Whats the point of Blogging in Sinhala ?

Posted by Nishadha in Monday, March 17th 2008 under: Blogging Tags: Blog Marathon

Looks like the Sri Lankan blogs are on the rise , This is the first time I heard of blog marathon held in Sri Lanka so I guess its safe to say I was pleased and a little exited as well.But I was disappointed to see that it was only for bloggers blogging in Sinhalese.To be honest I haven’t seeing many Sinhalese blogs so I have doubts about the number of participants , but I will be eagerly waiting for the event just to get to know some Sri Lankan bloggers.

Although events like these are good for building relationships I don’t think its a great idea to encourage people to blog in Sinhalese.By blogging in Sinhalese your limiting your readers to Sri Lankans only.Then theres the problem with Sinhalese characters , Very few Sri Lankan web surfers have this installed , there are many times I see only ???? marks in Kottu , so although you write great content chances of someone reading them are slim. Of course this greatly reduces your money making ability on the web , I doubt anyone will want a review from a Sinhalese blog.

People might argue this will encourage people who are not proficient in English to blog , but this is not a valid point since to setup a blog and to maintain it successfully you need some English knowledge. The introduction of the Unicode character set are great for the general public since they can access government websites using Sinhalese but for blogging I see no valid argument.

And I have few problems with the software itself.First of all it starts automatically with windows and I didn’t see any option to remove it from the startup process. Secondly Since I don’t understand Tamil I don’t want the Tamil characters installed but I didn’t find anyway to get only the Sinhalese characters installed. I don’t think its that hard to add these features so maybe we can expect the new and improved software in the near future.

I haven’t being in blog marathon so I don’t know exactly how this works , but I think the wordpress hosted users have a big advantage over other users because of the time stamp functionality available with wordpress.All you have to is set up some posts nice and early and once the event starts set the time stamps and have a good night sleep.Anyway I hope it will be a great event it will be a nice chance to get to meet some fellow Sri Lankan bloggers.

Update :- Instructions to install Sinhala Unicode .

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16 Comments Already.Leaving a comment can give you PR2 back link.

Chamara Peiris Said,

March 17th, 2008 @3:10 pm

Just google “sinhala bloggers” and see, you will get huge list

Cheers,
Chamara

Salami Said,

March 17th, 2008 @3:43 pm

there are ppl who blog for other things than money

Mia Said,

March 17th, 2008 @10:42 pm

I know about the ???? marks or ========= At first I wondered if that was a joke until I learnt otherwise. I would love to have been able to read some Sinhala blogs but I don’t have whatever that is necessary installed to read.

rumbling Said,

March 18th, 2008 @2:59 am

Chamara,
I typed Sinhala bloggers before writing the post and I came up with very few sites in the first two pages of the Google results.

Salami,
how nice of you to ignore the less readers and restriction in fonts part and just point out the money making part.

Mia,
I updated the post with a link to where you can download the Sinhala fonts.

nidhahasa Said,

March 18th, 2008 @3:50 am

Thing that you need to undersatnd is that language doesn’t matter until you provide inr=teresting content. let me tell you that most of the blogs in the world today use japanese or chines. So sinhala is still the main language in this country. So please don’t let itr down. We just trying to get more people involved in this.

Cheers

indi Said,

March 18th, 2008 @4:40 am

Most people in Sri Lanka read Sinhala, hence it makes sense to write for them.

English literacy is very low here. If Sri Lankan blogging is going to move beyond its current plateau Sinhala blogging is essential. Not to mention that the Sinhala language itself is expressive, hilarious and rich.

The Unicode was one step - it is now far simpler to read Sinhala online than it was before, and it will be seamless in a matter of years. What Sinhala bloggers are doing now is the next vital step in bringing this ‘common’ medium to Sri Lanka as a whole.

Rakhitha Karunarathne Said,

March 18th, 2008 @10:39 am

It is true that ability to read English is not a common thing in among Sri Lankans. But if you consider Sri Lankans that has access to Internet, English knoledge is common enough. Those who do not access internet regular basis will any way not read blogs regardless of the language.

I think the choice of the language will depend on choice of the audience. If you want only the Sinhalese people to read your blog then better to do it in Sinhalese. Otherwise you are only restricting the audience.

Blogging in Chinese or Japanese make sense because there is a huge Chinese population out there and most Japanese internet users are not English readers.

Peter Said,

March 18th, 2008 @10:44 am

It is tricky to balance between your own country’s language and something as popular as english. More blogging software should support posting in multiple languages. i don’t think wordpress does, but it would be really nice if your could put up one post and have it in more than one language.

March 18th, 2008 @1:02 pm

I think Rakitha has given the answer to most of the comments posted above.Its the content that attracts the reader and what I’m saying is that there isn’t enough people who are accessing the internet and can only read Sinhalese.And Unicode character set is still not popular enough to switch to blogging in Sinhalese.
Most of the blogs that support Sinhalese blogging write their posts in English because they know otherwise they will get very few readers.
What I am saying at this moment we are still not ready to be blogging in Sinhalese.

sam Said,

March 18th, 2008 @1:22 pm

Limited audience is not that bad. But if you trying to make money using the blog (not a bad idea at all), it is always good to find a large audience, such as men that don’t get laid (also known as married men) and make a porn blog for them, than writing in Sinhala.

But deferent people interested in deferent audience. Some do write about political blogs, some write a “Dear Diary” blogs and bore us with what they happened to did that day. So writing in Sinhala has already selected and quality audience and it is not as bad as you think.

But I don’t think there are very good Sinhala bloggers out there, writing unique, mind stimulating content. So I don’t think they are still able to expand their audience as they suppose to do.

Technical problems reading Sinhala fonts will fade away eventually. I never had a problem reading all of those Unicode websites using IE7 without doing anything extra. I think one day firefox also will fully support Sinhala natively.

mayooresan Said,

March 20th, 2008 @3:43 am

You’re wrong bro!
You should be able to blog in your own language. I started with Tamil blog then I started writing English blog.

Belive me or not I have high traffic to my Tamil blog, not to my English blog. You shouldn’t’ leave your mother tongue aside.

comic2 Said,

March 26th, 2008 @5:12 pm

Just keep up the good work…….

anuradha Said,

April 21st, 2008 @2:04 pm

Here are my thoughts about the topic:

http://anuradha.sayura.net/2008/04/why-native-language-is-important-for.html