Hindi Blogosphere: A brouhaha, customer service and blogger meets! · Global Voices
Amit Gupta

So it's after about one and a half month that we are looking at what has been going on in Hindi blogosphere. The dust had barely settled down when it rose again, this time on the issue of expulsion of a blog from the leading Hindi blog aggregator, Narad. For quite some time Narad has acted as a readership supplier to the handful of Hindi blogs, a number which has been growing steadily. Sometime back, Narad introduced a relatively lenient policy, to which all bloggers had to agree before their blog would be aggregated by it.
Now one particular blogger insulted another Hindi blogger by calling him a dirty napkin. This was against Narad's policy as it clearly states that if a blogger attacks another fellow blogger personally then his or her blog would be expelled from Narad and so it was. Most of the Hindi bloggers welcomed this action but some bloggers didn't like it and labelled it as an attack on freedom of speech and expression. However, it's interesting to note that the blogger wasn't forced to shut down his blog, only his blog was expelled from Narad. Some bloggers felt that this was rightly done as that same blogger was later putting up murder threats on another blog against all those who disagreed with him.
A second front was opened up against Narad and its public face Jitu. This issue went on for quite sometime and still hasn't subsided. During this, many accusations surfaced. Some bloggers found these accusations absurd. One stated that Narad and its technical team are radical Hindus who are running their saffron propaganda via Narad, while another accusation was that only posts supporting radical Hinduism are showing up on Narad, and that liberal and anti-Hindu posts are being blocked.
It's a little hard to fathom how Narad's team could have written a code that was somehow biased and differentiating on the basis of religion. However, things are starting to look as if they will settle down gradually, for now.
Anyways, moving on from this issue, let's see what else has been blogged in the last week. Notepad felt kinda low when she saw a photo of some nice looking coffee admitting that all she knew about coffee was that there's good coffee and there's bad coffee, not realizing that there are so many types of coffee. She narrates her coffee experience at Cafe Coffee Day, a chain of coffee shops in India.
Ravi Ratlami (who was recently awarded MVP from Microsoft) wrote a satirical article about a recent invention by Italian scientists – hunger killing pills. In his cartoon, besides the news clipping, he showed a pig saying to the other that perhaps one day someone will make a pill that would kill Indian politicians’ hunger for votes and (currency) notes. Then perhaps they will be able to attend to more pressing matters, like running the country in a better way (for a change)! ;)
He also blogs about a new blog comment selling service called Buy Blog Comments(link) where you can buy one of the three packages available at different prices which will give you different number of valid and relevant comments on your blog. Seems like this service is based on the model of website traffic selling websites which sell traffic for websites.
Customer service is important these days and efficient customer service is crucial for a business if it wants to have its customers stick around. So it looks like Google's Blogger.com team is working on the age-old service and have now introduced the ability to create polls as well, because Ankur blogged just about that. And on Tarakash, Sanjay narrates his experience with the first rains of this monsoon and how he got stuck as train services were stopped due to flooding of tracks and he finished the 4 hour journey in 10 hours. While he's all praises for the Railways for stopping the trains while the things become okay, I think that they should consider thinking about how to prevent these train stopping incidents when such a thing as flooding of tracks etc. occur; they can take measures to battle minor flooding etc.
Not everyone however, is happy to serve their regular or would-be customers by providing any service, let alone efficient or decent service. This became quite evident when I had a bad experience with Dass Studios with their ignorant and arrogant staff. I called them up, inquiring about a polarizer that I was looking to buy for my new camera. They are not just another small shop but are an established name in photography and photographic equipment business in New Delhi. But as the saying goes, someone's loss is someone else's gain. Dass Studios’ loss was Mahatta & Co.'s (a 92 year old photography shop in New Delhi) gain as I got excellent service from them; they even went to the trouble of finding the brand which I was looking for, even though they had told me earlier that I'd be lucky to get that brand in the market!
Blogger Meets are happening quite frequently in the Hindi Blogosphere now (or it seems that the blogger meet season is on). Pankaj blogged about his little blogger meet with the first Hindi blogger Alok(the man who started it all) as the latter was on a visit to the US. Sagar also narrated his experience as he had two blogger meets, one of them on the way to his native village. While I also participated in a recent blogger meet as Manish was on a Delhi visit due to some official work, it seems that this is all going to be just a warm-up compared to the BIG Blogger Meet that's going to take place this Saturday (July 14th) which if called an international blogger meet, won't be exaggeration as Kuwait based Jitu will be attending along with other fellow bloggers from other parts of India, and some from Delhi, the city which has more Hindi Bloggers than any other city around the world!
Ankur blogs about how he would like Linux to be, i.e., just as easy to use as Microsoft Windows with support for all his favourite and frequently used software. Now ambitious as this may sound, it's not far away. A while back, I blogged about ReactOS, which aims to be the Open Source and free alternative to Microsoft WindowsXP by being similar to the latter as well as having the application and driver compatibility, meaning all Microsoft Windows applications and drivers can run on ReactOS as well. Linspire's free offering of the scaled down version of their Linux distro as Freespire is already in the run, so things can be expected to be quite hot in the coming year or two. While we're on technology, Alok broke the news in the Hindi blogosphere about the availability of Blogger.com site in Hindi.
Sunil came up with a blog-post for the unmarried telling them about the hundreds of thousands of weddings scheduled on the 7th July all over the world and how people have booked venues for that day years in advance! And if you missed it, intentionally (like me) or accidentally, then not to worry, there's going to be 08/08/08, 09/09/09, 10/10/10, 11/11/11 & 12/12/12. Or for that matter even 06/07/08, 07/08/09, 08/09/10, 09/10/11, 10/11/12 & 11/12/13 as well! ;) Hmm, lots of cool dates to choose from, I think I'll also pick one of these & start planning! ;)
Manish finally finished his travelogue series of Andaman & Nicobar Islands. Just reading it one can imagine what fun it must have been (and you don't even need a strong and wild imagination like mine, eh!), so it's no telling how the real fun will be when you are actually there. So I think I'll just start saving!
This chapter of a guided tour through the Hindi Blogosphere concludes here. We'll meet soon again for another chapter of the guided tour. Till then, au revoir!! :)
Links courtesy: Narad