Telugu Blog Aggregators

Telugu blogs are growing in numbers. There are several aggregators which capture the feed from these blogs and present to the readers promptly.

Following are the details of the aggregators.

Koodali (www.koodali.org): This is the oldest Blog aggregator on the scene. Veeven is the owner and Administrator of Koodali. Started in 2006, Koodali dominated the aggregator scene, and it continues to do so. Pleasing User interface is the most important positive aspect of Koodali. Being the long standing player in the field, it is the most widely used aggregator. But it lacks a few important features: Delay in appearance of the posts and comments. There is a huge lag of upto one hour before a new post appears on Koodali. This is the biggest drawback of Koodali. It uses Python based Planet feed reader software. Koodali constitutes for about 50% of the total aggregator traffic to the blogs.

Telugu Bloggers (www.telugubloggers.com): Telugubloggers.com was started almost at the same time as Koodali. It was setup by Chandrasekhar Vallabhaneni. He is the least visible owner of all the aggrgators. He never really put explicit efforts to make it popular, which is, perhaps, the reason for its less popularity. It runs on Wordpress.

Jalleda (jalleda.com): Jalleda was started in 2007 and is the first to show individual statistics regarding the posts and comments. The people behind this aggregator are not known. There are many technical issues with this browser, mainly because of the huge amount of database calls that it makes. perhaps, it is time they moved to a virtual hosting, if not a dedicated hosting. Jalleda is also slow to capture latest posts and comments. One annoying issue with jalleda is that the comments appear repeatedly. When you go the the Author comments page, this repetition increases telescopically, if not exponentially. The first comment appears once, the second one twice, third one thrice,.. etc. It needs a correction immediately.

Haaram (haaram.com): Haaram came into being in 2009. This is the only aggregator which runs on Microsoft technology. This is probably the fastest of all the aggregators. Bhaskararami Reddy is the man behind this site. Haaram is one of the fastest to show the posts and comments; they appear almost immediately.

Malika (maalika.org): Malika is probably the fastest to show the latest posts and comments. This aggregator is the outcome of a tussle between Koodali and a few bloggers. When Koodali expressed inclination towards blocking some blogs based on the content, there was opposition from few people. That opposition led to the evolution of Malika which is a collective effort of Bharadwaja Velamakanni, Ekalingam and others.

Besides the above, there are two other aggregators:
A2Z Dreams (a2zdreams.com/aggregator) by Haranadh Kandulapati
Telugu Web Media (teluguwebmedia.asia/) by Praveen Mandangi

There used to be another Aggregator - thenegoodu.com, which ran for more than a year from 2006. It was shut down after the untimely demise of Kalyan, one of its promoters. Kalyan started a Tamil blog aggregator thenkoodu.com which too was closed.

As the Telugu blogging is still in its infancy, the aggregators continue to capture all the new posts and comments, and the readers are able to see their favorite blogs without missing any. But, when the number of blogs increases beyond these levels, the latest posts move down fast and disappear quickly from the page, and readers will lose site of their favorite blogs. To counter this, aggregators need to come out with user-customizable reading lists. Or, users should move to personal feed readers like Google Reader.

Create a contact form

We see different tyupes of forms on the web sites. Contact form, Sign up forms, Suggestion forms, etc. But creating such form on a Blog is something many bloggers don't know. With Google Docs, it is a matter of minutes now. The post explains in a few simple steps.

1. Login to your Gmail account. If you don't have a Google account, create one. It is free.
2. On the top left of the Gmail interface, you see the links for other Google services like Docs, Calendar, Orkut etc.
3. Click Docs. It opens in a separate window or tab.
4. Click "Create New" and click 'Forms' in its sub menu.
5. You can create a new form using the friendly interface.
6. Save the form. 
7. In the "More Actions" menu, you will see the "Embed" sub menu. Click it.
8. You will see the embed code. Copy that code.
9. Paste that code on the page or post of your blog 
10. Lo! you have the form ready on your blog.
11. When the user submits the information through this form, the data is captured in a Google Excel sheet associated to it. You can see this Excel sheet in your Google Docs.

 Should you have any doubts on this process, please write to us using the comments form of this post. 

A blog with a genuine purpose

There are blogs which publish commentaries on politics, current events or contemporary issues. There are blogs which present poetry or film reviews. There are blogs, dedicated to media watch and some dedicated to an ideology and some to IT. Today, we introduce a blog, dedicated to Science.

Science articles are rare in Telugu. Great writers of yesteryear like Mahidhara Nalinimohana Rao wrote several books on Science. Very few Science books or articles are written presently, almost non existent in blogs. Sastravigjnanam stepped in to fill this gap. Run by three young men, the blog presents several articles on Science, popular Science, scientific temperament etc in crisp Telugu. The blog features stories based on Science, as well.  One of the bloggers, Srinivasa Chakravarthy, wrote several books on Science in Telugu.

The quality of language used in the blog is of high quality. Some Science terms in English are used as is, untranslated. Wherever translated, the translations are apt and precise.

With about 300 posts, the blog is a wealth of Science articles in Telugu. Kudos to the Bloggers!

Media Matters

Mainstream Media in Andhra Pradesh has seen sort of an explosion in the last two years. There are more than 25 TV channels, with most of them in the News and Entertainment sector. All these channels air the programs in Telugu, mostly catering to the people living in the State. Considering the tele-density in the state, the number of channels can be considered as overflowing. This led to a fierce competition amongst the channels for the Television Rating Points (TRPs). Besides there are at least two new newspapers on the media horizon in the last two years.

Competition is always good for the consumers. And we saw the benefits of the competition in the Telephone sector. Gone are the days when people used to request the MLAs and MPs for recommendation letters to get a telephone allotted on priority. Now every pocket has a phone and virtually at rock bottom prices.

But this is not the case with the TV media. Competition brought no improvement in the quality of the service. Instead, it led the channels resort to cheap tactics to attract the eyeballs. It all started with the channels claiming 'exclusives', 'we showed it first', etc. This 'been there' attitude led to further shouting. It went to that level that the field reporters while reporting the news, focussed more on 'we reported this first', 'faster than any other channel' etc. Showing obscenities in the guise of news, glorifying the crimes by telecasting real life crime stories (reconstructed), showing late night soft porn shows etc have become the order of the day.  Channels stooped to such levels that one of the entertainment channels had to be asked to stop telecasting a program by the State Human Rights Commission (Later the channel got a stay on the order). Almost all the channels resorted to such cheap practices, barring a few. As the competition grew hotter, the channels got nastier. Instead of honing their production and presentation skills, the channels started sharpening their knives to back stab the competitors.

There are many allegations that the channels are resorting to unethical journalistic practices like extortion and blackmailing too. A recent exposure by ABN, of an underhand deal by an NTV top employee proved the point. In fact, it is believed that one such blackmailing tactics employed by a channel on an educational institution, some three years back, was one of the reasons that led to the institution establishing their own news channel.

But, little is reported about the state of the TV media in Telugu blogs. Bloggers do write about the media, do criticize it but not regularly. There is a great need for some blogs dedicated to the media. Some blogs appeared in the past, but those are all vindictive in nature and resorted personal tirades.

But there is one blog, AP Media matters, trying to fill this gap. Started a year back by S. Ramu, a media veteran, this blog keenly observes the print and TV media and reports promptly. He advocates Journalistic ethics and reports about the unethical practices resorted to, by the media houses and the journos.

Besides reporting, he also brings to light some of the issues facing the journalists which normally do not see the light. Recently he reported the story of a TV presenter who was fired by her employer, because she wrote some posts in her blog, which are unsavory to the employer.

The blog is regularly followed by many enthusiastic readers. Though the blog is generally unbiased in its criticism, there are instances where the readers complained about selective criticism. Overall, the blog is doing a good job. There is need for more such blogs on mainstream media.