The Indibloggies, India’s first and foremost blog awards unveiled its annual nomination process for the 2006 event on 26 January 2007. This is the fourth year of the Indibloggies award.

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.