Banglablogs is a directory of Bangla (Bengali) blogs. It has been created by Debashish, the brain behind The Indibloggies (dubbed India’s blog Oscars). The directory originated from a tutorial he wrote about how to start a Bangla blog on Blogger.com using Unicode. This tutorial sparked of a whole generation of Bangla bloggers, predominantly (initially) from Bangladesh and later on from India as well. Debashish says that his real motivation in creating the directory was to promote usage of Unicode (a text encoding system which allows creation of vernacular content).

The directory allows Bangla blog writers to get enlisted by submitting their URL which is approved by him. It has features like search, blog categories, blog ratings & reviews and a RSS feed to keep you updated. Something that caught my attention was the country tag cloud, where you can see that the bulk of the content is from Bangladesh. While monetization is not a primary motive, the site has Google ads to generate money for the hosting & domain costs. There is a featured section on the home page, and you can pay a nominal sum to get your blog listed there. Only blogs written using Bangla script (Bangla fonts) are considered. English blogs about Bangla or English blogs written by Bengali authors are not eligible.

Debashish is into other Indian vernaculars as well. He maintains a site called Chittha Vishwa which aggregates the Hindi blogdom. (Incidentally, the word ‘Chittha’ is the Hindi word for blogs). This features Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi & Nepali blogs. Debashish is also involved with Nirantar, the world’s first Hindi blogzine, written by a bunch of Hindi bloggers. It is an amalgation of conventional blogging and formal writing in Hindi.

It’s a commendable effort indeed. Blogging as a means of creative expression knows no language barriers and there’s no reason why, in the not too distant future, this should evolve into a thriving community. Hats off to Debashish !