Going through the indibloggies nominations

Sports category
Tough fight between sportolysis and sportsnob. Its difficult to decide. Both are real good. If I could vote for both of them, I would. And they cover many other games, apart from just cricket.

Travel category
Trivial Matters, Kalyan Varma , Windy Skies are good. I found Windy Skies particularly nice.
Travel tales from India is boring.. there is a lot of other stuff apart from travel. Kousik and Sumana site did not open in my browser so I cannot comment on that.

Best topical blog

aligarians - What?! Just contains lyrics of some ghazals.. I post rock lyrics often, I can stand a chance, cant I? Of course, it isnt so difficult to insert YouTube links to the music videos, like aligarians have posted for ghazals. But I am lazy.

alternative perspective - boring... same old leftist rhetoric. we dont have water, we are poor, how the hell can you feel good about the IT sector. .. you can safely give this a miss.

Well, reading further, most of them are just plain boring. I wonder if they nominated themselves.

In this category, Varnam, Reality check and Youth curry are interesting.


Best photo blog

Well none of them. Windy skies (nominated in the travel category) is actually a good one, but isnt nominated for this category.

Best new blog

joboptions, kalachakraist and barbadkatte look good, the rest are all just about OK.

Joboptions is just plain and informative, it isnt entertaining as such so not many people might like it.

Cookery blog

Err well, just anything. Though I would say actually opened a few of those sites, and tried to see which of the blogs explained their stuff better. I wanted to find out whose instructions were more detailed. But all of them were almost the same. If I would go cooking reading those instructions, it would be disaster in the kitchen.

Most humourous blog

Well, greatbong is good and highly humourous, though some of the posts (and the comments section) might be offensive sometimes. Point Blank is good too, featuring cartoons on current topics. A picture, or a cartoon, speaks better than a thousand words. Also worth reading is ouchmytoe.

Humanities blog

uhh, they are all the same to me. Humanities is what journalists study before they join newspapers as journalists. Going by the news quality on TV and papers, even that is not required these days, it seems. Hence, we see some improvement in journalism in the fields of technology and economy, atleast.
These days, the humanities graduates join BPOs. Actually much better. They do perform well here, whether in calling or backend processes. Those humanities grads who do not get a job in either newspapers or BPOs join some NGO, and mouth inanities.

Best community blog

INI signal, FTW, all the way. The great Indian mutiny is also good (I almost confused it with Sepia Mutiny and did not click). Regarding theotherindia.org .. yuckkk. A blogful of lies and deceit. Read http://barbarindians.blogspot.com slashing them apart and exposing their lies.

Best entertainment blog

The good ones are http://www.withoutgivingthemovieaway.com/reviews/ and To Each its Own. Again, I am wondering whom to vote for. It sure is difficult to decide when the competition is stiff.

By the way, Indian Writing!? Uma ? Entertainment ? Yeah sure, she does entertain. Some people would read it when they have lots of time and brain cells to kill. I would not do it even when I do have the same. IIRC, she is some IAS officer in the government or something. Well, pretty much explains the sad state of affairs in the government. No wonder, it has to be if the government employs people like Uma. After all, thats what is your idea of entertainment when you are fattened on our tax money. Hey Uma, get that IndianWriting thing off your blog. Its giving out a wrong image of Indians.

Best designed blog
Blogchaat looks good (with that chaat kee laari). Sakshi's site looks good too, but it was better earlier. The current one still looks good.
Karma dude looks good. Mediajunk looks good. Well, most of them do. All of them are pretty well designed. Some good stuff here in this category.

Best Technology blog

Now, this is interesting. We sure do have some good nominees here. But I am mighty impressed with Digital Inspiration and http://tech-buzz.net. Both these blogs are quite similar.

I wonder if there are good desi blogs on programming. Though, these blogs are techie blogs, they do not focus on programming. Please post some good programming blog links in the comments section, if you know.

A blog, quickonlinetips.com is good, but concentrates on stuff like Google, Blogger, Youtube etc only. That wouldnt really make it a core technology blog as such. Or maybe, I did not find what I look for in a technology blog. (Of course, technology just isnt Information Technology, it can be just about anything).
Also, shallow thoughts is good. It does not focus much on Infotech. It includes all other types of technology posts, and I even saw one on cosmetics. Also, the percentage of posts on science isnt high enough, I feel. Anyway, its a good read, whether it wins or not :)

By the way, check out http://science-core.blogspot.com/ . It hasnt been nominated for anything, but it is good.


Indiblog of the year 2006 - The Big one -

Well, many of the blogs dont even deserve a nomination. Like this one, who ironically calls himself the "opinionatedIndian" [Edited. I put in the wrong name earlier - objectiveIndian. And sure, he is opinionated. He should also be calling himself hyperbolic Indian, going by the kind of statements he makes :-) ] and names his blog "indian inheritance". Sample this from that blog - "NRIs exhibit the typical Indian trait of sitting on the fence and criticising anything and everything". Enlightening. Very objective indeed.

IndiaUncut is as usual. With cow related humour and features the most interesting news in the media. Though it does make some strange observations sometimes, it is a very good read. Subtle humour, and some good thinking.

Gaurav Sabnis - some really good insights and analysis. The IIM class shows through. Preciseness and facts. Wish I had prepared a bit harder after college and I would not have missed it by "just a little". But then, I was told that people with no work-ex (like me) stand very little chance in the interview. And now, I am too lazy to prepare all over again.

http://www.drishtikone.com/ is also another good blog. This should have been in the well designed blog category :)

And heck, how did Krishworld reach there. I should vote for themaanga :)


By the way, I just could not miss the fact that some blogs that are not even nominated get hits many times over the ones who are nominated.

Now, I must say that I am not a regular reader of many of these blogs, and I did spend some hours browsing through them. Just to vote for the right blog. Yeah but, if you read just a few posts of Krish or Indianwriting, you would come to a decision quickly. A few of those blogs did not open in my browser - I am using IE 7 on Windows XP.