Indibloggies ~ Indian Weblog Awards

Indibloggies 2005 ~ Meet the Jury

For those of you who still do not believe that the ball has been set rolling for the Indibloggies 2005 edition here is more proof. Indibloggies 2005 proudly presents the Jury for the event, comprising of fellow Indibloggers, a who’s who of the Indiblogdom if you will, most of whom could be regarded as true connoisseurs of blogging. Many of the jurors are second timers at Indibloggies but most of them are new, as we have an unprecedented 28 members Jury this year, with Jurors who would also monitor the Indic blogs. All in all, a qualified panel geared to steer the event with grace, honesty and vigour.

I thank all the jurors for devoting their time and effort to this event and hope that we would be able to highlight the very best of the blogosphere and attract attention towards scores and scores of blogs that escape our sight. Here is an alphabetical listing of the Jury.

• Amit Varma
  Amit Varma is a writer based in Mumbai. His day job is with Cricinfo, and he has also written for publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian and the Observer, as well as various Indian publications. He is best known for his blog, India Uncut, and is a regular contributor to The Indian Economy Blog.
• Anita Bora
  Anita Bora is a Bangalore-based communications professional whose blog and cat came into her life around the same time in 2001. Just A Little Something started off as a personal journal and through the years has become an account of her passions - photography, writing, food and travel. She also started the first Indian Bloggers List around the same time. Currently, besides JALS, she concentrates on more interesting pursuits like bird watching.
• Arnab Nandi
  Arnab Nandi has recently decided to defy common sense and sacrifice the glorious years of his youth towards the attempted betterment of Computer Science. He cherishes the memories of times before graduate school; where he actually had the time to run a pseudo-startup, websites like TimepassTown.com, and the fairly unknown web promotion service BlogSnob. When not sleeping or doing homework, Arnab thinks about posting to his weblog of many years, and then puts it off for later.
• Badri Seshadri
  Badri Seshadri currently runs a book publishing company in Chennai. He occasionally writes for some Tamil magazines and discusses cricket in Tamil TV channels. In his earlier avatar, he co-founded Cricinfo and ran its operations globally and in India for a long time. Badri maintains the following blogs:Thoughts in Tamil, a tamil blog, Nothing Frivolous. Only Serious and Kirikket, a group blog on the similar sounding sport in Tamil.
• Chakra Sampath
  Chakra Sampath is a Senior Software Consultant who works for General Electric and lives in United Kingdom. Chakra has been blogging since May 2003 and managed to grab the ‘Best Male Blogger Award’ in the first edition of Indibloggies in 2003. Once an avid traveller, Chakra reads a lot, organises Blogger’s meet, blog hops and takes immense interest in political affairs. Starting a Tamil blog is something which he has been successfully procrastinating for more than 2 years.
• Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan
  Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan, a copywriter by profession, and smart-aleck by choice. He is most known for his blog Selective Amnesia. It’s only a matter of time before he wins that jackpot and the Gold Lion at Cannes. He will also learn Swahili that very day and retire to an Island in the Bahamas. At other times, Chandrachoodan is a passionate advocate of blogging, and its potential. He is also a frequent traveller, and spends his time discovering palaces of ancient Tamil Kingdoms. Chandroo is a second timer at the Indibloggies Jury.
• Charukesi Ramadurai
  When she is not blogging and reading blogs, Charukesi works as a qualitative researcher and ethnographer focusing on emerging markets. Between travel to work and home, Charu tries to read as much as possible, although she feels strongly that it is just not enough. What keeps her going is travel - she lives to visit new places, meet new people, eat new kinds of spicy food. All the time, camera in hand and blog in mind, with the steady thought that one never knows where the next blog post may spring from. A Time To Reflect is her primary blog, which also won the best new Indiblog at the Indibloggies 2003. Charu also writes on specialist topics at Media Musings and MindSpace.
• Cibu C Johny
  Cibu is a Chicago based Telecom professional interested in Malayalam blogging. Visit his blogger profile for more.
• Debashish Chakrabarty
  Debashish Chakrabarty, a Software Consultant based at Pune, has been on the Internet since the “geocities” days but opened his Blogger account in October 2002. His English blog Null Pointer covers Java, Internet, blogging, Indic-blogging and topics that concern India. He also maintains a Hindi blog NuktaChini. Debashish is a DMOZ editor and maintains a portal Chittha Vishwa on Indic Blogging, launched the first desi blog-awards called The Indibloggies and keeps a sharp eye on Indic-blogging. He has also contributed towards localization of blogwares such as Wordpress and Pebble. He has also been associated with initiatives like Buno Kahani, a group blog where various authors literally weave a story and Nirantar, hyped to be the world’s first Hindi blogzine. Having interviewed few, he can now also boast of having been interviewed, finally.
• Dina Mehta
  Dina Mehta is a qualitative and ethnographic research consultant based in Mumbai, with 17 years experience in the field.  She also actively immerses herself in research around social tools and social media as they relate, manifest in and affect the way teams and organizations communicate and collaborate. Dina is part of the network that established the use of blogs, wikis and VOIP around disasters like the tsunamis, katrina and the recent earthquake in Pakistan and India.  She has presented several papers at conferences around the world on how these tools can accelerate collaboration in a global virtual world. Conversations with Dina is her personal blog. She also contributes to Worldchanging, TsunamiHelp, KatrinaHelp, Asia Quake Help and SkypeJournal.
• Divya Manian
  Divya Manian works as a graphic designer and is a passionate creative commie. She loves all things geeky and is a fervent worshipper of the Matrix Theology (with Philip K Dick as one of the messiahs). Currently, she is also pursuing realist paintings which she says, she loves to hate. Divya is a second timer at the Indibloggies Jury.
• Ganesh
  Ganesh works for one of the fortune 5 Telecom company in Chennai. His hobby is stocks and photos , he runs a financial blog for Indian stock market and IPO -Rupya.com. Ganesh also has a photo blog at http://www.chennaiblog.com. Tech gadgets and entertainment systems interests him a lot.
• Gautam Ghosh
  Gautam Ghosh is a HR professional in an MNC technology firm and moonlights as a blogger at http://gauteg.blogspot.com. His interests cover Management, Business, Innovation and Learning. As a potential journalist who was dissuaded from joining the ranks of the daily beat journalists, Gautam is thankful for blogging to turn into an amateur journo of some sorts. He has also written for HR publications but his big dream is to write a sci-fi novel someday. If he sounds confused, he admits he is!
• Guru Subramanian
  Lazy geek a.k.a Guru Subramanian is from Chennai, currently living a showery life in Seattle. A software consultant by destiny he loves creative arts, yaps about intellectual stuff and still on the only(!) belief that he is a geek. Guru also runs a filmy blog named scribbles of a lazy geek at lazygeek.net, he has been scribbling in the name of blogging for nearly four years now. Holy smokes! The blog was also was a winner of best media blog for two years back-to-back. Other than watching unheard films and writing nonsensical reviews, he also designs and creates solutions for data warehousing, his other passion.
• Kiran Chava
  Kiran Kumar Chava, is a software professional based in Hyderabad. By accident he started blogging in April, 2004. From then on, it has become one of his hobbies, small part of life. He is also the first Telugu Unicode blogger and with the strong support from other interested friends he is helping people to start blogging in Telugu, and maintains a list of Telugu blogs. He normally blogs at http://chavakiran.blogspot.com and dreams to write a big Telugu novel some day. Kiran likes Karnatic music (even though he doesn’t understand anything technical in it) and can listen to Annamayya songs for hours. In his leisure time he contributes to the Teluguwikipedia. His current passion is his newdigicam.
• Kiruba Shankar
  Kiruba Shankar earns his daily bread as an Associate Director at an online media company. His office peon scratches his head when when he sees Kiruba cycle 26 kilometers to work everyday. Having enjoyed the benefits of blogging, he encourages students to actively take it up. He has lectured at Asian College of Journalism, Madras Ad Club and Anna University where he organized a national level symposium on Blogging. He is rumoured to have organized India’s first bloggers meet. He blogs his daily life at www.Kiruba.com. When he isn’t working or playing with his two daughters, Kiruba runs marathons and rows in the smelly waters of Adyar river.
• Pankaj Narula
  Pankaj Narula is a SAP Netweaver solution architect. He has been one of the early bloggers in Hindi blogdom and has been part of the active community participating in projects like Narad, an aggregator for Hindi blogs, Sarvagya, Hindi blog wiki, Akshargram, a community blog of Hindi bloggers. Pankaj has two blogs – Mirchiseth, a Hindi blog where he writes about fun things like films, music and desi life and a second English blog - Beta Thoughts, which is more of a professional blog talking about consulting, SAP, life in the digital age etc. Pankaj lives in San Jose, California.
• Pawan Sorte
  When not working at his day job as IT Professional in Telecommunications industry, Pawan Sorte works on his various web projects. Pawan is a computer and technology enthusiast who also promotes Marathi usage on the web. He currently runs Marathi Blog Vishva to bring together all the Marathi bloggers on the Internet, writes his own Marathi blog Goshtigamti and tries to scribble away on effect of technology on social and individual lifestyles on his technology blog Techeffect.net.
• Ravikiran Rao
  Ravikiran has been blogging since August 14, 2002 at The Examined Life, where he pontificates on whatever strikes his fancy. Over the past three years, his fancy has struck him to pontificate on Politics, Economics, Technology and Philosophy, but he is most notorious for making bad jokes. He is an ardent supporter of  free markets and it is he wishes to see India as a Capitalist country before he dies. He is a guest contributor to IndianEconomy.org. In his spare time, he works for a software company in Mumbai.
• S.Jaya Prakash
  S.Jaya Prakash (aka) Prakash is an entrepreneur. He edits and publishes a bi-monthly magazine on new industrial projects in India, on behalf of a company founded by him along with a friend in 1999. He is into blogs since August 2003. Although he has the habit of reading angrezi blogs, he has restricted himself into writing only in Tamil, for reasons better known to only him. He runs a blog in English too, purely for his business promotion. Prakash mostly blogs on modern literature, book reviews, gossips, humour and film reviews.
• Sadagopan
  S.Sadagopan heads Consulting & eBusiness for a leading software firm for the Asia Pacific, Middle East & African Markets. He has led several consulting and technology transformation engagements covering multiple industries cutting across wide variety of technologies around the world. His blog is focused on emerging technologies & trends.
• Saket Vaidya
  Saket Vaidya is a recruiter-headhunter in the technology domain, working for the executive search division of a major Indian job portal. Saket has been blogging since June 2004, through which he has been able to discover a surprising passion for writing. His interests include individualist philosophy, technology and the open source software movement. Among other things, he aggressively advocates the Wordpress platform, and loves to assist fellow bloggers in shifting to it, customizing it as per their liking and troubleshooting generic technology issues. As a blogger, Saket is better known as Vulturo, a handle which he has adopted since he was 14, after a comic-book super villain by the same name. Saket is an avid reader of Indian blogs and a member of the Desipundit team.
• Satish Talim
  Satish Talim is a senior software consultant, associated with several MNC technology firms and has been in the IT field for over 25 years. His interests cover Chess, Badminton and Software languages. He has written various articles on java.net and loves to teach. He has several blogs to his credit, including Chess, Java, Ruby and Appliblog.
• Shanti Mangala
  Shanti Mangala is a senior software consultant trying to juggle a full-time career with a very demanding toddler, four dogs, husband and a blog, Dancing with Dogs. She loves music - any and all kinds and is constantly trying out podcasts of the different genres in her head. Shanti also happens to be the brain behind the popular clique "Blogmela".
• Sonal Vaidya
  Sonal Vaidya is a Software professional based in New York. She is a Postgraduate in Physics & Electronics. Being a software development person, ‘language’ meant more about computer jargon till she left India, the word now denotes the first software coded into Sonal’s brain - Gujarati. Unplanned attempts at renewing links with mother tongue combined with a creative urge led her into the forays of blogs. Thus was born ‘Prabhat na pushpo‘, literally "Flowers Of The Dawn", Sonal is the first Gujarati blogger. The blog has now become her glimpse of the world - a kind of view that gives unique yet universal meaning to her experiences. Blogs is her way of nurturing her roots at the same time nourishing her loss of homeland. She actively participates in several blogger’s meets. Sonal also has a well-read English blog. Besides blogging she loves traveling, trying new cuisines, meeting people & communicating.
• Srijith Krishnan Nair
  Srijith once used to blog. Now he doesn’t. He thought he could spend his freed up time doing his PhD. in Computer System Security. Invariably he wound up in the comment area of other blogs, playing devil’s advocate. Oh well!
• Veer Bothra
  VeerChand Bothra is a Mumbai based blogger, better known in blogdom for his creation: Blogstreet. Veer manages the Content group at Netcore. He also blogs at MobilePundit andBuddhi.
• Venky Krishnamoorthy
  Venky Krishnamoorthy has been in the tech field for over a decade now. He lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA. Venky’s interests include reading, biking, trekking and blogging, he loves to travel. Venky is still dreaming of a day when he can backpack and travel across India. He rants and raves in his blog Venky’s Musings.

December 1st, 2005 | Announcements