India Blog Watch

The social networking site IndyaRocks, which was launched in private beta in the month of March, is now moving into Public beta this Thursday. Along with this, they will be announcing three new features. All these features have been added to the private beta for feedback/review from the testers. The new features added are:

Entertainment - This section caters to the Bollywood movies and the service will rely a lot on the user-generated reviews. The interface is pretty cool. This section also beings the latest news and gossips from the Bollywood. You can even check for the showtimes in your city. They will be introducing commercial services as part of this module next quarter.

Tribes: Tribes is a group/community feature. You can join a tribe and contribute your content to the same. There are number of categories to make your search for a specific tribe a bit easier. If you are interested, you can make your own tribe. I am impressed.

Mobile: The site received a positive feedback for the Free SMS scraps and Free SMS calendar notifications and has now introduced FREE Group SMS capability also. The new feature has been embedded into “My friends” link. They have also introduced MMS based Blogging, Photo uploads and My Diary.

With these three new features and lot more on the way, Indyarocks is moving in the very right direction. It can be the Indian MySpace for sure.

A new online photo sharing site Photohugs.com has been launched in India that allows the users to upload and share unlimited number of photographs. The site claims to send the photos to every nook and corner of India along with the latest status of your order and the tracking code for your shipment.

Well, the service is meant for both the Indian citizens as well as the Indians living abroad. The most interesting thing is that it allows users to upload UNLIMITED full resolution photographs, which is not even offered by the giants such as Flickr. Photohugs.com has an appealing and cool easy-to-interface that indeed impressed me. the registration process is quite easy with a few formalities such as name and e-mail.

The charges are very reasonable as you will just need to pay US $0.50 for uploading 200 photographs, which is more economical than using Flickr. The detailed charge list can be found here. It will be interesting to see how they execute the things and do justice with their claims of being better than Flickr on some grounds.

Note: >>>You will just need to pay US $0.50 for downloading (not uploading...my mistake...sorry) 200 photographs.

Sakshi is in confusion and finding troubles to decide the best ever Jodi of Indian Cinema. She has posted a question with five options available on her blog under the title Jodi No. 1.

Just help her to decide the best Jodi of Bollywood. You can also find some important jodi’s name is missing from the options too as I found missing the name of Dilip Kumar-Vaijyanti Mala, Dev Anand-Wahida Rehman, Dileep Kumar- Madh Bala and so on... But you will have to go with options only.

Blogging in India is no more an alien phenomenon. We are witnessing the birth and growth of new Indian based blogs at a swift pace. Blogging has given best platform for the Indian users to express their views and opinions on any topic. Blogging is about conversations among people in real time and real voices. Blogs are a great way of intertwining the single minded people thereby forming online societies. We will undeniably see more of a convergence of social media in the Indian blog space in the near future.

Now, many bloggers in India are using their blog writings to bring out the social issues. For example, the blogs in the state of Madhya Pradesh has been in the news lately for providing a platform to campaigners and officials to raise concern on social issues like safe motherhood and children’s quandary. There are many blogs that are raising the social issues and gaining wide popularity. Few of them are enlisted below.

•SafeMotherHood: This blog is run by “Campaign to Raise Concern On Maternal Deaths” to bring to the audience the plight of the Indian woman. Other than this, the site also provides media reports concerning maternal mortality. Anil Gulati, better known as Bhopal blogger takes care of Hindi to English translation and vice-versa to ease the readers.

•NewsWhichMatter: This blog brings out the news and views of the central Indian state and the issues related to children

•Mpchildinfo: This blog keeps a tab on infant mortality, pitiable health care, and low nutrition levels among children

•IndiaDaily: This blog at Instablogs network covers all shades of the mystic land India including socio-political issues.

We can say for sure that the trend of blogging is catching up at a swift pace in India. Blogs now are no longer a place to run your personal lives only. They have emerged as a strong tool of communication which can have a significant effect on every aspect of people’s lives. It’s good to see that more and more Indian bloggers are writing on Indian social issues and bringing out those truths, which sometimes remain hidden from the public view.

Source: bizreport

Looking out for news, pictures, blogs and events of your home city? Yahoo! Has now introduced a new service dubbed Yahoo! OurCity that offers information on many Indian cities. For the moment, the cities added to the list are Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata , and Mumbai.
Moreover, the content on ourCity is displayed in local languages say Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, or Telugu. More cities would be added to the list very soon.

Via: thebizofcoding

The ban imposed by the government of India doesn’t seem to be achieving its objectives as internet users are shifting towards proxy sites to access the banned sites. I have already mentioned of such proxy sites via which the users can have access to the banned sites. The Internet Service Providers Association of India has also accepted that the sites could be accessed despite all the ISPs blocking it at their end.

In the mean time, Indian blogging community has shown its rage against the ban on blogspot since Indian ISPs have blocked the whole site despite the fact that government has asked to block certain pages only.

ISPs put their point forth by saying that it’s not possible for them to block specific blogs. That is the reason they have to close the entire site. Mr Kiran Karnik, President, Nasscom cited that the ban on blogs was ‘neither desirable nor feasible.’ The news in the air is that more web sites will be added to the list of banned sites very soon.
Anyway, that is not going to create any problems for the internet users, thanks to the proxy sites.

Via: sgknox

In an attempt to promote Indian bloggers, the fairly new ibibo is running The Great Indian Bloggers Hunt. The contest is open to all Indian citizens over the age of 18. The total prize money is 1,55,40,000 Rupees that makes somewhat around $3,49,333. Every month, the top 100 bloggers will get paid.

If we take another look, ibibo is trying to get a number of Indian bloggers migrated to its blog hosting service. But, the contest will certainly add a feather to Indian blogging as every Indian blogger will have a chance to win and it will probably add to the total count of Indian bloggers too. Well, The winners need to regularly update their blogs.

Well, I am pretty busy with my job here. So, I won’t be coming guys. You carry on!

Via: Quickonlinetips

BharatMatrimony.com is considered to be one of the top-most matrimonial sites targeting Indian community. Now, they have introduced a new innovative service by name of Voice Matrimony, which I think will certainly attract a lot of wannabe brides and grooms.

The Voice Matrimony is an upshot of collaboration between BharatMatrimony, Airtel and OnMobile. The new interactive service lets the registered users to record their voice and reply to the received voice messages. The person can record his/her needs and listen to the expectations of their likely partner.

The other two new services initiated by the site are the Online Diary and Travelogue, which caters to the Honeymoon experiences. Pretty interesting! I won’t be surprised to see other matrimonial sites following the footsteps of BharatMatrimony.com in the very near future.

Via: WatBlog

Designed and conceptualized on the lines of ‘The Weblog awards’ the Indiabloggies have also started taking nominations for the best Indian blogs. There are 16 categories and panel of jury but the final say rest on the number of votes that public polls for a particular blogs.

The blogsphere in India is pegged at 3.5 million by the Windows Live survey and even if we take conservative estimates on numbers 1 million bloggers or more are the final numbers that everyone will agree to. Blogs in India are still in novice state but in coming years as awareness grows more and more crowd will join in from the 100 crore+ population.

Off late these awards were marred by many controversies but still it’s a good thing as they recognize good work and also bring blogs to limelight.

The nominations are open and check out how to nominate blogs here and to know more about jury check here.

Via: Mutiny

If you are short on info about the dining options in your city, you need to check out the new site Needgrub.com that acts as a guide for restaurants in India. For now, they are offering the info on restaurants in two Indian cities, Bangalore and Chennai. The director of the endeavor Anu Parthasarathy enriched us with his take on the site.

The basic idea behind the website is to help people find a great place to eat in their city, when and where they want to. They are trying to provide the information they need to find the right restaurant, using the tools they need like extensive search options, extended information, maps and more. Its essentially a restaurant guide. The key being that the users not only get other user’s opinion about a restaurant, but also having Professional Food writers to give their opinion about a restaurant, the information on the writers and critics will soon be published online.

Here are a few questions that I asked from Anu Parthasarathy.

1. Are you going to cover the luxury restaurants, hygienic places, or everything that will come your way?

To us, any place that serves food or drink comes under our roof. We encourage any eatery to be listed on our website. Our target audience is from any walk of life, thus providing a wide variety of places to eat is key. Also, our team strongly believes that even the smallest road side stall has something to offer to people. We are trying to focus on getting from the smallest of restaurants and the big star rated restaurants get the same visibility on the internet. Of course, we list them at slow pace, so our food writers can catch up with the places we enlist as well. We eventually will be the ICON and reference point in understand restaurants and eating out in India. Our focus will stay within in the food industry.

2. Your comments on recent “Yahoo! India Plagiarism” that is witnessing a strong protest from desi food bloggers

Oh, I totally agree with the bloggers. Plagiarism is obviously not acceptable. I am a blogger myself, not too active, but I do voice my opinions when I have to. Using somebody’s content without permission is of course not right. All it probably takes is a few minutes to write to the blogger to get their permission to print their content. So, yeah I understand the bolgger’s frustration over this issue.

So, it’s the time you start writing your reviews about the restaurants for the foodie people. And, you can find the best one for yourself too.