This year Indibloggies again has good support from the Sponsors with Hachette India and WordPress pitching in. A big thanks to all the sponsors! If everything goes well, another feather may get added to the cap The 2008 edition has 17 award categories, with three new additions for Best Personal blog, Best Business blog and Best Microblog.

The nomination announcement post and link to nomination form can be found here.

Have Hindi and other non-English pages being excluded from Adsense or are these signs of any new service or improvement in the service by Google? If it’s the former I would be really sad.

Update: Could this be the reason?

Here is a little tussle Anil and Matt had on Twitter today

Arnab, better known as GreatBong, won prizes worth about Rs 3,83,000 that includes a special scrapture trophy worth Rs. 15,000 made by
Arun Verma, a 10 user cyn.in Bliki Business Edition pack for 3 years worth around $8064 (Rs 0.36 Million) from Cynapse, One Gym Kit worth Rs 1500 from Black Panther, Blogjet weblog client for Windows worth $39.95 (Rs 1797), Books and “a custom-made India Uncut Cow” from Amit Varma, a copy of Reader 06 from Sarai – CSDS, Delhi, a copy each of “Best of Tehelka 2″ and “Vox: Critical Conversations” from Tehelka. The Indibloggies would be publishing its customary interview with the winner of Best IndiBlog category.

Following is the list of winners:

• Indiblog of the year :Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind
• Best Topical IndiBlog : Atanu Dey on Indias Development
• Best Science/Technology IndiBlog : Digital Inspiration
• Best Group/Community IndiBlog : Blogchaat
• Best Humanities Indiblog : 2X3X7
• Best New IndiBlog : Saffron Tree
• Best Entertainment Indiblog : Blogical Conclusion
• Most Humorous IndiBlog : Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind
• Best Indi Photoblog : Trivial Matters
• Best Food Indiblog : Mahanandi
• Best IndiPodcast :The IndiCast
• Best Sports Indiblog : Sportolysis
• Best Designed Blog : Desipundit
• Best Directory/ Clique/Service : Desipundit
• Best Travel Indiblog :Travel Tales From India
• Best Indic Blog (Hindi) : Udan Tashtari
• Best Indic Blog (Kannada) :Majavani
• Best Indic Blog (Malayalam) : Kuruman’s Stories
• Best Indic Blog (Marathi) : Tulips in twilight
• Best Indic Blog (Tamil) : Pinathalkal
• Best Indic Blog (Telugu) : A Search

The Prizes were offered by various Bloggers and Organisations such as Cyn.in who are a Gold sponsor, Creativegarh, Microsoft, Tehelka, Sarai-CSDS, Techgoss, GoHindi and Black Panther, among others. Prizes in various categories include a copy of Cyn.in Enterprise Bliki, Windows Vista, Blogjet Blog client, Books, CDs, Publications, Gift certificates, Web hosting package and Sports Apparel apart from cash-awards.

On his blog, also called RTDM in short, Arnab gave a massive Mithunian “Ayeee Salaaaa” shout-out to his readers, the actor is amongst host of other persona such as Laloo Prasad Yadav that are the “Gods of the RTDM pantheon”. “It feels great to know that I have so many readers who not only show their support by visiting RTDM on a regular basis but also care enough to actually go and vote for it.”, acknowledged the elated winner.

Atanu Dey, who had won the Best Indiblog of the Year award at Indibloggies 2004 was “mildly surprised” on winning the Best Topical blog award. “My views are distinctly unpopular. I am not politically correct. Besides, my blog deals with economics, which is not called the dismal science for good reasons.”, quipped the blogger who writes on development issues and education.

The Indiblogosphere has been abuzz with the happenings of the events for the past few weeks and like any other subject has a mixed reaction. Some say that it’s a pure popularity contest but the organizer Debashish Chakrabarty differs, “We have a peer review process in place which ensures a stringent quality check on the blogs. The Public poll is indeed meant to select the most popular one among the nominees. In the end it’s a decent mix of diversity, quality and popularity.” Atanu opines, “Blogging is a popular medium, representative of people at large. Unlike TV, radio, or main stream media, blogging is not elitist. All blogging contests therefore are basically popularity contests. I think that the Indibloggies highlight the work of a diverse set of very talented people.”

Last year’s winner of “Indiblog of the Year”, the India Uncut author Amit Varma, who won three awards over the last two years but finished runner-up in the top category this year, said that the awards served a greater function than just honouring a few good blogs. “The range of nominees shows the diversity of the bloggers out there,” he said, “and going through the nominations list is a great way of discovering excellent blogs one had never heard of before.”

The peer review and public poll also indicate the current reading habits, likes and dislikes of people. Neha Vishwanathan, who contributes to the group blog Desipundit says, “While it’s easy to be cynical about awards and citations, it feels incredible that the community appreciates the time and effort of contributors to make Desipundit as it is. Perhaps winning an award based on popularity only pushes us towards making the site even more worthwhile for its readers.” “Indibloggies is really a people’s choice award. Press has written a lot about us but when your listeners vote for you and you win then it’s a different high” remarked Aditya Mhatre, founder of the Indicast.

Awards such as the Indibloggies, apart from generating vibes of competition amongst the bloggers, serve a wider purpose of generating awareness about the Indian blogdom, celebrating the unsung bloggers. “Awards like Indibloggies bring out the spirit of good-natured competition and most importantly, for someone new to the world of desi blogs, the nomination lists in each of the categories are excellent starting points for exploring the best of what the Indian blogosphere has to offer.”, said Arnab.

With the end of the 2006 event is it all kiboshed? Debashish replies, “Absolutely not! Indibloggies will have activities throughout the year. We have the 2007 blog-series “Hum Blogistani” coming up, where various bloggers do a SWOT analysis of the blogdom. Starting this year, we intend to organize a massive Blog survery “Blogensus” every year hat will shed light on the nuances of Indiblogging.” Indibloggies also has ambitious plans to make the event more viable and popular. “We are on look out for tie-ups, sponsorships and partnerships with various organizations. Apart from allocating funds for promotion through other vehicles, we also plan to renovate the website software as well as add features such as SMS poll to make the process more user-friendly.”, he informed.

The Indicast show is recorded in a very informal way and you cannot help but admire the free wheeling conversations. Aditya informed me that he is now going to work on Indicast fulltime and from this episode they are also allowing sponsors to pitch in. Great going guys!

I had never used Skype before but am I happy to have used it now. Last fortnight I, along with few blogger friends from the Hindi blogdom, were invited to a live radio show of WUV Radio, a student owned raio station at Verginia tech, which is hosted by fellow blogger Anurag Mishra, where we talked about Hindi blogging, probably first time ever on radio.

Nice feeling and I wish I could have many more of such experiences.

The nominations is open in 16 different award categories for Indian blogs from all around the world from 26th January until 5th February. At stake are prizes worth more than Rs 1,20,000.

The IndiBlog of the Year award, the top honor at the event, went to Jivha (now defunct) in 2003 and to Atanu Dey of Deeshaa in 2004. “The Indibloggies are a sincere effort to showcase the best Indian blogs. Just going through the nominations can be a process of discovery. It fulfils a greater function that just being an annual awards program“, said Amit Verma whose blog India Uncut won the “IndiBlog of the Year” award at the 2005 event.“Indibloggies is not only about showcasing the best of the Indian Blogosphere, its also about bringing the unsung blogs to the fore”, said Debashish, “Indibloggies has been successful in recognizing the outstanding bloggers year after year, for example Sonia Faleiro, who’s blog was adjudged the Best Topical Blog last year went on to win the CNN Young Journalist award in 2006.”

The award process at Indibloggies is three fold.

In the first phase anyone could nominate any number of blogs for any category by bookmarking their site at the popular social bookmarking website del.icio.us (http://www.deli.cio.us) using some custom tags. The nomination phase for the 2006 event would be open from Jan 26 until 5th February. Details on the nomination process would be posted at the Indibloggies website.

For the second phase, a jury comprising of prominent bloggers has been roped in to rate the nominated blogs. The peer review would result in short listing blogs for each of the 16 categories who qualify for the final phase. This phase is expected to be over by Feb 11, 2007.

The final phase of the event, expected to commence on Feb13, 2007 would be the Public Poll where the short-listed blogs will be open to weeklong public voting and the one with the largest votes will be declared the winner in each category.

The winners will be announced on Feb 22, 2007.

Indibloggies has 16 award categories as follows, with the categories on Food, Travel, Podcast, Humour and Entertainment making a debut this year.

1. IndiBlog of the year
2. Best Humanities IndiBlog (Blogs on Humanities, covering Art/Craft, Literature, Paintings, Poetry/Fiction)
3. Best Entertainment IndiBlog (Blogs on Music, TV, Movies, theatre)
4. Best Sports IndiBlog
5. Best Science/Technology IndiBlog
6. Best IndiBlog directory/service/clique/network
7. Best Topical IndiBlog
8. Best Designed IndiBlog (Blogs with original designs or with major visible customizations to existing themes)
9. Best Food IndiBlog
10. Most Humorous IndiBlog
11. Best IndiPodcast
12. Best Travel IndiBlog
13. Best New IndiBlog (IndiBloggers who began blogging on or after July 1, 2006)
14. Best Photo Blog
15. Best Group/Community Blog
16. Best Indic blog (Blogs written using Indic scripts, for example Devanaagri script for Hindi)

Indic Blogs is a category that Debashish has special affinity for; he has been one of the earliest blogger in Hindi and foresees a bright future for language blogging. “With new and easier tools, reading and writing on web in Indian languages has become much easier.” he told.

The winner of the IndiBlog of the Year will get a scrapture trophy worth Rs. 15,000 made by another blogger, Delhi-based Arun Verma.

Although sponsorship offers are still open, prizes worth Rs 1,20,500 have already been committed from various Bloggers and Organisations such as Creativegarh, Microsoft, Tehelka, Sarai-CSDS, Techgoss, GoHindi and Black Panther, among others. Prizes in various categories include a copy of Windows Vista, Blogjet Blog client, Books, CDs, Publications, Gift certificates, Web hosting package and Sports Apparel apart from cash-awards.

Debashish observes that the community feel is rampant at the awards. “More than anything else, sponsors involvement with the event signifies the ethos of the Internet and the blogosphere”, he said.

India has seen a tremendous upsurge in the IndiBlogging scene. According to a recent Windows Live Spaces survey the number of active bloggers in India was put at 3.5 million with 39% of the 25 million Indian internet users being aware of blogs.”We are trying to broadbase the awards as much as possible in keeping with the expanding nature of the Indian blogosphere,” said Delhi-based blogger Shivam Vij, one of the jury members at the 2006 events.

Coinciding with the nomination phase Indibloggies will also hold Blogensus 2006, a small blog survey, which is expected to shed some light on the oddities of the Indiblogdom.

Recently, while researching on the issue of “Real Estate Bubble” in India for an article that I am co-authoring for the Hindi blogzine Nirantar, I got in touch with Edward again, after a long gap. I don’t really have a penchant for Economics yet I do find myself infrequently visiting the Indian Economy blog, it’s a thought provoking group blog where apart from Edward you would also find known Indian bloggers like Nitin Pai, Amit Varma, Atanu Dey, Arjun Swarup and Prashant Kothari baring their mind.

Ed has informed me about a new group blog he has launched, called Global Economy Matters, if you dabble in the subject do visit the blog. And if you liked the blog, chances are you would appreciate the Global Economy Blog Aggregator too.

It may or may not be for the love of Blogger, all of us need a change, probably the reason we keep on changing our templates and themes so often. When Logahead came people immediately started touting it as a replacement of WordPress until the poor chap has to proclaim himself. Logahead wasn’t too superior a blogware but it did show a novel way to do things, for example getting rid of the cumbersome Admin console of WordPress an the AJAX way to effortlessly deploy widgets. If you ask me the refined UNU version of Logahead is far more superior to the original and can give a competition to the Goliath.

The craving for the much needed change did not spare the creators of WordPress either it seems now. WordPress was slated as the “ultimate blogware” but the core team of WordPress comprising of Chris Davis, Khaled, Michael (the Kubrick creator) has now left WordPress and are working on the nextgen open-source blogware termed as Habari, a Swahili word for “What’s up”. Habari would not be forked from WordPress (WordPress was based upon B-2), it’s been written from the scratch and would sue the most modern technologies such as PHP 5 (and PHP Data Objects), Habari code would be Object Oriented and Database independent.

The creator of WordPress Matt modestly wrote that Habari would probably be Drupal meets Serendipity. He not only pledged his support for the initiative but also offered his servers. Despite of this the unrest in the WP camp is quite noticeable. Some said that this is the outcome of politics of people pissed off from not getting appointed at Automattic. Habari’s Skippy clarified this wasn’t so but wasn’t wary of terming the spam-prevention capability of WordPress as Band-Aid code. The Habari team is hopeful of cutting a relapse before 6 months and yes this will have the capability of “importing from WordPress”. Owen on the other hand said that there are no hard feelings and he would continue to be with WordPress as well.

Right now the only blog running on Habari is Chris’s, it might not seem too different but the team claims it would be fast and modern. Habari may be used with other databases as well, apart from MySQL. I wonder how popular it would be until they go for a hosted solution. If you ask people like me, who pay for their hosting, PHP 5 is not what my Hosting service would provide in near future and even I would be wary of going for it, it might break my other applications. yet I am excited by the fact that Habari is talking of community and using new things once in a while is so much better.

Desipundit is turning one. Congratulations guys! It has been a fabulous year for you people and I am happy to see Desipundit graduate from a link blog to a movement. The welcome addition of links to Indicblogs has given it a wholesome flavor. I salute the dedicated team for relentlessly pointing to the best of the Indiblogdom. What Indibloggies does once in a year, you guys do on a daily basis.

Patrix recently asked me to pen my thoughts on the scene and I must say that I am honoured. I am not good at writing longer posts and the following are a collection of jottings spread over several days, so dear readers do bear with me if you find a lack of coherence or flow.

On hindsight my own personal blog journey seems pretty insignificant to me. My English blog Null Pointer, with which my blog journey started, by virtue of it being techie in nature and being hosted on JRoller, a den for technology bloggers, didn’t ever earn much notice from desi readers. So being a timid blogger that I am, I get more casual visitors than regular ones, the latter are probably being those who rely on the feed. My Hindi blog Nuktachini probably gets better attention.

Over these years I can say that I gained a lot from blogging. Whether actually blogging or not I was always happy to be part of the activities that spun around it. It gave me opportunity to be associated with the growing Indicblogging phenomenon, explore various CMS and blogwares, learn and try new technology and getting involved in Hindi localization. I am happy that Indibloggies was an effort that was respected yet I think the majority of readers may not be aware that the Indicbloging scenario has had enormous growth too. Having seen the Hindi blogging scenario growing from strength to strengths over the last 2 years, my belief about the growth of blogging in Indian languages has been always strong. Recall that the category for Indic blogging was added to Indibloggies back in 2004, Abo-hawa was a column at Nirantar that kept tab on the growth and Chittha Vishwa still sports a pie indicating the Indicblog share apart from having blog aggregators for Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and Gujarati blogs. With the meteoric growth in Indic blog count and with Google saying so now, that belief has been fortified.

I think that the journey of Indiblogdom has been significant if you see the blogs transition from mere personal journals to podiums contemplating on serious issues. There has been a spate of “Pundit blogs” since then, though even today majority of blogs simply postmortem news from the Main Stream Media (MSM). The paradigm that “content is supreme” still holds true; while bloggers like Rajesh Jain have been consistently blogging on technology others like Anita Bora also get good readership despite of her blog being chiefly a “personal journal”, so frankly one cannot say what works and what doesn’t, suffice to say that there is an audience for each kind of content.

Over the years Indian blogs also caught the fancy of the MSM, probably because many journalists recognized it as a potent medium for publishing their offbeat reports. Post IIPM furore I think, MSM in India also realized the “collective power” of, what the BBC calls, “army of irregulars”. Today many print publications and TV Channels have started vying for that element of conversation that had made blogs popular. It is therefore not too difficult to guess where the progressive news channels got the idea of “citizen journalism” from.

I think that this whole MSM v/s blogs debate is all bulls**t. Will Blogs replace MSM? Did FM Radio replace TV? Blogs and MSM can only compliment each other. Probably 60% of the blogs discuss topics brought forward in MSM, off late MSM, especially the online editions have started attributing Blogs as a major source of opinion. Peter griffin said it correctly, “Blogs will keep the MSM honest”, point out their flaws, make them more responsible, make them double check their facts and learn not to ignore seemingly insignificant issues. I can quote the recent case of The Acorn pointing out a historical flaw in Bill Clinton’s foreword to a book, a valid point that was augmented by a MSM journo and that led to the publisher apologize for the error. This is an apt example of how Blogs and MSM would co-exist and actually augment each other.

The advantage of Blogs is the collective wisdom that emerges, the 360 degrees perspective that they provide to an issue. Blogs would certainly help MSM take a true non-partisan approach, each news article can thus become a mini-forum voicing all concerns and bringing all facts to light. Moreover, the subjectivity of the view helps you get a bird’s eye view. The prudent can traverse the pheromone trail and could probably reach a better decision.

How has been the journey in Hindi blogdom? Alok, the “pitru-purush” of Hindi blogging, was the one who started the movement and even coined the term “Chittha” for blog. I “think” in Hindi and though I had written for Hindi print publication before I was bit hesitant to start as I was non-committal on the time it would need. So I prompted a colleague at Webdunia to start one. It was so difficult to hold myself after that and “Nuktachini” was born soon after. It was as if people were just waiting. Today we are a 225+ strong community; the growth is slow but steady.

I am fortunate that I just happened to be there, at the moment when Hindi blogging triggered-off. I was fortunate to be part of a group of like-minded people who were frenzied enough to bring Hindi to foray and do something new. Blogging was the common passion; this is what made it sticky.

I have high regards for Pankaj who launched Akshargram the first group blog of Hindi blogdom and Sarvagya our community wiki. People like Jitendra helped forge this community, the quality writing from people like Anup, Ravi, Atul, Sunil and so many others provided credibility. Since then many other ventures like Chitthakar, Anugunj, Nirantar, Buno-kahani, Blognaad and Narad came through; some survived some didn’t but I am sure the community was strengthened in the process. The baton of this passion has passed many hands since then, the knowledge base that we have created hopefully helped lot many people to create their own blogs.

I had been asked whether the regional language blogs can compete with Indian blogs in English. Honestly, I don’t see any element of competition here. With so many dialects we have, blogging in these languages was a natural course Indiblogging could have taken. Each has it own space to operate. The challenges with blogging in Indian languages are more technological in nature. Indian languages are not viable options for the blog-wares; there is still none with a built-in Unicode Indic-editor. A majority of computers in India still run on Win-98 that has poor support for Unicode, Internet Café owners despise Win-XP as it is resource intensive and warrants hardware upgrades. The whole publishing process, the simplicity of which made Blogging popular, becomes much tedious for Indic languages.

A corollary to the growth in Indicblogging is the growth in use of Indian languages over the Internet. The ubiquity of Unicode on Indicblogs has inspired websites in Indian languages hitherto using proprietary or TTF fonts to switch to Unicode. But Unicode is yet to find universal acceptance and it is here that tools such as Padma (extension for browsers such as Firefox) hold great value. Padma facilitates reading sites using popular formats by transforming the text to Unicode on the fly. Days are not far-off when search engines like Google would adopt similar technology to index numerous such Indian websites that have still not converted to Unicode.

No wonder there are many who foresee a bright future for Indic blogging. Many bloggers for example in Hindi started experimenting with blogs as a medium of showcasing their writings, their poems and stories. Literature is a great tool to popularize the language. Blogs in South Indian languages have already made it big, during Indibloggies I was pleasantly surprised to get a mail from a farmer in Kerala who has been blogging in Malayalam, despite being ignorant about the technical nitty gritty. So I think technological barriers notwithstanding the love for language would surely see the number of Indic blogs swell.

I am not sure if Blogging has got a long future, but it sure set alight many movements all along. Internet is more vibrant, news more vivid and opinions in galore. Even so blogging in India is an urban spectacle; the skew is so prominent, views portrayed don’t yet represent the real India. Indian corporate is still to recognize this phenomenon and employers still to devise blogging policy for their employees. Will there be a day when the blog post of a farmer written in Marathi and raising concerns on the agricultural policy of the state government echo in the corridors of Mantralaya? Amen to that.