Make way for Telugu blogs

HYDERABAD: Ganapati is a farmer from Tanuku, West Godavari, overseeing his work and also sharing farmer-related information sitting in Hyderabad through his first farmer-oriented blog రైతే రాజు (Rythe-Raju).

Non-conversant in English, Ganapati had no idea that one-day he would become the first farmer to maintain a blog for farmers, that too in Telugu.

These days, he is passing-on whatever new techniques of horticulture he is learning, through his blogs, to his farming counterparts. “It was last year when I came across an article on Telugu blogs. I noted down the blog addresses and visited them. The persons who maintained the blogs helped me to write in Telugu,” he says.

Thanks to the growing interest in IT among people from other walks of life, it has become easy for people like Ganapati to maintain Telugu blogs, writing and uploading Telugu articles in Wikipedia, forming Telugu chat groups and finding technical-support to ‘tweak’ windows and other operating systems to transliterate Telugu.

“Eighteen months back we started sharing information on how to make computer write Telugu by using English keyboard. Now, there are 3,000 active contributors to Wikipedia and 1,000 dedicated Telugu blogs,” said Chava Kiran Kumar, a software engineer blogging as ‘chavakiran’ at blogspot.com.

There are host of blogs dedicated to help first time users who do not know how to blog in Telugu.“For the uninitiated, it may take some time to get the hang of it. One can visit lekhini.org and he can straight away start writing in Telugu,” said another blogger, Veera Venkatramana, blogging as Veevan.

The websites useful to visit: Etelugu.org, koodali.org, computerera.kodali.org for technical support, lekhini.org for typing in Telugu, http://groups.google.com/group/telugublog for access to Telugu blogs and http://te.wikipedia.org for Telugu wikipedia.

Courtesy: The Hindu