Amit Gupta is a software engineer who works as a web applications architect in India and is a self confessed geek, in other words, someone who literally lives, breathes, sleeps He also has photo blogs, video blog, twitter… Name a tool and you will find out Amit has discovered it (probably before you) and is already using it to good account. Amit blogs to express himself, let off a bit of a steam and because he likes having his say on everything – and he also loves to meet people who declare themselves to be among his readership. It seems that we are talking to someone quite famous here – Amit was once chosen ASP Guru of the Year. Amit has been a member of the Global Voices Online family for just over a year, since January 2007, providing roundups of the Hindi blogosphere. From one of his many blogs, we discover that we are talking about a “blogosphere that hasn’t yet reached where its foreign (especially western) counterparts are, and even in the Indian blogosphere, the south Indian bloggers are much ahead than Hindi bloggers”. We thank Amit for the hardwork to bring these bloggers in the spotlight! What attracted you to GVO? A bunch of different bloggers from different parts of the world writing about different & yet not so different blogospheres. A bunch of cool guys & gals who are addicted to blogging! :) And what about projects, such as Paricharcha, you have to help Indian people to blog in their language, Hindi? Could you tell us how this has made a difference? Well, when I wrote my first post on my Hindi blog, I thought that there weren't any Hindi bloggers but I was surprised as there existed a number of them. Blogging itself is catching up in India, more and more people realising the potential of this medium, more & more people becoming aware of this medium to express themselves!! Hindi is a language that's spoken by most of the Indians, be it a different dialect like Bhojpuri or Haryanvi or Rajasthani but it still is Hindi and that's the first language of a lot of people, so they are more comfortable in expressing themselves in that rather than in another language which they picked up later in life! So I dreamed of Paricharcha as a place where “we” (Hindi bloggers & non-bloggers who know Hindi; differentiation because the first users were Hindi bloggers) can discuss just about anything be it religion or politics or technology etc. There have been other Indian forums around where people would communicate in Hindi but they would write in Roman characters there due to lack of knowledge about writing in Devnagari there. Unicode has taken away the font problems that used to haunt developers of Hindi websites earlier and phonetic tools like Baraha have made it way too easy to write Hindi in Devnagari script in unicode. We expected a lot of first timers also coming across Paricharcha (there've been some newspaper articles etc mentioning this platform) who didn't know how to write unicode Hindi so naturally we had a forum section for them to assist them in getting started & we integrated a Hindi editor (the Hindini tool made by a fellow Hindi blogger long before Paricharcha came into being) so that users not on their own PCs can also type in Hindi on the forum. The hindi wiki Sarvagya has been quite helpful in getting people started with both reading-writing in Hindi on their PCs as well as starting with blogging. You are very prolific on the blogosphere. How do you manage so many blogs (and now also a twitter)? Umm…..err….. to tell ya the truth I still don't have any freakin’ clue!! ;) I write whenever I have time & whenever I'm in a mood to write & I write on the blog on which I feel like writing on! No management at all!! As for Twitter, well, I post on it either from GTalk or my mobile, again whenever I feel like saying something; so if I'm on PC or logged into IM via my mobile I post & if I'm away from PC I load up Twitter widget in Widsets on my mobile & post whatever idiotic stuff I wanna write! :) Is there any super special application/tool that you wish would come true? Yeah. I wish someone could make a software & hardware so that a software engineer will just have to think how he/she is gonna make any software & all the coding etc is done by that tool just by reading the mind!! :D And how do you see the internet in 10 years? Hmm….. that's very far to predict & too wide. :) And which region are you talking about? I know about India so I'll focus my reply keeping the scenario here in mind. I guess just about everything will be connected to internet in next 10 years, be it music players (they already are) or TV or Refrigerators or phone calls (already in existence but not as widespread) or automobiles (navigation etc.), etc.