History of Malayalam Blogs

Blogging like activity among malayalees started first around 1996 on now extinct guestbook of Kerala.com. They used an ASCII font Kerala.ttf using the predecessor of Varamozhi, Madhuri. This activitiy continued for about three years and stopped. When commercial blogging services were made available a few years later, Malayalam online writing gained popularity. Advent of unicode fonts and transliteration tools such as Varmozhi and Mozhi contributed to the spreading of online malayalam writing. (Read more: 1, 2). The publicity that followed the Malayalam Blog meet in Kochi, July 2006 boosted the popularity of Malayalam blogging (see graph below).

Figure 1: Interest in Malayalam Blogs based on monthly average of unique visitors to this blog (May 2006 - Sep. 2009). Uncorrected for search engine parameters. The spike near August 2006 corresponds to the media coverage of the first Kochi Blog Meet.

From year 2004 to 2009 an exponential 'explosion' in the number of published Malayalam blog posts can be observed (Figure 2). While in year 2004, only 16 unicode blog posts where published, in year 2009, the number is going to well exceed 1 lakh. Future of any language depends on how well its users adapt to emerging technologies. From this perspective, Malayalam language seems to have a bright future.

Figure 2. Number of Malayalam blog posts from year 2004 to Sep. 2009 based on Google blog search.



Posting date: September 09, 2009