Manoj M. Prabhakaran is probably the most famous guy among Kerala bloggers. His blog aggregator Kerala Blog Roll is very popular and attracts a lot of Malayalis searching for quality blogs.  He is an assistant professor at Illinois University. He also has a personal blog at Melam. Thanks Manoj, for sparing some time from your busy schedule. 

When and why you started Kerala Blog Roll? 
I started with a list of about 25 bloggers sometime in March 2003. I think there were a couple of reasons behind starting it:

Firstly, I was already maintaining a small collection of Kerala-related links (at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~mp/malayalam/ ) and I figured that the blogroll would fit right into it. As I started coming across more and more Kerala bloggers, I wanted to list blogging as one of the interesting aspects of Kerala in the digital landscape. Other similar things included in that collection are things like some usenets postings: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~mp/malayalam/usenet.html and some pages on photos from Kerala: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~mp/malayalam/photoshow.html

(Unfortunately, apart from the blogroll, I haven’t been updating anything in this collection for a few years now.)

The other reason to start a blogroll was probably a fascination with the concept of blogging itself — at some philosophical level I found it remarkable, if not appealing, that people would willingly open up (parts of) their private lives to the world. (It was another two years before I started a blog of my own, though.) Also, it seemed like a nice way to showcase the diversity contrasted with the “unity” of the Malayali blogging community. (The diversity might be becoming less apparent now, but I recall the first 25 that I found as an eclectic bunch.)

How do you maintain the blog roll? 
My blogroll is not at all comprehensive. It mostly lists blogs whose authors wrote to me to list them. Occasionally I do add a blog that I stumble up on, or sometimes someone might refer a friend’s blog to me. It took me a fair amount of effort to get the first 25 names way back in March 2003. But today if I were to step out into the blogosphere looking for Malayali bloggers, I’ll be overwhelmed.  

At the last count, there are about 700 blogs listed, with 164 marked as being primarily in Malayalam. I still have about a dozen requests for addition sitting in my mailbox.

Tell us a bit about the history of this wonderful service
In case you’re interested, looking at my records, the trend of blogging in Malayalam started in late 2004 (thanks to the Unicode standard and effective software like “varamozhi”). The first Malayalam blogs that I listed on the blogroll are
“Peringodan” : http://peringodan.blogspot.com/
MK Paul: http://www.chintha.com/jaalakam
Cibu CJ: http://rhymesfornila.blogspot.com/
(all in Ocotber 2004).

Many of the bloggers requested me to start a separate listing for blogs in Malayalam, but due to time constraints I couldn’t. But anyway, since then, many other resources have come up exclusively for Malayalam blogs, like: http://www.thanimalayalam.org/malayalam/work/thani.html http://www.thanimalayalam.org/malayalam/comments/index.shtml These forums, as well as my blogroll, have given rise to a “community,” which you might already have connected with.

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