The state of the Indian blogosphere vs. the western blogosphere :
I wanted to start this blog post with a comparison between two potentially A-List bloggers who started blogging recently – one American and one Indian. These were: Marc Andreesen (at http://blog.pmarca.com) and Sanjeev Bikhchandani (at http://bikhchandani.blogspot.com/).
Unfortunately, Sanjeev has practically stopped blogging. He wrote 4 posts in May followed by 1 in June and that’s that – (all of which made for great reading by the way). Marc on the other hand started with a bang: he wrote some absolutely amazing posts on a variety of topics ranging from Entrpreneurship, Technology, Science Fiction and Current Affairs. But now, he has largely limited himself to pulling out passages or quotes from various sources and adding a one-liner to it as his take.
Nevertheless, the question I wanted to ask was, Where are all the Indian blogs?
There could be two reasons why I don’t have the answer to the question. a) I am a newbie to blogs and don’t know which are the most read Indian blogs even though they exist. b) Since I don’t hear about or stumble upon very many Indian blogs (Unlike say you would on all kinds of American blogs), it equally possible that they don’t exist. [I am not counting blogs like GigaOm, which, though run or written by people of Indian origin, touch upon India-related topics very rarely.]
There are definitely some well known Indian bloggers. There’s Amit Agarwal who is a full time blogger, there are some internet/tech blogs like Contentsutra, Alootechie, Webyantra (this one is dying by the way) and some others like Youth Curry (amazingly insightful) and Great Bong (hilarious).
You may find some more lists here: Indibloggies, iPatrix, India-Blogs
The point I am trying to make when I ask that question is that while bloggers exist and some of them are fairly popular, blogging isn’t a conversational medium at all.
Look at the US. Someone writes about a topic, someone else takes it up and so on so forth - creating a coherent and involving discussion around all kinds of things. This has also spawned sites like TechMeme which keep a track of such ‘conversations’.
Here, there have been some such discussions around specific issues in the past: IIPM, reservations and Jessica Lal come to mind – but do they create any impact? Why don’t they happen more often?
I think most Indian blogs are about the author and his/her musings – a personal diary on a variety of topics (this one included :)). [Even those make for amazing reading, but then we need more industry veterans like Sanjeev Bikhchandani blogging (and also hope that they blog more often)].
Also, in the USA, blogging is big business. Besides the success stories of Weblogs Inc. (which was purchased by AOL for $25m) there are other big blog networks such as Nick Denton’s Gawker Media, Techcrunch, GigaOM etc. There are others that exist on a variety of topics(link). Why doesn’t something like this exist in India, or why isn’t anyone trying to create a blog network? [A Google search got me this - on Instablogs - but it doesn't seem to have any flagship blogs (for e.g. Engadget for Weblogs), just syndicated stories from a lot of 'channels'.]
It’s unfortunate that the such a medium hasn’t found sufficient consumers or creators in India (yet?).
I think [Aside: I was almost going to say 'I personally believe', when I was reminded of this video] that proliferation of Internet media via blogs and the like, would be the real catalyst of internet usage in India.
