Best- also popular- Indian blogs

state of the blogosphere 2011 survey by Technoratti: interesting findings

2012-03-01T15:36:00.000+05:30

We forgotto discuss the Technorati ‘state of theblogosphere’ 2011 report, because it came outwhen we were terribly busy with updating our own Indian blog directory and thenwe got busy clearing the huge backlog of requests for detailed blog review (thebacklog still remains).

Those ofthe visitors who don’t know about Technorati let’s introduce it. It is arguably the biggest and most authoritative site / organization for searching and indexing blogs from theworld over, and tracking the blogosphere. It brings out a survey every year onthe trends in the blogging world.

Beforereading their survey results, however, do remember that these are based onresponses from those in Technorati network and/or their visitors. The ones who responded are necessarily the ones who are active onthe web and don't mind filling a detailed survey form. A surveybased on responses from such a sample is not likely to capture the entire blogging spectrum inrespect of parameters such asblogging habits and hours spent on blogging. Interestingly again, 80% oftheir respondents were not bloggers!

Someinteresting findings of the survey are:

Manyrespondents reported that they were blogging more than before, and they did sobecause it helped them professionally or in business. Some did so as they enjoyed interactingwith people. People who were blogging less than before did so as their time wastaken by other activities or they now devoted more time to other types of social media. Veryfew bloggers reduced blogging because it seemed to hurt their social life.
Bloggerstended to be influenced by others’ blogs when choosing topics for their own blogs.
Bloggerssaid, the primary reason for blogging was sharing expertise and experience,speaking out one’s mind, connecting with like-minded people, getting moreinvolved with their passion and so on, rather than seeking business.
More thantwo-thirds of the respondents believed that blogs were being taken more seriously as source ofinformation than before, vis-à-vis other media. A significant number of respondentsfelt, blogs are written better than the traditional media and are being taken seriouslyas source of information – more than the traditional media and much more thanFacebook and Twitter. Yet, blogs were down in the list as a trusted medium ofinformation.
Blogs, notprint media and television, were a source of inspiration for many people.
Wordpresswas found to lead Blogger as the blogging platform of choice; others didn’tcome anywhere near these two.

You canvisit the blogospheresurvey results here for details.

nascentemissions

2012-03-01T08:39:00.000+05:30

A fine Indian blog. Saumya Kulshreshtha, manages to keep it both serious and bubbly at the same time.

Nascent Emissions- a blog of personal musings

http://nascentemissions.blogspot.in/

The best feature of the blog as per me is the content. The layout has been appreciated and criticized, but the content of my blog has touched many a heart. I try to make my posts warm, fresh and straight from the heart.

I write on people, stories, observation, love, romance and books.

Widgets make a blog great or they mar it

2012-02-22T21:42:00.001+05:30

Widgets are those stand-alone elements in a blog that take care of all matters other than the core content. Technically they are small programs that are attached to the webpage's code and are executed from the webpage. They cull out matter from myriad sources, process it and present it on the blog.

Since widgets are not the core content of a blog, they compete for attention with the core content and other elements on the blog. There has to be a compromise between the value added on one side and space taken / conflict for attention on the other. Widgets and such other elements have the potential to ‘make or mar’ your blog in a big way, so we advise that you have a look at each widget and the whole blog separately for these two aspects - value rendered and cost in terms of space / attention / conflict.

Do not put too many widgets on the blog. Once they become a crowd, they put off the visitor.

Even a few widgets can be annoying if they are too flashy, irritatingly animated or out of shape.

Also consider the placing of widgets. Do not stuff sidebar(s) with a large number of widgets. If for some reason you must keep some widgets that do not add great value to the blog, put them down in the sidebar or in the bottom of the blog.

Many free widgets on the web have a link to the creator of the widget. This is true also of badges. Use such widgets and badges if you think that associating with them enhances your blog's value. Usually do not put widgets that trick the visitor into clicking on it and take him to a website selling widgets or other items. Even when hidden sale is not involved, a big link-text can be irritating. While reviewing blogs, we recently saw a cute fairy widget on one blog, with a witty remark coming from the fairy. But just below the remark was this irritating, animated text: ‘If you liked me, you can visit me for more such widgets, at www...’.

We have seen blogs with many widgets that contain links to other posts, labels / categories, and external sites, but a number of these links don’t open. Some widgets stop working or updating content after some time. Therefore, do check every few months whether the links and widgets [especially those not provided by the blogging platforms such as Wordpress and Blogger] are working or not.

Avoid these:
- widgets with text that is difficult to read because of its style or size;
- widgets with colors that pop up too much or completely submerge the widget content in the background;
- a few too light or too dark widgets in the sidebar of the opposite contrast;
- widgets needing scrolling [e.g. a newsreel that needs you to scroll a bar to read the news];
- more than one heavy widget [e.g. video bar] on a page;
- audio widgets that start playing on opening the blog [e.g. playing of a tune];
- too many advertisements, especially those between posts, and big ones;
- pop-up widgets [especially those needing action before they let you go further].

WIDGETS COME IN MANY TYPES…

- content – popular posts, related posts, latestcomments, labels, profile, search box, archives

- community – social media, subscription, feed,blogroll, polls

- utilities – clock, calendar, currencyconverter, map, tips, translator

- dynamic updates – daily quotes, newsreel,trends, stock quotes, stat counters, visitors, weather

- fun and show – game, jokes, celebrities, slideshow, photo-stream, video bar, songs

- advertisements

We analyse here some commonly used widgets. As indicated above, widgets - if used properly - add value to your blog [or website maintained like a blog] in terms of functionality and navigation. Some of them help in gaining popularity for the blog. So, use widgets to your advantage... but handle them with care.

Archives
Having an automatically created archive helps navigation and cross-linking. People can visit your old posts without going back page by page. Archives can be shown in many ways; see which one suits your blog.

Content listings
Listings such as label list, category list, recent comments and popular posts serve their purpose well if they are properly configured and placed in proper places. Such widgets should not have too many entries. If you must have a list in which each entry has text over 50 characters, use a wide sidebar so that the list does not become too long.

These widgets should usually come high in the sidebar so that the visitor has a glimpse of your content in one go. You can use these elements in navigation bar under [or above] the blog title also.

Automatically created post summaries often do not capture the sense of the post. If you make each summary long, the list becomes cumbersome. You need to find a golden mean of number of entries and the size of summary.

Do remember that when certain posts are put in popular posts or recent posts widgets, these posts grow at the cost of others, because they are likely to get more visitors, and the visitors may not return to see other posts.

Blog roll
Blog roll is a good way to promote blogs that you like, and is often mutually rewarding. However, too big a blogroll stops serving its purpose; it shows that you have not been discreet. So, don’t list others’ blogs and websites just because they would reciprocate or because you want to show off your popularity among bloggers. Your recommendations tell a lot about you. Keep only the blogs and websites that you’ll really want to recommend.

Visitors
Giving the number of visits ato the blog might help you show how popular you are getting, but as the widget can be easily manipulated, people hardly believe the numbers. The rotating globe or static world map with color dots showing visitor locations also do not add much value to the blog. Showing visitor locations dynamically in a list too is of hardly any use. If at all you are tempted to show any of these widgets, use a simple design. The same goes for the number of ‘likes’, ‘followers’, 'subscribers' etc.

Social media and social bookmarking
Social media and social bookmarking links are useful to evolve a community around the blog. However, you need to be very regular for such activity to get really ‘social’. If possible, use very small, unobtrusive widgets for subscribing/ linking / liking / following / tweeting / digging / stumbling / etc. Many bloggers make them too big and some even repeat social media and social bookmarking links on the same page; it does the blog more harm than good.

Post footer elements
A widget or blog element with ‘You may also like’ or similar text is often found at the end of posts. Quite often the links given there are not relevant, and they clutter the post-footer too. We’d rather advise that if you feel that another post is greatly related [e.g. a sequel], put the link manually at the end of the post.

Profile
Do not make your profile or ‘About me’ too flashy on the webpage. You may expand it further in the blog's profile page that can be linked to the 'About me'. In case you need to tell a lot about yourself or the blog, create a new page and give a link to this page on the main page.

Happy blogging with widgets!

shadowsgalore

2012-02-20T18:51:00.004+05:30

A fine, beautifully crafted and well maintained, Indian blog on travel and photography.

Shadows Galore

http://www.shadowsgalore.com

Travelogues, Photography and Memories and More!

This weblogby Puru, Ekta and friends is a look at the world around us, the places we havebeen to and the experiences we had, through our eyes behind the lens andour memories translated in words.

Shadows Galore is dedicated to the beautiful twinpassions of travel and photography.

New bloggers enter the best Indian blogs directory

2012-02-16T11:39:00.000+05:30

Since we issued the updated Directory of Best Indian Blogs on November 30, 2011, we have discovered a number of blogs that meet our listing criteria of content, design and regularity. Most of them are the ones suggested or submitted by fellow bloggers while some are our own finds.

As we mentioned on the updates page of Indian Top Blogs, we are trying to consolidate rather than expand beyond our limited resources. We had thought of drafting two more people to our gang to take care of social media and expert posts on SEO and monetization; unfortunately, we have not been able to do so, so far. We have, nevertheless, made our notional presence on social media by opening accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Digg. We are reducing the frequency of showcase to thrice a month and not accepting blogs for detailed review for another month. This has saved us some time for detailed reviews, adding new blogs to the Directory and writing posts. We hope to have more time from the next month but then our work on examination of Indian blogs for blog rankings will begin.

Too much of blah blah about ourselves, you'd say. So we stop. Hope, you approve of the new additions to the Directory of Best Indian Blogs. The blogs being added are:

aartiharish Aarti Harish

akriti91 Brown Penny

aksindiblog One Stop Blog

alkanarula Deep frm my heart!!

arnabmaity Arnab Maity

bollyhooha Bolly Hoo Ha

chennaifocus ChennaiFocus news

fashion-bombay FashionBombay

feistypad The Feisty Pad

firaszphotography Firasz Photography

inspirationaldaily Inspirational Daily

nascentemissions Nascent Emissions

onemint One Mint

personal-lovediaries Secretdiaries of a girl in love

pickyc Picky C

rachit91 Sentimientos

recommendbooks Recommend Books

squamble squamble.com

srayyangar Ayyangar’s blog- “VYANGYAM”

storyinpieces Story in Pieces

subhorup Subho’s Jejune Diet

subramoney Subramoney

sushmaspage Sushma'sPage

tflguide The Financial Literates

vevisia Vevisia - Circles inthe Sand

You might like to visit posts on different aspects of the selection process for the Indian blog directory.

privytrifles

2012-02-15T10:13:00.001+05:30

An rather new Indian blog full of energy and ideas.

Privy Trifles

http://privytrifles.blogspot.com/

The blog tries to touch those beautiful aspects of life which remain mostly unseen.

paulprosenjeet

2012-02-09T09:58:00.000+05:30

A fine blog by Prosenjeet Paul, an Indian blogger.

Pro Pulse

http://paulprosenjeet.blogspot.in/

My blog is an endeavor to express myself and write

about almost anything and everything.

It mainly features satires,

but there is also the occasional poetry and fiction.

Indian Top Blogs is One Year Old… and we are happy to serve you!

2012-02-06T14:23:00.000+05:30

Anniversary is the time to gloat over one’s achievements, talk about failings and take stock of the journey. We complete one year of our existence as a blog [on Blogger platform] and six months as an independent website.

It has been painful year in some respects, but a lot more rewarding.

The first thing we did just after starting the blog was to issue rankings of top Indian blogs in February 2011. We received a few kudos but many brickbats. We were equated with the ones who beg for link exchange, offer a ‘listing’ in their websites for a fee, cheat outright. We now know that many of them were doing so with the good intent of cautioning co-bloggers, but some were hell-bent on berating us. Some had a proof of our dubiousness in that we didn’t want to come out in the open about our identity. [We’ve given a glimpse of our human identity on our Facebook profile: http://facebook.com/indiantopblogs.] On a few blogs, we also read that the bloggers were embarrassed that their blogs had found a mention in ITB blog rankings!

We responded with this post explaining our position. We commented on a few blogs to clarify our position. We offered that if a blogger wanted his blog to be deleted from our listings, we’d do so. We also learnt quite a few lessons from some very well-meaning criticism.

The hard work soon started paying in unseen and pleasant ways.

One of the most delightful experience of our team was when we sat to analyse the conduct of our initial critics - 50 of them. We discovered that nearly half of them had submitted their blogs for a detailed review by us. Six had submitted their blogs for showcase on Indian Top Blogs. Eleven were in the updated Directory of Best Indian Blogs, but nobody had asked us to remove their blogs from the Directory. At least five had put our badge in their blogs!

We have received immensely encouraging and kind words from bloggers whose blogs we’ve reviewed in detail. Some blogger friends have asked us to expand to related activities such as issuing e-books, accepting guest posts, offering paid services etc. Our Directory and listings have found mention in many respectable websites. Our badges can be seen on over 300 blogs (after that we stopped counting), despite the fact that half of the bloggers whose blogs are listed in the Directory might not even be aware of this. There is a long list of blogs we’ve received for showcasing. We had to stop accepting requests for blog review as our pendency started going beyond 110 days…
It gives us satisfaction that in the last six months, we have written nearly two dozen exhaustive posts highlighting different aspects of blogging. These range from blogging-bloomers to content quality, putting images and labeling.

We’ve fumbled too. On a friend’s advice we started search engine optimization (SEO) tricks-of-the-trade. We are glad that we’ve discarded them all except for a very few sensible and natural practices of cross-referencing, etc. We also thought of giving a thrust to interactivity by encouraging comments on our posts but soon found ourselves unable to even reciprocate greetings. We do comment on others’ websites / blogs, but too infrequently. We also tried to plunge into social networking but when we realized that we had no time for activities beyond our core commitment, we gave that up except for having a token presence on a few social networking / bookmarking sites. When we brought out the first edition of the Directory, we informed individual bloggers about their being on it; we discontinued that when we found that some recipients took our gesture as spamming. We do make proof and linking mistakes though we are harsh on others when we review their blogs in detail. We were suggested to ‘nofollow’ links to conserve ‘link juice’ and guard against spammers getting better of us. We did it on some links but soon realized its futility. We are in the process of removing the ‘nofollow’ attribute from the few links where it already is. Almost all our links are now ‘follow’ links. What it means that if your website or blog is linked from Indian Top Blogs, it gets benefit of our growing blogging authority and popularity.

What next

We are bound by our core commitment: helping bloggers with advice and promoting good blogs – especially Indian blogs. This is our strength too. We can claim to be the only team that has reviewed over 400 blogs in detail, browsed over 30,000 Indian blogs for quality checking and critically examined over 5,000 blogs.

As we said in this post on Directory-related FAQs, we’d keep surveying Indian blogosphere for quality blogs and add good blogs every month to the Directory of Best Indian Blogs. The next addition will be made in a week and the next major updation of the Directory will be around November.

We’d keep publishing analytical and educating posts on various aspects of blogging, especially tips on blogging. We have decided to have a few guest posts on SEO and monetizing blogs, but only when we find posts worth Indian Top Blogs.

We have already started marking blogs for our next blog-rankings, to be published around June. We’ll come out with a detailed post on that, sometime in April-May.

We’d continue to showcase good blogs and help Indian bloggers with detailed blog reviews. We intend to start accepting blogs for review in March.

We wish all our blogger friends all success in their blogging endeavors!

soutikchakraborty

2012-02-05T09:30:00.003+05:30

Dreams are on what life lives on!!!

www.soutikchakraborty.blogspot.com

This is my personal blog with all my rants.

Mostly poems and few pieces ofprose is what makes Dreams... It relates to the life of a teen making his way through the tangled vines of life.

Websites and blogs should care for text color

2012-01-31T19:50:00.002+05:30

In an earlier post on ‘text display in blogs and websites’, we discussed size, font and formatting aspects of text. The present post is devoted to color aspect of text. Since text color and other text attributes impact each other, these should be considered together. We suggest that you browse that post too while reading this one, since many recommendations we made there relate to color too, and we’d not repeat them here.

Is text color that important for blogs and websites?

Text color [=colour] is a much neglected design element in blogs and websites. We don’t remember having rejected any blog exclusively for wrong text color, while compiling the Indian blog directory, but we did downgrade quite a few when we found the text unreadable due to weird color combinations.


fig 1

When deciding the template and color theme for your blog or website [or any other web presence], you must keep the font color high in priority, especially if your website has (i) prominent text display and (ii) a lot of text to read.

The text color is also important for printing. Text in too light colors, too less contrast and that over images may not print well, especially in black-and-white prints.

Text in unusual colors and color-combinations may render poorly on some computer screens and mobile devices.

How much text coloration is optimum?

Text color is a function of overall blog color and appearance. In a fun blog with lots of color or a website for kids, text could be in funky colors while in a serious blog, we’d like to see text in only one or two muted colors.

In general, there should not be too much text color variation. Too much change in text color impairs readability and irritates the reader.

Coloration of text of different elements should not be arbitrary. What it means is that the same type of elements should have same colors, e.g. all headings or sub-headings should be in the same color.

Choosing colors and their combinations

Have a look at the colors used by popular websites and blogging platforms such as Wordpress and Blogger (fig 1). Do you observe that they all use light backgrounds [white / light grey / light blue-grey] and darker fonts [ black / dark grey / dark blue] for general purpose and reverse for buttons? Do you also see the use of a sharply different colored text for ‘call to action’?

Well, in some cases, they too make the color so muted or text so thin that it hurts readability.

When text is written on light surfaces, its colors should generally be in darker shades that do not glare. Avoid pure bright shades of red, pink, green etc as they look too shiny. Use darker shades of muted colors; they look good as text colors as well as backgrounds (fig 2: G, H, I). Backgrounds of muted colors also have the beauty that you can use dark as well as light text on them (fig 3).

fig 2

While the text in darker shades of grey, dirty yellow, blue, etc looks fine, do avoid small text in light shades. They look washed and dull, even blurred (e.g. if the color of the B and C marked rectangles in fig 2 is used for text). If you like the trendy greys (e.g. color of F rectangle in fig 2) for text, use them with care.

fig 3

Note that light text on dark background tends to lift the text. Similarly, text of warmer hues [red, orange, yellow] tends to pop up when it is placed over cooler hues [blue, green]. This can be used for highlighting text such as a ‘call for action’ in an advertisement. But not all such combinations fit; some color combinations create optical illusions and so should not be used. Fig 4 shows how text in warm and cool colors pops up or sinks; it also shows wrong color combinations.

Text on dark backgrounds should usually be in pure white or in a light shade of the background color. Light-text-over-dark-background should be used rarely, e.g. for buttons, widget headings, and small blocks of text needing special emphasis. See fig 1 above: many sites effectively use white on dark blue or similar colors in buttons.

Some colors tend to bleed, such as red. Some colors sucha as red, pink, light green, cyan and yellow dominate too much due to their brilliance.

fig 4

Do not shade or emboss long passages of text. Even when you do so, choose the shade color with care. Leave this effect only for titles, small headings, a small quote or other small chunk of text that you want to specially highlight.

If embedding text in an image or putting text over the background of a photograph, go for a color that contrasts well with the general hue of the background image. It is better to darken or lighten the image before applying text into it. But if the image has myriad shades and colors all over [‘busy’ background], use white or black color [and if needed, selectively make it black / white over different backgrounds – but too much of it will look unprofessional].

Text coloration in blog posts

As far as possible, keep the main reading pane of the blog light. If the blog is text heavy, keeping the background a little greyish rather than white makes it more soothing.

All blogging platforms allow variations of color of link-text, and text when cursor is hovered over it. Keep different versions of the link-text properly readable. Often the linked text tends to change color when clicked and the change stays all through the current session of browsing that website. If you’ve not taken take care of the color changes, it might hamper readability and irritate the reader.

Do not put yellow, green or other background behind text to highlight it unless you have a strong reason to do so; use a different text color / underline the text / make the text bold / change font. Even if it is required, limit it to the standard yellow highlight on black text.

You may like to visit the ITB post on text in websites / blogs for formatting and other aspects of text.

Another very relevant series of posts is on pictures in blogs.

conversations

2012-01-30T02:00:00.000+05:30

This popular Indian blogger's 'peeks' into life around her are eminently sharable and often have a fresh perspective.

Conversations

www.sujathasathya.blogspot.com

A blog by Sujatha Sathya

The blog is a conversational peek into my life and times, and it peeks with as much honesty as I can muster at this point in time.

The blog's best features are not its design or template but its clarity and simplicity.

storyinpieces

2012-01-25T09:52:00.000+05:30

Story in pieces

http://storyinpieces.com/

A blog of short-stories that run in episodes, hence the name Story in pieces.

The storyteller makes his audience a part of these stories such that they start feeling it and living it. He says one piece of the story at a time so that they can think over it, imagine what's going to happen next and then, live the next piece as if it is their own story.

Indians bored of social networking? Also of blogging??

2012-01-23T14:00:00.001+05:30

ASSOCHAM has come out with a social media survey. One main inference of the survey, as given on their website, is that, “Youngsters have started finding social media boring, confusing, frustrating and time-consuming and they surf these sites less frequently.”

They claim to have interacted with 2,000 young people in the age group of 12 to 25 years in major Indian cities. Over half of the respondents said, they had “consciously reduced the time spent on social media websites…” A third had deactivated or deleted their accounts and profiles from these websites and “it is no longer a craze among them”. Rest said, they had started maintaining a low profile on social networks. Three-fourths of respondents had “opened their profiles on almost each of these websites which was a fad among them when these websites were just launched. But… they barely use them anymore and prefer sticking to a singular site.”

About a fifth of the respondents hardly logged on to the social networking sites and preferred staying in touch with their folks via other means.

Let’s assume that ASSOCHAM’s data collection and analysis was flawless. But we beg to differ on the inference.

One. What the responses have shown only validates the findings of many international and localized surveys: that people keep experimenting with new platforms as they develop; that people tend to get bored of their experimentation with a particular web engagement; that new platforms get huge initial following. The Indian Top Blogs survey of blogging habits based on factual examination of blogs also proves that. What we found in the case of blogs relating to slowing interest over time will, sure, apply more to the social network sites because of many factors.

Two. Take a boy of the age 15. He [or she] experiments with various platforms – the social networking sites, blogging, mobile chat and phone calls, web-chat, forums, and so on – to be in touch with his community and to expand it. As he cannot cope with all, his interest in many of these platforms goes down but he retains the ones that he finds the most interesting and useful. This has been happening for ages and will continue to happen. Does that mean that the youth are getting frustrated with social networking sites?

Three. Take the entire youth population. While a boy of 18 goes to college and his community habits undergo a huge shift, another one takes his place. The new boy is even more experimental than his predecessor. So, in this dynamic situation, new boys and girls carry the activities that have been partially left by their seniors. That’s why, with every passing year, the number of people embracing social media is only growing.

Four. New platforms for web and mobile based interaction keep getting evolved, some incremental and some revolutionary. At one time, Indian youth was a fan of Orkut, and suddenly it lapped up Facebook much more than Orkut. Twitter and Google+ came with different promises, so people [mostly youth] started experimenting with them. When a new platform comes tomorrow, people will throng to it. This flux will only grow as technology turnover gets faster.

Five. People use web for different purposes. The social media universe does not only include social networking sites, it also has Flickr and Picasaweb, Youtube, social bookmarkers such as StumbleUpon, Digg and Pinterest, and so on. There are also social networking sites such as Linkedin and close forums that help in professional networking. In addition, there is this stable and serious platform of blogs. And they all are getting more and more integrated. So, if people shun some networking for experimentation sake, they would use new more of it for getting entertainment and information.

What ASSOCHAM’s study finds is just the obvious but makes a juicy, misleading, inference out of it. Just to be in the news?

sandeep-thakre

2012-01-20T13:30:00.002+05:30

This new blog by Sandeep Thakre, being maintained with zeal and care. It has the potential to be a serious contender for a high place in the Indian blogging scene.

Sandeep Thakre

http://sandeep-thakre.blogspot.com/#axzz1jyxw9y1e

A blog where you find short stories of action, thriller, suspense, comic, adventure and love stories genres.

If you like to read stories for fun and entertainment, this could be your sure destination!

Text display in blogs and websites matters a lot!

2012-01-16T17:03:00.000+05:30

One of the many things that we observe during our detailed blog-reviews is poor display of text. We have come across many more such blogs - and websites - during Indian blogosphere surveys that we conduct for updating the Directory of Best Indian Blogs and blog-rankings. So this post specifically on display of text on websites and blogs.

When you start a blog or a website and when you tweak it, text display probably comes the last in your list of priorities. If you have a blog on Blogger or Wordpress platform, you might think that the default text scheme suits your blog and playing with it will only make it less appealing. After all, these big blogging platforms spend a lot of time and energy in creating the best in the industry. And when you think that your blog needs some change, you tend to choose from the numerous ready-made templates available on the web. When you engage a web-designer to make a website for you, you discuss background, layout, images, columns, logo, content positioning and so on but feel that the text suggested by the designer [often unmindfully and sometimes to impress you] is fine and no discussion is required on text aspects. Many superbly-crafted websites too suffer from this disregard for text – the building brick of a webpage.

Appeal and functionality should go together

Like all other elements of display, a website must have appealing text. Appeal does not mean too flowery a font or too much variation in size and color [colour]. What it means is that the text should look normal and pleasing. It should not put off the reader by its gaudiness and difficulty in reading. Real ‘beauty’ of text lies in not inviting attention but doing its job beautifully.

We always advise bloggers and web designers to care for the functionality of all site elements, and text is no exception. Functionality, like visual appeal, depends upon many factors. The two are also very closely related.

The quality of text display depends a lot on text color, but since we’d not be able to do justice with all aspects of text display in a single post, we’ve another post on the importance of color on blogs and websites.

Text characteristics

Font is one of the most important aspects to look at. Fonts with stylish curves, embellishments, quirky shapes, ligature, etc may look artistic but they are often less readable than simple fonts such as Arial. Too slanting a font too is not good for a website. There is another problem associated with unusual fonts: they do not render well. So, the text may not look the same as it looks on your computer and a particular browser. In some fonts, alphabets with similar shapes mix up [e.g. c and e; e and o; u and v; 3 and 8].

Text size is equally important. We have seen may websites that have good content but very small text. What purpose does the content serve if people find it difficult to read it? If your site has a lot of matter to read, do have text of 11-12 point, no less. If you need to use slanted, short or italicized text in big blocks, do raise the text size to make it properly readable.

You need to choose the size of the text of the title with care. In a few blogs that we reviewed in detail, we found an inconspicuous title, followed by bold description and huge post-headings. On the other hand, some blogs had stuffed so big text in the title that it hung down half the screen.

Text shape and size also impact navigation. Consider this especially in the case of sub-titles / post headings / widget titles. Maintain uniformity of text [and accompanying bullet] for similar elements.

Choose the right font.

Choose the hyper-linked text with care. The text should always make sense to the viewer and should also have direct relevance with the subject of the link. We have given below an incorrect and a correct way to place links:

incorrect: This website contains the best blogs on India and by Indians and you can reach there by clicking here.
correct: This website contains the best blogs on India and by Indians.

Some text should mandatorily have hyper-link. For example, the title text. People use it to navigate to the home page from other pages. Similarly, the post heading. Widget heads in many cases need to be hyper-linked. All external links such as web-pages in the main content and blog-roll should be hyper-linked. When you break a long post with ‘jump break’, do have an expression such as ‘Read more’ and it should expand the post when clicked [as in the case of this very post].

Do not write big chunks in italics, CAPS or slanting text. Unless it is your style, do capitalize the first letter of sentences and proper names [In the exceptional case, it needs to be uniform].

Text variation is important always and more so when your post turns big. It can be brought about by varying color, size, boldness, italicization etc.

Use a different color / bold text / italics for highlighting a point. Use quotes, line-break and italics to make direct speech distinct from narration.

Enhancing readability

For a good reading experience, it is also necessary that the text column is neither too narrow or too wide. The text column should have no less than 30 character width, for proper flow. However, there are other distracting elements on its side, and therefore try to keep the main reading column much wider than this minimum. In general, keep the main column of the website at least twice as wide as sidebars.

Paragraph size is also closely related with text display and readability. On the web, paragraphs should be short [usually under 7-8 lines] and clearly separated. If the separation is not clear, you should increase line space between paragraphs.

If paragraphs look mixed up, make the first letter of paragraphs bigger and bolder and in a different color. If you make it too big, be warned that its line will have higher height than others, and this might look odd.

Avoid ‘justified’ text. Usually keep it left aligned. Do not break words unless necessary. Do not right-align text except for special effect. [We are not talking of Arabic and other such languages.] Do not centrally-align text except for special effect or for poetry. Unless there is a compelling reason, do not animate text.

Have sub-titles wherever possible. They should, of course, not look out-of-place and labored. Use a different font / text size / color for sub-titles and make them bold.

Take care of line height if you are using an unconventional text. Lines should not be too close or too distant. Overall too, the text should look properly spaced. Too scanty and too loosely placed text looks as irritating as a large chunk of text without breaks. Avoid having single-sentence paras in a row.

We strongly advise breaking text monotony with photographs and sketches. [Do visit ITB series on images in blogs.] Image size, alignment and captioning should be such that the image enhances the quality of text content and does not mar readability. Take care that (i) the image does not leave a very thin column for text, (ii) the image is not centrally-aligned with text on two sides [This leads to many types of problems in reading.], (iii) there is enough - just enough - space around the image, and (iv) the caption does not merge with other text.

Unless you have a strong reason to do so [e.g. accessibility / photo-blog with bright images], use black-text-on-white-background and not the other way round. Similarly, avoid light text over light background / images and dark text over dark background / images, especially when they are of similar or un-matching colors. Even if you like white-on-black-background text style - and it is supposed to be less stressful to the eye - it will show up its limitation when you highlight text in a different color or when a hyperlink changes color on clicking.

Some website designers and bloggers tend to use light text display that they perhaps find trendy, e.g. light grey text on white background or mid-dark blue on light blue background. This type of display might look soothing but before applying such themes, you should ask yourself whether the text is adequately readable. [Do also consider that not all monitor screens are set at the same brightness, and web-page rendition on all computers / other devices / browsers may not be the same.]

When embedding text in images

In case of blog titles and description, try to avoid embedding text into an image because changing the text in future would involve re-processing the image itself.

Avoid putting text in the background image of the website / blog; it has the potential to badly impair readability of the site.

If you must put text in an image, do it with care. Since text embedded in images tends to smudge, you should take extra care of font, text-size and contrast. Re-sizing of text inside images plays havoc with it. So, if you want to put a 1000x100 px image behind the title, with text embedded in it, do image re-sizing, cropping etc to bring the image to this size before putting text into the image.

Copy-pasting text from word processors

If you copy-paste text from a word processor such as MS Word, do take care that the hidden and visible special attributes do not create a mess when the text is pasted in the html page of the website / blog. As we advised earlier on ITB along with other tips on blogging, remove special attributes before doing the paste, by first pasting the text into a text editor or email composer.

Care to look at the Indian Top Blogs post on importance of text color for blogs and websites?

indigenou

2012-01-15T01:00:00.000+05:30

A sober, serious blog. Piyush writes regularly, though not frequently. He writes with conviction and puts his heart into it.

Indigenou's Blog

https://indigenou.wordpress.com

A blog by Piyush Kaushal

This blog talks of life inside out, through poetry, humor
and deciphered views.

A place where I mull over the chronicles of
life, social issues, politics, cricket, religion and what not…

celebrationsdecor

2012-01-06T10:26:00.004+05:30

A very regularly updated blog by Dr. Lakshmi, devoted to India's interior decoration and art styles.

Celebrations Decor

http://celebrationsdecor.blogspot.com/

A decor blog by Dr. Lakshmi Arvind

The blog celebrates the enigma and the charm of Indian interiors, Indian decor, Indian art and Indian designs, and the numerous ideas collected during my trips to the nooks and corners of India.

I have tried to research the themes well and put relevant images. You may like an inspirational element in the articles; I feel that this is what makes my articles popular among readers.

crazyanu90

2012-01-05T11:15:00.001+05:30

A blog by aNU - an established Indian blogger - who likes to wrongly capitalise important things in life [herself included], but seems to capitalise on them rather correctly.

cRAZY tHOUGHTS of aNU

http://crazyanu90.blogspot.com/
A blog by aNU

A Journey Into My Life...

A Clash Of Emotions, Relations, Titles, Duties, Responsibilities...

This blog showcases the random thoughts of a college girl from South India.

10 deadly flaws in blog posts: blogger's sins!

2012-01-03T10:06:00.001+05:30

Posts arethe life of a blog. More than anything else, the popularity and respect of ablog is decided by the quality of its posts. Yet, posts are one of the mostignored blog components.

We givebelow the ten most deadly and yet quite common pitfalls of blogging. Ourprofessional grooming on content apart, we came to see these content flaws duringour detailed blog reviews and the three major blogosphere surveys that we havecarried out so far.

We'd call them bloggers' sins that take the blogs to the hell that poor blogging is.

[Thefollowing observations and advice primarily relate to general blogs and websites, and text-heavyposts; some of these may not relate fully to photo blogs, vblogs, veryserious and very frivulous blogs.]

1. Improper title: abstract, highly witty or vulgar title

The hell-bound-blogger's vision: Let’s keep the post heading as non-sensical as possible. Let's make the journey difficult from the beginning. That's the way we win mind games.

2. Poor post display

posts not set distinctly; too much text and many thumbnails stuffed in headers and footers

The hell-bound-blogger's vision: It’s good to irritate and confuse the reader – that’s the best way to get attention.

3. Poor readability

reversing text colour display [white text on black background]; keeping poor contrast between the background and the text: light text on light background or dark text on dark background; having a background image with varying contrast; too fast or too slow scrolling text; animated text; animations over text; too narrow reading column; unconventional experiments with font and text display; prose written with central or right alignment

The hell-bound-blogger's vision: These are excellent ways to spoil readability. If you want good readability, buy a book, not sit before the computer screen. Reader, you must have the capacity to appreciate the hard work put in by me.

4. Poor writing skills

abstract or self-indulgent opening sentences [and not going straight to the topic]; poor grammar; random experimentation with language; ‘I-don’t-care’ attitude towards language to hide language illiteracy; shifting persons and tenses
The hell-bound-blogger's vision: My friends come to my blog because they like me, not because they like my language. Blogging is not for puritans, dude!

5. Poor editing

not checking proof mistakes and letting many punctuation, spelling and other errors pass
The hell-bound-blogger's vision: Why spend time on nitty-fritty? Big people go for thought, not proof correction.

6. Monotony; boring text

long-winded, sentences; long paragraphs; no text variation and highlighting, especially when a large number of things are discussed; very long posts [and refusing to break them into two or hiding a part of it by using ‘jump break’]; using obscure expressions and quotes; linguistic show-off
The hell-bound-blogger's vision: People take you seriously only when you write superior-looking expressions. Breaking long text into paras and series don't matter; if the reader is serious, he would read the text whether it is in one big passage or in many small ones.

7. Detached writing [especially in personal blogs]

writing in third person, even converting oneself to he / she

The hell-bound-blogger's vision: After all, the blog is a web diary; why should we bother for the reader?

8. Not using visual content or quirky visualization

not using images; images without regard for design, picture quality, relevance etc; irrelevant video; absurd text colouring, text variations and image effects

The hell-bound-blogger's vision: All stupidity is fun; it’s pleasure to let people laugh at our foolishnesses. If you can't appreciate the underlying fun in absurdity, you are not worth being my reader.

9. Poor bilingual support

jumping from English to one’s native script and expressions; not caring to give an English gist of something expressed in a different language
The hell-bound-blogger's vision:Nothing gives more freshness than slangs and colloquialism.

10. Digitally heavy content

putting very big photos one after the other; putting long video(s)
The hell-bound-blogger's vision: Who has the time to work on visuals? Thay are just fillers.

baketitude

2011-12-30T10:12:00.000+05:30

A new but buzzing food blog by Shalini. Its simple design, detailed instructions and a personal touch add worth to the content.

baketitude

baketitude.blogspot.com/
A food blog by Shalini

Every dish has a story behind it.This blog is about my life with my husband, son and dog...not to mention neighbours and friends and their kids.

I am also trying to catalogue lesser known North Indian Recipes, focusing on Dogri and Punjabi Cuisine.

Lots of dishes are Indian Dinner Party dishes adapted from the world over and needless to say, much loved.

Let’s promote blogs that promote a social cause!

2011-12-26T15:39:00.000+05:30

Today, we are taking another humble step towards promoting quality websites and blogs, especially Indian blogs.

On Indian Top Blogs, we are offering the following support to organisations, websites and blogs that promote social cause.

We believe that the work of a good Samaritan generates positivity which, if supported by people, generates a momentum in favour of the underlying cause. Our contribution may not matter significantly to big websites, blogs and organizations; it will nevertheless be a sincere appreciation for their good work. To not-so-big ones in this arena, it might act as a much needed - and much deserved - honour. It is our way of saying, we stand by you and your cause.

Here goes our offer:

1. We have reserved a space in the sidebar for free display of a website or blog supporting a social cause. It is under ITB supports this cause: bar. As of now, we are rotating social ‘advertisements’ among themselves and with stand-alone social messages. We’ll not restrict this space to only Indian websites / blogs / organizations. [If you want your social ad to come here, do send an image of 250 pixel width and up to 260 pixel height.]

our first list of Indian blogs
promoting social cause

2. Among the websites mentioned above, bloggers will be invited to send matter for showcasing their blogs on Indian Top Blogs.

3. We have identified some Indian blogs that promote social cause on a regular basis. We’ve listed them in the Directory of the Best Indian Blogs as a category and also specially highlighted them in the alphabetical list of best Indian blogs.We'll keep adding more such blogs as they come to our notice.

We have also created a badge for blogs that feature in the 'social advertisement' space or blog directory or blog showcase. Bloggers may copy the following code and paste it in html widget of their blogs.
<a href="http://www.indiantopblogs.com/2011/12/blogging-websites-blogs-for-social.html"><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-N86eLmjjgTM/Tvgk--nDe8I/AAAAAAAAAtA/j6AmKMDB2ms/s200/social-cause-indian-website.png" style="border: 0;" /></a>

Do support our initiative if you like it. Do write a line if you’ve any suggestion to offer, either by commenting below or writing to kp.nd.2008@gmail.com. Do suggest Indian blogs that promote a social cause, for directory listing.

anish-whatalife

2011-12-25T09:34:00.000+05:30

'What a life!' by Anish is the Indian blog on showcase today. This blog has thought-provoking articles, travelogues with personal touch, and much more.

What a life! Opinions, ideas, thoughts and more...

http://anish-whatalife.blogspot.com/
A blog by Anish

A blog about anything and everything that I feel is appropriate to write about, though I usually tend to stick to genres like travel, marketing, employment, politics & society and relationships.

I don't not claim to be an authority in any of these areas. When I visit different countries, I write experiential accounts of my trips. Mine is a rather atypical Indian take on local social situations I had to deal with and other topics that get me going.

I believe that frankly expressed opinions lead to debate and discussion, and their outcome quite often is change, both personal and professional. We are able to at least understand, if not deal with situations that life throws up. After all, there is only one life... What a life!

Favicon: the cute image for your blog or website

2011-12-20T17:40:00.001+05:30

Seen the cute little letter on the browser’s address bar just before the URL of a website or a blog? Like the tri-colour kite next to the Indian Top Blogs URL or the blue birdie next to Twitter URL? These are examples of favicon [short form of ‘favourite icon’]. Though old browsers are not able to display a favicon, all updated browsers can display it well.


Alexa favicon, zoomed to show pixels

Favicon is an important, and often ignored, design element of websites and blogs. It acts as an unobtrusive logo for your website or blog. People relate it immediately to your web-product, much like they relate a logo to a product in the physical world.

Typically, favicon is a 16x16 pixel image file with .ico extension. Its small size does not allow for elaborate design or play of shades. By seeing the zoomed Alexa favicon on the right, you'll appreciate the limitations of favicon.

Favicon can either have a single picture or an animation made out of a set of pictures [as in Indian Top Blogs site]. Animations allow display of more than one identitities associated with the blog or website.

What looks best in a favicon?

Favicons look the best when they are simple and clear. Favicons displaying a single alphabet or simple geometrical shapes come up very clear. Single or at most 2-3 strong colours with high contrast lead to strong favicons while grading colours – only if applied with care - lead to smooth, graceful favicons.

Some companies and institutions have beautifully captured their logo in the favicon. Others have used only one or two letters or a shape that express their organization well, without trying to stuff every part of their logo into the favicon.

Look at the following strip of favicons. [Just in case you don't know some of them, they are: Alexa, Apple, Chrome, Doordarshan, Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook, Unilever, Firefox, IndianTopBlogs, United Nations, Bing, Yahoo and Blogger.] Notice the number of colours and simplicity of design. Also note that when a complex design or more than one letter are used, due care has been taken to use contrasting colours.

Now look at the following strip of favicons of DD News, FAO, UNICEF and US government.

See the DD News favicon? The favicon could have looked much better if they retained the clear, iconic Doordarshan one and coloured it in their own shades.

See the FAO and UNICEF favicons? In trying to copy their logos in full, they have messed up the favicon while their big brother, the UN, has done a great job by just using its initials.

How do I create a favicon and put it on the blog?

You can make a favicon using any of the dozens of free online favicon creators, using an image editor or with the facility provided in the blogging platforms. If you create a favicon using a favicon creator or image editor, you will need to place it in the header of the html file of the website. Though not a big deal, but if you are not comfortable with this, use the method given below.

A quicker and easier way to create a favicon – if you use Blogger - is to use the favicon-making widget of the blogging platform itself. [Go to layout; it is on top of the header menu] In the case of Wordpress, there is no widget available right now but there are plugins to do this job.

We have seen often during detailed review of Indian blogs that many bloggers use a high-quality portrait or a scenery or photo of a product to create favicon. It usually results in a favicon trying to imitate the details of the original photo. Obviously, a photo of a million pixels cannot be replicated in an image of 256 pixels [i.e. 16x16]. The blogger, used to seeing the original photo, feels that others would also relate the icon with the photo, but the reality is that others see it as a blob of coloured points.

You need to process the photo before creating a favicon out of it. The first thing to do is to reduce the size of the photo as much as you can, in terms of pixels. Crop the image and select a rectangular piece out of it. Next, do save the rectangular photo as a new photo and work on it. Remove unnecessary background. Also remove elements that have muted shades, if you can. After that, adjust light and contrast as much as you can do without harming the image quality too much. Now try to reduce colour depth to 256 or even 16 colours. If the results are OK, move forward; if not, go one or two steps back and re-try changing light / contrast / depth. The resultant picture should have clear outlines and strong colours. Now your picture is ready for making favicon using either the online favicon maker or your image editor or Blogger widget / Wordpress plugin.

Happy blogging!

anirbansaha

2011-12-20T08:31:00.000+05:30

Seen this nice blog by Anirban? It scores on simplicity of design and passion for blogging.

Anirban Saha's abhibyakti

http://www.anirbansaha.com/
a blog by Anirban Saha

The blog features my photographs, writeups, experiences, poems and reviews.

I have tried a simple design to put more focus on photographs.

aalayamkanden

2011-12-15T08:27:00.000+05:30

Aalayam Kanden

http://aalayamkanden.blogspot.com/

A blog by Priya

Aalayam Kanden is a journey through the rare, unique and lesser known temples of India as experienced by me.

It is a showcase of Indian heritage and mythology.

Indian blog directory, rankings, showcase: FAQs

2011-12-12T12:21:00.001+05:30

We have received a number of queries on the Directory of Best Indian Blogs that we updated on 30^th November 2011. We are not able to respond to each email, and we feel that some visitors might have similar queries to ask and so we’ve imagined some questions ourselves! We’ve included related FAQs on blog ranking and blog showcase also.

Will you include my blog in teh Directory even now if it meets your terms?

Why not? We are open to inclusion of high quality blogs in the Directory whenever we spot them. However, updating the Directory on a daily basis is not possible. We intend to include new finds on the last day of every month starting January 2012.

Why have you mentioned blog rankings along with Directory entries? You have included many more blogs that might be very good but were not seen by you during your last ranking?

Blog ranking mentioned along with an entry is for June 2011 ranking; we’ll mention 2012 ranking when we rank blogs in the middle of 2012.

I have applied for blog review / blog showcase. Do I need to submit the blog also for inclusion in the Directory?

No. Your blog has already been seen by us and we’ll automatically consider it for inclusion in the Directory.

My blog was there in the July edition of the Directory but is not there now, while I find many other blogs in the new Directory. Why?

Do have a look at this post on selection criteria for the blog directory. Does your blog meet these criteria? For blogs already in July 2011 edition of the Directory, the main point for consideration was regularity of updation.

My blog is there in the Directory and yet in your review of the blog you have listed out many problems. Do you apply different standards for blog review?

As mentioned in this post on blog directory compilation, we tend to be very uncharitable when making a detailed review. We hope, that helps bloggers much more than just praising the blog or making off-the-cuff remarks.

My blog has been showcased on ITB website but is not in the Directory. Why?

Blog Showcase is meant to display good blogs and let their owners talk about their best features. We showcase even very new blogs, blogs in other languages, foreign blogs and websites maintained blog-like. We are stricter in the case of Directory and even more strict for blog ranks.

Though my blog is not listed in the Directory, the blog of a blogger friend is there. I consider my blog much better in design and content than hers. How come?

We have tried to be as fair as is humanly possible. Have you checked all the blog selection criteria mentioned in this post? If you think, we have made an error of judgment in your case, do write to us at kp.nd.2008@gmail.com.

Can you help improve the layout of my blog? Can you guide how I can improve a photo? Should I go for Wordpress or Blogger? Can you do this for a fee? Can you suggest a web designer who’d help me with designing my blog professionally?

We are not in a position to guarantee that we’d respond to each specific request, though we try to respond to emails with specific requests when time permits.

No, friends, we don’t charge fee for the work that we do. We can’t recommend a web designer too; that is beyond our ethical boundary.

Can I see reviews of some blogs for my guidance?

No, that’s private. However, if a blogger passes on our review to you or places it on his / her blog, you are free to use that.

Do you mind sharing the raw data captured by you during compilation of the Directory?

No way. We also request marketing firms not to ask us for this.

You have written in the disclaimer about someone wanting to get his blog removed from the Directory. Does anyone really do that?

Till now, no one has asked us to remove his / her blog from the Directory.

We have made this offer for three reasons:

One, some people might really not need publicity to their blog so that they are not disturbed by too many visitors.

Two, a blogger might have the feeling that his / her blog is too important for the Directory. Someone may feel slighted that his blog is placed next to a blog of much lower standing. If the blogger does not want his blog in the Directory for any reason, we feel that the Directory as well as the blogger are losers. We are here for a win-win game, not the other way round.

Three, we offer this to bloggers who suspect our intentions. When we published the July 2011 edition of the Directory, some bloggers did write on the web that we should be taken with a pinch of salt. Some even took offence to our sending them an email to announce inclusion of their blogs in the Directory. [We understand their cynicism. We are happy to share that some of them wrote very flattering emails to us and a few even have ITB badge on their blogs! We’re humbled by their kindness.]

Why didn’t you send an email or make a comment on blogs to announce that my blog is in the updated Directory? You did that the last time.

As mentioned above, when we did this last time – in good faith – some bloggers took it amiss. We are doing our job with sincerity and are happy about it. Let good bloggers get a surprise when they discover their blog in the Directory.

My blog is listed only once in the category-wise listing of blogs while a similar blog has been mentined twice. Why?
Could be that your blog had only a few posts or most of your posts belonged to a focus area or you write on too many topics. We have tried our best to accommodate blogs in their proper place(s) in the category-wise listing of blogs. If you want your case to be reviewed, do write an email to us; just give reasons why you feel otherwise. Before sending the email, do see this detailed post on blog categories in the Directory.

binsinuation

2011-12-10T09:37:00.001+05:30

Bloggers Park

http://binsinuation.blogspot.com/

A blog by Binu

A blog where books are reviewed my way, society is described my way, politics is simplified my way, sports is explained my way.

I am not a rebel and my way is not the highway!! I am what most of Indians are - simple and straightforward, and will call a spade a spade!!

'Dynamic views' on Blogger platform: does it suit your blog?

2011-12-07T16:53:00.001+05:30

This is a hurried post on the dynamicviews by Blogger. We were provoked to write it because when we startedreviewing individual blogs today [after a long time-gap during which we werebusy compiling the Directory],we found many blogs on Blogger platform having shifted to dynamic views. This is a rather new feature of Blogger, allowingthe blog to be seen in any one of the 7 templates that the dynamic views function offers.

We liked the many excellent features of the dynamic views: its aesthetic appeal, clean presentation of content,smooth scrolling of posts and their listings in many ways, and so on. EarlierBlogger did not allow any personalisation in dynamic views but now you can change the header image andbackground colour. You can even fix a particular view, if you fall in love withthat.

Why we've written this post is not to share our joy with the great stuffthat dynamic views is, but to giveyou a caveat.

The dynamic views feature isexcellent but the superb personalisation that you have carried out and all thewidgets of the old blog will not be there for others to see. Though they allremain in the background, your viewers will not be able to see your cute labelcloud or month-wise archives or followers or blogroll or advertisements or ...That is a big big loss for a gain in appearance of content. Don't you agree?

Well, if you have only content pane to show, without frills, you mayconsider switching to dynamic viewsaltogether. Otherwise think twice.

If you have already changed your blog into dynamic views, you can revert back to the old view.

If you have changed to dynamic viewsbut want to stay with it, do at least leave a link on the blog to allow for theold, traditional, view too. People used to the old view may like to see yourblog in that shape.

Blogger team informs that it would soon come up with widgets re-written for dynamic views. When that happens, theIndian Top Blogs would perhaps shift to the dynamicviews, not before that.

;)

What Kapil Sibal has done is right!

2011-12-07T09:47:00.001+05:30

Btw, we’re not saying he’s right, we’re only saying, what he has done is right.

Kapil Sibal is doing the right thing for himself, and blogging and other social media, on three counts.

One, because when his boss, Mme Sonia, is attacked even slightly [We hear, she was lampooned, her image was morphed and there were even nasty remarks about her. Very bad, indeed.], do you think he should keep mum? So, what he did was just right for him.

Two, he is Kapil Sibal. True to his name, he must botch up things as much as he can, and create controversies where there are better ways to deal with a situation. Remember his dealing with Baba Ramdev and Anna? The final result almost always is that the government turns defensive and apologetic.

Three, what he did in the case of social media will be highly counter-productive. This indiscreet act of his serves the purpose of social media more than anyone else. So, he couldn’t have done better. The service that Indian politicians like Tharoor, Omar, Sushma and Advani could not do to social media, the savvy Kapil has done in one stroke.

Thanks #Kapil!

Google Chrome emerges as the top internet browser in India

2011-12-05T16:07:00.001+05:30

As per data released by Statcounter, Google Chrome is fast becoming the browser of choice and has toppled Firefox to become the second most used browser after Internet Explorer. In India, it has surpassed even IE!

In India, where the usage of net has risen fast only in the last couple of years and most net users are of younger age, the percentage of users of Google Chrome has gone up to 34.75% as compared to Firefox 34.29% and IE 26.9%.

Though we have been Firefox fans for many years, we welcome this development as it will lead to (i) more commitment from Google for improving Chrome, and (ii) more competition to other browsers, in turn improving them.

Good news for bloggers using Chrome

Chrome browser, like the open source Firefox, gains in functionality with use of add-ons. For bloggers, Chrome has many add-ons in its ‘Chrome Web Store’. With its popularity rising, we hope that more add-ons will be available on this browser as they are in Firefox. We do not use add-ons for writing blogs, but a number of bloggers use them to find topic ideas, monitoring traffic, uploading photos, commenting, etc. They range from quite functional to weird, by some are worth trying.

reacharcs

2011-12-05T09:50:00.000+05:30

Rashmi's Blog....Footprints of Past and Future

http://reacharcs.wordpress.com/

A blog by Rashmi

This blog is a mirror of my feelings and contains my latest collections and also showcases the pieces I wrote in the past.

Whatever poems and prose I have written and published are based on emotions that have actually delighted me, enthralled me and also have made me shed tears quite a few times.

Category-wise listing of best blogs is out!

2011-12-02T11:07:00.000+05:30

We have uploaded the category-wise listing of the Directory of Best Indian Blogs.

We have given details of category-wise blog listings in the post on variety of Indian blogs. As mentioned there, a good number of blogs have figured in more than one category. We have done it for blogs that are well-maintained over a long period of time. Blogs of general nature with a bit of eveything have gone ot personal and comments categories.

Do read the disclaimer given at the end of the Directory listings. We intend to issue an FAQ on blog directory listings in a few days, to clarify some additional points.

Do put a badge on your blog if your blog happens to be in the Directory. The html code for the badge is at the end of the Directory.

You can see our posts on the process of compilation of the Directory and what the Directory contains in these posts:

Updated Indian blog directory by 30th Nov
Where do Indian bloggers stand?
Trends in the Indian blogging scene
The vast variety of Indian blogs
Indian blog directory: an effort to list the best blogs

The Best Blogs Directory is out!

2011-11-30T17:42:00.001+05:30

We have uploaded the Directory of Best Indian Blogs.

If your blog is there in this directory, be ready for surprises.You – with PR 6 Google ranking, 1000 followers, 1000 Face Book fans - could be sitting next to a newbie but promising blogger. You could bea columnist, analysing heavy political or economic stuff and your blog mighthave the company of a blog sharing a jilted lover’s heart's pains. You could bea grandpa sharing your life’s experiences and you might find a neighbour blogtalking of gadgets and blogging hacks. Maybe, you believe in using only themost respectful language; we give you the opportunity to sit close to a highlyirreverent teenager’s blog.

Do read the disclaimer given at the end of the Directory listings.

Do put a badge on your blog if your blog happens to be in the Directory. The html code for the badge is at the end of the Directory post.

You can see our posts on the process of compilation of the Directory and what the Directory contains in these posts:

Updated Indian blog directory by 30th Nov
Where do Indian bloggers stand?
Trends in the Indian blogging scene
The vast variety of Indian blogs
Indian blog directory: an effort to list the best blogs

Indian blog directory: an effort to list the best blogs

2011-11-30T13:21:00.000+05:30

This is fourth post in the series on Indian blogs. Today we share with you our limitations, and the results we have been able to achieve in compiling the Directory of Best Indian Blogs.

We’ll bring out the Directory of Best Indian Blogs around 5:30 pm today.

Believe us, we worked really hard in our effort to include as many good quality blogs as possible in the second edition of the Directory of Best Indian Blogs. At the end of the exercise, which we call Indian blogosphere survey, we scanned 30,000 blogs and ended up with about 650 blogs. As happened last time when we issued the first edition of the blog directory, we will be criticized for omitting some high quality blogs and including some ‘poor’ blogs. We sincerely apologise to the bloggers whose excellent blogs we could not reach, but we insist that each entry in the directory is a valuable blog.

See, what makes the task so voluminous
and why the 650 blogs are indeed so valuable

We admit that we have only been able to browse a small portion of Indian blogs – but we’re sure of having seen a significant proportion of active Indian blogs. We have not come across any other such exercise in India.
We had to leave out the majority of blogs that we browsed, for valid reasons. We also had to drop about a quarter of the blogs from the first edition of the Directory of Best Indian Blogs. Being irregular in posting was the biggest single reason for rejection, followed by major issues relating to loading, advertisements, navigation and readability. Some blogs had inappropriate content, some had turned totally into static websites, some had become private.
We’ve accommodated blogs looking like web-magazines or non-blog sites when we found that they were regularly updated and had some element of interactivity.

Part of our data-sheet [blurred]
most blogs got rejected
on 1/more parameters

On quality, we need to concede that we couldn’t be too strict. We used a software and some statistical tools last time, but we realized that measuring quality in quantitative terms was fraught with strange inconsistencies. This time, our approach was more traditional. Bloggers whose blogs we’ve reviewed so far would vouch for it that we are very demanding when it comes to quality, especially of design and language. But if we applied those parameters in compiling a blog directory, we’d be left with only a dozen blogs. We didn’t want our exercise to be self-defeating. Hope, we make sense.

Some will question our calling the directory as Directory of Best Indian Blogs. We must make our stand clear as we do believe that the 650 blogs we have included in the directory are indeed among the best Indian blogs. These blogs meet a minimum standard of quality. They are regularly updated. They don’t have issues relating to readability. They do not have inappropriate content. Their design is not weird. They have at least some level of interactivity. Finally, the only site that manually checks so many Indian blogs has found them the best among the 30,000 that it scanned. Hope, you don’t mind giving the ITB team a small bit of credit for their common sense, fairness and hard work.

As informed in the post on blog categories, we are giving separate lists of Indian forums, blog aggregating sites, and blogs on jobs / exam results and stock market advice, in the Directory of Best Indian Blogs, in addition to the list of best blogs.

Just to repeat, we’ll bring out the Directory of Best Indian Blogs around 5:30 pm today.

bedazzledeternally

2011-11-30T08:06:00.001+05:30

Bedazzled

http://bedazzledeternally.blogspot.com/
A blog by Bhargavi

Funny posts, personal rants, book reviews, art-related posts... the blog has evolved over the last three years I've been writing here.

Like me, the blog has many alter-egos and even I don't know who'll come out to blog next. Right now, the sarcastic one, Zulu is out on a rampage...

The vast variety of Indian blogs

2011-11-28T16:30:00.000+05:30

This is the third post in the series on Indian blogs. Today we share with you the variety of Indian blogs and their categorisation in the Directory of Best Indian Blogs coming out on the 30th November.

Based on our experience while compiling the Directory of Best Indian Blogs in July 2011 and its updation now, we have tried to categorise the blogs according to their main theme(s).

This time, we have put blogs in more than one category when they have a good number of posts on a particular theme and will add value to that category if included there.

The categories are: art – audio-visual media - comments - culture - current affairs - economics – environment – expatriates - fashion - finance - food - health - improvia - information technology - personal - photo - social issues - sports - technical subjects and niche areas - travel

Blogs of general nature come under personal blogs category if they talk about 'me', 'my kids', 'my house', 'my life' and so on. The ones with posts that talk of 'you' and 'they' rather than 'me' tend to be categorised as comments blogs. Such blogs have opinions on anything on the earth – so this category is ‘free for all’. When personal blogs talk less of physical matter and mundane thoughts and more on self-improvement, life's aim and spirituality, they come under the category improvia. When personal blogs have comments on topical matters more than others, they get clubbed with more newsy blogs and make the category of current affairs blogs. Blogs that discuss social problems or promote social cause come under social issues category.
Art includes design and décor, drawings and cartoons. Culture includes heritage and history. Environment includes wildlife.
A blog has been categorised as photo blog only when it either deals with the subject of photography or photography as an art form, or its primarily content is photography. A blog using photos for supplementing travelogues, recipes etc is not included in this category.
Literary blogs include authors’ blogs, blogs with a large number of posts on fiction and poetry, and blogs with book reviews.
Economics category also includes blogs on business and finance, advertising, marketing and management.
Information technology blogs deal with software, hardware, gadgets and web. Highly technical IT blogs come under technical subjects category.
Technical subjects and niche areas is the category that includes blogs of highly technical nature and those with very narrow subject area.

Beyond the Directory of blogs,

We have listed Indian blog platforms, blog aggregating sites and forums of good quality.
In addition, we have compiled a list of blogs on (i) jobs and exams related information and (ii) stock-market analysis. These blogs serve a useful purpose, are updated very frequently and need a good deal of effort on the part of blogger, but it is difficult to analyse their content for quality as they have a set language repeated over and over. Ignoring these blogs altogether seemed unfair, so we have listed them separately.

Many bloggers have not archived their blogs in a way that allows a reader to see the complete listing of their posts. Though we went back and forth inside multifaceted blogs to get a sense of content – and we also made site search - we might have missed a major topic in some cases.

We had started with some more categories such as product reviews, management, poems, hobbies and religion, but had to give up mid-way when we faced too much overlap among categories. Personal and comments categories too could not be dissected beyond a point.

If your blog happens to be in the Directory and you feel that it has not been given proper category listing, do write to us by sending an email to kp.nd.2008@gmail.com.

The next post in this series will be on how much of the Indian blogosphere we could cover in our latest survey.

Trends in the Indian blogging scene

2011-11-27T13:05:00.000+05:30

This is second post in the series on Indian blogs. Today we share with you the blogging trends we noticed while doing survey of the Indian blogosphere for updating the Directory of Best Indian Blogs.

There do not seem to be even a lakh [a hundred-thousand] blogs run by Indians and on India which are over a year old and are updated at least once a month in most part of their life.
A large number of bloggers have more than one blog.
Most of the bloggers lose steam midway [details in this post on blogging habits].
Young adults – who have to deal with major turning points such as leaving school / college, getting / losing job, marriage, conception, birth of the first child, break-up - often give a pause to blogging and when they re-start it, they tend to shift the main theme of their blog.
Of all blogs, personal blogs seem to have the highest longevity.
Among niche segments, tech, travel and cookery bloggers flourish well. A large number of blogs on these subjects are well maintained and have supporting photos and large archives. They have high search rankings and get a good stream of visitors.
Indian bloggers have a strong presence in the global information technology blogosphere.
A good number of celebrities / public personalities stop blogging after a while or - if they become popular - pose restrictions on interactivity by making the blog private or login-only.
In most Indian blogs, the language quality is no issue. In sophistication, the language ranges from just passable to literary and academic.
Indian bloggers tend to be serious writers. They have opinion on any conceivable matter on the earth, especially India’s problems, social issues, human nature and life.
In personal blogs, young mommies like to write a lot about their growing kid(s) and their discovery of a new relationship.
Overall, money does not seem to be the prime motive behind blogging by Indians.
Only a few Indian blog have Google Page Rank more than 5 and respectable ranks in other search engines, Technorati and Alexa. Only a few get comments in hundreds.
In blog search, a few blogs appear again and again on the first page [or in the top 10-20]. As not many new blogs maintain high quality and regularity, established blogs face very little competition for popular search terms.
Most Indian bloggers are on Blogger platform [*.blogspot.com]. Wordpress is the second most-popular blogging platform. A small number of bloggers shift from Blogger to Wordpress platform; some of them come back. [The movement from Wordpress to Blogger is very rare.] A few blogs on these platforms graduate to websites and/or website-like independent URL.
Bloggers from India usually forget to make their blog a part of their overall web presence; they rather shift to new formats such as Facebook and Twitter, and reduce or stop blogging. On the other end of the spectrum, some bloggers seem to get too pleased with their presence in 'modern' platforms and they over-burden their blogs with social media widgets.
The distinction between blogs, websites and blogzines is further diminishing as more blogs and websites have similar look and feel.
Most bloggers either do not care for design and search optimisation or do them excessively. A good number of blogs have too many widgets and animations. Some bloggers over-indulge in widgets and hurt the blog’s functionality.
Teens are the most experimental of all bloggers, in all aspect: technology, variety of topics, use of language and embellishment.
A large number of bloggers make their own small communities and tend to visit only the blogs that belong to their 'kitty party'. Going by their commenting habits, it appears that they often play 'You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours'. Many bloggers reciprocate badges.
A number of competition sites operate in the Indian blogosphere. Some established as well as many new bloggers contribute to these sites on regular basis. In return, they get noticed and get to add badges on their blogs.
Some Indian portals offer blog pages. Bloggers on such portals become part of big blogging communities and tend to interact regularly with blogs within their community.
Blogs by newspaper and magazine columnists are usually well-composed and regular. In many cases, their blogs are replicas of their columns. These blogs have a big following.

The next post in this series will be on the vast variety of Indian blogs that we noticed.

wherehopelives

2011-11-25T08:08:00.001+05:30

Life Unlimited

http://www.wherehopelives.blogspot.com/

A blog by Shreya

When the world seemed to come to a standstill, an old blog wasshut, and with it an old life. This blog holds onto the tiny bit of hope insideme, and pulls it out to ensure I strive each day to live a new life, unlimited.

Raves and rants about the everyday life, of a 20-something girl from Delhi,trying to make it in this roller-coaster of a city called Mumbai.

Where do Indian bloggers stand?

2011-11-23T11:42:00.001+05:30

The countdown to the November 2011 edition of Directory of Best Indian Blogs has begun. From today till about 5^th of the next month, we plan to share in a series of posts our experience during the blogosphere survey for the directory.

In the first article in the series, we share with you our joys and frustration with Indian blogging habits.

Blogging regularity

We shared some trends that we'd noticed in our surveys, in these posts: Who does not blog in India, February blogosphere survey, June blog rankings and the July 2011 directory compilation.

How many Indian blogs followed which pattern
over a year? [data of 30,000 blogs]

In our earlier post on the November 2011 directory, we had indicated that this time, we’d do most of screening work manually. In doing so, we have had time for going in detail into the blogging habits of Indian bloggers. Our findings only confirm, statistically, our earlier observations. The majority of Indian bloggers start a personal blog with a lot of enthusiasm and then leave it to die. Some carry it forward, but their quality and quantity pale over time. Some seem to get blogging fits now and then. Many bloggers believe in commenting more than creating posts. A good number of bloggers join blogging to test waters in their professional field or hobby. After giving out their best in some posts, they give up. Some join blogging just for money-making. They write less and advertise more. Soon they get frustrated and either give up or botch up the blog further.

Well, there are some who persevere. Some of them have become expert bloggers [especially in IT field]; some have made a huge collection of quality analyses, photos, travelogues, and recipes; some have branched out to consultancy; some – we hear – earn quite handsomely from affiliate marketing, advertisements and professional activities started through their blog(s). A few established Indian bloggers have huge following, and they synergise it superbly with their other social media accounts.

Regularity is related to the effort needed. Some blogs, e.g. on news updates, have numerous posts, but unless the blogger adds his own analysis, such posts need only a little effort. On the other hand, a well-rounded economic analysis, a passionate travelogue, a moving short story and an elaborate recipe take time to create and cannot be as frequent.
We had announced that we’d reject outright the blogs that do not have at least one post each in August, September and October 2011. However, we relaxed this criterion when we saw that long-established and quality-rich blogs too miss postings in some months. So, wherever we found that the blogger had been otherwise very regular and missed posting in only one of these months, we brought back such a blog though rejected earlier.

Quality and design of blogs

We had, in our earlier post on the present survey for the blog directory, mentioned what quality criteria we’d keep in mind while short-listing blogs. We have observed that in quality, Indian blogs generally score over non-Indian blogs. English may be an issue, but can we be too finicky about that as long as there is spirit and substance in the content? As for design, we ignored minor flaws, except when design considerably hampered a blog’s navigability, loading time and readability.

Let's share another observation – mostly from our detailed review of individual blogs - about Indian blogging habits. [We stand by what we said in the para above, generally speaking.]
A large number of Indian bloggers tend to preach, even on intimate type of topics. When they do not preach, they tend to analyse their life’s failings, human values, human sufferings and such other serious matters. While taking life a bit too seriously, they ignore to care for their blog - the place where they pour out their heart. They ignore design. They also stuff the blog with quirky widgets. They comment 'sweet nothings' on other's posts probably to get compliments for their hurriedly composed posts.
To many bloggers, language doesn't matter. Not that they don’t know good [Indian-] English, they either don’t want to re-edit their posts or introduce alien colloquialism and jargon for effect.

If Indian bloggers just observe the way good bloggers conduct themselves, blogging will evolve further in quality. But in the age of SMS and Twitter, when even Facebook and Google+ look too demanding, asking bloggers to take blogging a bit more seriously is asking for the moon, isn't it?

Our next post will be on the trends we discovered during the present Indian blogosphere survey.

capturedalive

2011-11-20T08:16:00.001+05:30

Throo Da Looking Glass

https://capturedalive.wordpress.com/

A photo blog by Pheno Menon

This is a photoblog with the tagline 'I came I saw and I shot' and describes my way of looking at life.. through my camera of course !!

I am running a project 365 whereby I will post one picture everyday about anything I have taken for the rest of my life (wishful thinking that is).

bemoneyaware

2011-11-15T08:37:00.000+05:30

Be Money Aware Blog
Awareness empowers

http://bemoneyaware.com/blog/

We would not allow one to drive a car without getting a driving license, yet we allow people to enter the financial complex world without any financial education. An uneducated individual armed with a credit card and access to a mortgage can be just as dangerous to themselves and their community as a person with no training who is given a car to drive.

BeMoneyAware Blog empowers people by making them aware of money-related stuff in simple terms. We cover the basics in a way that readers find it interesting and are excited by it.

Why showcase your blog on Indian Top Blogs?

2011-11-11T11:09:00.001+05:30

You have a beautiful blog on India, things Indian, your child or your pet subject. You write well. You also write regularly. You have many visitors. What more you need to grow as a successful blogger is regular hand-holding and support.

While the Indian Top Blog does the hand-holding, its blog showcase is a powerful platform for improving your blog’s popularity and reputation.

How?

The blog showcase gives you at least 3 backlinks, one of them of high quality! This means, your Google pagerank improves.

a collage of some blogs showcased recently

The showcase URL and photo tag have your blog’s signature. It means, if you post the link on your blog and tell it to your friends in the real world and on Facebook, your popularity grows by leaps and bounds. It is like a third-party certificate to your blog, at your own terms.

You have been recognized by a site that is growing fast in reputation and authority on blogging in general and Indian blogosphere in particular.

The best in you comes out when you write the punchline for the showcase. It acts like a blurb on the jacket of your own book.

It is free! You are charged $’s for getting a link from a website with Google page rank 3 or above. We not only give the link free, we do not remove it, like the charging companies do when you stop paying them.

When we receive a blog for showcase, we have already noticed that blog for the next blog ranking and blog directory.

Look, how the Indian Tiop Blogs is growing. When you link with it, you also grow.

Has Google Pagre Rank of 3. It is likely to grow significantly in the future.

Has Alexa page rank of 6.9 lakh. It was 105 lakh when we started the site 3 months back. It is coming down faster than we imagined. By the time you read this post, it might already be much lower.

Is on the top pages already, when you search on Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista and Bing for the best Indian blogs.

Why does ITB not charge for blog showcase?

By the way, it also does not charge for rankings, inclusion in the Directory of Best Indian Blogs and blog review.

Well, the ITB team work with a passion. They also get some good words that seem to come from people’s hearts. ITB also grows while you grow, because many bloggers write about us and our genuine effort. Many bloggers whose blogs we review keep a small badge about this on their blogs, voluntarily. Our commitment grows as we find ITB growing.

Well, if you insist on knowing our monetary rewards, let’s share our secret with you that we also have a few AdSense advertisements on the website. A very small number of people do click on them but that comes to almost nothing. We, however, tend to think that it will pay us in the long run.

You can see here our earlier posts about guidelines on showcasing your [Indian] blog and how to submit the blog for showcase.

neelamings

2011-11-10T08:10:00.001+05:30

whimsical me

http://neelamings.blogspot.com/

a blog by Neelam Kamdar Bhamani

'Whimsical Me' is an attempt at finding humor and satire in day-to-day situations.

It's entertainment in the form of wisecracks on age, addictions, adventures, mishaps and life in general, all packaged up neatly in self-deprecating humor.

Google's Indian indiatative for small businesses

2011-11-07T18:18:00.001+05:30

Google has given a gift to small businesses in India by offering them a platform to open a website for free. The site is also hosted free on HostGator for one year.

Thanks Google.

For details, do click Indian sites - Google

animeshkmishra

2011-11-05T01:30:00.000+05:30

Just like that...

http://www.justlikethat.info/
A blog by Animesh K Mishra and friends

जब जो चाहा, दिल में आया, लिख दिया...

just like that...

The blog with this tagline aims at presenting honest opinions about current social affairs. Even the short-stories and humour pieces represent some face of our society.

The straight from the heart writing style is loved by its readers.

Use labels and tags effectively on your blog

2011-11-02T11:26:00.001+05:30

While reviewing blogs and checking them for inclusion in the Indian blog directory, we found that majority of bloggers do not effectively use the facility of labeling blog posts. Labeling, we reckon, is a great tool to highlight content and make the blog more functional.

Most of the blogs [Indian as well as others] that we have come across are of personal nature, with posts on all conceivable topics. Since blogs are regularly updated – and that is indeed their strongest point vis-à-vis static websites - the content has to be arranged chronologically and not subject-wise. This makes it difficult for the visitor to find the matter he / she might be interested in.

overlapping items in category
and tag clouds; and a category list.
a bit too much!

Think of a blog as the ‘latest arrivals’ rack of a library where new books are added everyday. If books of this rack are not sent to their assigned places, it will become difficult after a while to find the book of one’s choice. While in physical world, we need to place the books in their subject racks, in the electronic world we have the choice of tagging / labeling – it allows the objects to be grouped in many ways while they remain placed in a particular sequence. For that to happen efficiently on our blog, we need to give thought to how we’d use the tagging facility.

Different blogging platforms have their own ways of doing this job. Wordpress has the facility to put posts in different categories and apply tags to posts. Livejournal has tags only. On Blogger platform, we have labels on posts. Community blogs often use tags to place individual blogs in different categories. Blog aggregators and blog directories use categories that are often assigned manually at the level of blog submitter or administrator. We’ll talk here about the use of categories / tags / labels on Wordpress and Blogger blogs, and we’d use 'tag' and 'label' interchangeably.

Difference between category and tag in Wordpress

Some bloggers are not sure of the difference between 'category' and 'tag' on the Wordpress platform. From a blogger’s point of view, there is just one difference as far as their basic function goes: Categories are used for major categorization [e.g. a blog on Indian websites can have these categories: English language sites, websites in native Indian languages OR Indian travel sites, finance & economy sites, sites for NRIs, etc]. Tags, on the other hand, are used for pin-pointing specific information or an information that spans across posts but does not deal with the subject of the post itself or an information that relates to specific events and will not occur again and again to justify a broad category [e.g. bringing up child, angry retorts, my spiritual side, Ritu’s wedding, grandpa]. Let’s admit that depending on the blog’s posting quantity and style, any of the names given above can be of a category or a tag. Wordpress mandates that each post is given a category but keeps tagging optional.

Putting a tag / label

Deciding beforehand how one will display tags on the blog helps a lot. Editing all old posts for tagging may become a pain when there are already a few hundred posts and one finds that the old posts need to be re-tagged.

Tags can have different nesting structures, or they can be distinct from each other. For example, a post in a cookery blog can have these labels: Indian cuisine [for a grouping based on different locations], breakfast [for a grouping based on the type of meal], fried food [for a grouping based on the type of preparation] and so on. Also look at the example we’ve given in the Wordpress section above.

Number of labels

Think of the total number of tags you should have so that managing them does not become a headache. You should also not keep adding labels as you go along. If you must do it sometimes, make sure to put this tag on all relevant old posts. Luckily, new blogging platforms give the facility to quickly apply and remove labels from the post editing menu.

Too many labels, when they are shown under a post, are an irritant. We are told, irrelevant labels also hurt a blog’s popularity on search engines.

Naming labels

As far as possible, labels should be one-word long. You may have longer labels if that adds value.

Think of the word that people will like to search the blog for. In multi-word labels, put that word in the beginning, so that the label comes in right place in alphabetical listing.

If breaking the norm serves a better purpose, do that.

Displaying categories / tags / labels

You can display the tags in many ways. Each has its own beauty and limitations. You should not only think of functionality but also the label widget's matching with the template and other elements in vicinity, before deciding its form and placement.

a label cloud

As a list of labels in the sidebar. Lists look fine as long as they do not become too long, and the entries are not too frivolous. You can have labels in alphabetical order or in order of decreasing number of associated posts. You may or may not have the number of posts given alongside the label.

As a label cloud. In the cloud, labels with larger number of associated posts look bigger. Clouds can have a larger number of labels than lists and you can have all sorts of labels [though being sensible is desirable here too]. You can arrange labels alphabetically or by their importance. You may also choose to have the number of posts given alongside the label.

Animated labels. Labels can be arranged in a rotating globe formation, as a floating cloud, or in some other form of animation. We find animatless functional than the simple displays, and sometimes irritating.

labels used in the menu bar

As a horizontal menu bar. Menu bars – simple, many layered or with drop-down sub-menus - are one of the best ways to categorise blog content. When placed under the title, they should be used to showcase the best content in the blog. On the Indian Top Blogs site, labels have been used to display blogging tips and blog showcase.
There should not be many categories, and categories should be as distinct from the other as possible. As said above, Wordpress gives you the facility to have categories separate from tags. Wordpress also allows sub-categories. Blogger can do that by imaginative use of labels such as allowing you to show or hide labels. If you need to have many types of categorization, you can manually place the label URL where you need to put it [an example given below].

You need not give label list or cloud title to the label widget. Think of an imaginative one, such as ‘View posts by topic’ or ‘What’s in this blog?’

Creating a manual sub-labeled content page till Blogger etc give you that option

Suppose you want to have this type of content page that you'd like to put in a widget in the sidebar or as an item on the menu bar:

Yogasanas

suitable for women

…suitable during periods

…suitable during pregnancy

…suitable after childbirth

suitable for the old

… etc

Pranayamas

… etc

You can create this sort of content page if you have these labels: yogasana, pranayama, for woman, OK for periods, OK for pregnancy, OK after childbirth, OK for the aged,…

Create a page. Write all the main categories and sections as given above. Link the label URLs appropriate for each of them. The easiest way to find the URL of the label on the browser window is to create a temporary label cloud of all labels and click on the desired label. You may choose not to link the main category headings.

You can also manually mix pages, posts and labels by this simple technique.

Happy blogging!

joejachs

2011-10-30T07:47:00.000+05:30

Encounter with a Superstar

http://joezachs.blogspot.com/

A blog by Joe Zach, an avid photographer

A blog that covers about everything from travel, restaurants, humour and nature to life around us.

I don't like to stick to one subject.

Am willing to write for others too.

thoughtsofchetan

2011-10-25T08:18:00.001+05:30

Smiling Planet

http://www.thoughtsofchetan.blogspot.com

A blog by Chetan Maheshwari

Smiling Planet presents to you posts that bring smile to your face.

It aims at making this world a better place by

s p r e a d i n g s m i l e s.

Give your blog an Indian identity

2011-10-22T20:37:00.000+05:30

A website should have its own identity. It should not only look distinct but also be identifiable with its main purpose, activity, location, etc.

Indian tricolour

Most popular websites and blogs pile up a great brand value, and their brand is such that people relate it with one or more of the sites’s basic attributes. This also applies to Facebook and other social media sites.

Tiger: Indian national animal

India has some superb national symbols. For example, its tricolour. The saffron-blue/white-green colour combination looks fine on website and blog design. It can be used for a blog or website’s theme, fonts, title bar, frame outlines and so on. The colours can also take the shape of flags, balloons, brush strokes, animations and patterns. The Indian Top Blogs website uses it as a kite in the favicon. The badges of ITB and the Directory of Blogs Indian Blogs are in saffron and green colour.

Peacock: Indian national bird

If you have a blog or website on nature photography, travel, Indian flora and fauna, etc, you can display tiger and peacock. Both make powerful visual elements. While tiger is majestic and forceful, peacock beats all animals with its fan of colourful feathers.

Travel, culture and nature sites can also display the Himalayas and the Taj. Culture, history and travel websites can use photos of Rajasthani folk dance, a classical dance, dancing Shiva, Ganesha, yoga, lotus and other cultural icons of India.

The Taj Mahal

India’s map can also be used. Do use the full map as authorised by the Survey of India. If your website or blog targets audience beyond India, do place India in a globe or world map. You should not show flavour of a particular location or culture if your theme is global; identifying oneself with a particular location, etc might hurt your global image. Even if you want to show your Indian identity, you need not do it routinely but on special occasions only. You can think of colouring your website or blog in the tricolour or having a flag animation on the independence day or when Indian cricket team wins the world cup.

Kathkali dance:
face decoration

Avoid visuals showing poverty, icons of a particular religion, people – especially the poor, handicapped and socially backward - in bad light, superstitions, crime and filth. India has a good share of these all, but displaying them serves hardly any good purpose while it amplifies India’s negatives at the cost of its strong cultural and social traditions.

This post is addressed specifically to Indian bloggers, but those from other nations can think of similar actions on their websites, blogs and other social media.

photo courtesy: India portal, Kerala Tourism, Wikipedia

satish-oneeyeclosed

2011-10-20T08:27:00.002+05:30

satish-oneeyeclosed

http://satish-oneeyeclosed.blogspot.com/

News blog by Satish Mutatkar

The blog is a satire on Indian current affairs covering everything from politics to cricket to bollywood.

The pomposity of public figures is particularly attractive to any satirist and if bringing a smile to the reader's face can be considered a noble purpose, then count this blog in.

The blogger is an English and Hindi Writer, Lyricist ('Hanuman'), and producer of TV Serials and corporate films.

indiaadvice

2011-10-15T08:57:00.001+05:30

India Travel Information, Tips

http://indiaadvice.blogspot.com/

Travel blog by Bloggi

This blog is all-in-one website on travel to India, with latest travel news, tips and travelogue. It has a great number of links to airlines, tour operators, information sites, maps and so on.

I have given my views on the genuineness and reliability of travel sites. All advice and recommendations are without any monetary consideration whatsoever.

The site also links to a highly informative page for PIOs and NRIs.

Updated Indian blog directory by 30th Nov

2011-10-12T05:30:00.000+05:30

For two months, we have been discussing how to capture various attributes better for updating the Directory of Best Indian Blogs. Aiming at selecting only the top quality blogs on India and by Indians, we kept on making the selection algorithm more and more complicated – with over 70 attributes, each given a weightage vis-à-vis others, marked in a scale of 0-5 and so on. When it became almost perfect, it collapsed: we found that we’d become too rigid and our work had gone up manifold! So, we not only returned to our earlier algorithm, we made it as simple as it gets.

We have sometimes been criticized for including blogs of all types in the Directory of Best Indian Blogs while many serious and analytical blogs have been excluded. We believe that blogging is both a personal and social activity, and we do not hold a case against blogs on very personal matters as long as they meet our selection criteria. So, while a spirited, well-composed and regularly updated blog on one’s kid, preacher, dog or garden may get included, a visually dull blog with copy-pasted newspaper columns, not allowing comments at all and not caring to provide any archive may be left out.

If we find great blogs, we’d not bind ourselves to a maximum number of blogs in the directory. However, we intend to have a stricter filtering for quality [as explained below] and might end up with 500 to 600 blogs, no more.

Blogs as young as 3 months will be eligible for the directory.

We’d include blogs that are suggested to us and those explored by us only till October 31, 2011. We’ll bring out the updated blog directory by November 30, 2011. We have delivered on all our promises so far, and would strive to meet the deadline this time too.

Now the selection criteria.

•   Non-English blogs will not be included. Bilingual blogs are OK if the other language is used unobtrusively.
•   We’ll consider the following as inappropriate content and will reject blogs with such content: unacceptable levels of nudity and violence; vulgarity; pornography; abuse; racial, casteist or communal denigration or hatred; rumour-mongering; slander; criminality; and other content not considered acceptable in responsible writing and visual / audio / audio-visual presentations.
•   Propaganda will be rejected; promotion of universally accepted social and moral values or a just cause with wide appeal is welcome.
•   If the blog or its content is found indulging in plagiarism or copyright infringement, it would be blacked out.
•   Commercial blogs and blogs of corporate bodies will not be included. Blogs with advertisements making more than 25% of their homepage content will also be filtered out.
•   If more than 25% of content in the blog is automatically generated, the blog will be rejected. [Content in widgets such as recent comments, archives, followers and advertisements will not be counted towards this.]
•   Blogs that have not been updated [by way of new posts] at least once in each of these months will be rejected: August, September, and October 2011.

Blogs not rejected due to above-mentioned reasons will be graded excellent, good, passable and poor for various qualitative attributes. The broad categories would be content, design and regularity. We’d give high weightage to content, followed by design and regularity. Blogs that score poor in any two of the three categories will be rejected. The main attributes for inclusion in the directory would be:

•   Effort made in blogging, as evident from big and small steps taken to improve the quality of presentation, proof-reading of text, use of widgets, etc.
•   Grammatical correctness of text content.
•   Various aspects of visual appeal [e.g. whether the blog is clean or cluttered, how well is the opening screen composed, elements introduced to break monotony and make the content interesting, use of widgets, appropriateness of colours and titling, etc for the type of blog]
•   Qualities relating to the niche of the blog [e.g. selection of subject and depth of analysis in case of current affairs, clear depiction of recipe and display of cooked food in case of cookery blogs, mastery over subject in technical subjects, and unbiased advice in case of blogs on share-markets].
•   Quality and size of visuals, their appropriateness, captioning, attribution in case of content drawn from others.
•   Value addition [e.g. background information and external links] relating to the subject matter.
•   Ease of navigation and interaction.
•   Engagement with visitors, especially in the case of personal blogs.
•   Regularity in publishing content over a long period of time.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We thank bloggers for their suggestions. We have incorporated them to the extent possible.

Since it is a directory created manually by us, we’ll not like any blogger to feel that we have included his / her blog just to give legitimacy and popularity to ourselves. So, we’ll inform all bloggers whose blogs come in the directory, by email or by posting a comment on their blogs. If a blogger wants his / her blog to be removed from the Directory of the Best Indian Blogs, we’d be glad to do so at the earliest.

saraswathan

2011-10-10T08:57:00.001+05:30

My Musings on Life, Poetry and Short Stories

http://www.saraswathan.blogspot.com

A blog by Ramamithram

The Blog is about a variety of things like views on Human Values, Poetry, Short Stories and articles all carrying a "Message" for the readers or guidance on various things.

Short stories in English as well as Tamil are about leading a happy life by observing good standard of values.
Articles on Tips for Interview, Writing Good Content and Preparation for Competitive Exams have been very well received.
The section on Acrostics has been the 'Apple of the Eye'.

Who does NOT blog in India?

2011-10-08T08:00:00.000+05:30

There are supposed to be about 4 million Indian blogs. If we take that one blogger maintains only two blogs in India, only about 2 million bloggers would be operating in India. So, 1,198 million people [plus-minus a few million] in India do not blog!

But the question is not that, it is – who do not blog, out of those who are active on the web? That gets us a more sensible number if we take that half the bloggers have quit blogging for ever: about 19 million of them do not blog out of 20 million [plus-minus a few million] people who contribute content on the www. So, what do these web-active guys do if they do not blog? Who are the ones who spend a lot of time in front of web- enabled computers and mobiles but don’t blog? And why do they not blog?

Let’s see.

We asked and observed our Orkut, Facebook and Twitter friends. We talked to many people who use these modern social media platforms, both online and in person.

Facebook is quite popular among young persons, especially college and school students. Twitter seems to be more popular among the employed youth and older people interested in personalities, politics etc. Twitter is the a medium of chatters and followers. [Canging times: earlier we were taught to follow achievers, now we follow incessant talkers!] Serious thinkers / writers / creators do not seem to belong to this medium except when they want to tweet out their achievements.

Most of the young web users have jumped to the latest platforms without graduating from static websites and blogs. So, the less dynamic platforms such as blogs and websites do not offer them what they need - instant information on matters they love, instant chat with friends, instant multi-way gossips, instant commenting on controversies, instant sharing of photos and videos, and so on. This group comprises people who do not blog, unless they are thinkers too. In India the contrast gets magnified as internet penetration is rising by leaps and bounds.

Let’s share our own experience of surveying the Indian blogosphere. After exploring it for our February 2011 and June 2011 rankings and scouring it further for expanding the Directory of Best Indian Blogs, we can say that we must be among a handful of people in the world who have manually [not using software for popularity check etc] examined over twenty thousand Indian blogs. What we found among Indian blogs, in the context of the present question, is this:

A very large number of the blogs have only a couple of posts that were created when blogging came to fashion. Some bloggers opened dozens of blogs and gave up all except a couple. Some bloggers opened their blogs and ran them with lots of passion, but they got bored because of the discipline it demands. When it comes to discipline, bloggers can get influenced by any conceivable excuse: change in job, marriage, birth of a child, a small health issue, real or imagined busyness…

Some bloggers have automated their blogs, so they themselves do not have to do anything to run them. Some copy passages and photos from the web, paste them into their blogs and do nothing else.

In our opinion, this group of ‘bloggers’ must belong to ‘the people who do not blog’. They must be over a million or half of those who have taken to blogging ever.

Blogging requires hard work and discipline. It demands an urge to write / create. Blogging demands much more work than just typing out one or two casual sentences or making a pithy comment on Anna’s fast. It survives when the blogger has passion for blogging. Not one out of two bloggers survives this drill. Those who survive reap the joy of blogging.

Coming back to non-bloggers, this lack of drive along with availability of ‘instant’ social media platforms explains why blogging is seen to be getting less popular. So, our answer to the question is: most people do not blog, the same way as most people don’t write books, make paintings or perform in films.

Post script: There has been talk of decline of blogs over the last few years. Our logic, experience and study tell us that the number of blogs and bloggers is, in fact, growing. We’ll explain that in a post sometime later.

desigirlinvides

2011-10-05T09:39:00.000+05:30

An Indian's take on desi and videsi influences

http://desigirlinvides.blogspot.com/
A personal blog by Anjali

Blogically speaking... A blog about the complexities and the trivialities of modern life, as seen by a woman, a mother, an immigrant and a global citizen.

The blog deals with topics ranging from immigration related issues to discussing the latest hindi movie, and everything in between.

wholesomeoptions

2011-09-30T09:41:00.000+05:30

Wholesome Options

http://wholesomeoptions.blogspot.com/
Health blog by Varsha Tiwary

Wholesome Options is about making wise, smart choices in Nutrition and Fitness.

It questions the humbug, dogma and marketing spiels in Nutrition : from Low Fat Diets to Heart Healthy Oils and Sugar Free Biscuits.
It promotes a love for Movement for its own sake-not to attain a mythical size zero or six pack abs.

Wholesome unabashedly loves real, unprocessed foods and heart thumping, muscle tautening Functional Exercises that have a carry over in Real World activities rather than populating Gyms with pretty shiny machines.
Wholesome helps People love moving and eating well for its own sake instead of doing these things from a sense of duty, guilt or self-deprivation.

Anna Hazare embraces blogging!

2011-09-29T09:03:00.000+05:30

Let the Indian blogosphere welcome the blog of Anna Hazare.

'Anna Hazare Says' is the twin blog in Wordpress and Blogspot platforms that has just started. In Hindi, English and Marathi, the blog is still under construction.

We had earlier put a post on Anna Hazare. When we posted that one, there were 1.8 million blogs that had talked about Anna. Nice to find Anna in the Indian blogging world.

Is the blog a feather in his cap or is it the other way round?

Indian Blog Directory updation in November

2011-09-28T18:02:00.000+05:30

We are planning to have a thorough updation of the Directory of Best Indian Blogs in the coming weeks and publish the updated directory by the middle of November.

We will post details of the selection procedure sometime later. Right now, please note the following:

The closing date for including blogs for examination will be 15^th October 2011.
Selection of blogs will start de novo. That is, a blog’s being there in the present directory or blog ranks will have no relevance to selection except that the blogs will automatically be examined.
Nominations received for blog review and blog showcase will also automatically be considered for the directory.
We are conscious that despite our survey of the Indian blogosphere in the last one year and current efforts, we would be able to check only about 20,000 blogs in all out of a few million Indian blogs. We’d welcome suggestions for inclusion of good blogs in the directory, till 15^th October. Do email us at: kp.nd.2008@gmail.com
Blogs with inappropriate content will be rejected outright.
Blogs, however good, will be rejected if they do not have at least one post published in each of these 3 months preceding the closing date: July, August and September 2011.
We do not intend to artificially put a ceiling on the number of blogs that are to be included in the directory. Yet, the competition will be tougher this time than in July. Blogs in the directory whose quality or regularity has suffered badly since July are likely to be dropped.

woodooz

2011-09-25T06:00:00.021+05:30

Woodooz
http://woodooz.blogspot.com/

Arts, crafts, woodworking blog by Preethi & Somu

Woodooz is about being self-reliant and unearthing the simple things around the house that we can do ourselves - be it fixing a cabinet door, decoupaging a bottle or hanging a painting.

Through Woodooz, we intend to chronicle our learnings on woodworking that can help one be one's own handiman. Woodooz is a hobby that has burgeoned into custom making furniture, lamp shades, clocks, paintings and more for friends and family. We believe in adding personal touch to home decor through DIY on arts,crafts and woodworking and Woodooz remains to be a platform to showcase our projects.

bigtamasha

2011-09-25T01:00:00.003+05:30

Big Tamasha

http://www.bigtamasha.com/

News & current affairs blog by Harbhajan Singh

Life has become one big tamasha. And here is your daily dose of the same.

All named and photoed characters are real, words attributed to them partially unreal but just to make the satire.

No harm is intended to anybody. Apologies in advance.

Is my site a proper website or a blog?

2011-09-20T08:17:00.001+05:30

Websites have been in existence since the advent of the World Wide Web, and blogs came much later. The early blogs were true to their literary meaning – web log or web diary – but slowly they turned into full-fledged websites. Over time, the difference between a website and a blog has blurred to the extent that they look the same. The saying that was popular once – that a website is static while a blog is updated - does not hold good anymore.

Blogs are a sub-set of websites
but blogs are often not like
traditional websites.

Technically speaking, blogs are a subset of web spaces or websites. In this assumption, all blogs are websites but not all websites are blogs. Loosely speaking, you can call a website with blogging features as a blog and a blog with lots of other content than posts as a website.

Both blogs and other websites have a homepage and a number of other pages. Site designing these days does not require writing each line of code, and a large number of ready-made templates and what-you-see-is-what-you-get [WYSIWYG] programs are available to create any type of website with numerous features. External codes in the form of widgets / gadgets are available that can be fitted into almost any design. Blogging platforms give this functionality through their ‘design’ option. So, the end result of designing whether doing it through Wordpress / Blogger or ab initio in a web-designing software might look the same.

However, big sites / portals, business sites and sites needing online transactions have structures that blogs cannot [and need not] have.

Blogs have some distinctive features that websites, especially those maintaining old characteristics of websites, do not possess. If your site has the following features, it is more likely a blog:

Not necessarily, but generally, if a site URL shows that it is part of a blogging platform [e.g. example.blogspot.com], it is a blog. But a blog need not have such an identity [e.g. http://www.indiantopblogs.com]

If a site is maintained in the form of a diary in which posts are written periodically and are arranged reverse-chronologically, it is a blog. If a site allows commenting on posts, it is further into the blog mould.

If a site has widgets for current content, aggregation / grouping of content and interaction, it shifts towards being a blog.

If there is a main site with a sub-site that is called blog, it must be maintained as a blog that has the inherent quality of log-keeping, updating and interaction.

On the other hand if a site, even on Blogger / Wordpress platform, is maintained with lots of information but not in the form of periodically published ‘posts’ and not allowing interaction, it is a site not fit to be called a blog.

Is a blog less prestigious than a website?

Since most blogs are of personal nature and not always serious about their brand, people may take a blog and its owner less seriously. Another reason for people not taking blogger as seriously as a site-owner could be that most blogs are maintained free on blogging platforms while you need to pay hosting charges, etc to maintain independent sites.

Because of this, sites / blogs with names containing blogspot / wordpress / livejournal and other blogging ‘surnames’ score poorly as compared to sites and blogs with independent URLs. Blogs [or sites devoid of blogging features] with names of blogging platforms are said to be taken less seriously by search engines too! [In totality, however, blogs tend to get more search friendly because of their regular updating, comments etc.]

But some website owners prefer to call their websites as blogs, as it invites interaction and tells that the site will keep regularly updating the matter.

The last point

If you are a non-corporate blogger, you can do whatever a simple website can do and much more. Just keep it in the best form [You can find a number of tips on Indian Top Blogs].

Do not pay huge sums just to have your website that needs technical knowledge for its maintenance and upgradation; use Blogger or Wordpress – the best available blogging platforms. You can create fine websites using Blogger [settings - publishing] and Wordpress [Wordpress.org] - at a much smaller fee.

If you are in business, it is advisable [at present] to have a full-fledged website and a complementary blog and/or a social media page [e.g. Facebook/Orkut]. Studies have found that websites with blog sections drive more page indexing on search engines, links and traffic.

If you like the content on this blog, do consider subscribing to the blog through feed / email.

Blog showcase: a quick follow up

2011-09-15T14:35:00.001+05:30

The response to our call for entries for blog showcase has been tremendous. Within about 36 hours of publishing the previous post, we have received 8 nominations. We'd have given this update in our blog updates section, but we wanted to clarify some points in view of the likely big response, so this post.

It appears that we will not be able to accommodate even one-tenth of the nominations that we receive, so we have thought of the following mechanism to choose the 'first among equals'.We'll shortlist the available nominations on the 4th, 9th, 14th, 19th, 24th and 29th of a month so as to publish a post on the next day.

We thought of limiting the showcase to Indian blogs only but we realise that it doesn't serve much purpose. We are also not in a position to shortlist blogs for quality beyond what is described below.

The blog must meet a minimum standard in content, regularity and design. In content, subject matter and blogger's effort would score over grammatical refinement. There should be no objectionable content on the blog.

The nomination should be in the exact format provided in the previous post.

The description should be compelling. Allow us to re-emphasise that a good blog with a poor description in the showcase does not do justice to the blog, and so you should give your best in the description of the blog. Though we'd not like to reject nominations only on the basis of description, nominations with a very poorly written description are liable to be rejected. [We are open to modifications in the description and re-submission of the same blog, if the revised submission is as per guidelines given in the previous post.]

We won't further shortlist nominations available in the basket based on merit, popularity or any other criterion. We'd just pick one blog randomly. We'd carry forward all earlier nominations.

We'd be criticised for lack of transparency in this system, but do let us showcase blogs this way for the next 5-6 weeks. In the meantime, we'd welcome suggestions in this regard. Should we shortlist blogs based on their Google PR / Alexa ranking? Should it be on popularity, based in turn on comments? Should we list the nominations on Indian Top Blogs and invite readers' votes? We are averse to shortlisting blogs based on popularity, but we would also like to be as transparent as possible. What do you say?

Please read this post in continuation of the previous post on blog showcase.

Review and showcase your own blog!

2011-09-14T01:19:00.001+05:30

Indian Top Blogs is happy to announce a new platform and a new way for you to review and then showcase your blog. From 25th September, we are starting a 'blog showcase'. It is a window to feature quality Indian blogs.

The process

- We'll feature ~~about four six~~ three blogs a month on the ITB website.

- The blogs will be from the Directory of Best Indian Blogs. Blogs not in the directory will also find a place if they meet the general criteria for inclusion in the Directory. Such blogs will automatically go into the directory too.

- The featured blogs will be available in ITB archives, and all featured blogs will be accessible through the 'blog showcase' tab in the navigation bar on the ITB site.

Need you apply for being featured, and how?

You need to apply by sending an email to kp.nd.2008@gmail.com in the following manner:

in the subject of the email, write: blog showcase
in the body of the email, write exactly as stated below:
- first line: the URL of the blog [e.g. http://www.indiantopblogs.com]
- next line: title of the blog in no more than 30 characters. Whether you call it 'Teenu's Blog' or 'Where sky meets the nephros' is up to you. It will help if you identify the blogger and / or the purpose of the blog.
- next line: describe the best features of the blog in no more than 750 characters [100 words]. It has to be the best description that you can think for your blog, without self-praise. For example, if you feel that you need to highlight the design aspect, do that. If you feel, your blog is helping poor children get helping hands, tell that.

This is how the blog showcase would appear on ITB.

What is that you get by showcasing your blog on ITB site?

- You get featured in a site that is gaining popularity and reputation for genuine rankings and reviews. It adds to your blog's reputation.

- You get a backlink to your blog from ITB. It means more popularity, greater authority and - as ITB grows - more and more Google PR value as the blog gets a 'dofollow' link.
- As your post will be linked to your blog, visitors to the showcase post as well as the list of featured blogs are likely to visit your blog.
- Your blog gets a mention on our Facebook and Digg accounts. When we go to other social media sites, we'll carry your blog there too.

- You get a URL of your own. [We'll give the 'showcase' featuring your blog a page name with ITB + your blog's URL.] You can put it anywhere on your blog or elsewhere - and it will show only your blog's showcase.

- We'll also put a thumbnail of your blog's homepage, as shown above. Visitors can see a glimpse of your blog in the 'showcase' itself. We'll also highlight one or more of your best features.

- You'll benefit immensely by this exercise as you will discover the best things in and potential of your blog. It will give you an excellent 'pitch' for your blog that you can use on other social media sites, bottom of your email, etc. The odds are that you will feel happy after the exercise.

- When visitors comment on your 'showcase', you will get those many opinions on your blog.

How does it score over peer review? You get great reviews from competition sites.

- You will find that award and recognition sites on the web depend either on popularity or votes given by other bloggers. Bloggers entering competitions need to promote their entries, and mostly the ones with good networking win over others. Yes, such rankings do serve a purpose, but in our view ranking / review by a totally unbiased agency with no monetary interest or lure of reciprocity in promoting a particular blog works the best.
- In our email interactions with some bloggers whose blogs we reviewed in detail, we found that most of the times, bloggers do not know the intrinsic qualities of their blogs even when they feel they are the best blogger in their group. This exercise would give you an opportunity to think of the best in your blog.

- In any case, the showcase also tells that you meet a minimum standard in terms of content, design and regularity.

How can you be sure to be showcased? Can you apply again?

We don't know what response we'd get. We have been overwhelmed by the review requests. If we get a large number of requests, we'd check them in chronological order. If we find a blog wanting in some respect, we'd send an email to the blogger. ~~We'd review it after about a month.~~ We'd carry forward blogs that are not showcased, to the next week. If you have applied once, you don't have to apply again. Just stick to the guidelines given above for sending email to us, and we'd respond to you. If you want to modify the description of the blog subsequent to a submission [but before showcasing], write in the subject line: blog showcase: modification request.
As per our present scheme of things, all showcased blogs will be allowed to modify the description once in six months.

We have followed it up with another post on blog showcase.

=========
If you like the blog and the tips given by us, do subscribe to ITB via email.

Pictures can make or mar a blog: III - images inside the blog

2011-09-10T13:03:00.001+05:30

This is the last post in a three-part series on use of images in blogs. The first post dealt with technical aspects of imaging and the second one was on image properties and editing for blogging purposes. The present one deals with various aspects relating to pictures inside the blog.

10. Purpose of picture elements in blogs

Images and other visual elements are used in blogs in these major ways:

1. Photographs, other graphics and videos are put in posts to supplement text. In photo-blogs or posts in the form of photo-features, images are the dominant content and text is used to supplement it.

2. Images are used to enhance overall blog appearance: template; background; title background; icons, titles, blogger’s portrait and badge; pictorial headers and footers; animations; flash introductions and navigation schemes; favicon; etc.

3. Images also land up in blogs when they are part of external code: widgets and photo-widgets; honours and awards; linked photos; etc.

4. Besides images and videos, colours and patterns are used variously in blogs to create visual variety.

11. Relevance of the image

nice template, but is
the text easy to read?

One of the foremost things to be kept in mind is whether an image will add value or reduce it. Is the image relevant? Does it not reduce readability? Does it match the overall colour scheme of the blog? Does it go with the overall personality of the blog?

The question of relevance is especially important for images in the blog’s title bar and background. The image in the title area can increase the appeal and overall value of the blog many times. The image in the background gives a sense of continuity by weaving together various elements, and complements the personality / mood of the blog.

colourful template, but does it
suit IndianTopBlogs?

You will find on the web very fancy templates that cover the title area and block background. Some of them are really very imaginative. Some websites and blogs have impressive graphics that seem to add great value to the website / blog. However, before applying them to your blog, test them on the parameters we have mentioned in this post. Please keep two more points in mind: (i) Only because an image or a template looks great on someone’s blog does not mean it would look as good on yours. (ii) Your own images and designs give the uniqueness to your blog that generic images and templates cannot.

snapshot of 4 templates
suitable for different types of blogs

12. How many and how big images?

An important consideration is the number of images in a blog. As said above, images should not be put there without a good purpose. The number of images in a blog should depend primarily on the overall personality of the blog.

The number of images in posts and sidebar also depends on the blog layout and design. A 3-column blog with two narrow sidebars is inherently cluttered; it would look worse if you put many photos in between. Beauty and functionality of many blogs is destroyed by numerous badges and icons stuffed in the sidebar. When the blog has a brightly coloured and lively background, there should be fewer images in posts and the images should also go with the overall colour theme.

Posts should generally have images, but not too many. If your blog is a fun blog with only small bits of text, you can have a large number of images. In personal blogs, you should sometimes have a photo-feature with a number of photos on a theme [e.g. child, home, a trip, a ceremony, flowers in your garden, party]. Have the photos in good size [500x400 px or so] in a series, tweak or slightly edit one or two, use smart text to integrate them into the theme – and your photo-feature is ready!

File size is important too. As explained in the second post in this series, convert big images into images of small file size. Even then, big images [say, 600x700 px] will generally be of big file size and if there are many such images on a page, the page might take long in opening in the browser.

Keep image width a few [about 10] pixels less than the width of the column in which you intend to put the image, to allow for indents and margins set for that column.

Unless you have a purpose like the photo-feature mentioned above, do not have too many big images in posts. They unduly elongate posts and make the text look disjointed. There are many situations when you indeed need big pictures (besides those in photo-features): individual big photos of some memorable occasion; a scenic panorama; a painting that excels in detail; pictorial presentation of a process such as cooking, making a handicraft or repairing an artefact; fashion and portfolio... If you must put big photos in posts, keep a very small number of posts in one page.

13. Use of slide shows and animations

You can use slide shows when you have a large number of photos to show [e.g. after a lovely trip].

Do put slide shows and animations after due consideration. Moving images are a big distraction and can irritate. They also slow down the blog. Use of funky images / animations such as a moving bird or falling leaves, make the blog look interesting, but they also distract; their freshness also wears out when people visit the blog many times, and chances are that these elements start annoying after a while.

We’d recommend that moving elements are reserved for special occasions. For example, you can put a fluttering flag for a few days during the Republic Day; twinkling stars / glowing lamp flame / colour balloons bursting all over the blog around Christmas, Diwali and Holi; and a slide show of wedding photos after your [if you are too old, your daughter's] marriage.

14. Image in the title bar

It is no-brainer that title bar is one of the most important spaces in a website. A graphic, however simple it may be [see the title of the Indian Top Blogs], is often better than no graphic.

Do keep these points in mind: (i) Generally, you should place the title image behind the title text [and description too if it can be accommodated] and not above or below the title text. In addition to looking good, this scheme saves precious space. (ii) Avoid including title text as part of the title image, as the text clarity may suffer and changing the image would require again including the text in the new image. (iii) For making title image, use the cropping tool profusely instead of stretching an image to fit in the unusual dimensions of the title space. (iv) Since you need to use text, see that there is exceptionally high contrast between the text colour and the background behind it. (v) Do not use a picture with varying dark and light areas if you want to place text upon it. (vi) Avoid putting animations and slide show in the title area. (vii) Though some popular templates, especially in Wordpress platform, have a search box in the right corner of the title area, we’d rather recommend keeping the title clutter free; the exception for a simple search box can be made for plain titles with monochrome or white background.

15. Image(s) in the blog background

As we discussed above and in the second post in this series, size and resolution of the background image are very important. A single image for the background will need to be big and of high resolution. It will need to have dark and light portions such that they are not in conflict with other elements such as text and images in the post and widgets. On the other hand, a supporting image inside the post has to be of small size and can have low resolution. For background, blogging platforms usually allow you either to place a single large image or a tile made of repeated occurrences of a small image as a montage. They also allow you the liberty to keep the text column without the background image in it. [Do see this post on how to put a background image on a Blogspot/Blogger blog.]

text readability in different background shades

For putting a single image in the blog background, the free images provided by Blogspot and Wordpress are usually nice enough. However, if you want to use your own image, take a big image [Blogger presently recommends an image of at least 1800x1600 px dimension but less than 300 kb in file size]. See that it does not have too much variation in brightness and contrast. Also make sure that the text you use for posts, titles and links looks clear enough. In the background shown here, there is light sky and dark hill, and the text –especially link headings - is not properly visible.

a bad tiled-background can be a disaster

You can use repeating images in the background, making a beautiful montage behind other elements such as posts and widgets. Since the small image is repeated in a tiled background, it loads faster as compared to a single image of big file size.

Please note that unless you choose the image with care, a tiled background may mar readability and visual appeal of the blog - the blog might look cluttered and confusing. Choose an image with (i) muted colours and contrast, (ii) no sharp light or dark objects near the edges, and (iii) objects that would look fine when repeated. In the background of repeated figurine shown here, the black and white corners make each tile different and do not allow smooth transition. If you like to have ‘white text on dark background’, a dark tiled background may suit you well.

16. Placement of images in posts and sidebars

In many blogs that we review, we find images going out of the column. We have discussed the size aspect in a section above and we’d only re-emphasise here that images intruding into other columns render the look of the blog unprofessional.

Awards and recognitions serve a purpose in blogs, but these are often reciprocation of your appreciation of others’ blogs. Then there are icons for hit counters, copyright, and so on. Not only going by their value, but as visual elements too, such badges should be kept low in the sidebar. If they happen to be too many, they should be brought down to the blog footer or dumped into a separate page [not the homepage].

Alignment of pictures within a post is very important. Images can be aligned left, right or centre. Your post editor gives you that facility. Generally align images left and right, but keep them in the middle when they are big or you want to give them special importance. A range of photos in terms of size and effects can be used to bring in variety. For example, you can rotate a photo by 30 degrees, frame a photo, differently align them…

Placing of pictures in the top 10” of a blog needs special consideration. We have dealt with this matter in an exclusive post earlier and have discussed images in the title area in a section above. We’d like to repeat that the selection of image(s), their placing, size, shape and quality are much more important for the top 10” of the blog than other spaces. Generally avoid keeping a big slide show or a video here, unless that serves a special purpose.

17. Caption

Unless you want to deliberately avoid caption [e.g. when the image’s content is obvious or when it has been amply described in the accompanying text], you should caption the image. It is a good idea to change font, size, colour or slant of text to make it distinct from the body text. Search engines are also supposed to be giving importance to captions.

18. Attribution

You must give proper credit to the source of the image, as mentioned in the beginning of the first post in this series on images, unless you are the rightful owner of the image. We thought, we must end the discussion with this very advice.

Best of blogging!
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Pictures can make or mar a blog: II - image attributes, editing

2011-09-05T08:24:00.000+05:30

This post is second in the three-part series on use of images in blogs. The first post dealt with some technical aspects of imaging. The present one deals with major attributes of pictures and simple image editing. The next one is on matters relating to images inside a blog.

5. Image attributes

London Wheel:
good contrast

Image quality depends on dozens of factors. We’ll talk here of some important attributes of quality of an image.

1. Brightness. In dark images, shadows and poorly-lit areas look too dark while in too bright images, bright objects lose details and turn white. Manually increasing brightness in an image makes it look whitewashed unless some other attributes are adjusted.

2. Contrast. In images with proper contrast, you can distinctly make out one object from the other and see details. but in an image with poor contrast, objects and their details mix up. Photos taken in low light, say at dusk, tend to have low contrast.

London Wheel
in poor contrast

3. Resolution. In digital imaging, resolution refers to the size of the image in pixels. Thus a 10 MP [=megapixel] photo will have around 10 million pixels. If the length x breadth ratio of the photo is 4:3, the 10 MP picture would be around 3400 pixels wide and 2600 pixels in height. Since blog images are generally for viewing on screen and not for printing, images in high resolution don’t add to the visual quality but make the blog slow.

Vibrant colours, details, contrast

4. Hue. It refers to the underlying colour of the image. If a photo is not ‘colour balanced’, it will have a tinge that seems to spread over objects whether they are of that colour or not. Photos taken at night using ordinary digital cameras often have yellow-orange hue.

Poor saturation:
grey-shaded, dull colours

5. Saturation. High saturation means you will see bright colours as in daylight. A fully un-saturated image is gray-black. Under-exposed photos tend to be un-saturated.

6. Photography and blog images

This post cannot even try to teach basics of photography, but we must say just as a reminder that if you intend to put photographs taken by you in your blog, take care in properly shooting the photo rather than shooting arbitrarily and thinking that you would improve the photo later on. Point-and-shoot digital cameras give you the leeway to shoot as many photos as you can and without much regard to adjustment of various values, but it does not mean that you should not take care of basics of photography. In all cases, you should keep these very basics in mind:

compostition of the photo – position of the main object, distribution of objects, framing, including or excluding objects, the main object versus the surroundings, direction of action and imaginary lines in the photo…
focus and zoom - keeping the main object in sharp focus, using zoom to blur background, adjusting camera for moving objects, depth of field [i.e. whether distant and near objects all need to be in focus]…
light – abundance of ambient light, time of the day, light direction, lighting of main object versus the surroundings, use of flash…
resolution – Take photos in good resolution so that you can crop them if needed.
naturalness - people’s natural facial expressions, caring that photos do not look affected…
unusualness - kids’ and pets’ candid shots, people in unusual expressions or acts in public places, fun photos, photos taken from unusual angles, with unusual lighting and unusual times…

7. Editing images

With the help of a professional image editing program, you can improve an image’s quality but only if you have long experience with photo editing. Even then, there are chances of the edited picture looking artificial. Therefore, if you want to use photos of a family function or a picnic on your blog, do take care that the photograph is inherently of good quality, as advised above. If you want to put images of your un-mounted paintings, drawings, old letter etc, scan rather than shoot them.

Note that if an image – mostly a photo – is of poor quality, it is often better to use a different photo rather than wasting time on improving the poor-quality photo.

For a lay person, we'd advise making use of a free image-viewing program to tweak images before putting them on the blog. These programs have limited editing capability, but that is more than enough for customising photos and other graphics for blogs. Some popular image-viewing programs that you can download from the web are: Irfanview, Photoscape, Picasa, Faststone, Photofiltre and XnView. Besides, there are a number of online image editors; you need to upload your photo and use the online tools to improve the image.

Before editing your image, make its copy. Do editing only on the copied image, keeping the original intact.

cropped from the image
of London street above

The most useful and easy tools that you should use for image processing are:

Cropping: This is one of the most important and very simple tool in image processing. What it means is keeping only a portion of the original photo and discarding the rest. If you want to get rid of the disturbing background in a portrait, you need to keep only the guy’s face and remove the rest. Let’s demonstrate how you can easily crop a photo in Irfanview. There is ‘crop’ option under ‘edit’ menu. When you select this option and move the mouse cursor over the image, it draws a rectangle. If you feel the rectangle is not OK, you can undo this action and again draw a rectangle or you can stretch the rectangle to suit your need. There are slight variations in other programs in how you can crop the image.

Keep these points in mind while cropping images for your blog: (i) Cropping will reduce the size of the image. So, if you have already a low resolution picture and you want to bring the cropped image’s size to the original one, you will lose quality. (ii) Crop with the final shape and size in mind so that you don’t have to resize the image later on.

Resizing: Find the image size by either hovering the mouse cursor over the image icon in the computer or looking for ‘image information’ in these programs. The size will be given in width x length form, e.g. 500x300 px. Look for the resizing tool in the program and resize the image to a smaller size. For small images that you can fit in a sidebar, you will need much smaller image width as compared to images that are placed in posts. For title bar, you will need very wide photos but with small height. Keep these in mind when you resize an image: (i) Resizing adds or removes pixels artificially in the image, so a drastic resizing might reduce the quality of the image. If you are forced to do so, do it in steps, doing about 20% in one go. (ii) Unless you want to distort the image deliberately, keep the width x length ratio intact [e.g. resizing a 2000 x1800 photo to fit in a 210 px sidebar, you should resize it to 200x180 px, not 200x140 or 200x300 px]. (iii) Resizing of image with text in it blurs the text outline and makes it unclean. (iv) Avoid increasing the image size, as it always results in loss of quality. If you must do so, do it only by a small percentage. (v) When resizing image to fit a column, keep the width a few pixels less than the column width so as to take care of indents and margins of that column.

Irfanview's menus
for common editing tasks

All these programs let you correct the image’s brightness, contrast, hue, saturation and other visual attributes, but use them with caution. Often, especially in these non-professional programs, when you try to improve one aspect, you might lose something else.

These programs also give you the facility to write text over image, make collage of many images, rotate images, put border and frame around an image, make thumbnails and icons, and give numerous 'effects' to the image. While we cautioned you against experimental editing for improving an image, we’d rather encourage you to play with ‘effects’. These effects allow you to make a piece of art out of your photos in a few simple steps. In Irfanview, these effects can be found under the ‘image’ tool. Apply these effects after [not before] doing proper cropping and resizing.

8. Computer graphics for blogs

eyes!

You can use an existing image, take an ordinary photo of people or objects, or create one from scratch using brushes in a program such as Paint [in MS Office] to create wonderful computer graphics. You need not be a professional image editor and you need not use professional programs; the ‘effects’ and some editing tools such as ‘rotate’ and ‘hue’ in the photo viewing programs mentioned above will bring out the artist hidden in you. You can convert a bright hillscape into a somber evening scene to go well with your poem… scribble graffiti over a fun photo…twist your own face to show how angry you are with corruption in the society…turn your walking photo by 90 degrees to look like walking on the wall…Take care that you do not manipulate people’s or national symbols’ photos to the extent that it invites criticism and legal action.

9. Saving images for the web

Save images for the web in formats mentioned in the first post on using images in blogs, and not in other formats. Please note that when you save images in these formats after editing again and again, their inherent quality goes down.

Previous one: technical aspects: size, shape, formats

Next one: images on the blog