This article appeared in Life 365, 13th March 2013.

The road so far…

Ever since we made blogs into plays with the help of the very energetic Stray Factory, we have been trying ever so hard to get into waters alien to IndiBlogger.in. The publishing world! Since then, it has taken us over two years and many endless hours to get a partnership for an exclusive short story collection written by bloggers on IndiBlogger.in. We approached many publishers with the idea, but it didn’t seem to impress them. We longed for something exclusive because we wanted the whole book to echo the stories and experiences of IndiBloggers and not just one or two to be added as a footnote. Enter Harper Collins and Yashodhara Lal! The whole thing seemed to seamlessly take shape with Karthika, the chief editor at Harper Collins giving us a crash course on “Publishing for the clueless”. However, we like to believe that the whole thing happened because Harper Collins has a lot of women in their team and IndiBlogger has a lot of men! This book was meant to happen!

Challenge accepted…

We had many challenges to overcome and the road so far was not exactly smooth like some of you very rightly pointed out. With every team in different places across India and working together for the first time, it was hard to translate novel ideas quickly. For example, The IndiBlogger development team was in Chennai, while the marketing team was working out of Bangalore and Mumbai. Yashodhara Lal and Harper Collins were in the Delhi NCR region but by no means close by.  When we designed the initial site, it was like a big game of Chinese whispers. By the time the requirements ping ponged back and forth and across to the creative team in Chennai for some development, the reaction would be, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot??

Breaking all the rules…

A lot of questions regarding the rules and regulations have come up and we have had to change them a few times but here’s the thing, our primary aim is to get the best possible ideas and stories so that we can make a great book. The number of votes for example, is an indicator of the influence of the Blogger in his social circles and to establish the Blogger’s reputation in some ways. Having said that, if the story does not take shape or is poorly written, the editors will be reluctant to put the story in the book because it’s their call and their editorial name at stake.  So when it comes to the book itself, votes will amount to nothing. We would urge you to do your best to write, and take this as an opportunity to learn how and build your influence, because if not today there’s always a tomorrow. We realize that many people across the world know of the GetPublished initiative and we don’t have a name for the book yet. This is BIG!

It’s about family…

IndiBlogger is a big family and we can call it that because thousands of bloggers have met with each other in our IndiBlogger events across India.  Some of you might know that your family and friends can interact with the GetPublished program as well through their FaceBook, Twitter and many other platforms. We hope that they are proud of your efforts so far.

One of our directives is to create a book that will come alive after it is published. This in effect means that the readers of the book can easily interact with the bloggers again with most social mediums through the IndiBlogger network. We are sure that many with similar experiences would relate to the stories and will definitely want to have their say as well, keeping everyone engaged.

The road ahead…

One of the biggest issues for authors today is not the publishing itself, but the marketing and raising awareness. Bestsellers weren’t born because someone published a book.  It’s getting the word out that really matters after that. We believe that the bloggers on IndiBlogger will have no such problems.  As long as there is a good story, IndiBlogger.in’s experience of executing over 100 successful IndiBlogging campaigns coupled with your insightful understanding of social media will send this rocket into space. I must say that there are some very gutsy stories in some of the entries that we have gone through so far. I for one am expecting the book to be “Saucy with a hint of Ice”!

A glimpse of the future…

The activities around the book are going to get more pronounced as the year matures. To start things off, GetPublished is going to feature in the Bangalore IndiBlogger meet on January 20^th, 2013 as part of HP’s interactive campaign to promote everything original including writing, products and supplies. There are many more activities planned through the year and we hope that you will jump in and give us some company through this long and IndiAwesome journey.

So the next time you look through a glass window of an airport bookshop, don’t be surprised if there is a book with your name on it.

Happy writing!

Anoop Johnson

Indian by Birth, Blogger by Choice

Hindustan Times, Mumbai, January 13, 2013

Be it through candid blog posts or publishing houses, the one thing every writer dreams of is to see their work being read by the rest of the world. And now, to aid this dream, HarperCollins India and blogging forum IndiBlogger are coming together, to launch a unique initiative that will give Indian bloggers a chance at getting their work published. The bloggers on the IndiBlogger.in network are being invited to share their experiences under the theme of real love stories, and the best that are shortlisted will be published by HarperCollins later this year.

Read the rest of this article here, and check out GetPublished now!

Come September, Indian bloggers on opposite sides of the planet come together to celebrate blogging.

Mumbai | Register now

Vodafone & IndiBlogger bring you the most spectacular IndiBlogger meet yet, with Lewis Hamilton himself! Not only do you get to meet him, you could be one of the lucky IndiBloggers to get strapped in next to him while he does what he does best!

Those who attend the IndiBlogger Meet also get special passes to watch Lewis Hamilton race down the streets of Mumbai as he does donuts, wheel runs and more in the MP4-27 F1 race car.

When?
Sunday, 16th September, 2012 – 1:00 PM to 8:00 PM (Lunch and tea will be served)

Where?
The Grand Hyatt
Kalina, Santacruz East

New York City | Register now

Join IndiBlogger & celebrity chef Vikas Khanna at the first official IndiBlogger Meet in New York City!

The Junoon IndiBlogger Meet promises to be an amazing day of gourmet food & cocktails amidst the merry chatter of fellow bloggers.

When?
Sunday, 16th September, 2012 – 11:00 AM to 3:30 PM (Lunch and cocktails will be served)

Where?
Junoon
27 W 24TH ST
New York, NY 10010

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.