Mumbai Pervert

That's what some erudite person searched for, and found this blog. And guess what? Thanks to a quote on our sidebar and one quote from an article that mentions the city that we still stubbornly call Bombay, we're the number one for the term.

Any pron sites want to buy ad space from us?

In which we stick our necks out and critique..

..Desicritics, the blog that everyone has been talking about, which is now open for business.

We have mixed feelings.

The positives first.

As both our readers know, we're a fervent evangelist and disciple of collablogs.

Add to that the site's promise to showcase excellent writing from the Indian blogosphere, and we're sold. And from an initial cursory flip through, it is defintely worth a bookmark or an addition to your feedreader. Quantity and quality.

Set against that is the nagging discomfort we feel when we see human beings choose to replicate political boundaries in this wonderful, borderless world of blogs that we love so much. (And yes, we know we started indi³. We're conflicted. Sue us.)

[Extremely opinioniated statement warning]

And then there's the design.

The blogcritics look is way too busy as it is, making it extremely difficult to enjoy their excellent content.

The look here takes the worst elements of that design and adds some clutter of its own. It's not so bad once you see the post pages, we'll grant them that (bad yes, just not so bad), but the home page is more crowded than a stockbroker's terminal during trading hours.

How do you bug us? Let us count the ways.

Post introductions are way too brief — we'd prefer to get more of a taste of a writer's style, more of the flavour of the post, before we click through to read. Especially when there's so much to choose from. Here, one has to click through, read a bit, and then trudge back to the home page.

There's an advertising panel of which the kindest thing that can be said is that it does not have animated banners. It completely overwhelms the content, which is supposed to be the site's USP.

And those icons, flags, call them what you will, that mark post categories? Two words.

Ug.

Ly.

Thankfully, there's an RSS feed. Whew.

Contests for writers at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival

We're helping organise two contests as part of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival's Literature and Writing section. The submission details are still being worked out, but here's the basics. An exclusive preview, so to speak. :)

Hope you decide to participate. If it's not quite your thing, we'd appreciate it of you would pass on to pals who you think might be interested.

And those of you with blogs, personal sites, mailing lists, forums and the like, we'd be eternally grateful if you gave this a plug. This blog will return the favour any time.

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Reprised from last year, SMS Poetry (: someone you know won first prize last year :)

The basic rule is simple: your poem must fit into a single 160-character SMS.

For more details, prizes and the jury, please see http://www.caferati.com/contests/SMS.htm

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The second contest is a new one, Flash Fiction. Also known as short-shorts or micro-fiction. The challenge here is to tell a story within a very limited word count.

For more details, prizes and the jury, please see http://www.caferati.com/contests/FF.htm

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Caferati will also be hosting an evening at the Festival. 12th February, around 5 or 5:30 p.m. If you happen to be in Bombay at that time, we'd love to see you.

This page will detail the programme once we have it finalised: http://www.caferati.com/contests/KGAF2006.htm

And to generally keep track of important updates for any of these three events, please keep an eye out on http://www.caferati.com/contests

Bombay Bloggers

Akshay of Trivial Matters announces a Mumbai Meetup for bloggers here and here.
The basics:
Tuesday, January 31st, 6 p.m.
Cafe Coffee Day
Carter Road
Bandra

We hope to be there.

In which we succumb to 55er mania

Succumb

‘Want to go up to the terrace while the order gets ready?’
‘Yes.’ As simple as that. No games.
...
Her eyes glistened in the moonlight.
‘I...’
Whack!
My cheek stung. ‘That was for presuming I’d say “Yes.”’
Whack!
The other cheek. Christ. She’s ambidextrous. ‘And that was for being right.’
And then she kissed me.

9th January 2006. 55 words.
The addition of the ellipsis thanks to excellent suggestion from an anonymous commenter,

In which we pontificate..

..in the Hum Blogistani series.

Blogs will help keep MSM honest

Written for the Indibloggies series Hum Blogistani and cross-posted here later

Why, you wonder, is this chap writing a piece in this series? He isn't a pioneer blogger, or an A-lister, he doesn't have legions of adoring fans (or even the type that love to hate him). He doesn't even make it for Best Tagline. Fercryinoutloud, the loser doesn't even have comments disabled.

It's pretty simple, really. Debashish only knows I exist because of the collablogs* I have been part of. Very probably for the South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog (SEA-EAT), which finds itself nominated in two categories this year. (And while I'm at it, consider this a plug for your vote.)

So, not to worry, I won't test your patience with my usual boring pronouncements on the state of the blogosphere. Instead, I'll just waffle on for a bit on the stuff that Debashish asked me to write about: collablogs and disaster relief blogging.

I'll start with some excerpts from an essay I'm writing on the experience. It will make its appearance on my blog in due course, and it sets the background for the preachy bits afterwards.

SEA-EAT was, for me, a life-changing experience. I had experimented, with moderate success, with collablogs before, with Caferati, set up for my online writers' community, and as a contributor to what was originally Desi Media Bitch and then became well-known as CSF.

Just prior to the Christmas of 2004, Rohit Gupta had this great idea of growing Desi Media Bitch beyond the 'desi' label, and we had set about inviting bloggers from neighbouring countries to join in on what we had planned as a sort of media-bashing without borders fortnight (hence Chiennes Sans Frontieres). So you might say I was rather evangelistic about collaboration by the time the earthquake and tsunami happened.

However, the size of the disaster shocked all of us, froze us (well, I guess; it certainly paralysed me) as those terrible pictures flooded our screens. It was only the next day that my brains unclogged enough to be realise that a blog could possibly help. A few SMSes and phone calls later, I set up the template, Rohit made the first proper post, and we had begun mail bombing our address books with pleas for help. Dina Mehta was one of the first names we both came up. Thanks to her and Rohit being contributors to Worldchanging, a highly respected group blog, they were able to write about what we were doing there. Which was noticed by BoingBoing. And the traffic to our site surged almost immediately. (It is pertinent to note that Rohit, Dina and I had never met face-to-face at that point.) Around the same time, I had mailed Prem Panicker, Managing Editor at Rediff in the USA (yet another online-only friend) and almost immediately, all Rediff's coverage began to feature a link to our blog. Our viewership boomed from the few hundred people we had mailed directly to thousands every hour. We were flooded with offers to help from all over the world. People who wanted to blog with us, others who sent us information, linked to us, promoted us. And, of course, people asking how they could help directly.

There were news organisations who had the infrastructure to do hard news better than we could. What was missing was information about the NGOs and aid organisations working on the ground. That helped us hastily define what we were going to do: “News and information about resources, aid, donations and volunteer efforts.” We set some ground rules: no politics, no opinions, steer away from controversy, just find out about and link to aid efforts.

The next day, the New York Times and the Guardian in the UK had written about us, and put our URL in their articles, shortly after, the BBC linked to us too. These, and many other news organisations across the world cited us as an authoritative source for information. Including - high point! - the search giant Google itself, who not only linked to us from their dedicated Tsunami page (which, in an unprecedented move for Google, was linked to off their search home page), but also, through the efforts of one of our members who had friends in Mountain View, guaranteed us unlimited bandwidth, thus ensuring that the site wouldn't go down. Traffic was overwhelming - a million plus visitors in the first week.

I won't continue with the blow-by-blow (you can read these eloquent descriptions by Dina Mehta and Bala Pitchandi, and as I said, I'm writing about it in detail myself), but I will tell you that SEA-EAT model has been used, with modifications, and varying degrees of success, in the other disasters that have hit our planet this year (MumbaiHelp and Cloudburst Mumbai, KatrinaHelp and RitaHelp, QuakeHelp had many of the same core group behind them; ChennaiHelp did an excellent job of self-organising too). And I'll also confess that I have seeded a few other collablogs, some with less, erm, humanitarian goals.

Anyway, what did I, not the smartest cookie in the jar by any stretch of the imagination, learn from all this?

• One, that blogs can make a difference. That blogs can be more than the medium of choice of the self-obsessed. That the linking and research that the better bloggers all do, the ethics that guide them, when powered by a huge need to make a difference, to just reach out and help, can make for a pretty powerful vehicle.

• Two, that collaboration rocks. That a group of people with common cause can do bigger things together than they could do separately, even in a world as staunchly individualistic as the blogosphere.

• Three, that bloggers (or at least the ones that I have had the privilege of working with) are very creative people. Even without inventing anything new, the team made some pretty damn innovative use of existing technology. Not just the “blog as collaborative disaster relief tool” bit. Stuff like using Yahoo IM chat as a war room cum conference room, SMS as an information system when other communication is shot to hell, Flickr tags as missing persons notifiers, a Skype number staffed by people in three continents as a virtual call centre. Obvious in hindsight, like so many of the best solutions are, but hey, we did it first.

• And four (this is the really preachy bit), that people are essentially good, though it can take a disaster to make that clear.

That seemed like a good place to end, but alas for you, Debashish also foolishly asked me to include a section on where I saw the Indian blogosphere going, and which red-blooded blogger can pass up an excuse to pontificate? I have no rocket science to offer you, but here goes anyway.

I think a few bloggers will be able to make a living off their blogs. They will largely be, I'll wager, truly superior writers, specialists who have built up and nurtured an audience. And collablogs might make some Ad Sense money too.

And there's a flip side. There will be more and more attempts to turn blogs into cash cows. More corporate blogs, more splogs, more comment spam innovations, more paid-for blogging.

Blogs will not replace big media. They will complement it, they will help keep MSM honest, and in return, after all the hype is over, be an invaluable resource for gauging the pulse of the community.

And here's the big one. It is inevitable that computers and net connections will become more affordable, and that will bring more people into the blog world. But when user interfaces in Indian languages become ubiquitous, that, my friends, is when you will see a boom in the Indian blogosphere that will make the explosion we saw last year look like a wet firecracker.

So, in a few years, you will find me leaving comments on this site when the categories are announced, demanding that one be set up for Best Indic Blog - English.

*That's a term I believe I kind of invented, in an article in the magazine GT.

The IndiBloggers of the year

We're very pleased to see so many of the blogs and bloggers we admire winning at the IndiBloggies.

Huzzahs and hosannahs to:
Amit (IndiBlog of the Year), Sonia (Best Topical IndiBlog), Jai (Best Humanities IndiBlog), Prem and gang (Best Sports IndiBlog), the DesiPundit team (Best IndiBlog Directory and Best Group Blog), Shivam (Best Tagline) and Megha (Best Designed IndiBlog).

Comments

If you comment here, you'll notice we have turned on comment moderation. Just to tell you that we haven't got too big for our britches and all fancy-like, and the chicas aren't beating down our door with proposals decent or otherwise.

It's just that someone seems to have figured out how to get past the Blogger word verification / captcha thingy. Got a bunch of identical spam comments on some old posts.

We will try turning it off later, and hope that it's gone away.

butt naturally

And here's what we had started to post when we learned that we were a spam blog *mutter, mutter, mutter*

The Scotsman tells us that

a team of researchers from Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University are launching what is believed to be the world's first scientific study to answer the often asked question of how clothing can affect the appearance of the female rear.

The team, from the university's School of Textiles and Design, based in Galashiels, believe the study could have major implications for retailers.

Yeah right. A bunch of scientists staring at female posteriors all day and getting funded to do so. We should be so lucky. Ig Nobel, anyone?

Oh yes.

four models had been chosen to provide as representative as possible a sample of female rears.

There are only four?