All valid points, as always.

I have updated my IndiBlogger post to reflect some of the points you made: http://www.gauravonomics.com/blog/the-indibloggerin-state-of-the-indian-blogosphere/.

I think the IndiBlogger data works more or less at the aggregate level (city/ language/ PageRank/ Alexa Rank/ Frequency/ Rececny), but not for ranking.

How to make it more robust is a big question. As of now, I want to focus on data/ insight that is already available. At some point of time, all of us (you, Mahesh, Rajesh, Rajiv, Kiruba, Siddharth) should pool our resources (both time and money) and do a proper study, which all of us can then use for our companies.

The IndiBlogger report, in any case, is just one part of the whole project, which has been in my mind for more than six months. The original proposal was to make a qualitative report, which will give an outsider an overview of the Indian blogging scene. It was meant to be a very non-commercial, Global Voice/ Desipundit like affair. Here’s something else that I have been pitching to GV: http://indiatalks.org/best-indian-bloggers/

I think we should suggest the best blogs within each category, based on some criteria, which we can collelctively decide on. It doesn’t have to be quantitative. It will be biased, by default. But, it’s better than nothing.

Yes, we should have more categories. The category list is just indicative.

Blog Melas are great but they are temporary. IndiBlogger has a meme-aggregator called IndiVine which is similar. We need something more enduring, more “meta”, like the wikipedia page on Iranian blogs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_blogs

1. I’m happy to help with #8 as I mentioned to you in my email.

2. #1 is a dicey area – we would need to launch a proper survey for that to be robust – there are so many varying estimates about the number of blogs, readers etc. The report you referred to in your earlier post on the Indiblogger State of the Blogosphere has a sample of just 7895 – and the data seems flawed as some of the most obviously successful bloggers like Amit Varma to name one, are missing. Why? Perhaps due to the opt-in nature of collecting data which isn’t really successful given the fact that we’ve crossed the stage where there were a few thousand bloggers who were better-knit as a community.

We need to look for a more solid methodology (like what Pew does for eg.) to really get robust statistics.

3. Neha’s point of wikifying this exercise is great. It’s the perfect tool for collaboratively building a document and would make it so much easier to add/edit/review. So I’d suggest you or someone starts a wiki and instead of blogging thoughts at each one’s individual blog – lets work within that space to create this ‘living’ document.

4. Lots of categories are missing I feel – like Naina points out Design there may be several others in different professions, in the Arts, Culture, Poetry, Fiction and many many more that I am sure I’m leaving out

5. How are we going to assess Most Popular Blogs in each category – we need clear parameters for this. If they fit into the narrative anecdotally to make a point or as an example that’s super. But having lists with rankings etc. is something I am wary of after 6 years of blogging. Most lack credibility as they are based on faulty or inadequate samples and a lot of subjectivity which was ok when the blogosphere was much smaller (blame the researcher in me for being cynical about this).

6. More importantly, what purpose do these lists of popularity serve really?

7. Building a bridge-blogger’s directory is a nice idea – once again lets do this the wiki-way as Global Voices had done.

I personally would just have passing interest in a document about the history of blogging in India. But show me the future. Show me whats hot in India and how to make it even better. That is something I would pay for.

I would love it if more politicians and media personnel and CEOs take to blogging and make things more transparent. So my suggestion would be: could you make it a bit more future oriented than just history and context oriented?

Pramit’s post is a perfect example of how knowledge is often hidden in places that aren’t obvious. If ten Indian bloggers write a post like that, we will have the first draft of the State of the Indian Blogosphere report.

@Pramit: Thanks for your post. I was compiling a list of the top ten milestones in Indian blogging and your post reminded me to include some milestones I would have otherwise left out.

Recently, I also gave a long interview on citizen journalism in India that will appear in the Sunday edition of Mail Today. I’ll use inputs from your series to expand that posts as well.

Before that in Feb 2008 I wrote a three part series on Citizen Journalism in India. Cross posted on Journalism.co.uk site.
http://mediavidea.blogspot.com/2008/02/state-of-citizen-journalism-in-india_9328.html

Hope it helps.

Another unrelated theme could be an effort to understand why there haven’t been any purely ‘Indian’ innovations in blogging/ social networking whereas gobally there have been so many of them. Does it only have to do with internet penetration or there are many other peaces of the puzzle?

@Gautam: I feel that it would be nice to put together a first draft of the report based on what we already know. We can do the survey in the second phase.

@David: Thank you for your encouragement. I have seen the Global Voices Bridge Blog directory. What I have in mind is even more top level than that. In fact, I would argue that the focus in the sections I have outlined above should be more on the blogging themes and less on the bloggers themselves.