Nerve Endings Firing Away

This might be one of the late posts asking you to vote at the Indibloggies. Like I mentioned earlier, the Indian blogosphere, just like any other blogosphere likes to pat itself on the bat once a year. The rest of the time we are busy squabbling and tagging each other apart from getting occasionally riled up over some issue in India that we can hardly affect (although we did manage to unblock the blogs).

Poor Debashish who takes much mehnat setting up the nomination and voting system gets murmuring polite thanks for including blogs and violent reaction for excluding them. But then all thankless jobs are just that. All credit to him for trying to make it work and keeping the wagon chugging along. However, others outside the blog network are taking note and have sponsored the awards to the tune of Rs. 13,00,000 and trust me, given the size of the Indian blogosphere those are big bucks.

I was a late entry to the jury panel which sifted through almost 700 blogs and ranked them on a given scale. At least 175 blogs made it through to the nominees list that was opened to the general public. And since then I assume voting has been going on in all earnest. Although the size of the blogosphere is small, a conservative estimate easily puts it at 100,000 so it is strange that less than thousand blogs were submitted for consideration. Some may blame the nomination process that involves tagging through del.icio.us but then many jury members had offered to tag the posts if URLs were emailed to them. Then again, you don’t have to work hard to get criticism. I hope next year, we’ll get far more nominations. My experience on the jury helped me reconnect with blogs that I had lost touch with after taking a sabbatical from DesiPundit linking and also helped me discover many more new ones that I added to my feed reader.

Many categories (Best Indiblog or Best Topical Blog) are crowded and fiercely competitive while others are relatively head-to-head contests (Best Podcast). DesiPundit is nominated in two categories – Best Directory/service/clique/network and Best Design. Although the first category seems tailor made for DesiPundit, as some alleged last year, it has tough competition from Blogbharti and Gilli. And of course, the design category seems crowded but is literally a contest between Megha and Chugs (also designer DesiPundit) although Karma Dude and Chetan provide worthy competition.

I have already voted but unfortunately cannot reveal my choices as I am on the jury but please head over to Indibloggies now and vote. All it takes is 5 minutes and a valid email address.

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