ExtraBed.in : Where Bloggers Help Visiting Bloggers

This is a site that was born out out of a wonderful personal experience.

A few weeks back, I had to visit a conference in Mumbai. It was a three day conference and the question of accommodation arose. I had two choices. I could stay at a hotel just like everybody else. Or I could crash at a friends’ place. I chose the latter. Only, I took it a bit further..

I mailed a couple of Mumbai bloggers and asked if was ok for me to crash at their place. Audacious though, eh? But guess what, I got an extremely positive response. Sathish, who is the Country Manager of MyZus at Doha mailed in saying that I could stay at his parents’ place at Mumbai. As luck would have it he was flying in from Doha for his vacation. The hospitality was fantastic.

A few days ago, Sathish and his brother traveled down to Tirupathi and they landed at Chennai to catch their flight back to Mumbai. They had a day to spare at Chennai and guess who they called first? 🙂 My wife and parents were only too happy host the guys who took such good care of me.

This isn’t the first positive experience. Arjun Singh and his wife had traveled from Canada on their first South India trip and they were glad to enjoy their lunch at our place. And every time Arjun mails or calls me, he would relentlessly extend his invitation to come stay at his place when we visited Canada.

There are many more instances but you get the drift…

Hence the idea of ExtraBed.in, where we lend our extra bed to a visiting blogger. The wiki was soft launched a week ago. I quietly snug in a link from my side bar and expectedly there’s already been a bit of traction. There are nice folks from Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, New York and Bahrain who have laid out a red carpet for visitors.

This idea is definitely not original. There’s the wonderful CouchSurfing.com, a fantastic site with a very strong global presence. Then there’s CanICrash.org, a wiki based site.

After my experience at BlogCamp, I felt a community site for the global Indian blogosphere might be nice. A small niche community that people are comfortable with. If you feel like helping out a person, do add yourself out here. It’s a wiki. It’s your wiki. Feel free to add or edit any information. The password is ‘blog’.

P.S: Amit Ranjan, author of WebYantra and Head of Uzanto India, who is traveling down from Delhi for Proto.in on Jan 20th & 21st mailed in to request if he can crash at my place. I think I took less than half a second to say ‘absolutely’! 🙂