CHENNAI: They say it’s simple to make money off the Internet. Sure, everybody’s doing it, but for bloggers who operate Tamil and other regional blogs, it just doesn’t seem to pay off. A lack of supporting software has held them back, despite the fact that blogging in vernacular languages has become quite popular in the country. And this has, quite simply, acted as a deterrent for many aspiring Tamil bloggers, complain those from the blogging community.
These were some of the issues that came up for discussion at the blogger meet on Sunday, organised by Indiblogger and Tata Motors. Touted as the biggest blogger meet in India, some of the 200-odd blog junkies, who have passionately stuck to writing in Tamil and other regional languages, said that the temptation of reaching a wider audience was such that many who started off in regional languages switched over to English. The perception of commercial establishments also added to this view as many advertisers were of the opinion that people using the web would not be looking for content in local languages and preferred to attract the English-speaking lot.
Elangovan, who maintains about six different blogs in Tamil, said that even basic word inputs for the blogs still remained tough as some of the hosting websites did not provide proper transliterating facilities. “For someone who uses a laptop or a tablet, finding Tamil keys could be difficult. We depend on transliterating softwares that consume a lot of time and are far from perfect,” he said.
Other topics that found mention were the effect of micro blogging sites, such as Twitter, on conventional blogging. Vishwa, an engineering student, said that people found Twitter faster as opposed to conventional blogging, for which a fair amount of attention and time was required. Also, the amount of interactivity on Twitter was far higher than blogs and this was a huge incentive.
However, some like Joel, a visual artist, said that much depended on what the person wanted to blog about. While Twitter could be comfortable for those who just wanted to put in their perspectives to a larger pool, somebody who was passionate about things like photography would find blogs and tumblr much more useful. Participants also said blogging was moving towards a more collaborative format where a number of bloggers got together to maintain blogs rather than doing it individually. This, apart from providing a variety of views, also widened the scope for making more money.