India’s estimated one lakh bloggers — of the worldwide legion of 50 million — are still a small community dominated by techies.
CHENNAI: For Mumbai’s Dina Mehta, blogging has been a self-confessed addiction for over three and half years. So much so, that her 72-year old mother diligently tracks her blog when her work as researcher and ethnographer keeps her on the move.
Once when she was abroad and didn’t update the blog for two days, her mother posted a message: “Please update your blog, this is the only way we keep in touch with you.’’
India’s estimated one lakh bloggers — of the worldwide legion of 50 million — are still a small community dominated by techies. But as India’s top bloggers converged for a stock-taking at Chennai, it became clear that with technology getting simpler, more people are entering the blogosphere to record anything from personal diaries to current events.
Among those gathered here is Kiran Jonnalagadda, who has had an online diary since the trend began in the West six years ago, and is among the country’s oldest bloggers.
What began as a personal journey has helped professionally as well. Mehta’s postings on market research have helped her get “tonnes of work” for her one-woman market research outfit, while Kiran, a techie, landed a job in a software company.
For Amit Agarwal, an IIT engineer who quit his job from a Fortune 500 company to blog full time, the activity pays what he would have otherwise earned from the multinational.
Sitting in Agra, Agarwal offers readers tips on how to use gadgets like mobile phones and computers and these simple suggestions attract over 1.25 million visitors to his blog every month, traffic that is the envy of top bloggers in the West as well.
“People like to know simple things about the products that they use every day such as mobile phones and computers,” Agarwal said.
He is also ready to share his ideas on how to make a living from blogs, like he did on Saturday, when 200 bloggers met face-to-face for the first time.
And the topics discussed ranged from new technologies, trends and the evolution of blogging from personal diaries to a community that played an active role during calamities like the tsunami and last year’s flood in Mumbai. Corporate blogging and censorship by the government also made the agenda.
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