The Indian blogosphere (or IndiBlogosphere) is the online predominantly community of

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

weblog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

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, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

when typing in Indian languages on computer became possible, blogs in Indian languages started to be written. Initially due to a lack of

Indic Indic may refer to: * Indic languages (disambiguation) * Various scripts: ** Brahmic scripts, a family of scripts used to write Indian and other Asian languages ** Kharosthi (extinct) * Indian numerals * Indian religions, also known as the Dharm ...

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
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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 Google IME, also known as Google Input Tools, is a set of input method editors by Google for 22 languages, including Amharic, Arabic language, Arabic, Bengali language, Bengali, Chinese language, Chinese, Greek language, Greek, Gujarati language, ...

tool in its blogging service

Blogger A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

, 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 a language given supreme status in a particular country, state, or other jurisdiction. Typically the term "official language" does not refer to the language used by a people or country, but by its government (e.g. judiciary, ...

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

is the most popular among Indian bloggers because it supports Indic Unicode and has rich features. In 2007, the Indic language typing tool

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 Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...

sites. In addition to this,

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...

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 variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of ...

encoding, most languages are supported by default everywhere.

References

{{Reflist Indic computing Blogospheres

History

Indic language typing tools

Blog platform

See also

References