When blogger Umesh Shrestha's blogsite www.mysansar.com received 20 visitors in April 2005, he was ecstatic. One very eventful year and lots of blogging later Shrestha\'s Merosansar site notched 67,000 visitors on a single day on 25 April.
"Merosansar was not born because I was suddenly a blogging expert and had big ideas about changing the world," admits the 29-year, "however, this past year I participated in lots of street protests, all I saw was torture and oppression and I just couldn\'t stop writing."
Shrestha was one of the many laid off from Channel Nepal after King Gyanendra's February First takeover. "I was interested in the new media so after losing my job I had time to teach myself all about blogging, videostreaming and podcasting," he says. Today Shrestha works full time on his blog and has even started helping other interested Nepali bloggers from Myagdi and Qatar. "You don't have to be a tech guru to be a blogger, all you need is internet connection, a good microphone if you want to podcast, a video and digital camera and you all set to go," Shrestha says.
Merosansar gets over 35 percent of its visits from the US and the rest from Hong Kong, Japan, UK, Korea, Belgium, Germany, Qatar and Canada. Only about 7 percent of the visits are from Nepal. "I was the first one to use Nepali Unicode in my blogsite, but I also have podcasts, audio and vide, which attracts," says Shrestha.
Shrestha receives many threats, some of them death threats, via email and was beaten up by security forces once last November when he was out videotaping police atrocities. But this hasn\'t deterred him. He says Nepali bloggers feel it is their responsibility to spread the message of loktantra and it is very hard to discourage those who are out on mission.
Shrestha admits problems with online credibility and says that he sticks to the ethics he learnt as a conventional journalist: "Media bloggers are different we follow the same codes of conduct journalists follow, we don't write what we have not seen with our own two eyes."
Mallika Aryal
