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The grand title notwithstanding, this is just a blog meme, that asks bloggers to set forth five reasons why they blog.

Congratulations to Ian for tagging me before the usual suspect got around to doing it.

And thanks Ian, for giving me an opportunity to do unto the Moof before she does unto me.

Moof, I can’t wait till the end of this post to say this, so here it is…

You Are Tagged

It is highly noticeable that most bloggers get a confessionary urge to explain the motives behind their blogging at some point or the other during their evolution.

I did that in a half-hearted manner when I celebrated (if that is the right sentiment) my blogiversary recently.

I don’t intend to do a reappraisal.

Instead I have modified the meme a bit to suit my purpose. I hope to explore how my blog evolved to be what it is now in five steps.

Step 1: Conception and Gestation.

The first time I heard about something called a weblog or blog was in the immediate aftermath of the killer Tsunami of 2004, when the newspapers and TV news reports lauded the role of blogs and bloggers in helping the victims in various ways. I had no idea what blogs were and I did nothing to find out any more about them. Hard as it seems now to believe, I did have a life those days!

The next I heard about blogging was from Suresh, who had started a blog. Being an über-techie, he had to have his own domain before he got his blog online and had to pre-post (if that is a valid word!) his earlier two related posts that featured me.

Suresh in turn seems to have been inspired by Navin who had been at it for a while longer.

Step 2: Birth.

Intrigued, I did some exploring and discovered the wonderful world of med bloggers. I decided I wanted to be part of it. So I took the plunge. I actually registered new blogs in Blogger and the free version of WordPress and tried out an identical post in both before I chose WordPress - influenced to a great degree by my blog parents, Suresh & Navin.

Also because I was influenced a great deal by medical bloggers (who are predominantly from the first world), I chose to be an anonymous / pseudonymous blogger.

I chose ’scan man’ as my blog-pseudonym as it describes what I do as a radiologist.

Step 3: Early Days.

Initially my life on the blogosphere was spent as a lurker (a term that I learnt much later) and an occasional commenter. Some of my initial posts were my responses or my takes on what I read in other (mostly medical) blogs.

Most other posts were pure ‘random noise.’

And I met some great people, who remain good blog friends to this day.

Step 4: Leaving Home & Living Independently.

After a short infancy spent in the comforts of WordPress.com, I felt constrained. So I took the bold (? rash) step of setting up my own domain. I did that with a lot of help from Suresh (who of course, had been there and done that. Yawn).

The homepage to this day looks as bare as it did on Day 1. I think I’m beyond the point of worrying about ‘more coming soon.’

But I did get WordPress loaded and effected the move without much trouble in spite of being in the middle of moving my real world house too at around the same time.

Step 5: The Real Me.

The next major step in my evolution as a blogger was to lose my cloak of anonymity.
As I said in a comment on that post explaining the reason for the ‘revelation’:

When I started blogging 6 months ago, I wasn’t too sure if it would be something that I would stick to. I realize now that I’m going to stick to blogging. It is no longer a ‘passing fancy.’ And I did not know if there would be any professional liability caused by blogging. I’ve not found a single thing which could be considered a liability professionally. From what I could discern, most medical bloggers chose to remain anonymous because they don’t want their patients and/or their employer(s) to know about their blogs. I have no such problems. As a radiologist I don’t have any patients of my own. They come to me because some other doctor sent them. And my employer was the one who pushed me into blogging
There really didn’t seem to be a necessity for me to ‘hide.’

So there you have it, the story of how I got to this point from the time when I wouldn’t have known what hit me if a blog had hit me.

Now for the best part of such memes. I get to tag five people…

You are all tagged:

1. Moof.
2. Lakshmi. Maintaining the ongoing blog meme route.
3. Arunn at his new non-science blog.
4. Suresh.
5. Rob Lamberts. Yet another distraction for him.

If you link back to the Blog Meme Tracker, you can see who has already been tagged and record who you tag.

And finally,

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