वडनेरकरजी और ब्‍लॉग जगत को बधाई

दिल्‍ली से प्रकाशित इंडिया टुडे समूह के अंग्रेजी अखबार

मेल टुडे में 9 फरवरी को

ब्‍लॉगजत पर एक लेख छपा है। इसमें हिंदी ब्‍लॉगिंग से लेकर तमिल ब्‍लॉगिंग तक का जिक्र है। पर खबर में अपने शब्‍दों के सफर वाले अजीत वडनेरकरजी का खासा जिक्र है। इसमें बताया गया है कि वाडनेरकरजी को रोज करीब 80 हिट मिलते हैं। इसके साथ साथ कानपुर के अनूप शुक्‍लजी का भी हवाला दिया गया है। पूरी खबर ज्‍यों की त्‍यों दी जा रही है।
Vernacular bloggers carve a niche on Net
By Abhishek Shukla in New Delhi

According
to a
survey,
44 per cent
of existing
Internet
users
prefer
Hindi to
English,
while
25 per cent
prefer
South
Indian
languages.

WHAT started as an experiment for Ajit Wadnerker six months ago has now become his passion. Today, he is one of thousands of bloggers stuffing the web with their writings in Indian languages.
Wadnerker’s blog on Hindi etymology is an interesting read, receiving about 80 hits
daily. Since mid-2007, his blog has received over 14,000 hits and has been declared one of the best in the Hindi language.
Wadnerker, a journalist with a leading Hindi newspaper in Bhopal, says his passion to get into the roots of Hindi words led him into blogging. “You cannot be personal while writing for a newspaper so I satiate my creative urges on my blog. I was
fascinated to know the origin and derivation of Hindi words and expressions. Soon a collection of resources was ready. I started to take a word and write about it on my blog. I also write about contemporary issues,” he adds.
Blogging in regional or vernacular languages started in early 2000. Since then, the blogger strength has been increasing constantly. Tamil bloggers led the way for vernacular blogging in India. By the time Hindi blogging took off, the
Tamils had already created about 400 blogs.
According to estimates, there are more than 1,000 Hindi bloggers,who are regularly updating their blog spaces like chitthajagat,blogwani and hindiblogs. Regional language blogs such as tamilblogs.-blogspot.com, desipundit and mydunia are some of the leading sites.
The country has an estimated four crore Internet users and the number is growing. A large number of these users are from small towns. A report by market research firm Juxtconsult reveals that 44 per cent of the existing Internet users preferred Hindi to English, while 25 per cent went for south Indian languages.
“These bloggers are young and ready to post their personal views on the web. They are using blogs to publish their poems, literature, politics, films and trivial
things like photographs of actresses or SMS jokes,” said Debashish, a Pune-based software professional who is hooked to blogging since 2002.
Besides personal views, one can find literature marvels like Rag Darbari posted by Anup Shukla from Kanpur and stories of Premchand posted by USbased
Raman Kaul.
A software package developed by an Indore firm, Webdunia — an offshoot of the Hindi
newspaper Nai Dunia — triggered language blogging in India. This software allowed
users to use the standard keyboard to chat or blog in any Indian language.
“We were the first Indians to develop Unicode-based software that did away the need to download the fonts for different scripts. We supplied this software to Microsoft MSN, Rediff and Sify,” said Pankaj Jain, president of webdunia.com.
In 2007, Google began to provide transliteration features making it possible for the bloggers to invade the blogosphere.
The Google page comes up with an inbuilt Hindi dictionary that helps the users edit the published material.
abhishek.shukla@mailtoday.in