Ethnic blogging and Bangla
If any award were to be given for regional language blogs in India, I have little doubt that the Tamil Blogs would emerge as the deserving winners. Just look at their magnitude. I am not aware exactly how many of them are in Unicode but I believe that majority of them are. Apart from opening-up for universal readership, Unicode encoding also paves the way for these blogs to surface on Search Engines. Happily the Hindi blogging scenario has matured too, there are almost half a dozen Hindi blogs now apart from a Community blog “Akshargram” started by Pankaj. While I Googled for regional blogs I could not find a single one in my mother-tongue Bangla (or Bengali). Thankfully Sukanya di was keen enough to start one and thus began the first Bangla Blog. this blog is actually a “Baby-step guide” on how to start a Bangla blog of your own. Meanwhile, Sukanya di has started a blog of her own and with two of a tribe it was probably reason enough to go for a Bangla Blog directory. Hope other Bangalis follow suit.
Ravages, Take a look here http://www.bhashaindia.com/trivia/trivia.aspx
I don’t think there are more Bangla speakers than Tamil.
I have been doing a quiet survey, and almost a third and more of mainstream Blogger’s are from Chennai. And there are other people settled outside who are Tamil Speakers. Tamil and Bangla would balance each otherout.
Debashish its ironic that though Bangla speaking people outnumber both Hindi and Tamil speaking people in the world (though Hindi is still the most spoken language in India). Given that fact I think its in reverse sorting where Tamil leads the blogger count, followed by Hindi and finally Bangla.
Hi certainly hope so too Debashish (may the tribe of bangla blogs grow)….for starters, it is doing wonders for my rusty bengali!
Good to know about The Tamil yahoo groups. I should say Hindi blogger Alok Kumar is a one man army in the sense that he is also managing one for “devnaagri”. May the tribes flourish 🙂
Tools for Hindi are catching up. Takhti (http://www.geocities.com/hanu_man_ji/) a free unicode editor has been available for long. Indic languages has been supported since Win2000 and are rampant on Win-XP so one can go for INSCRIPT. This link (http://devanaagarii.net/#Windows) has all the details.
Nothing about any North-South divide Ravages. IndiBloggies did ask for comments on Categories (and infact added few on demand) at the very start of the awards. Hindi being the national language was treated separately and no body asked for a Tamil category. The next awards should hopefully correct the mistakes 🙂
The prevalence of Tam blogs could have something to do with the availability of good tools for content creation. The basic, free Anjal version which plugs into Notepad/Word is great for most editing needs. Recently, I was trying to help a colleague with typing in Hindi and I was shocked to find very few transliterating editors. Why is that? And the few that were available where not free.
BTW – there is an entire Yahoo forum and yahoo group for Tamil bloggers.
And of course a Tamizharhal blog digest.
Inspite of all this, and more tamil bloggers than Hindi, The Indi bloggies had a special category for Hindi blogs, and Tamil was a regional/vernacular one. Why?