Archive for January, 2006
Final Polls begin
Ladies and Gentlemen, the moment of truth has arrived. We embark on the final stage of the Indibloggies 2005 edition, the final Public poll begins today and we will accept your votes till January 10, 2006 (IST). This is the stage where the junta speaks its mind. Yes, you can decide the fate of about 110 blogs that are in the fray in 18 different award-categories, handpicked from over 300 blogs by a distinguished team of Jurors.
Click on the link below to reach the Voting area, you would need a valid Email address to be able to cast your vote. To let the best and deserving blogs win, we request your cooperation.
Update [10 Jan 2006, 9 PM IST]: The Polls are closed now. Thanks for voting.
Update: Based on several suggestions, only the Best Indiblog category is now made a compulsory voting category. You may choose not to cast vote for any other category/catagories. Sorry for the mishap about the last date!
And for the Indibloggies 2005 nominees, shown alongside is a button that they can sport at their blogs/sites to reap more votes. I urge you not to link to the image directly, save it on your server or a free image hosting site like Flickr, if possible.
January 6th, 2006 | | Permalink
Just Blog it!
In the sixth article of the ongoing series “Hum Blogistani” Ravishankar Shrivastava talks about the scenario in blogging in Indian languages.
E
xpressions. You find it everywhere.
At a cool corner of a collage café, at the Bus adda, in a train compartment, at a Party, at your work place and, may be, even during those intimate moments with your beloved. Everybody out there is trying to forcefully convey his or her feelings. At times, you have to shout, make faces and even shove elbows to make yourself heard. Try fathoming a conversation within a group and you will quickly realize that nobody actually seems to be listening, yet every one of them is in a great hurry to express opinion.
You also want to express yourself eloquently. However, you don’t get yet get an audience. You shout. Damn it, nobody cares. What do you do now?
Just Blog it!
Blog, an alternative medium to express one’s expression, can change things upside down for you. Even if you whisper in your blog, you will be noticed. In your blog, you can express yourself without any interruption, without an argument, and without an express permission from anybody else! To add to the beauty, you and your audience can share views in real-time through the blog-comments. (more…)
January 5th, 2006 | | Permalink
Closer to the Polls :: Meet the Indibloggies 2005 nominees
With more than 300 nominations made over 10 days and close to 25 Jurors browsing through the myriad flavors of writing and rating them, Stage one of the Indibloggies 2005 edition has come to an end. I do not have enough words of appreciation for the members of the Jury; many of them went out of the way to help me during the process. For the first time in the Indibloggies, and perhaps in the history of the internet, a social bookmarking tool was used in an award event.
For the interested, here is some trivia to savor:
- Indibloggies used the bookmarking tool del.icio.us for the nomination and Scuttle for the juror-rating phase . We had customized bookmarklets and tag-generators for delicious. The Scuttle interface was also customized for the occasion (compare the actual interface with the customized one). Here is a screen-grab of page showing the final tally.
- This was the first time I power-used Scuttle, some of my code such as the “Users list” and suggestions might actually make it to the next version of the tool. An interesting side effect of my using “Scuttle” was the Hindi localisation of Scuttle, that happened thanks to my Hindi blogger friends. The Hindi gettext file is available here.
- Jurors rated blogs in several award-categories on a scale of -1 to 5. A weighted score was calculated based on all Juror ratings for a blog in a particular category and a merit list prepared. The final list, in almost all categories, that makes it to second and the final stage comprises of blogs that were 40 percentile or above in the merit list.
- Juror Srijith prepared a flash video, a “how-to” guide for the Jurors while Saket and Pawan compiled exhaustive step-by-step guides for the nomination process.
- Many people complained about the nomination process being too geeky (though the 5-step guide, that came up of Arnab’s suggestion, evoked a good response) and I had to put a conventional email-form but that resulted more-or-less in what we all know email forms result in, spamming and multiple nominations. One of the blogs almost suffocated my Inbox, so much so that I had to ask the blog-owner to stop his people from flooding my mail-box.
- 63% of the nominated blogs were Blogger.com blogs. If few other blog-hosting services like live-journal may be ignored, WordPress blogs must have been a close second.
- In all 193 blogs were rated by the jurors with about 15 blogs ending up with a negative or zero final score.
- Like last year, a private mailing list had all the Jurors deliberating and discussing over issues before and during the rating process.
- The whole rating process was also audited throughout, by three of the jurors to ensure a smooth completion.
- Juror Saket nominated the highest number of blogs, a whopping 115 blogs.
And now, without any further ado, we present the list of Stage-1 winner blogs that have qualified to participate in the final voting. To me this is the notable outcome of this event, if this list contains even one blog that you have never read before, my mission is accomplished. For your ease, we have a category wise OPML list available for you to subscribe (most of the newsreaders provide for importing an OPML list). Listing in each category is alphabetical.
(more…)
January 4th, 2006 | | Permalink
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