A Lens to represent Hindi bloggers around the world.

The Hindi blogging community is probably 300+ now and the spirit has been strong. Few like minded among us joined forces to float many initiatives like Akshargram, a group blog, now primarily used for group notification and Sarvagya, a group wiki where we collaboratively accumulate our knowledge. Chittha Vishwa is the first Hindi blog aggregator and now aggregates other language blogs (notice the Indic blog Pie chart and the Hindi "tagcloud"); another popular aggregator is Narad.

Few novel initiatives of the group to increase cohesiveness were Anugunj, where bloggers express their opinion on a given topic and Chittha Charcha, where we highlight the blogdom's activities (infact our intention was to highlight all indic blogs, but the effort could not gain momentum). Buno-kahani is another such unique attempt where various bloggers try to write a story collaboratively.

In early 2005, we started publishing an online Hindi blogzine called Nirantar (and it has been revived this August with a bigger core team). The Chithakar mailing list, that has over 300 members, regularly discusses technical and other issues pertaining to usage of Hindi over Internet.

Probably each one of us doing his bit to benefit Hindi and the blogmandal, from making customized Hindi templates for Blogger, to encouraging new bloggers by commenting on their posts, to writing tutorials, to creating tools, to maiking ourselves heard at the immensely popular link-blog Desipundit.

I think that the one single factor that makes the Hindi blogdom stickier and more cohesive than the English blogdom is the love for the language, the desire to promote it on web and to take it to its worthy position.

Please do not think that Indicblogging is limited to the names taken here. If you wish to know about Indic blogging notice the links and the last event's winners at the Indibloggies blog. There are blogs in Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bangla, Malayalam, Kannada and even Sindhi, Assamiya and Kashmiri.