IndiBlogger – Development blog

Can IndiBloggers make the Difference? – 40,000 kids depend on you or is it just about that?

At IndiBlogger we believe in a code and the code is simple as it’s from the movie Troy; Honour the god(s), love your woman/man and defend your country!

Those days of chivalry are still at hand. We might not fight with sticks and stones any more but we can do so with the power of the collective words towards social causes. Soldiers fighting a war was a social cause and nothing more. India has a huge online community and the huge network of bloggers in the IndiBlogger database is a testament to that fact.

So what are we fighting for? Well its not only the 40,000 kids that GiveIndia promises to educate. It’s the very core of our blogging existence. To understand this, we have to wonder why we started blogging. Was it for the fame or the money or the hits on our homepage or the recognition? We believe it was to make a difference. This is the time for all of us to unite under one banner. We might be from different parts of India, speaking different languages, writing about different things, none of this matters if we can’t help the community.

Over the past two days we have received many blog posts on GiveIndia’s campaign to help win one million dollars that will go a long way to educate 40,000 kids in India. The truth of the matter is that it’s not even close to its full potential. In effect it means that Hector called his troops into battle and 90% of them did not show up. Well, try defending Troy with that.

Imagine the power if we all blogged about this. Words will not be able to describe the outcome of such an event

So here’s what we have to do before the 22^nd of January,

Vote here : http://apps.facebook.com/chasecommunitygiving/charities/338730

Do what you do best! Blog about it!

Do you need more information?: Visit the GiveIndia blog.

Do you want to be sure: Send an email, giveindiachase@gmail.com

Do you want to talk about this with other bloggers? Log on to the forum.

In the words of Achilles (Troy again) “Do you know what’s there, waiting, beyond that beach? Immortality! Take it! It’s yours!”

Well that’s what is at stake and here are some of our heroes contributing to the battle; Please do add your blog posts in the comments so we can update the list accordingly!

- Anoop Johnson

1. http://totalgadha.com/
2. http://craftisland.blogspot.com/
3. http://blogeera.blogspot.com/
4. http://vibgyorhopes.blogspot.com/
5. http://www.dostanamehfil.com/
6. http://thoughtfulrandomness.wordpress.com/
7. http://zombieanoop.wordpress.com/
8. http://tulsidas.wordpress.com/2010/01/17/giveindia/
9. http://vinni.co.in
10. http://www.renieravin.com/
11. http://www.webtrafficroi.com/facebook-giveindia/
12. http://planetphoenix.com/2010/01/18/vote-for-give-india/
13. http://aseems-infinity.blogspot.com/2010/01/one-for-cause.html
14. http://zillion2ndinnings.blogspot.com/2010/01/support-child-welfare-project-on.html
15. http://karansguesthouse.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/an-appeal/
16. http://gopalramanan.blogspot.com/2010/01/help-for-cause-please-vote.html
17. http://geekydood.wordpress.com/
18. http://myamusingmind.wordpress.com/
19. http://rfazli.blogspot.com/2010/01/help-children-of-india.html
20. http://vu-point.blogspot.com
21. http://slishacrazy.blogspot.com/2010/01/give-india-vote.html
22. http://monikamanchanda.wordpress.com/
23. http://paanchwakhamba.blogspot.com/

A very eventful Sunday it was for Birla, the owner of Pot Luck restaurant in BTM layout.

His tweet read “Teaching kite flying and chopsticks to 100 kids, hosting bloggers meet and catering for a bday party. ZZZ..What a weekend!

At the bloggers meet is where we all came in.  25 bloggers came together for a time out and we were pleasantly surprised to find the terrace garden venue extremely refreshing. Dhempe wanted to make it into a film studio of sorts.

It was an interesting blogger meet. It did not have the strength of the Bangalore blogger meet before this as we promoted it only through twitter. But I would say that this is the most comfortable I have been with a bunch of Blogger URL’s in a long time!  A lot of jargon was exchanged in the time allotted for discussions and needless to say, it all flew over my head. In times like this, we like to say that we left our technical brains at Chennai, safely with Renie. Everyone gave us some very good feedback. Mohan from Yahoo gave us his view of the voting process in IndiVine being misused. We will be brainstorming this on priority after we brush up on our php skills, re-learn our code and fill up our drinks cabinet.

This blogger meet was ever so memorable for the IndiBlogger team. Even though we were from different professions, our unique hobby made us realize that we shared similar problems. I mean, we hated “The Man”, we abused a few companies/films, we screwed over a few technologies, we shared stories of the many failed companies/blogs we once started and the camaraderie was just brilliant!

The pagoda blogger meet?? Here’s the good stuff; our man Birla definitely put something in the pagodas to get everyone hooked. I ate three plates of assorted pagodas and 2 cups of coffee. How much did everyone else have? It was a very worthy snack for all of us also considering the fact that Birla was flying kites in the morning, literally!

Well, until we meet again, you’ve been awesome; we’ve been IndiBlogger, Goodnight!

- Anoop Johnson

Remember we said we have another announcement to make in 2010? Vineet Rajan, who was the hero behind our well received blogger meet at Pune in March 2008 is now officially a member of the IndiBlogger team. Vineet is moving out of his job at HP, Hyderabad to open our office at Mumbai – yes, that means we’ll have a lot more activity for bloggers at Mumbai!

Here’s Vineet (aka Pappu Pager), with an Ubuntu logo proudly displayed at a Microsoft – sponsored meet:

We guess we really got to know Vineet after the blogger meet, in some dark smoky pub at Pune. He even took a bus from Hyderabad to Bangalore to join us at the pre- Iron Maiden Kingfisher Heavy Metal Blogger Meet, even though he wasn’t going to the concert!

The halo always appears when Vineet is photographed after a few beers:

You can read more about Vineet here.

Needless to say, we’re delighted to have someone of Vineet’s caliber on our team, and we’re sure he’s going to be an instrumental part of IndiBlogger’s future. Welcome aboard, Vineet!

Our last announcement of 2009 is an exciting one for all of us in the IndiBlogger team.  We have been named the official blogging partner of the third season of Vodafone MTV Splitsvilla, and we have just launched their official blog. This is our first association with a Television series and it’s great to be working with a brand like MTV!

Check out the official blog here.

We have another announcement to make – however we’ll save it for 2010.

Here’s wishing all bloggers out there a Happy New Year – may your blogs be flooded with traffic like you’ve never seen before!

Our Christmas update is here – albeit a few days late!

Our last two Christmas updates were blogger meets in 2007 and the forum in 2008. Considering how successful both these features became, we sure did have a lot of pressure to come up with something really useful. Thankfully, as always, there were bloggers who came to the rescue and told us what they needed. The discussion evolved into a plan, and the plan evolved into our latest feature, IndiMail.

If you’re thinking “who needs another email service?”, allow us to clarify. IndiMail is not a wannabe replacement for Gmail, nor does it provide you with an email address. It’s a simple, private, 1-to1 messaging system that bloggers can use to communicate with each other, similar to the messaging on Facebook . IndiMail can only be sent between bloggers who are on each other’s networks, giving the networking feature a greater purpose than before.

Here’s a screen capture of my inbox with a couple of messages from Anwin, our team’s tattooed bug-finder.

But wait, there’s more!

• We’ve revamped our homepage.
• We’ve made an all-new dashboard. You can use it as a starting place for all your IndiBlogger activity.
• The ETA of the next IndiRank update is now shown on the dashboard.
• Mutual connections are now shown separately on the network as well as directory pages.
• A little email icon now sits beside the mutual connection icon; allowing bloggers to easily send messages to people in their network.
• Notifications are now sent when a post on IndiVine gets a vote.
• An updated settings page allows you to control the alerts you receive from IndiBlogger.
• Fixed an error on the IndiRank stats page: if a new user who doesn’t have a rank as yet tries to access the stats, it used to say that there was an error with the blog’s feed.

We owe a big thank you to Sudama and all the others on the forum who gave us their support and made IndiMail possible. IndiBlogger would be nothing but a simple directory if it wasn’t for all of you.

We hope you all had a great Christmas, and we wish you an awesome year ahead.

Keep blogging!

Renie & The IndiBlogger Team

Indiana Jones came alive for a few weeks when IndiBlogger.in hosted the “Star Movies – Indiana Jones Blogger contest”.

Reema of My Random thoughts and Ali Naqvi of TheReelMag took the top honours. Our hearty congratulations to these two deserving IndiBloggers!

Inceidentally, Reema also won the IndiBlogger of the Month award in the humour category.

TheReelMag.com won the prize for their portrayal of George Lucas and Spielberg’s very first conversations that led to life for Indiana Jones on the big screen. We highly recommend them for some great movie reviews!

The gift hampers from Star Movies were quite enviable and we had to provide a good level of security for it, lest someone stole the book on Heroes or the Casino Royale playing card set.

Look at the glee on the face of Ali Naqvi Co-Editor, TheReelMag.com. We remind him that this is not a pirate movie and that he should share his treasures with the IndiBlogger team.

More pics of the prizes, courtesy Reema:

You can look to the IndiVine channels for more competitions of this kind. Whether you are a sports, science or technology blogger, you can find competitions that choose your writing style and area of expertise within these specific IndiVine channels. The Star Movies blogger contest was run on the Movies channel.

The first IndiBlogger of the Month awards in 2009 will most likely be for blogs on movie reviews. Bloggers will be thrilled to submit their posts on a lot of new movies from Twilight New Moon to The Ugly Truth.

Once again, thank you Winners and everyone else who participated. We had a wonderful time getting this done!

Is there a comical genius lurking inside you? Um..No…? Ok then, just a comic? Either way, here’s a wacky contest for bloggers from the guys at TempoStand.com:

Tadka Maar Ke offers you a chance to be a part of the spiciest movement in Indie music in India and grab a few prizes while you are at it. We hereby declare the bloggers competition for Tadka open.

Share with us ‘the most masaaledaar incident of your life‘ and the top five most entertaining posts, as decided by our judge, Sidin (whatay.com), will get a 500 Rupee gift coupon courtesy Flipkart. Don’t worry if the incident you are going to write about happened with a friend (who may or may not be imaginary). Yes, you can submit more than one entry but you can win only one prize so submit your best ones.

..did we hear you asking ze word limit? ney! this is not for any newspaper, just let your thoughts flow (but dont send a manuscript)

Timelines
Are pretty simple. Final date of receiving url’s to your blog posts is 25th Nov.
Results will be declared on Nov 30th.

How to Submit

1. Submit your post to the humour category on IndiVine.
2. Send an email to tadka@tempostand.com with the url of your entry on IndiVine (or) tweet the url with the hashtag #tadka.

Prizes
There are not one or two or three or four but five!
Five gift coupons, each worth INR 500, courtesy Flipkart.

Don’t forget to visit http://tadka.tempostand.com/ for more updates. Good luck, and keep blogging!

The NASSCOM conclave this year ended last week at Bangalore, and IndiBlogger was one of their blogging partners. The crowd this year at the conference was much higher than usual, with more than a 1000 people participating in the event. The NASSCOM organizers did a great job this year of connecting with the community via social media and generating a lot of buzz online. We also feel that the past recession (yes… its gone now) brought in more entrepreneurs!

Either way, the conference was a big hit. There were a lot of companies showcasing their products and services. We’ll soon be writing about a few here. Day 1 started with Mr. Guy Kawasaki’s key note on “Art of the Start” where he spoke about how to run a start up company and why not to go to a VC right at the beginning. It was an interesting key note which was credited as “a scitilating performance…” by the presenter! (We briefly wondered if Guy had started with a Bollywood style dance!)

This speech was then followed by various other unsessions and workshops. After a couple of sessions like Saas, Marketing and branding strategies was lunch. The food at the Lalit Ashok Hotel was great throughout the event!

Post lunch, we attended a workshop on “The art of writing a business plan” by Mr. Naeem Zafar. It was an extraordinary discussion and there was a lot to learn and look back at your work form this session. Mr Naeem, who is also a faculty at Haas Business School at University of California Berkeley, spoke about how to create a business plan and running a startup successfully.

The evening continued with a cocktail networking session where the IndiBlogger team relaxed a while and spoke to various bloggers and other start up chiefs.

On Day 2 we attended Guy’s twitter session for a while and visited the expos. There were lots of products being displayed. We will provide you with a write up on a few interesting ones soon. Some of the interesting products that we came across were, Vizual – HR management solution, Fusion charts, Yopedia etc.

The IndiBlogger team also met with several startups, and we met Nirav and Harish from Blogadda. We were also live tweeting the event, for which pictures are available here.

Overall, the NASSCOM conference was organized very well and our congratulations to the NASSCOM team. Thanks for inviting us, and it was an honour to be your blogging partner!

UpdateHere’s a cool contest for all bloggers and tweeters who are in or around Bangalore. NASSCOM counts down to Product Conclave and Expo 2009 with a special contest through IndiBlogger.in where one can win NASSCOM Product Conclave T-Shirts, and free passes to the event itself!

The event is to be held on October 27th – 28th at Hotel Lalit Ashok, Bangalore.

So what’s the deal? All you have to do is write or say something about the following topics on your blog, on twitter or on NASSCOM’s facebook page. Be as imaginative and wild as you want! Just remember to add the tags #indiblogger and #nasscompc. A lucky winner with the best ideas, whacky comebacks or thought provoking one-liners will be chosen every day.

The topics?

1. Do you think Entrepreneurship can be taught, learned or is it an instinct?
2. Do you feel Indian Education system needs to focus more on Entrepreneurship?
3. What is your favorite product startup from India and Why?

So go on, tweet about the topics, blog, comment on this post or post your thoughts on NASSCOM’s facebook page.

UPDATE: 2 passes have been given out already to @sangfroid and @santoshp via twitter. Congratulations! 3 more passes to go!

After completing the successful upgrade to IndiVine, we got down to the next task in our list – the big IndiRank updgrade. Apart from several small bug fixes and performance tweaks, all bloggers who have an IndiRank can now view detailed stats about their blogs under their account.

The new dashboard will tell you:

• If we were able to crawl your feed properly
• Your IndiRank history
• Your Pagerank performance and history
• Your Alexa performance and history
• How often you blog
• Tips on how you can improve your IndiRank

Of course, this dashboard is still pretty basic, and will be updated based on community feedback. Hope you all find it useful!

One major bug that some of you wrote to us about has been squished; the bug where a newly approved IndiBlogger doesn’t find his/her blog in the directory until the IndiRank crawler hits their blog. Now bloggers will find themselves on our homepage the second that they are approved – just like old times.