Experiences as a software engineer

I will soon be completing my first year working as a software engineer. An year ago, I was an eager college student and was dabbling in open source stuff heavily to make up of the extra time that I had spent in college. I had the prerequisite knowledge to be a developer even before college, but in India, you are worthless if you do not have anything on paper, but are deemed to be knowledgeable if having degrees and certifications.

To start off with, I consider myself lucky to be in my present job, last year during my fifth semester, a trip to various local companies to 'test the waters' proved out to be an opportunity in disguise. I was interviewed and then selected without much fanfare. During the first day as an intern(my last semester involved industrial training) I jumped headfirst into connection pooling using spring, which was required here and there was no looking back (In direct contrast to people working in multinationals, who with much fanfare start their training - but later migrate to management as growth as a developer is restricted).
Among other things, I was having a java and ruby background and was started as a java developer. One of the perks of being in a product company is you have time and opportunity to try out, learn and explore new stuff all while doing your job.
After working considerably in the RnD over product development, I was put to test in scaling web scraping applications, porting of our product in .net platform and creating a keyboard/mouse capture application for assembling a test management mashup during the course of the previous year. Although I miss web applications a wee bit, the middleware and logic is what keeps me busy. On a parallel basis, I am into lot of books involving me to be a better developer. The Clean Coder, The passionate programmer,
With regards to updating my blog with the new stuff once every month, I learnt and made some interesting excercises during my free time, but paucity of time as well as my frequent forays in dzone and other knowledge portals led to cancellation of various blog posts. I am thinking of reverting to small posts providing a high level overview of technology practices that I consider important in current scenario instead of writing tutorial like posts.
Am having quite a few of these items in my mind, and will post them as the time allows.

Are we a dying breed ?

Is it really beneficial to build and maintain an online persona when it is fraught with problems all around the corner? This thought was echoed on a thread on javaranch.com, which happens to be a very popular social forum for java technology enthusiasts.
One of my acquaintance had also, quite recently expressed reservations about the same due to the lack of appreciation. Whether his comment is just his perception or is it the truth, remains to be seen. The concept of professional blogging too remains an elusive concept for me and as far as I have observed, this remains largely and exercise in isolation or through and 'tool'.

In the google trends on blogging, it appeared that the search volume index dropped to an all time low in the last quarter of 2010 ever since the usage curve became consistent since 2007. The reference of blogs in the news also became erratic and dropped during this period.

This leads to an interesting conclusion; is twitter really ushering in an era of microblogging since the people don't really want to go that extra mile for sharing their thoughts ? Applying social networking in the above comparison definitely causes no raised eyebrows as it is quite clear that social networking has taken the lead for the online citizens.

As the aftermath of this change, you can expect greater emphasis on the management of information over these platforms - both for commercial and research purposes as well as a general change in the dissemination of information. This is because instead if the traditional Author-reader/follower role, we're fundamentally shifting towards an peer to peer approach with spontaneous interactions. So instead of following your favorite blog and waiting for the posts to come in, real time and probably, geographically aware interactions rule the roost. Social networking today has spread much beyond socializing with friends, family and that 'hot chick' profile(pun intended) to an information sharing portal. It is customizable as a mini internet with all the users being able to be the generators of the content.

So if you are a techie or business savvy, you can utilize this change for your benefit. What do you feel about this ? are there any new developments in this arena that you are aware of ? please do comment about it.