Within / Without

While Kamla and Mridula do cover the Indian Blogosphere, the number of Indian blogs is huge and I’d love to have more volunteers who like to do link fests for Global Voices.

You need to love reading blogs. All I ask for is a post once in a week or fortnight with five to ten links to interesting blog posts. These links could be thematic or they could be more general. You’ll have to provide a little context to these links and keep close to the pulse of the blogosphere. The post needs to reflect the Indian blogosphere to other people across the world – conversations, preoccupations, the ups the downs etc.

Getting linked on GVO will probably not get you too many hits. However, GVO itself gets about 25,000 visitors a day. Then there’s the large number of feed readers. This number appears to be going up steadily. So on a link-loving site like GVO what do readers do? The editors at GVO are there not to just link but to provide the context to the link. A few examples – Kamla on BarCamp in Bangalore, Rezwan on Bangladeshi Blogs, Reactions to the bomb blast in Colombo, Mridula on travel, a post I did on India and the missing girls. Over the last ten months or so – I’ve also got ample feedback that a lot of MSM checks GVO to get an idea of what blogs are talking about. The bigger the blogworld gets – the tougher navigation is. A regular blogger may be willing to navigate through stuff but when people are looking for posts on specific issues and do not want to sift through results that Technorati or Blogpulse may give them?

One of the perks for being an author for GV is the amazing opportunity to interact with people who are completely involved with blogs, social software, democracy, mainstream media and alternate media. It’s fascinating to follow these conversations from all over the world.

Apart from English language blogs, it would be great to have volunteers who would like to link to blogs in other languages. We could even think of photo-link fests on certain themes. The frequency could vary given the number of blogs for that language. Please feel free to email me at nehavish[at]gmail[dot]com or use the contact form to get in touch with me and we’ll take this forward.

Update – Thanks for the great response. Some amazing people have got in touch with me for English language blogs – However I am still looking for authors who can cover Hindi, Bangla, Urdu, Tamil or any other language that Indians are blogging in.

Posted on May 11th, 2006 by Neha Viswanathan
Filed under: Blogs, Global Voices