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:

What else…

Now go forth and tag! I’ll be right here, watching this page. ;-)