On Creating a Desiblogs Directory in a Distributed Fashion
As the experience of Indian Bloggers List has shown, it is really difficult to maintain a directory in a centrally managed fashion. Further, expecting each and every blogger to register their own blog, like Blogstreet, is expecting a little too much. Finally, any resource like this should be freely and easily be accessible to everyone.
I propose that a directory be built upon the excellent foundation of del.icio.us. For those who are new to del.icio.us, it is a social bookmarking service which allows you to create a collection of weblinks, categorized using tags or keywords. This collection is stored online and you can share it with everyone on the web. Read more about it here.
The idea is simple: just bookmark desi blogs with the tag: desiblog. That’s all! A list of all desi blogs bookmarked like this by everyone will then be accessible at this page.
But don’t stop there! Add more tags as needed. For example, my blog could be bookmarked with the additional tags singapore and linux. Other blogs would be tagged similarly and then, the next time I want to organize a meetup of all the desi bloggers in Singapore who are interested in Linux, I just have to visit this page!
Group blogs like Sepia Mutiny could get a groupblog tag while those like DesiPundit could be tagged metablog. I would tag Acorn with politics and Alternative Perspective with economics. Note the key thing here: these are my choice of tags. When you bookmark these blogs, you could/would choose a different set of tags.
Hindi blogs would be tagged hindi; photo blogs would be tagged pblog; anonymous blogs would be tagged anon!
A more creative example: if I tag my blog with single, male and singapore - voila! Instant creation of Desi Bloggers Singles Network! With a special Singapore chapter!
Some thoughts:
- Duplicate blog entries; blogs receiving a different set of tags from different folks: such things are bound to happen. I think that’s a good thing! Sloppy is Good!
- You can easily keep track of new blogs that match your interests using the RSS feeds that del.icio.us publishes.
- It will be very easy to build on this list for other creative projects. My Technorati blog rankings could trivially get its list of URLs from this directory.
- It doesn’t put the burden on any one person or group to create and run this thing.
- No single entity owns and controls the data.
What else…
- Try and bookmark the correct blog URL. See if there can be a www in the address. That means bookmark www.antrix.net/journal and not www.antrix.net nor antrix.net/journal
- Be nice when tagging a blog. For example, don’t tag my blog with hellokittylover or windowsfanboy ;-)
- How should the Description and Extended fields in the bookmark be used? I invite suggestions.
- Can someone create a nice logo and button to link to the directory? :-)
Now go forth and tag! I’ll be right here, watching this page. ;-)