2016-10-27: UrduTech - The GeoCities of Urdu Blogosphere
On December 12, 2008, an Urdu blogger Muhammad Waris reported an issue in Urdu Mehfil about his lost blog that was hosted on UrduTech.net . Not just Waris, but many other Urdu bloggers of that time were anxious about their lost blogs due to a sudden outage of the blogging service UrduTech. The downtime lasted for several weeks which has changed the shape of the Urdu blogosphere. Before diving into the UrduTech story, let's have a brief look into the Urdu language and the role of the Urdu Mehfil forum in promoting Urdu on the Web. Urdu is a language spoken by more than 100 million people worldwide (about 1.5% of the global population), primarily in India and Pakistan. It has a rich literature, while being one of the premier languages of poetry in South Asia for centuries. However, the digital footprint of Urdu has been relatively smaller than some other languages like Arabic or Hindi. In the early days of the Web, computers were not easily available to the masses of the ...