[Reader-list] Nominate your blog for the 2006 Indibloggies

[Shivam Vij]

The Indibloggies, India's first and foremost blog awards would be
unveiling its annual nomination process for the 2006 event on 26
January 2007. This is the fourth year of the Indibloggies award,
organised by Pune-based blogger Debashish Chakrabarty.

The nominations would be 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 85,000.

The IndiBlog of the Year award, the top honor at the event, went to
Jivha (http://www.jivha.com, now defunct) in 2003 and to Atanu Dey of
Deeshaa ( http://www.deeshaa.org) 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 (http://indiauncut.blogspot.com ) 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 (http://soniafaleiro.blogspot.com) 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 at http://www.indibloggies.org.

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
(http://www.arunverma.com).

Although sponsorship offers are still open, prizes worth Rs 86,000
have already been committed from various Bloggers and Organisations
such as Creativegarh, Microsoft, Tehelka (http://www.tehelka.com),
Sarai-CSDS (http://www.sarai.net), Techgoss (http://www.techgoss.com)
and GoHindi (http://www.gohindi.com), among others. Prizes in various
categories include a copy of Windows Vista, Blogjet Blog client,
Books, CDs, Publications, Gift certificates, Web hosting package 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
(www.shivamvij.com), one of the jury members at the 2006 events.

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

For additional details, please visit http://www.indibloggies.org.

- End -
Issues by Debashish Chakrabarty
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