New Delhi: It started as a joke.
Two lines of black text on a yellow box, pinioned in a corner of Peter Merholz’s personal website. “I’ve decided,” the user-interface designer from San Francisco wrote in 1999, “to pronounce the word weblog as ‘wee-blog’, or blog for short.”
In the next 10 years, the unwieldy and awkward word grew from being an exclusive preserve of the tech savvy to become the dominant face of the Internet. It became Merriam-Webster’s word of the year in 2004. It spawned an entire subset of language to explain itself. The 133 million “netizens” of its “blogosphere” rang alarm bells in mainstream media organizations, and it was arguably responsible for the millionth word in English: Web 2.0.
Also See A Decade of Blogging (PDF)
In India, the blog has grown steadily, if unspectacularly, from a handful at the dawn of the country’s Internet era in the early 2000s to an estimated 3.2 million, according to JuxtConsult’s India Online 2008 report. JuxtConsult is a Delhi-based market research firm.
The exact number of active Indian blogs, however, is hard to pin down, and the size of the Indian blogosphere could be “roughly between 200,000 and half a million active blogs today”, says Gaurav Mishra, chief executive of social media research and strategy company 20:20 Web Tech.
“When I started in June 2003, the Indian blogging scene was mostly personal blogs commenting on each other’s posts,” says Patrix, the founder of DesiPundit.com, a popular Indian blog aggregator. The prominent bloggers were so few, he says, “You could count them on your hand.”
Kiruba Shankar, now chief executive of Business Blogging Pvt. Ltd, a social media consultancy firm and one of India’s earliest bloggers, remembers trying to organize a bloggers’ meet in Chennai in late 2002. Shankar was then a senior executive for Sify Technologies Ltd, an IT services company.
“It took me three weeks to find five people to attend, and back then it was just relief that there actually were other people in this strange new pursuit with you,” he says.
Technorati, a search engine for blogs, in its annual State of the Blogosphere report indexes 133 million blogs worldwide since 2002. The 11 September attack in 2001, and the 2003 Iraq war saw the emergence of a large number of personal and political blogs. In 2004, the first year Technorati published its report, it tracked four million blogs. By October 2005, that number had risen to 19.6 million.
But in Indian blogging, there were no such tipping points. “Indian blogs have always grown organically, steadily through word of mouth. They’ve never suddenly exploded onto the scene in terms of numbers,” says Shankar.