The Indian blogosphere (or IndiBlogosphere) is the online predominantly community of
India
India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...
n
weblog
A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...
s that is part of the larger
blogosphere
The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community (or as a collection of connected communities) or as a social networking service in which everyday authors can pu ...
.
History
In India, like elsewhere, blogging gained momentum in the early years of the twenty-first century. However, it was limited mostly to English. With the advent of
unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
when typing in
Indian languages on computer became possible, blogs in Indian languages started to be written. Initially due to a lack of
Indic typing tools, the early Indian blogosphere was small. Greater awareness and availability of Indic typing tools led to rapid growth in blogs written in Indian languages.
An impressionistic survey of Indian
nglishblogosphere in 2019 says money making is still not the primary goal of most Indian bloggers. Most bloggers open multiple blogs on free blogging platforms and lose interest over time; only a small portion of bloggers sustain their blog beyond initial spurt.
2019 Indian blogosphere survey
/ref>
Indic language typing tools
Although the standard keyboard of Indian languages is InScript
InScript (short for Indic Script) is the decreed standard keyboard layout for Indian scripts using a standard 104- or 105-key layout. This keyboard layout was standardised by the Government of India for inputting text in languages of India writ ...
yet Phonetic transliteration based typing became most popular for Unicode Indic typing in spite of its drawbacks. The two most popular phonetic typing tools of old times are "Indic IME" and "BarahaIME". In 2007, with the advent of the Google Indic Transliteration tool in its blogging service Blogger
A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...
, it became the tool of choice for new bloggers because it is dictionary based and does not need a learning curve.
Blog platform
India has over 20 official languages
An official language is defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as, "the language or one of the languages that is accepted by a country's government, is taught in schools, used in the courts of law, etc." Depending on the decree, establishmen ...
and yet most Indian blogs are still written in English. However, a large number of blogs are created in Hindi and other Indian languages. These blogs are written as stand-alone blogs or on popular blogging platforms.
Among Indian blogs written in languages other than English, Google's Blogger
A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...
is the most popular among Indian bloggers because it supports Indic Unicode and has rich features. In 2007, the Indic language typing tool Google Indic Transliteration was also integrated into it, so no separate Indic typing tool was needed. Blogspot (Blogger) also provides the facility of custom domain redirects such as .com, in and others. There is also the .বাংলা domain for Bengali sites.
In addition to this, WordPress
WordPress (WP, or WordPress.org) is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...
being supporting Indic Unicode, is most popular among those who host their blog on their own domain. Though since every website uses UTF-8
UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8.
UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...
encoding, most languages are supported by default everywhere.
See also
*Blogosphere
The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community (or as a collection of connected communities) or as a social networking service in which everyday authors can pu ...
* Hindi blogosphere
* Online journalism in India
*Tamil blogosphere
The Tamil blogosphere is the online community of Tamil-language weblogs that are a part of the larger Indian blogosphere. The Tamil blogosphere has a considerable number of contributors from Sri Lanka and Singapore, and is one of the largest bl ...
* Webcomics in India
References
{{Reflist
Indic computing
Blogospheres