Welcome to the new and hopefully improved DesiPundit. We have made some changes to make DesiPundit more sustainable in the rapidly evolving and growing world of Indian blogs. DesiPundit is now served in three flavors – Community, New & Upcoming, and Featured.
Community – These are a collection of invited Indian blogs that have agreed to share the best of their posts with DesiPundit. These bloggers were invited based on basis of previous links on DesiPundit and voted on by the DesiPundit board (most accepted; some didn’t). These bloggers are known for their consistent and quality blogging and are well-known in their own right. They tag selected posts on their blogs for DesiPundit and our hamster in the wheel picks them up for display in the Community section. This gives them the bloggers the freedom and ability to select which of their posts they wish to share with you, the DesiPundit readers who have the convenience of reading their best posts at one place. Of course, keeping in tune with the blog etiquette, we share only the title and the excerpt of the posts and you have to click through to read them in full. We’ll accept applications twice a year from bloggers who wish to join the Community. More details on this later.
New & Upcoming – These are posts from bloggers who are not in the DesiPundit community…yet. This section can be best described as the original DesiPundit where a select bunch of contributors will links to desi posts worth sharing. However, this section may not be updated as frequently as before due to reduced number of contributors. In the future, we may invite the oft-linked bloggers in this section to be a part of the Community so they can decide for themselves which posts might interest DesiPundit readers.
Featured – These are kinda like the best of both the previous sections and lets DesiPundit contributors highlight certain posts that we feel deserve a second look (or read). Our weekly Friday Photo of the Week will also be displayed in this section so will any frequently-updated posts on breaking news like we did for the Mumbai Terror Attacks or the IIPM Fiasco. This might be the least-frequently updated section of the three but I would suggest keeping an eye on updates at least once a week.
As you might notice, there are other new sections on DesiPundit – Forums and Bookmarks.
- Forums is a discussion section where you can register and start a thread on anything you wish to discuss be it current affairs, tech probs, or merely rants. We hope readers will engage in stimulating discussion and refraining from turning it into one of those Rediff Comment Boards. We are still working out the chinks and regular discussants will be upgraded to moderators. The five latest threads will be displayed on the front page sidebar.
- Bookmarks is one of those easy to use link aggregators. If you see any non-blog link that might be interesting to share with DesiPundit readers, you use del.icio.us to bookmark it (assuming you’ve a del.icio.us account) and tag it with ‘fordesipundit‘ tag along with other tags. It will appear on the Bookmarks page. We envision this page to be a treasure trove for interesting links and perhaps inspiration for something to blog about in case you’re suffering from an acute case of writer’s block. No voting, no moving up or down, no comments; just a simply link-dump for you to browse around. Of course, it would help the reader if you edit the title and add a little summary to give context to the bookmarked link.
Our Resident Experts – Baradwaj Rangan and Ashutosh – have their latest posts featured on the sidebar so that they are just a click away. I hope you continue to enjoying their musings on Movies and Science respectively.
Other goodies include photos from our DesiPundit – India through Flick group (displayed in the sidebar) from which we select our Friday Photo(s) of the Week and the Most Voted & Most Viewed posts (displayed in the footer). Yup, we still want you to vote on the links you like. These votes may decide who will make it to the Community or who will be asked to leave. Our DesiPundit store still awaits your clicks and orders. RSS feeds are available for any and every section of the site so feel free to subscribe for all or some contents on the site. We’ll have a full menu of options available soon.
Last but not the least as the cliche goes, we have to feed our hamster to keep him running at the wheel. Although DesiPundit is a labor of love, the hosting providers do not accept that as compensation for space on their servers. We’ve removed all text link ads and Adsense ads from our pages and instead are relying solely on 125×125 graphic ads (max of 6 for now) at the top of the sidebar. The rates are extremely reasonable and if you want to buy a slot, please email me at Patrix [at] desipundit [dot] com. You can advertise your product or your blog. If you know of someone who might be interested, then please let us know.
Unfortunately, as a part of this change and refocusing of our offerings, we had to let the Indic sections go. I’m sure there are plenty of dedicated Indic aggregators like Gilli and Akshargram that do a magnificent job of bringing the best from the respective Indic blogospheres.
That’s all, folks! Hope you enjoy this new avatar and keep reading DesiPundit.
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