This year saw the baby bloggers growing up. After the Indian government’s ban of blogger.com in July, many bloggers who had till then been lost in a sea of websites, banded together to try to fix this problem. Within a week there was an online group created on google, and about 500 bloggers were active on the forum. Many made RTI applications to the government. Others posted helpful proxy server addresses so that people could access their blogs once again. And suddenly everyone seemed to be talking about them. The mainstream media noticed this frenzied activity on the Internet and censorship became the buzzword of the summer. The ban was lifted, but a movement had been created. Most bloggers now look back at the ban as a good thing — because it gave them a coherent voice. But they are still concerned about the government keeping tabs on them.

For the uninitiated, blogs are personal spaces on the Internet. They are small websites where an individual can write about any subject under the sun, post pictures or use as a platform to collect information. “It is a social medium” says Dina Mehta of Conversations with Dina, “And I think the mainstream media did not quite understand it. It is community based. You build relationships with other bloggers as you leave comments on each other’s blogs, and that helps you improve. It is a self-correcting medium and so the good ones become popular and the bad ones left behind.” In fact, many from the blogging community in India have banded together in Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Delhi to meet face-to-face. This October there was a Bloggers ‘Unconference’ in Chennai and Delhi Bloggers Meet (DBM) started in 2004. A team from the BBC that covered DBM this year was impressed with the diverse blogs in India. Apart from personal blogs, they found numerous social-minded blogs, and moreover, bloggers who were leaving the anonymity of cyberspace to spread this social consciousness.

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