us are expats here I think that follow me on Doha news so but then also I have a private twitter account that I think some of you have tried to follow but I won't accept your request follow me on Doha news but my private account I just keep from my friends and family to keep control of them because they're far from here um and then also I'm a global voices contributor and global voice is online basically it curates the news it curates the conversation and it brings um into focus the conversations that are going on in places that the media might not necessarily talk about so this post example was a cartoon that ran in the local newspaper and people are really upset about it uh they thought it was a bad taste so I just basically followed what the blog said and what followed the tweet said and and came up with a an article just breaking it down what people were talking about so that's another way to use blogs as a as a way to gauge the sentiment in a region um so those were just the things I do that's all I really wanted to say I guess they're shorter than I thought but I mean I'm excited to see all the women in the audience and I'm sure a lot of you have full time jobs that have nothing to do with blogging but I think culture can be a lonely place sometimes and it's really hard if you don't make a real effort to go out and meet people who aren't in your circle already and I think the online hemisphere is a really good way to start that I've had a lot of people uh on twitter who I hopefully will meet in person today just based on your tweets I think a lot of you are here who I follow on twitter and who follow me so um so that's all I have to say uh tips for the new people we talked about at the workshop but for example shabina.net you can start a wordpress or something and then you can for eight dollars buy a domain name so for eight dollars a year I have shabina.net and that's a lot easier to get to than shabina.net or shabina921.wordpress.com so we can talk more about that later um and that's it thank you