Sri Lankan blogosphere in 2008 – a glance in the rear view mirror

A year is a long time in the Sri Lankan blogosphere which essentially consists of kottu.org -Sri Lanka’s “main”/primary blog aggregator. At least one thing has stayed reliably constant: change.

The Sri Lankan blogosphere seems  to have lost its feel of a political battle ground. Replacing the enraged posts of 2007 is the quiet blandness of reposted AFP news feeds. On the positive side, there is a growing number of Sinhala language blogs. Interesting new “faces” have emerged. Kallusudda introduced his innovative comment blog. SN shock up the politics heavy quagmire of the SLB with her fresh take on an ancient art.  There have been quite a few passings such as the half doctor, R and the wonder dog. 

Thankfully there are enough stalwarts holding on. The drumming continues skilfully. The Sandwich is never missing or stale. Dominic keep up his poetry with light (rarely do photons gets used so well). Indi has mellowed yet still keep attracting an interesting commentary. The court jester — though an unfortunately sporadic poster — tends to always have something insightfully relevant to say. Vindi also fires up interesting observations amidst her studies at Hogwarts. Rajarata offer insights into defence matter. All take the time to drop by — something I have been shamefully lax at doing. Sadly, I feel very out of touch since I don’t get much time to visit other blogs lately. Most of my writing gets done off-line on a PDA. One sentence at a time during stolen moments. 

I think this “out of touchness” is reflected in my blog’s traffic sources. Until recently (which is as specific as I can get) the major referrer (or source) of hits used to be kottu.org. Now the dominant sources of traffic are wordpress.com tags, Google web searches and links from other blogs. Interestingly the most dominant consistent source has turned out to be the defence-Sri Lanka wordpress category. It also helps that there’s a regular crowd out there sifting through google to build their own radars. Developments that might be seen as a good things.

The drop in the traffic from Kottu.org makes me wonder if I’m being less relevant to Sri Lankan readers (as if the vomit of my dishevelled mind ever was). Yet virtually all the commentors on this blog are ” Sri Lankan” bloggers.

To end this ramble my clumsy survey needs more respondents to sort out. I hope you will contribute with a few mouse clicks.