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ShareBANGALORE: Throughout last week, Chennai's water woes were the hottest topic among the city's bloggers. Now they have some good news to blog about. Latest blogstreet.com figures reveal that Chennai has the highest number of blogs (297) in India.
While bloggers from other cities debate the finding of blogstreet.com, a popular site that hosts blogs, Chennai's cybercitizens are a happy lot. "Chennai's bloggers were among the first few to start blogging when the concept was new, during 1999-2000. It was only a matter of time before more people signed on," says Chennai-based blogger Kiruba Shankar. He has been blogging for five years and lectures on blogging at Anna University and the Asian College of Journalism. Bangalore may lay claim to the IT capital tag, but lags behind in the blog ranking with 218 bloggers. But the IT city's bloggers feel that Chennai may lead on India-blogstreet.com, but those figures are insufficient to draw conclusions on the actual number of Indian bloggers. "Other blog sites don't list figures. I'm sure, Delhi and Bangalore have more bloggers than Chennai," argues Bangalore blogger Anurag Jain.
Mumbai, though active inblogosphere with 186 bloggers, ranks third in the city. With blogs, or web logs, which are fast multiplying, blog directories now face a bigger problem. Splogs or spam blogs have become a bane. Splogs promote vested interests and are of two forms, one that is intended to boost page rankings in search engines and another, which leaves spam comments on blogs.
Bloggers are more concerned with the deluge of automatically generated splog comments. "The kind of marketing spam on blogs has been there for around two years now. But there was an increase in the activity in the Indian context following the IIPM (Indian Institute of Planning Management) episode. During that time there were several fake blogs going around," says Kiruba.
According to Kiruba, the software used in some blogs comes with a feature, which lists IP addresses of splogs. Globally, this issue is being tackled by search engines Google, IceRocket and Splogspot.com, which lists splogs. A unidentified American blogger, fightsplog.blogspot.com , has also been actively monitoring splogs on Google's Blogspot.com.
