What do Indian Blog Readers like to do?
I echo the thoughts expressed by Vijay. Majority of the blogs I follow are from non-Indian Bloggers. There are only few quality blogs from India. We definitely have more scope for new bloggers to cover different aspects of start ups and entrepreneurship.
I would like to add one more perspective. Some of our fellow bloggers do work hard to bring stories. The visitors to these blogs prefer to stand outside and watch the show. Very few of them actually leave quality comments on these blogs. To give numbers to my thoughts, I mined the data for 5 of the Indian Blogs which I follow. The blogs I chose are WATBlog, Webyantra, Startup Dunia, Pluggd.in and Trak.in. This is in the ascending order of the number of RSS Readers these blogs have. If I am correct, most of these bloggers, except WATBlog are part time bloggers. The following graph is a comparison between RSS Readers and Comments for the month of April 2008.
On an average, these blogs have around 1200 Feed Readers. Trak.in has the most readers; around 2000. You can see the dismal number of comments readers leave on these blogs. Pluggd.in received the maximum number of comments; around 260. To complete the analysis, here is another graph, which compares number of posts and comments for April 2008.
If I summarize, only a few of us leave comments on blogs. Blogs in US and else where carry discussions which are useful for the readers as it gives different perspective. The discussion in these comments often become the subject of the next post. I am yet to see an Indian Blogger’s post in Techmeme.
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Comments
Hi Saad,
Great Analysis, I echo your conclusion whole heartedly. In my one year of blogging, this probably is the most frustrating thing that I have noticed. People just do not like to interact. Every post of mine get more than 500 uniques on average and only couple of them choose to leave comments.
Interaction is what a blog is built on…it is kind of a boost a blogger needs to keep going and churning out good stuff.
Good point you have brought out here…
Indian blog readers comment shy ? I came across an interesting comparison done by Saad Mohammed on his blog Oodami. Saad rightly points out that very few Indian blog readers
Well, i would say that the main reason this is, not many Indians know about web 2.0 stuff. I hope the situation will change soon.
Thanks for leaving comments. The posts of the blogs I used for analysis have about 80% informational and 20% original content/thoughts. I found that only 10% of the visitors really leave comments. And most of the original content had some quality comments.
@ Vikas- You brought up a good point. Are Indian bloggers just informational bloggers? Can Indian bloggers create commentable content? Aha! it looks like topic for my next post. 
Thanks for the tip
@ Vijay- In the month of April 2008, TC had over 245 post and thousands of comments. And TC gets 80% of the traffic from US, so roughly 80% of the comments also could be from US. Another thing which I noted is that there are lot of spam comments in TC. TC and RWW have established them selves as subject matter experts (SME) in their respective fields and hence more value to readers. As you covered in your post there is a huge potential for SMEs to start blog in India and be successful.
@Arun- Thanks for giving coverage to my post and hence facilitating some health discussion around this subject. I will have a follow up post soon on this subject.
[…] hot topics in the blogosphere. It helps to keep up with the latest happenings. I am yet to see a post from an Indian Blogger which made into the Techmeme list. Lets look at the anatomy of the RSS feed […]
[…] my previous post we discussed that very few (around 10%) readers of Indian Blogs leave comments. One of the reader (Vikas) left a comment saying that there […]
indians are poor commentors probably because independent thinking and debate have never been inculcated in the average indian. we are better at collecting info, solving techno math problems and nodding our heads and saying “sahi hai, bedu”. we have never inour whole lives been seriously asked “what do u think?” and so we have never learnt to think on ourown and give a coherent answer. the average american commentor is probably one who got in front of a comp because he wrote his own essays thru school and college. the average indian got in front of a comp by writing MCQ enrance exams. dont expect such a person to actually visit a technical blog.
u wanna see indians going wild with comments? go to rediff.com and read any of the general news articles and the comments below it.
then dear bloggers, ask yourself whether you realy wantthat quality of comments on your blog
Sachin, I have seen the quality of comments in Rediff. One of my friends reads that for his pastime . Bloggers expect quality participation from readers. This will keep the bloggers motivated, I guess.
Thanks for leaving comments.
Today I found a blog from 17 year old kid from India (Yuvi) listed in top 100 of Techmeme. Congratulations! He is a stats freak!
http://thestatbot.com/2008/05/28/unbelievable-the-statbot-in-the-techmeme-leaderbaord/
Nikil @ PaidContent as well as Amit @ Labnol have also appeared on Techmeme. But Yuvi appeared on the leader board currently at rank 91.
Interesting analysis. I’d like to see the comments vs. posts analysis for some of the other sites, like readwriteweb. I think techcrunch and all attract a global audience, so the commenting might be different and hard to extract demographics from.