Pramit Singh gives a comprehensive overview of blogging history – and the blogging scene – in India.

During the Mumbai Terror attacks, a blog started by Dina Mehta was perhaps the first place to provide useful links and phone numbers. During the unprecedented Bihar Floods in August 2008, a blog was the first site providing useful information. During the Tsunami in December 2004, another blog came to the rescue. I can go on.

My point is: Indian blogs have proven themselves time and time again when it comes to providing timely information before anyone else.I consider myself relatively late onto the Indian blogging scene: I started blogging seriously in October 2006 [400-odd posts since then means serious enough, don't you think?]. Before that, I helped train and manage a blog network in India.

Here goes a list of most notable moments in Indian Blogging History – some inspiring, some, umm, maybe not. Enjoy:

Who are the Indian Bloggers?

Miteshvasa did a survey of the State of the Indian Blogosphere in 2006:

• It seems Indian men are much more blog-active than women. 32,000 males vs. 5,300 females – or 80% male compared to just 13% female. This is a big deviation from the global scenario: 45% male to 38% female.
• Males: 32,203 (80.2%)
  Females: 5,302 (13.2%)
  Undeclared: 2,623 (6.5%)
• Around 350,000 bloggers are students (~15.4%). People from the field of education represent another 100,000 bloggers (4.3%) while technology-related bloggers come up third at 81,000 (3.54%). Not far behind are bloggers from the arts, communication/media and engineering.

Female Indian Bloggers

There is no Blogher-type network of female bloggers in India and it is a pity. Last time I checked, they started an ad network focused at women, called Divanation. Damn, the unimaginative name inspires spending.

I would like to think that blogs by women don’t get more nonsense in the form of nasty comments and flame wars. What happens when you post about matters such as domestic violence, gender equality and so on? Is it safe for a female blogger in India and is what happened to Kathy Sierra in America an abberation rather than the rule worldwide?

The three notable female bloggers who come to mind are Rashmi Bansal (http://youthcurry.blogspot.com) who also runs a popular college magazine JAM; Dina Mehta (http://dinamehta.com/) who has been blogging since Mar 2003, and Kamla Bhatt (http://kamlabhattshow.com/) the woman behind the Kamala Bhatt show.

Blogs in vernacular languages

A search for Hindi blogs in Google turns up 18,400,000 results; for Telugu blogs – 1,840,000 results; for Tamil Blogs – 5,100,000 results; for Punjabi blogs -1,590,000 results. I can go on.

A list of notable Indian bloggers across those categories can be found at this link, which is maintained by Amit Agarwal. More about the guy later on.

MSM bullying bloggers

In 2005, Pradyuman Maheshwari, writing at Mediaah criticised the Times of India. TOI sent Maheshwari a seven-page legal threat for libel. The threat works, and Maheshwari decides to close his media-criticism site. Readership at time of closing: 8,000. Maheshwari had complained about TOI’s practice of selling space for photos and profile stories for money under its much-maligned MediaNet initiative.

A word on media criticism in India: Indian blogging still has less than a tenth of the power enjoyed by bloggers in America. In India it appears there is simply no tolerance for criticism within the media, and many tend to look down upon bloggers.

Bloggers bitching

Bloggers vs. reporters: TR Vivek writes for Outlook, the weekly newsmagazine about the Star Syndrome in the Indian Blogosphere:

“For the urban twentysomethings with intellectual pretensions and the hope of being spotted by the commissioning editor of a publishing house, it’s the new P3, or rather the virtual world’s own India International Centre.”

He gets this response.

To publish photos or not: In 2007, bloggers quarrel over the use of Khairlanji atrocity images. Shivam Vjj went ahead and published the disturbing pictures of dead women, while Gaurav Sabnis was against the idea. A fierce debate ensues. Gaurav Sabnis was almost coerced into quitting his IBM job following the IIPM scandal in 2005. [see below]

Bloggers becoming reporters and authors

Amit Varma, pioneering blogger at indiauncut.com , went on to write for MINT business newspaper, winning the Bastiat prize for reporting and is now writing his novel “My Friend Sancho”. Varma also liveblogged the Mumbai Terror Attacks.

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writing at the Compulsive Confessor blog got herself a book deal owing to her racy, revealing posts. Her book ‘You are here?‘ was published by Penguin India, a major publisher.

Mayank Austen Soofi, who blogs at http://pakistanpaindabad.blogspot.com, was approached by the Oxford University Press in Karachi who will be including material from his blog in a Pakistani Class XI school textbook. Soofi had invited Pakistanis from all walks of life to list the “five best things” about their country on his blog.

Indian Group Blogs

Nothing beats the power of channelling people’s efforts in a group blog. Desipundit, started by U.S.-based Indian students, was a pioneer in this field. Others include:

• http://blogbharati.com
• http://indiauncut.com
• http://coolbihari.blogspot.com [Ajit Chauhan, Chandan and the Guys]
• http://www.delhibloggersbloc.com/
• http://delhibloggers.in

Entrepreneur and Corporate Bloggers

Rajesh Jain of Indiaworld fame is a pioneering blogger in this field and regularly writes smart pieces at his Emergic blog.

Owners of web startups like Sanjiv Bikchandani of Naukri.com were, unsurprisingly, the first to take up blogging. Bikchandani has done the smart thing: hosting his blog at a different location, instead of the usual location for many corporate blogs, namely ‘http://acme.com/blog or blog.acme.com‘. A Forrester report this month has written about how few people trust corporate blogs. Hosting a blog somewhere else and having a genuine voice is a start.

Some other corporate blogs can be found here , here and here

Bloggers Uniting for a Cause

Activism blogging is something we need more of in India and this is also the future of news. Shanmugam Manjunath, an engineer with an oil company, was murdered in Bihar. As a manager of IOC, Manjunath had shut down a pump that was selling adulterated fuel. In no mean time, Indian bloggers here and abroad had launched a concentrated campaign in support of Manjunath. For example, here.

Likewise, during the Coca Cola water controversy bloggers had written in support of Sunita Narain‘s noble cause.

So far, no one has taken the government to task on a big scale and issues abound everywhere. I had written about the Government’s ham-handed approach to land acquisition vis-a-vis SEZs (Special Economic Zones) and archaic laws. But that is all I could do. Fortunately, people have risen against SEZs throughout the country and I am happy to report that many related big business plans have come undone.

Bloggers have covered the Nandigram tussle between Mamata Banerji’s people and CPM thugs and the state machinery as well. For example, here.

Indian Media Plagiarizing from Bloggers (or, bloggers highlighting cases of MSM misdeeds)

This is a rich vein, with The Times of India leading the field:

• thecookscottage accuses them here of plagiarising a blog post
• Here the Bangalore Times is accused of copying Jennifer Aniston’s Daily Mirror interview
• Here, the TOI admitted to copying images from Shrinidhi Hande’s blog
• Twilight Fairy accuses TOI of copying from their Flickr account
• Blogger Jabberwock accuses the Times of India of lifting Roger Ebert’s review from the Chicago Sun Times.
• India Uncut on the TOI allegedly lifting from The Guardian’s coverage of the 2003 Cricket World Cup
• Sakaal Times: accused of copying editorial on healthcare from here
• Dainik Bhaskar: accused of copying liberally for its supplements on career
• The Hindu: The paper’s movie reviewer Ghautaman Baskaran is accused of lifting from NYTimes review of the Film “Alexander” by Manohla Dargis.
• Indian Express: Bloggers Amit Varma and Rashmi Bansa accused the paper of lifting from their posts on the Manjunath case without permission. Although, some have said that at that point of their career, this was a good MSM linking thing.
• Yahoo’s newly launched Malayalam site is also accused of copying recipes from blog entries by several Malayalam Bloggers.

Bloggers who have made their millions from blogging

Yes, we have our own Michael Arrington – Amit Agarwal, who blogs about tech tips and tricks at Labnol aka DigitalInspiration, and who reportedly makes a six-figure (dollars) income from the exercise.

Journalists who blog

You can organize these into two broad categories: blogs run by newspapers and TV channels (essentially articles online with a comment feature); and independent blogs written by journalists. Ravish Kumar, who works for NDTV India TV news channel, for instance writes a good freewheeling blog.

Celebrity bloggers

The discerning reader will discover that actors only blog when a major events happens or when their movie is due to release. But while bloggers may remain skeptical about the whole exercise, the general online Indian audience is seemingly enthralled by celebrity bloggers, ever since the news that a social networking site funded by Anil Ambani, the same man who is funding Spielberg, paid Rs. 100 crore ($20 million) to the actor Amitabh Bachhan to blog. Other blogging actors include Aamir Khan, who used to to announce that his dog’s name is Shahrukh Khan (a rival).

Directors took up blogging earlier than actors. Shekhar Kapoor of “Bandit Queen” fame was first off the block, followed by the Quentin Tarantino/Tarsem Singh of India, Anurag Kashyap who wrote the script for the seminal “Satya” . The talkative Karan Johar also blogs.

The quality of writing varies. Grandstanding is rife. I am not looking for Erroll Morris-like quality on these director blogs.

Bloggers vetting politicians

Considering how little we know about our elected representatives – tax records, criminal antecedents, business dealing, mistresses and so forth – it was good to see bloggers write passionately about Pratibha Patil, our President-to-be at the time and her “visions”.

Expressing concerns about the ills of ceremonial posts, a blogger writes, “a system that accords unaccounted privileges to VIPs will end up undermining us, the people”.

Bloggers versus big business: the IIPM controversy

In October 2005 bloggers Gaurav Sabnis and Amit Kapoor (a Professor at MDI, Gurgaon) along with Rashmi Bansal wrote about the veracity of print advertisements given out by a business school in New Delhi, The Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM).

IIPM used all its muscle in silencing the bloggers and it looks as if it succeeded. Apart from Businessworld and Outlook magazines, no one else in the Indian media was brave enough to forego ad income from IIPM (the 7th largest print advertiser at the time) and cover the story, bringing it to its logical end.

While Gaurav Sabnis resigned from his IBM job, Prof. Kapoor stopped writing for his blog altogether.

IIPM still buys out front pages of newspapers to print its heavy-duty ads.

I was building the team at Instablogs Blog Network at the time. Still new at blogging. The IIPM story was the first big story we covered. You can read about it here, here, here and here.

Blog Monkeys and India

What is a Blog Monkey? The term is derived from SEO Monkeys, a derogative term for lowly-paid SEO people working for Indian SEO firms, doing mostly low-level off-page SEO jobs including much-maligned Comment Spamming.

The Blog Monkey writes spammy, heavily rewritten (or copies from RSS posts) 100-word blog posts to make Adsense money.

I think there are more than 100,000 blog monkeys in India, writing for SEO firms, blog networks, and for themselves. Thanks to the Blog Monkeys and the SEO monkeys, Indian blogging enjoys a shady name in certain quarters overseas.

Where do we stand now?

Then are some, including some bloggers, who say that not enough Indian bloggers are providing user-generated content.

To them, I say, wait and watch.

The normal Indian citizen is not as blessed with the same resources as those in developed countries, but we are finding our way.

No one is funding citizen bloggers to perform useful reporting out here – and I am not counting the pay per post spam-blogging deals. Hell, the largest cash-rich newspaper brands in India pay Rs. 2000/month ($40) to their stringers in each district.

I believe Bloggers in India must be ‘a real agent of change’. Craig Newmark says that the role of newspapers is to provide customer service to the community. As bloggers, as Indian bloggers we must each find our own communities to serve.

Will a P.Sainath of Indian blogging appear? Will someone start covering issues that matter to the community? Will bloggers start to graduate from easy opinion-blogging to hard reporting?
Sure, sure. The Great Indian ‘Jugad‘ will happen.

That is all folks. Are these the biggest moments in Indian blogging history? Feel free to add your suggestions.

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Here’s another one for that book I’m working on – I’m trying to think: what have been the most significant events in the history of journalism blogging?

Here’s what I have so far (thanks Mark Jones and Nigel Barlow):

• 1998: The Drudge Report breaks the Monica Lewinsky story. While Drudge denies the site is a blog, it demonstrated how the nimbleness of an online operation could scoop the mainstream media.
• 2001: September 11 attacks: while news websites collapse under the global demand, a network of blogs pass on news and lists of survivors
• 2002: Trent Lott forced to resign after apparently pro-segregationist statements made at an event and initially ignored by mainstream media, were picked up and fleshed out by bloggers
• 2003: Invasion of Iraq: Salam Pax, the ‘Baghdad Blogger’, posts updates from the city as it is bombed, providing a particular contrast to war reporters ‘embedded’ with the armed forces and demonstrating the importance of non-journalist bloggers
• 2003: Christopher Allbritton raises $15,000 through his blog Back-to-Iraq 3.0, to send him to report independently from the war, demonstrating the ability of blogs to financially support independent journalism (called the ‘tip-jar model’).
• 2004: Rathergate/Memogate: CBS’ 60 Minutes broadcast a story about George W. Bush’s National Guard service, and within minutes a section of the blogosphere mobilises to discredit the documents on which it is based. Dan Rather eventually resigns as a result.
• 2004: Asian Tsunami: more blogs mobilise around a disaster, of particular significance for video blogging
• 2005: July 7 Bombings, London: mobile phone image of passengers walking along Tube tunnel posted on MoBlog (although was first sent to The Sun), and goes global from there. A significant moment in moblogging.
• 2006: The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service cites the blog run by the New Orleans Times Picayune during Hurricane Katrina. The flexibility of blogs during a disaster which stopped printing presses and delivery trucks was driven home (h/t Bob Stepno).
• 2007: Talking Points Memo blog breaks story of US attorneys being fired across the country, demonstrating the power of involving readers in an investigation, and carrying it out in public (h/t Albert in the comments).
• 2007: Dave Winer wins his $2,000 bet (made in 2002) that blogs will rank higher than the New York Times for the top 5 news stories of 2007 (h/t Bob Stepno), demonstrating the importance of blogging in news distribution.
• 2007: Myanmar protests: the clampdown that followed democratic protests in the country was seen around the world thanks to blogging, moblogging, and social networking sites. Journalists were not allowed in the country. Even after the government cut off the internet, bloggers located outside the country continued to post material. (h/t Sandra Fish in comments)
• 2008: Peter Hain resigns over donations revealed by UK political blogger Guido Fawkes, who in 2006 broke a story on an affair by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott which he claimed lobby correspondents were sitting on
• 2008: Chinese Earthquake: a key moment for microblogging, as news of the earthquake spreads on Twitter (and Chinese IM service QQ) quicker than any official channels.
• 2008: Collapse of Northern Rock: BBC correspondent Robert Peston breaks one of the biggest stories of the year – not on TV, but on his blog.

What have I missed? This is a horribly Anglo-American list, too, so I’d particularly welcome similar moments from other countries.

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A few weeks ago I wrote an 800-word piece for UK Press Gazette on how journalism has changed in the past decade. My original draft was almost 1200 words – here then is the original ‘Blogger’s Cut’ for your delectation…

The past decade has seen more change in the craft of journalism than perhaps any other. Some of the changes have erupted into the mainstream; others have nibbled at the edges. Paul Bradshaw counts the ways…

From a lecture to a conversation

Perhaps the biggest and most widely publicised change in journalism has been the increasing involvement of – and expectation of involvement by – the readers/audience. Yes, readers had always written letters, and occasionally phoned in tips, but the last ten years have seen the relationship between publisher and reader turn into something else entirely.

You could say it started with the accessibility of email, coupled with the less passive nature of the internet in general, as readers, listeners and watchers became “users”. But the change really gained momentum with…

The rise of the amateur

The blogs of September 11; the camcorder images from the Asian tsunami; the mobile phone images of July 7; the Facebook pages of Virginia Tech. If you needed to read about any of these major events, you could do so – if you wished – without opening a newspaper or watching TV.

The spread of cheap camcorders and video- and photo-enabled mobile phones, coupled with blogs and the viral distribution of the internet made publishers realise they were not only competing with each other, but with the readers themselves. And when a big story broke in public, they needed to be in a position to harvest what became known as “user generated content”. Thankfully the NUJ’s suggestion of “witness contributions” didn’t catch on…

Everyone’s a paperboy/girl now

If a newspaper didn’t reach a particular newsagent, or viewers in the Cumbria region were experiencing difficulties, that simply wasn’t a journalist’s problem. Online, however, distribution has become part of a journalist’s job description, whether they realise it or not.

From your Facebook profile to the way you respond to comments on your blog, a journalist’s activity online has formed a key element in any news organisation’s distribution (although few have yet realised this). Meanwhile, newspaper webpages have come out in a rash of ‘Digg/Blog this’ buttons, and Facebook applications from the likes of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have demonstrated how important it’s become for newspapers to be where the reader is, rather than the other way around.

Just a click away

Amidst all the Web 2.0 hype it’s easy to forget the fundamental characteristic of news in the online era: everything is connected; and the reader is only a click or a search away from something else. This has created major opportunities and challenges for journalists.

On the one hand, journalists can now link to full documents, previous reports, and unedited material. On the other, so can the readers. Material culled from wire copy is more easily spotted; and, as Dan Rather discovered, holes in your story can be quickly highlighted.

And while doorstepping used to be between you and the Dear Departed’s family, its digital equivalent is so much more public. The game has been raised – but have news organisations responded?

Really Simple Syndication

RSS is one of the most underestimated innovations in journalism. At it’s most basic level it means journalists can subscribe to a range of RSS feeds in one RSS reader – and therefore not have to keep checking back to dozens of original websites for updates. But the more people play with the technology, the more is being achieved.

For one thing, RSS enables very specific consumption: readers can now subscribe to just one section of a newspaper – or even one writer. In the Sun’s case, they can subscribe to search results. In terms of production, RSS enables different bits of news to be aggregated: pick a source, any source, and mash it up into a single feed. It works for Google News, why shouldn’t it work again?

Mapping

2007 saw some real experimentation with mapping in UK newspapers: the Manchester Evening News mapped fatal shootings in Manchester, the Grantham Journal

tracked a “killer heron” and the Lancashire Evening Post mapped roadworks and speed cameras. The Shropshire Star used it to map fuel prices.

But 2008 should mark the year mapping and geotagging gets serious. Leading the pack are Archant, with their much-awaited geotag-based website relaunches. Journalists, says Web Editor James Goffin, can now draw on a map when they submit a story, or supply postcodes. He argues it will “make for a better archive and make reporters’ lives easier in handling cuttings and follow ups.” The Telegraph launched the first stage of their dynamic Flash-based political map of Britain, while the BBC are using similar technologies for their proposed local website plans, which looks likely to further increase the pressures on regional publishers.

Hyperlocal, international

The internet has released news organisations from the limitations of physical distribution and broadcast – to the extent that news organisations have seen a new market for their old print products.

The Guardian, emboldened by statistics about website visitors, took its step across the Atlantic in 2003; The Times followed in 2006, and the BBC announced plans to sell advertising on its international site last year. And figures released last month showed visitors from outside the UK outnumbering the domestic audience for the BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times and The Daily Mail.

Conversely, “hyperlocal” has entered the nomenclature of the news executive. Trinity Mirror’s Teesside Gazette’s experiments with hyperlocal, postcode-based news led to print equivalents, and likely extension to the group’s other newspapers.

Databases

The biggest untapped potential in journalism online is that of databases. So far we’ve seen some impressive demonstrations: ChicagoCrime.org famously drew information from a crime database onto a map of the area – and was followed by similar efforts at the LA Times and Washington Post (who added house sales and schools); The Herald Tribune, meanwhile, used databases in their coverage of how complaints against teachers were handled - readers could drill down to data in a specific school.

In the UK it’s The Telegraph leading the way, with football coverage that pulls up player statistics to rival ProZone, an A levels results map, and a recently unveiled political map that presents information on how local services ratings have improved or declined. Developments such as these have generated debate about whether journalists should be taught how to program. The conclusion seemed to be that it was easier to teach programmers how to do journalism.

Measurability

Most read, most commented, most emailed. Hits, pageviews and unique visitors. If you felt your editor’s news sense was as bad as his fashion sense, the measurability of the web gave you valuable ammunition; but if you thought Performance Related Pay was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Multimedia

If the pen is mightier than the sword, what does that make a microphone, camcorder and laptop… in a wifi hotspot? Newspapers dabbled in podcasts in 2005, before really mucking in 2006 when video took off and print journalists started worrying for the first time about tea staining their teeth. Now print journalists are learning about white balance, and broadcast journalists are learning about local news. And everyone is waiting for an almighty fight.

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