It’s not easy for bloggers to get credible information about their online rights when it comes to freedom of speech and internet censorship. If you would like to have a better understanding of the situation in India as it stands now, and how it affects everyone of us directly, then head over to the Internet Democracy Project. They’re organizing a day-long training session on freedom of expression and censorship for bloggers on the 25th of February 2012 at New Delhi.

In the course of this day-long program, a mix of short lectures and more interactive sessions will take you through:
-       the history of censorship in India and its current status;
-       the legal framework regarding online censorship and the ways in which it may affect you;
-       debates on difficult questions such as where and how to draw the line where hate speech is concerned;
-       what to do if you are served a legal notice;
-       alternatives to censorship to fight problematic content;
and much more. Throughout the training, we will of course be paying particular attention to how all of this may affect your blog and yourself.

Read more about the project, and people behind it, and how you can support it here.

The IndiBlogger forum has a discussion amongst bloggers about internet censorship here.

The Delhi HP IndiBlogger Meet is scheduled for this weekend and the media has already expressed their enthusiasm. The Hindustan Times graciously did an eye-catching trend story on the blogging scenario in the National Capital Region.

We thank HT City for this wonderful story and specially Vaishali for putting the piece together.

Looking forward to meeting you all this weekend – it’s going to be one hell of a meet!

For those of you who aren’t aware of what we are talking about, we had announced the twenty winners of the Samsung “It’s Time to Tab” contest a few days ago. Some of the participants have been quite unhappy with the winner selection and the way the contest was run. You should probably read these first, in case you haven’t done so already:

IndiBlogger Forum: Samsung Mobilers Winners : A Disappointment!

TechJunoon: IndiBlogger-Samsung Conspiracy Against the Indian Tech Blog Community

Tech2Date: Samsung, IndiBlogger And The Rat-Trap

TodayOnTech: Indiblogger and Samsung Galaxy Tab Contest – We call it a Scam!

Firstly, we’re sorry this caused so much distress. We understand how much work goes into a quality blog post, and it’s tough when one’s efforts go unrewarded.

Secondly, there have been several things said about IndiBlogger.in, Samsung India and the winners of the contest, and we intend to shed some light on the same:

This is not a winning entry, this is the correct link.

When Samsung India sent us the list of winners, they had sent the correct link to the winning entry. We normally link to the IndiVine post from the winner’s list – and when we looked for entries by that particular blogger, we chose the wrong one. It was a human error, and it was corrected as soon as it was brought to our notice. The last tweet was also mentioned in this post, leading everyone to believe that we had awarded an entry which only had pictures to a launch event; this isn’t the case!

Extension of the contest by two days

It’s been suggested that we extended the closing date of the contest as there were not enough entries; that IndiBlogger was forced to do so because the promised number of entries was not met. The truth is, the contest was extended by two days because the Samsung Blogger Meet was re-scheduled for the 10^th, and we wanted to give those who attended a chance to enter the contest after seeing the device and meeting the Samsung team.

Plagiarism

We checked all the winning entries for any sign of plagiarism before announcing the results. Considering that we burnt our fingers once before, we’re quite thorough for all our contests now. It’s been suggested that we neglected to disqualify this winning entry, because the technical specs were copied from here. We did so because technical specs are usually copied – either from the manufacturer’s website or another source, and copyscape/Google will always throw up several results for the same.

Favoritism by the judges/random selection

It’s been claimed that friends of the IndiBlogger team and Samsung have been awarded the prizes. This is not the case – IndiBlogger had no part to play in the judging and Samsung India has nothing to gain by favoring friends – the entries were judged on the selection criteria alone (see below). It’s also been mentioned that winners have been randomly selected, a misconception because we stated on the contest page that the winners are displayed in random order.

The selection criteria

As was stated on the contest page: Entries will be judged based on creativity, relevance, depth, impact and level of interaction.

Judges, in all their wisdom, are only human. Everyone has their own way of looking at things – and what is important to one, may be considered irrelevant to another. We are not aware of the weightage given to each of the criteria above – that decision belongs to the sponsors of the contest, as it should be. Some entries may have been found to be so creative that it caught the judge’s fancy, and it may have outweighed the other factors. Some entries might have been so well researched and insightful that it outweighed the need to be creative. That is why the winners are a mix of techies, fictional writers and comedians. We believe that if the judges disregarded the entries and only chose bloggers who would make good Samsung Mobilers, they would have chosen only tech bloggers (considering they tend to have better reach). In the end, 20 winners needed to be chosen out of 220, and we’re certain that Samsung India gave the judging process the time it deserved. To say that their judgement was flawed by criticizing the winning entries and the work those bloggers put into it is extreme.

Changing the contest rules

When we launched the contest, we had stipulated that only those who promoted the live webcast would be allowed to enter the contest. Unfortunately, this was a bit botched up – this announcement was made on the blogger meet page, and it led to a lot of confusion. Some bloggers said that the webcast was showing up as a blank screen; others thought that they had to attend the blogger meet in order to participate in the contest; some thought that the launch event and the blogger meet was the same; and a few were misled into thinking that the launch was postponed along with the blogger meet. We also had many new registrations during those two weeks, as bloggers were signing up with IndiBlogger purely for the contest. Our moderators had a tough time keeping up, and several bloggers were approved only after the launch event. It was to accommodate for all of this, we had to simplify the rules; and we allowed bloggers to link to the recorded version of the webcast within their entries. We realize that those who abided by the original rules and went all out to promote the live webcast on their blogs, twitter and facebook feel slighted by this change. We do apologize – it was a decision that wasn’t made lightly, and on hindsight, may have been the wrong one. On the other hand, we feel that the change increased the level of competition, and that’s always a good thing!

Former IndiBlogger staff “confessing” the truth

The person in question is a former IndiPolice of the IndiBlogger forum, which is moderated by the community. Members of our team (part time, full time and one-time) are listed here. Unfortunately, he left the IndiBlogger community a while ago, as he did not like the way we handled the plagiarism problem, and wasn’t happy with the way the forum was run. We’re still sorry he left; he brought to light several issues on the forum (carefully disguised affiliate links, for instance) which the rest of us had not realized. His advice to us before he left has proven to be invaluable, and we hope to see him back one day, assuming time really does heal. However, to use the words “staff”, “confesses”, “scam”, “inside story” and “dirty truth” is a tad misleading, to say the least.

To conclude, for today:

We’d be happy to update this post with any questions we’ve neglected to answer. If we have missed out on anything, it’s not intentional; it’s just been a long day and an even longer week. We didn’t mean for all of this to happen, and we certainly didn’t anticipate it. I (Renie Ravin) must admit, I’m not too pleased about confidential emails and personal facebook comments shared out of context, let alone being shared at all. IndiBlogger and what it represents is much more than work for all us; we live for it and we do it 24/7 (much to the dismay of friends and family.) We know this doesn’t necessarily make us right – we’re here to learn from mistakes and make changes, as we’ve done several times before. We do hope that all of you who feel disappointed right now would stick with us while we do so.

Come the 10th of August, Samsung officially launches the Samsung Galaxy Tab 750 in India – and IndiBloggers everywhere are invited to participate!

So aside from the Samsung Galaxy Tab Blogger meet at Bangalore on the 20th of August which promises to be loads of fun, Samsung is also giving away spanking-new Galaxy Tab 750s to twenty bloggers deserving enough to become a “Samsung Mobiler”!

Learn more about the campaign here, and stay tuned for the IndiVine contest and the live webcast on the 10th of August.

It’s time to tab, and keep blogging!

Remember Milli Vanilli, the pop band that won a Grammy award 21 years ago, only to have it revoked soon after it was found that they used someone else’s voices? It’s recently come to our attention that a fairly well known “blogger” has done the same, taking content that doesn’t belong to him, claiming it as his own, entering into competitions, garnering votes and winning prizes.

Sourav Pandey, we’re talking about you.

Thanks to the sharp eyes of Lakshmi Rajan (who first told us about it) and Eon Heath (who first blogged about it), we’ve been able to uncover a shocking betrayal of the trust placed upon him by the blogging community and his readers. The evidence speaks for itself:

Exhibit #1

Original: http://spottedjaguar.deviantart.com/art/Animal-Farm-55608516
Plagiarized: http://www.souravpandey.in/2011/04/contretemps.html

Original author‘s reaction: Yeah, that’s actually my piece. I wrote that my Sophomore year in high school for an English class I was taking. Let me know what I can do to help you remove my artwork. I’ve never experienced someone plagiarizing me before.
Thank you for informing me.

Exhibit #2

Original: http://octoberazriel.deviantart.com/art/Barefoot-127709686
Plagiarized: The plagiarized post was removed after being warned by Eon Heath. We have a backup copy here thanks to Lakshmi’s early warning.

Original author‘s reaction: Yes, this user has taken my work without permission and posted it as his own. As seen from my copyright information my poem was posted way back in 2009. His copy was posted just weeks ago. He did not credit me to the piece, rather he claimed ownership. I’ve also noticed several images that he has taken from deviantArt and used in his posts.

The post containing my poem has since been removed from his blog but I do happen to have a screen capture from before removal.

I’m not sure how else I can be of assistance but keep me posted. It isn’t fair to any of the parties involved that he takes credit for someone else hard work and creativity and hopefully the matter can be resolved soon.

Exhibit #3

Original: http://modnar-redrosid.deviantart.com/art/Homeless-and-Hungry-174166330
Plagiarized: http://www.souravpandey.in/2010/12/we-will-walk-hand-in-hand-we-are-not.html

Original author‘s reaction: I’m actually really surprised. I mean, one side, sort of annoyed because it is plagiarism, on the other, sort of honoured because of the comments of people (even though they presume it is him). But no, he didn’t get in contact with me. It’s quite sad that he didn’t just go to the effort of telling people he didn’t write it himself, and simply found inspiration there, but people do that. Thanks for messaging me about this.

The above post was submitted for the Akshaya Patra contest where more than a hundred bloggers came together for the greater cause of feeding India’s underprivileged children. Thankfully it did not win any prizes.

Exhibit #4

Original: http://andthenyou.deviantart.com/art/Real-186741075
Plagiarized copy removed by said plagiarizer, backup copy here.

Original author‘s reaction: I’m actually really surprised. I mean, one side, sort of annoyed because it is plagiarism, on the other, sort of honoured because of the comments of people (even though they presume it is him). But no, he didn’t get in contact with me. It’s quite sad that he didn’t just go to the effort of telling people he didn’t write it himself, and simply found inspiration there, but people do that. Thanks for messaging me about this.

Exhibit #5

Original: http://megumitierana.deviantart.com/art/4-am-147121119
Plagiarized: http://www.souravpandey.in/2010/10/just-call-away.html

Original author‘s reaction: Oh my god, I’m always so scared that this would happen. Thank you so much for spotting this. Yes, this is indeed mine. I hope this case is solved real soon.

Exhibit #6

Original: http://kjavinash.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html
Plagiarized: http://www.souravpandey.in/2009/04/kashmir-unedited-and-untextable.html

Original author‘s reaction: Damm !!! This is my original Post which i wrote in 2007 !!

Exhibit #7

Original: http://inpenguin.deviantart.com/art/A-Dream-of-Death-70267821
Plagiarized: http://www.souravpandey.in/2011/04/dream-or-nightmare-or-just-nothing.html

Original author‘s reaction (please read the comments): No, I wrote this and posted it in 2007, as you can see. Its old, representative of my early attempts at writing, but the writing is mine with no collaboration.

Note the line at the beginning of the post, which says “Please do not leave half-baked comments, as this is a very personal post!”.

Exhibits #8 – 9

Original: http://shadowgriffen.deviantart.com/art/Opposites-attract-Perfect-day-122715247
Plagiarized: http://www.souravpandey.in/2011/01/fire-and-ice-wishes-and-love-in-dreams.html

Original: http://gid.deviantart.com/art/Morning-Light-8666691
Plagiarized: http://www.souravpandey.in/2011/04/while-she-drifted-among-sleep-filled.html

We have similar exhibits for almost every post on Sourav’s blog.

Sourav Pandey, now is the time to do the right thing.

• Apologize to all your readers via the same channels you used to gain them in the first place.
• Put up a blog post with your apology so that all your feed subscribers will know.
• Comment on every one of your plagiarized posts so that those who commented earlier will know who the real author is.
• Inform all your facebook fans and twitter followers.
• Return your prize winnings so it can be given to someone who truly deserves it.

At the very least, you owe this much to the community and hard-working authors you betrayed and robbed.

Chip, the popular tech magazine ran a featured article on the present state of blogging in the face of the rising popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. We had our say on the issue, and gave them some stats to prove it. In the end, Chip concluded that blogging is definitely very much alive.

Anoop Johnson, Director-Marketing and Strategic partnerships at IndiBlogger, which is the largest community of Indian bloggers, feels that even though the number of bloggers has gone down, the quality has definitely improved. “Back in 2007-2008, we used to approve around 500 blogs every month, and reject around 700. Blogs are mainly rejected because they had duplicate content or did not have enough posts because the author ran out of things to say. In 2010, we approved roughly 600 blogs per month, while the number of spammy blogs came down to 500 per month. In other words, serious writers still continue to grow in number, while the half-baked attempts at blogging decrease since those authors have other outlets like Facebook and Twitter. Blogging requires much more discipline and passion than maintaining a social network profile, and there really is no comparison between the two.”

Read the whole article and the stats here.

Merry Christmas everyone! What was meant to be our usual Xmas update to IndiBlogger took us much, much longer than we expected it to, thanks to more ideas getting added to the mix every day. Our quality control team having OCD didn’t help us very much with the deadline we set for ourselves, but they sure made a difference to IndiBlogger. We finally decided to forget Christmas, take the whole site apart, throw old parts out the window, and put it back together with gentle love and care. We’re finally done, and here’s what’s changed:

Global changes

• IndiBlogger is now lighter and much faster (as already confirmed by the community), thanks to several changes to the user interface as well as the way things are handled behind the scenes.
• We’ve built version 3 on a custom framework, which means we can bring in new features much faster and with less bugs.
• IndiBlogger is now W3C valid, except for the pages which integrate with Facebook, Google maps and other third parties. Most sections can be used on smart handheld devices now, and for the not-so-smart devices, we still have the recently launched mobile version.
• Email alerts are now sent via Google’s app engine – which means they are delivered faster, and are less likely to end up in your spam folder.
• Consistent (and better looking!) user interface elements are now used all over.
• Pagination has been numbered on all pages. A few users have reported that they’re missing the “last” button – we’re working on that right now.
• Default gravatars are now much better looking. We wondered what we were tripping on when we made the old ones.
• New IndiMail notifications are now displayed on the IndiMail link in the header. If you see a yellow alert icon, that means you have unread messages.
• The footer section is more organized, and doubles up as a sitemap.
• Improved browser compatibility. We’ve decided however, that IE6 is not a browser.

New Theme

• Inspired by our most recent partner Cleartrip.com, we decided to see what IndiBlogger would look like in a lighter color scheme – and we liked what we saw.

The Home Page

• New Jquery slider, showcasing everything that’s new on IndiBlogger. Tip – try using the arrow keys to navigate through the slides.
• Popular posts from IndiVine are now showcased on the homepage as well. The new blogs on the network have been pushed to the sidebar.

Improved Search

• IndiSearch now uses an Ajax interface to search for blogs by subject, as well as bloggers by name or location. Results are ordered by IndiRank. Blog content is also indexed, powered by the all-powerful Google search.
• We’ve fixed a bug wherein the search results were inaccurate. For example, if you had searched for the word “rave”, you’d also see results for “travel”. Not too smart, that was.

Dashboard

• Your dashboard now has a facebook-inspired activity feed, showing you stuff like network activity, blogger meets in your city, new IndiMail, replies to forum topics you’re tracking, and votes for your posts on IndiVine.

Blogger Meets

• The main blogger meet page highlights upcoming blogger meets in your city.
• Organizing your own blogger meet is now easier, with an updated suite of organizer tools and better customization so you can have your blogger meet like you mean it to be.
• Now that we have over 200 bloggers attending our blogger meets, our attendee list was taking ages to load over slow connections. Gravatars are now turned off by default, and you can enable them if you want to.

IndiBlogger Drives

• We’ve decided that “contests” were not the right word the initiatives we have planned. We needed a term that was more generic, yet with greater purpose. The IndiBlogger Drives page showcases all our latest campaigns and the latest winners from the IndiBlogger of the Month archives.

The Directory

• The directory is now gravatar enabled – so if you’re looking for someone you know elsewhere, let’s say on twitter, you’ll find it easier to find them on IndiBlogger.

IndiForum

• IndiTalk, which was recently integrated with the forum, can be used on mobile devices.
• Replies to a forum topic can now be sorted by time, so you can see the latest replies at the top without having to go to the last page.
• Forum alerts were disabled months ago when we exceeded our hosting service limits. Moving to a dedicated server didn’t help much in that regard, and now, thanks to a little help from Google’s infrastructure, they’re back.
• You can track topics faster, without having to reload the thread.
• Forum pages have an on-page search filter similar to iTunes, so it’s easier to find relevant replies or subjects.

New & updated Pages

• We have a new page about IndiBlogger, as described by the Indian blogging community. Our thanks to all of you for showing us your appreciation!
• Updated FAQs.
• Links to download the IndiBlogger browser addons (for Firefox and Chrome) created by Sujith and Kevin.

There are a more changes we’ve not mentioned – it’s better to leave a few surprises for you to discover. A HUGE thank you and hugs to all of you who have supported IndiBlogger – you have no idea what it means to us. IndiPolice – the time you spend making IndiBlogger a better place for thousands of bloggers is priceless.

IndiBloggers, please post your feedback on Hemal’s thread and let us know what you think.

What’s next?

You can expect upgrades to IndiVine, IndiRank, a few new initiatives and a new product that’s going to change the way you use IndiBlogger. For now though, our team is off to Kolkata for another blogger meet.

Keep blogging!

That’s right, IndiBlogger.in comes back to Kolkata after 2 long years, courtesy Akshaya Patra, the world’s largest NGO run school meal program.  Come the 20th of February, bloggers from all over India are going to land up for what promises to be a fun-filled IndiBlogger Meet!

We’ve always told people that our meet at Kolkata was one of the best we’ve ever witnessed, thanks to the warmth and camaraderie of Kolkata’s bloggers. We can’t wait to experience it again!

Since our first batch of blogger meets, we’ve come a long way, and yet, the song remains the same. Pardon us while we take a quick trip down memory lane.

We almost lost BG to a Kolkata tram:

This is Anoop, trying to remember the speech he didn’t prepare:

Kolkata bloggers, who clearly did not forget their lines:

Our journey back home:

Kolkata, we can’t wait to see you again! If you haven’t registered for this meet as yet, register now!

It was the same pleasant weather in Bangalore; something we’ve always enjoyed everytime we stepped foot in the city. The entire team had grouped a day before the event in the Bangalore office to go through the meet agenda. But like every blogger meet we usually end up forgetting the agenda; so leaves us thinking why we have these brainstorming sessions. And we don’t even need an excuse to drink actually!

The meet was a culmination of more than a month of hardwork by all the stake holders prior to the meet. The video showcased at the meet was shot by Anoop; which was not just well received but received a lot of mentions on twitter as well.

IndiBus made a roaring debut with more than 60 bloggers using it to reach the venue and back. Many bloggers liked the fact that they could meet and talk blogs much before the meet and get to know each other better. The super fast ultra mega deluxe blogger meet luxury express  was however late by an hour for the blogger meet thanks to super-fast traffic in Bangalore on the Sunday afternoon.

Akshaya Patra after hosting a very successful contest on IndiBlogger where each blog post fed 50 children made a grand entry into the hearts of the blogosphere with a MASSIVE blogger meet aimed to improving awareness about the noble efforts of the NGO and the lakhs of children who are given nourishing food every day. The success of this endeavour cannot be emphasised enough; because when they started back in June 2000 they were feeling close to 1500 children. Now they are feeling more than 1.2 million children daily making them the world’s largest NGO to implement the mid-day meal programme.

The meet had more than 270 registrations with bloggers from all over the country coming down to Bangalore to meet and network. The meet had bloggers from all walks of life – from homemakers, software engineers, government officials, entrepreneurs to even school students.

Based on suggestions from Lakshmi Rajan, we changed the format of the blogger introductions which went off very smoothly thanks to the system built especially for Blogger Meets. 60 random bloggers were chosen and had 30 seconds to introduce themselves. The screen also showed their blog link for others to see and refer. The bloggers who took more than 30 seconds to introduce themselves were ceremoniously sent to jail. All bloggers who introduced themselves got a photobook specially printed for bloggers by the bloggers. The photographs were taken by Naveen and Sanjeeb.

Next up was the lunch served which was also the same food that children eat everyday. There was bise bela bath and sweet pongal served with some namkeen. Bloggers got to experience for themselves the quality and nutrition value of the food served.

The time tested activity of Live and Let comment then commenced. A few first timers also asked what the chart papers were for and we were only too happy to respond, “You shall soon find out!” Soon the bloggers were seen sketching some funny stuff on everyone’s back. Some were risqué too! Rashmi from IndiBlogger was even proposed to by two bloggers. Why they would want to marry the crazy sketch pen lady of course is a discussion that warrants an #IndiTweetMeet ASAP!

This was followed with a discussion by Akshaya Patra who shared their journey as an organization that is doing social good. A lot of bloggers also shared suggestions for incorporation into their activities. The good thing about the session was that it was yet again proven that the blogging community is always there to support noble causes and would welcome any initiative with open arms. Bloggers also emphasised that they would like to have a long term association with them.

The final session included group discussions moderated by bloggers themselves. Issues ranging from online harassment to technology were discussed by them; and some even taking notes on their iPads and tablets.

This was followed with a team introduction; as usual the person introducing others forgot to introduce himself. This time the victim was Renie, but he really needs no introduction. He is the guy with the porcupine hair; we all know that now don’t we?

After another successful blogger meet in Bangalore, the team headed to The Higher Taste, an exclusive restaurant in the ISKCON premises where vegetarian gourmet food is served. Some patrons of the restaurant later complained about the empty buffet counters.

We thank Bangalore bloggers for being as hospitable as ever and Akshaya Patra for the wonderful work they are doing making every blogger in India proud to be associated with them.

The blogging community is indeed committed to bringing social change in India!