Pranathi publications has organized a Kannada bloggers meet in Bangalore on Sunday 16th of March. As for as i know this is supposed to be the first in it’s kind for the online Kannada writers or bloggers. With the increasing use of Internet & English, there is a greater need for the use of Kannada & other Indian languages in the online world to reach a wider number of geographically dispersed young population & to keep the stream of literature flowing. These kinds of events are sure to help the bloggers to meet & share their thoughts with other like minded people. This in turn can help the bloggers to take their blogs to the next level. I will also be attending this meet with same intention. Though, i don’t have a Kannada blog, some of my posts are related to Kannada & Karnataka.
Venue : Indian Institute Of World Culture, Basavangudi, Bangalore
Date: 16th March 2008
Time: 4 PM
BTW, i came to know about this meet from
OnebyTwo Mahesh Malnad. Thanks for the info Malnad.
Update:
The bloggers meet witnessed a pretty good turnout from the Kannada bloggers community in Bangalore. More than 100 bloggers took part in the meet. The event lasted for about 3 hours. There were talks by
Pavanaja,
Hariprasad Nadig,
Abdul Rashid &
Shamsunder about the use of Kannada in the Internet and some technical pros & cons associated with it. In particular, Pavanaja’s talk on how he started using the Kannada on the net way back in 1996 was very enlightening to the audience. For all don’t knows over here, Dr. Pavanaja is the person behind Vishwakannada.com which is supposed to be the first Kannada portal on the World Wide Web. The organizers from Pranathi gave an estimation that currently there are around 350 active Kannada Blog’s on the net. As I mentioned earlier,the most important part of the meet was networking, which helped the like minded bloggers to get to know each other. Pranathi deserves applauds for organizing this meet which was first of its kind for the Bangalore Kannada Bloggers.
Few days back i was chatting with one of my blog mate
sman about blogging & it’s reach in India. He had a opinion that ‘still blogging is very new to India & there are only few bloggers in the country’. I was not much to his side. Because i don’t think blogging is very new to India. I just went through profiles of bloggers based on their country in Blogger.com. Till today we can see as many as 2,57,000 bloggers in India who are hosting their blogs on Blogspot. I think there are greater number of people hosting their blogs in other popular blog platforms like wordpress & typepad. So if we take the cumulative count into consideration, it doesn’t seem to be a small number. Still i agree that there are lot of people, i mean the internet user’s who doesn’t know much about blogging & its advantages.
I feel in a democratic country like India blogger’s have a very important role to play. It gives an opportunity & a platform for everybody to express their thoughts on various topics. Blogging has been treated as one of the most innovative revolutions of this decade. Not to forget, Indian govt. also took part in this revolution by banning few blogspot blog’s in the later part of 2006. This indirectly helped the bloggers to get a wide media publicity & paved way for the entry of more number of bloggers to the blogosphere. Not just internet literacy but, Blog literacy may also gain more & more significance in the days to come. I hope this revolution continues as more & more people join the elite blog literates club.
Let’s celebrate & spread the spirit of blogging in the new year.
Wish you a healthy & wealthy new year to all the readers.
I was fortunate enough to meet & discuss few rousing facts about blogging with Mr.
Amith Agarwal, India’s first professional blogger, during the recently held Barcamp at IIM Bangalore. Amith also gave a session on blogging which provided a platform for all the enthusiastic blogloreans to put forward their thoughts on blogging. That was a pretty edifying session both for the bloggers & for people who are thinking of entering the blolgosphere. You can read more about Amith Agarwal
here
