May 27th, 2009
The IndiBlogger State of the Indian Blogosphere Report Featured in Indian Daily Indian Express
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The IndiBlogger.in State of the Indian Blogosphere 2009 report, co-authored by me, was featured in Indian daily Indian Express recently on a story on blogging in India.
This is also the first news story on 20:20 Web Tech, which isn’t bad, given that we just started.
I can’t find a link to the story online, but here is the full text of the story —
Indian Bloggers’ park stormed with 15 percent more posts during election period
PRANAV KULKARNI
PUNE, MAY 20
The sensitivity of the latter is such that after almost every important phenomenon that takes place across the sphere, the blogosphere is stormed with posts and comments that trigger open discussions, views, debates and forums. According to a national analysis conducted by Gaurav Mishra, co founder 20:20 Web Tech and Vote Report India and Renie Ravin of Banglore-based IndiBlogger.in, the postings on the Indian blog world witnessed an increase of over 15 percent in the month of May- thanks to the ongoing Indian Premiere League fever and the most sensitive- election results.
“Off late, blogs have emerged as a strong medium of expression and election being one of the most sensitive topics, expressions of all sorts do the rounds of the blog world. To give an example- there was a lot of online discussion after the election results came out. Some of the biggest themes were rehashes of news reports on the elections results, exuberance over the Congress win, some soul-searching over BJP’s loss (from a very strong BJP support base online), and opinions on what the election results mean for India,” said Mishra.
Out of the total number of blogs posted on the blogosphere across the country during the election period, the analysis also talks about the percentage contribution of bloggers from five cities with maximum number of postings from Banglore as 18%, Mumbai- 14%, NCR- 16%, Chennai- 17% and Hyderabad being lowest with 9 %. It also points out that while English, with 92 percent remained the most popular language of expressions; Hindi(four percent), Tamil(1.6 percent), Marathi (0.7 percent) and Telugu (0.6 percent) remained the next best-preferred mediums of expression during the period.
While many look at blogging as a medium of expression, there has been a significant increase in the number of netizens who look at blogs as a reliable source of information, some times even more trusted than the official sites. Harshad Oak is a well-known blogger from Pune and revealed that on the day of the election results- May 16, as many as 16,965 people visited his blog www.harshadoak.com just to obtain the correct information about the election results. “I was sure about the fact that on the day of the election result, accessing the official election commission website would be troublesome due to jamming. It was for this reason that I had obtained the links of the site days in advance and uploaded them on my blog. To my surprise, many of the outside-Pune people who were searching for election results on the Google search engine were directed automatically to my blog. I knew where to look for the information and that helped many,” said Oak whose blog displays the election result along with the number of votes
Contrary to the general perception that sheer expressions or discussions are not sufficient enough to bring about a change in the world, avid bloggers claim that the words on the blog are just the tip of the iceberg and that those who express, act as well. Never Forget is one such website that has been active towards creating political accountability. Aman Zaidi one of the four founder members of Pune- based Never Forget said, “We are working towards reminding people about the promises their candidates made before elections. For instance, we have the entire profile of Suresh Kalmadi along with his promises loaded on our website. Further, a team of 100 volunteers in cities such as Banglore, Pune, Mumbai, Delhi, Kanpur and so on is active in increasing the database to that of all the 543 elected candidates.”
While individual’s urge to express his or her own views remains one aspect, what contributed to the humongous number of posts on the blogosphere during the election period are the contests organized by individual blog sites. “We had organized a contest titled- IndiBlogger of the Month with the topic- Politics and Current Affairs. The contest was sponsored by Microsoft India,” said Ravin of IndiBlogger.in. Neeta Kulkarni from Thane who won the contest with her blog- A wide angle view of India said, “My blog talks about the socio-political issues related to India. Over 2000 people visited my blog during the election period, but I must also admit that people in India need to take blogging more seriously.”
