Blogger Interview # 94 : P V Ariel

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your blog?

I am Philip Verghese ‘Ariel’, a native of Kerala, commonly known as the “God’s Own Country”.  Born and brought up in the villages of Pothanicadu, near Moovattupuzha and Valanjavattom near Thiruvalla, Kerala, India.  Presently I am working in a Christian Organization as an editor to its publication division.  I started blogging, (not exactly blogging) writing at a very young age.  Started writing Malayalam poems, articles and stories.   And a good number of them were published in the leading Malayalam publications like the Malayalam Manorama Daily, Balarama, Deepika Daily, Kuttikalude Deepika, Balayugam, Poompaatta, Balabhoomi etc My main genre is spiritual or religious ones, and I published a good number of articles, and poems in the print media.  At a later stage I entered into the secular field and published many number of letters, stories and poems in English and in Malayalam languages. . I was a regular contributor to major English publications like India Today, The Week, Outlook, The Open Magazine, Tehelka and The Sunday Indian etc.   And at a later stage one of my colleagues suggested me to write on web pages or to start a blog page or your own. I thought it a good idea to start a blog page of my own.  And I did a search and found out few platforms and started posting materials to them and finally concentrated on Google’s Knol pages and then Google’s blogger pages.  And now I am regularly post blogs in my English (Philipscom) and Malayalam blogs (Arielinte kurippukal – Ariel’sJottings).  Some of my writings translated into Hindi and Telugu languages.

Are you a full time blogger? How did you get into blogging and why?

No.  I am not a full time blogger, as mentioned above I just happened to enter into this field by mere coincidence.  I was using Google’s Knol pages as a platform.  Unfortunately the closing down of knol by Google was a shock to all the knol authors.  But Google provided a platform to all its authors and we all landed at WordPress.com under the title  peeveesknols with our resources.  Since Wordpress was not so familiar to me and upon the suggestion of one of the  co-authors at  knoll,  I started writing at blogger.com and migrated few of my posts from Wordpress  to my Blogger pages at ‘Philipscom’.  And consequently I joined different social media’ and other web platforms, recently I joined Indiblogger.com and as on today my indirank stand as 81/100. This April I joined the famous A to Z Blog Challenge 2013 and I am also an Ambassador to this event with lot of activities around.  My blog posting is going on well with lot of support and encouragement from my readers and visitor. This month I am active in English blogging only, due the time constrains.

If someone was interested in blogging, what would be a few things you would suggest?

Since from the beginning of my blogging, I used to encourage others those who are interested in writing as well as other writers to start their own blogs, and few followed and now they are very active in blogging.

There are many suggestions I used to give them through my blog pages as well as through comments. But here I want to give my first suggestion to such people is that: First to find out their own genre and start writing your own pages, and then visit similar blogs. This they can do by a small search through Google, Yahoo or Bing.  After finding out few such blogs carefully select few useful and informative ones and join in their pages by pressing their followers’ button so that when they post new post you will get information through your blog’s dashboard. Closely watch these blogs you can find many similar bloggers and you can visit them also and join them.  Please don’t stop there, keep on reading and post your feedback  whatever may be your views air it at he comment box, some may like and respond back but some may not, but don’t get annoyed, keep on doing this and seeing your intelligent comments few will turn to your page. Very recently I have posted an article on this subject, those who are interested to know more on this line can visit that page HERE. 

How do you build a community around a blog and social media?

I am an active member in many of the major social medias like Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, and many others… You can find more about my membership here at my G+Page. I specially use these media to promote my resources.  There is a share button (Addon) provided in my blog page.  From this button anyone can promote our writing, immediately after posting the blog I post my link to these major medias, and this is a good thing to promote and inform about your blog post among your friends circle or community

What are your three favorite blogs to read? What makes those blogs special?

My top one in this line is my environmental blog post on TREES 

And the second one is on Philately

And the third one of course about my own story LOL my Bio-Blog.

Which one plug-in would you suggest all bloggers to have?

I use a good number of plugins but, since I am not a tech or net savvy I can’t evaluate or suggest one to all bloggers, so I am skipping this question.