The Sunday Times of India - Blogging In India

The Sunday Times of India covers the Blogging fever that has gripped India. Some excerpts:

Be it Bollywood or business, sex or spirituality, there is little that Indian bloggers don’t tackle. But how did a trend that was slow to pick up initially in India become a phenomenon that has embraced so many?

The opinion’s almost unanimous on this one: a government directive that led to the blocking of blogs in July last year proved to be the turning point for the Indian blogosphere. ‘‘Till then, awareness was very low. The ban sparked such a furore that many people who didn’t have a clue what a blog is found out about it,’’ says Amit Agarwal, a techie who gave up an MNC job in 2004 to become the country’s first professional blogger.

Today, the blogging bug has bitten so many that Agarwal, who brings out a directory of the best Indian blogs, gets over five review requests a day. ‘‘Though readership of most Indian blogs isn’t very high, some of them have extremely good content.’’ But readership is what cyber success is all about and that’s where most blogs flounder.

‘‘Making money through blogs isn’t easy. It takes vision, creativity, commitment and a lot of hard work — more than you would give to a job.’’ Agarwal should know — he makes a living from his technology blog Digital Inspiration, which averages a whopping 1.2 million hits a month. Most of the revenue generated is via online advertising. ‘‘I work more than 12 to 14 hours a day, answering queries and reading hundreds of RSS feeds to track what’s hot and what might interest people,’’ says this IITian turned-blogger.