DesiPundit » Administration

Accepted Blogs for Community

Patrix — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:01:11 +0000

The following blogs have been accepted for inclusion in the DesiPundit Community:

Invitations will be sent out shortly to these bloggers and if they accept, you will soon start seeing their shared posts in our Community section. Thanks for submitting your nominations.

Update: All blogs have been emailed the invitation. If you are one of the above and haven’t received it yet, let us know.

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Nominate New Community Members

Patrix — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:00:00 +0000

We are seeking nominations for new Community Members for DesiPundit. Community members can choose selected posts from their blog to appear on DesiPundit so no more tipping us off to linking posts. You cannot self-nominate your own blog but instead nominate your favorite blogs.

How to nominate:

Check if the blog you wish to nominate is already part of our Community. The full list of our Community Members can be found here.
The nominated blog is eligible ONLY IF it has been around for at least 6 months and posts at least once a week.
Fill in and submit the nomination form below:

Thanks for your nominations. The form is now closed. Selected nominees will be announced soon.

Nominations close on 5th October, 2009. Accepted nominations will be announced shortly after. We’ll invite the selected blogs to be a part of our Community and if they accept, you’ll start seeing links to their selections on DesiPundit.

Please feel free to cross-post on your blog to spread the word or to ask your readers to nominate you.

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Suggestions Welcome

Patrix — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:07:35 +0000

If you may not have noticed already, we have a small feature on our sidebar powered by Skribit. If you scroll down below the Search box in the sidebar, you’ll see a tiny text box asking you, What should we link to? See the image on your left. If you want DesiPundit to link to certain content (subject-wise), then simply enter your suggestion. Keep it short, obviously. Pssst…see the floating suggestions tab in grey on your right? You can use that too.

You can already see two suggestions made by readers. If you agree with them then click on vote. Similarly other readers can vote on your suggestion as well and we avoid redundancy. If a suggestion garners enough votes, we’ll definitely consider linking to the suggested content more often that we currently do. We’re trying to keep ourselves appraised of what our readers are interested in reading and asking for hat-tips only results in increased self-nominations so hopefully this will give us a better and more generic idea.

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No Excerpts?

Patrix — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:32:15 +0000

We are having some problems in pulling in excerpts from our Blogger and WordPress.com Community blogs. Self-hosted blogs are fine. This problem cropped up after we upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. We’re trying to figure out a solution so apologies for the inconvenience until then. Hopefully, the titles will be interesting enough for you to click through.

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No More Middleman

Patrix — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:05:34 +0000

Feed readers rejoice! We have eliminated that extra click you needed to make before reading the original blog from the Community section. You will no longer be directed to our site before clicking through to the linked post. Hopefully, you will click more often and read more from our Community bloggers. The comments link in the feed footer also directly takes you to the original blog’s comment box.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t drop down to our site occasionally to vote up a link that you like although we’re trying to figure out a way to do this inside your feed reader as well. Thanks to a bunch of readers who provided us with valuable feedback for making this change.

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Friday Photo of the Week #37

Patrix — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 03:34:00 +0000

The Memory of a Closure

It takes a closed door to evoke memories of times when it used to be open.

Pushkar

[click on image to enlarge] Selected by Anil and Arun. Join the DesiPundit India through Flickr group to see your photos here. This group is administered by Akshay Mahajan. Other notables are:

Distance

From a distance most things look beautiful, and like with things you can’t easily reach they look alluring as well.

Machhan

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New at DesiPundit

Patrix — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:01:02 +0000

It has been over a week since we launched our new design and the feedback has been positive. We’ve continued to update our site and added more details on the new features:

We have a new method for tipping off either your self-nominated posts or to submit a post from another blogger. We no longer need you to email us your link but instead use deli.icio.us to tag the post. All submitted links are also displayed on the site. You can use a similar method to share other content like interesting news stories or non-desi blogposts. These links – Bookmarks – are also displayed on the site.
The About DesiPundit page has been updated. All Community Members that have accepted our invitation and submitted their RSS feeds are now listed here. In addition, we also display five members chosen randomly from the list in the sidebar.
There are hazaar options for subscribing to the DesiPundit feed and you can choose one or as many as you like. We are working to resolve the partial feeds dilemma.
We removed the Forums due to lack of interest and need for high-maintenance. There are plenty of topical and focused forums out there.
We have new banners so feel free to download them and display them on your blog. And those Tshirts too

I hope you are enjoying the new look and experience. Feel free to contact us for anything specific you have in mind.

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Why partial feeds on DesiPundit?

Patrix — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:30:00 +0000

This message goes out to our 3000+ feed readers. Like any blogger, we hate partial feeds too. But we had to switch to partial feeds on DesiPundit yesterday. Let us explain why and then I hope you understand. DesiPundit has always believing in sending readers away…to the blogs we link to. In our previous model, we provided short excerpts and provided the link to the source which you dutifully clicked through from our feed. In our new model, we asked community bloggers to create a category called ‘DesiPundit’ (although some have been creative) from which we extract the category feed. We use this category feed to syndicate their posts and display excerpts on our site with a link that says, Continue Reading. Clicking on that link takes you to the original source.

However, the posts from our Community bloggers are displayed in full in our feed. That means, you no longer have to click through to the original blog we linked and can read everything off the DesiPundit feed. We don’t think this is fair to the blogger. After all, why would anyone agree to be a member of our Community if our readers are not visiting their blogs or not subscribing to their feed? Any attraction or incentive to be on DesiPundit is lost. Hence the partial feeds on DesiPundit.

Of course, if all community bloggers create a partial feed for the DesiPundit category using FeedBurner, we can get around this problem but then you assume everyone uses FeedBurner or knows how to or even wants to. Even if one community blogger does not have partial feeds, we’re back to square one. Some bloggers just want to write and care less about the technical details (unlike some of us). We rather figure something out at our end without asking our Community bloggers to do anything more than creating a DesiPundit category, writing posts, and tagging them for sharing on DesiPundit.

That said, we are not resigning ourselves to partial feeds forever but are actively looking for solutions. The ideal solution would be for partial feeds for the Community feed while retaining full feeds for other categories within the Entire Site Feed. Until then, we apologize for the inconvenience due to partial feeds and we hope that based on the title and excerpts provided, you click through to read. If there are any solutions you are aware of, we are all ears. Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Update: We finally managed to figure out a solution. Posts from the Community section are now partial and rest of them are offered in full. Thanks for all your suggestions and inputs.

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The New DesiPundit

Patrix — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 14:34:35 +0000

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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DesiPundit on Twitter

Patrix — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:57:13 +0000

For folks connected to the Twitterverse, you have one more ‘person’ to follow – DesiPundit. This Twitter feed will contain links to DesiPundit posts and occasional important updates. So if you use Twitter more often than your RSS feed reader, you might want to follow DesiPundit.

More importantly, you can send tips to DesiPundit using the @desipundit (replies) or d desipundit (direct message). We’ll give credit in form of a hat-tip to your twitter account unless you specify otherwise if we publish your shared link. Hopefully this will make it easier for people who don’t want to go all the way to our contact page to send us tips.

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Front Page Display

Patrix — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:43:14 +0000

After upgrading to WordPress 2.6, the plugin that customizes our front page to display only English posts messed up other sidebar features (DP Says and Speak Up). Hence it has been temporarily disabled. This will cause Indic posts to display on the front page. The plugin author has promised to update the code soon. Until then please bear with us.

Feeds remain unaffected.

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Name a Desi TV Show Contest

Patrix — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 02:00:00 +0000

DesiPundit readers are invited to help name a TV show in the United States for desi audiences. Currently the show is in pre-production stages and slated to be a local show for Indians living in Cleveland, Ohio.

Hosted by Simran Sethi, the TV show is aimed at the Indian community in the US and will have news, event updates, spotlight on desi life in the US that aims to incorporate the Indian and American elements of the social and cultural life of the diaspora. However, the show also hopes to attract the mainstream American audience who is casually flipping channels looking for something new and interesting.

Prize for the winning entry – $50 payable through PayPal or an Amazon gift voucher. The name should be upbeat, reflective of the vibrant Indian culture, and preferably devoid of any stereotypes or cliches. Post your suggestions in the comments section below with your name and email ID (do not email them in). You can post as many suggestions as you want. Deadline – June 23rd, 2008 midnight CST.

Update: The contest is closed. Unfortunately no entry was found to be worthy of a prize. But thanks for participating.

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Displaying Popular Weekly Links

Patrix — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:51:16 +0000

There is a slight change in the way we will be displaying popular weekly links. Instead of a separate post, we shall display the top ten clicked posts at the top of our homepage on Sunday. Thus, you will not see the list in your feeds and may have to click through to the homepage to see the list. The first edition of this change goes live in few hours [12am CST].

As mentioned before, this list is populated based on the clicks on links shared on the website over the past week. Unfortunately, clicks through the feeds are not counted. We hope you come down to the website from the feeds and vote if you like the shared link. The list is displayed in chronological order.

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Like a link? Vote for it

Patrix — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:57:56 +0000

We are introducing a new feature at DesiPundit. If you look carefully, you’ll see box below the date [of each post] that says, Vote [see image after the jump]. We would like you to click on it i.e. vote if you like the link shared in that post. It takes only a second to vote and we would really appreciate if you could use this feature extensively since it will give us an idea about the links you liked. Feed readers might have to click through to the site to vote.

Mind you, this voting feature does not act like the ones on Digg/Reddit and other social media sites. The post with the highest votes does not move up or go anywhere. We might choose to feature the top voted posts in the sidebar if this feature is used extensively. Also, while voting please keep in mind that you may disagree with the content of the post link but you can still vote for it if you thought it worthy to be shared with others [one vote per IP].

We may enable negative voting as well in the future but for now, do not click on Vote if you didn’t like the link. Hopefully, this feature will also give you an idea of what your fellow readers like. In addition, we have five guest contributors on DesiPundit this month so your votes will give them useful feedback and let them know what kind of posts you like.

We would love to hear about this feature in the comments so feel free to chime in. Also, this feature is brought to you with a simple WordPress plugin – Vote it Up.

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Welcoming Guest Contributors

Patrix — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:13:29 +0000

We were pleasantly surprised to have received an overwhelming response to our request for guest contributors and although we had to reject more than we accepted, I hope others continue to send in tip-offs. We present five guest contributors who seem eager to share the wonderful world of blogs that they enjoy:

Jennifer Kumar, also known as Jayanthi, has been creating and maintaining a website about India, Hinduism, and spirituality since 1997. Jennifer has had the extraordinary experience of living two years in Chennai, India as a college student. Jennifer was the first American to earn a Master’s degree in Social Work from Madras Christian College. Currently, Jennifer is a homemaker, and enjoys spending time with friends, family, coordinating and planning events, creating things with her hands (cooking, soap making, beadwork, sewing, etc.). She blogs at Alaivani.

An MBA and an Electrical Engineer working at an IT MNC, Nikhil is usually found devouring fish fry and rice at Kerala restaurants in Bangalore. He was admitted twice for Withdrawal Syndrome after his friends locked him in a room without an internet connection. He overloads himself with irrelevant information about anything and everything and apparently this helps him win quizzes.After being warned by his boss for blogging during work hours,he juggles between the 35th tab window in Mozilla Firefox and excel sheets when at work.

Karthik Sriram a.k.a LKS is a PSBB – SVCE alumnus from Chennai who did his graduate studies in Biomedical Engg at University of South Florida. Currently working as a Quality Systems Engineer, LKS is an Internet Addict, self-proclaimed PhD on Tamizh Cinema and a small time blogger. LKS blogs at Extra-Ordinarily Ordinary.

Aditya Ramgopal, is a Graduate Student in Computer Science at Texas A&M University and an alumnus of IIT-Roorkee. He has been blogging since 2004 but has shifted his blog from Blogger to Wordpress.com, to currently running two self-hosted blogs. At the moment he writes on his self-titled blog on current affairs, Internet and online-media and concentrates his creative and personal energies on his other blog – the link which will remain known only to a few!

Sampada has been a blogger since early 2002, having moved from her early Blogspot days to posting on Livejournal. She is a true Mumbaikar at heart, now settled in Houston, Texas. She loves splurging on books, and finds intellectual company highly stimulating. She dabbles in poetry writing, loves analyzing movies and going to the theater when she can afford it. She hopes to continue her life in the academia, hopes to continue teaching, and is currently pursuing her PhD in English at University of Houston.

I hope the readers enjoy the links they share. Your feedback is essential in helping us decide which two we shall retain as regular contributors.

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JK joins DesiPundit

Patrix — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:30:48 +0000

We have a new contributor at DesiPundit. JK is a California based engineer with an interest in history and archaeology and is the host of the Indian History Carnival. Besides this, he is also interested in foreign policy, Indic religions, and spirituality. He has been blogging since March 2003 at varnam. His history posts have regularly featured on DesiPundit and he regularly tips us off to great posts as well.

JK is a regular contributor and we’ll be announcing the new guest contributors on Monday. Thanks for the great response. The invites for the selected ones will go out over the weekend. So if you expressed an interest, watch your email inbox and respond immediately.

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Guest Contributors Wanted

Patrix — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 21:50:10 +0000

Love reading and sharing interesting blogs? We are looking for guest contributors for DesiPundit for a period of one month. We are looking for five people and we might invite couple of them to stay on as regular contributors at the end of the month. You don’t have to be a blogger but must have a strong regularly-updated blog list in your feed reader. If you are interested, click for details:

Email me at patrixblogs [at] gmail [dot] com (or leave details in comments below) with the following – Name, Blog URL (if applicable), and number of blogs you read on a regular basis (most important factor). It definitely helps if you have been sending in tips regularly. If you are reading blogs already linked frequently on DesiPundit, don’t bother. Deadline – April 11, 2008 midnight.

Update: Thanks for the great response. The guest contributors will be announced Monday after the invites go to the selected ones over the weekend.

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Indian Blogger Directory

Patrix — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:15:23 +0000

Rada Radhakrishnan wrote in expressing frustrations of newbie bloggers in getting the word out and attracting visitors to their blogs. She suggested hosting a desi blogger directory that we could use to find newbies. In fact, we had one but the Wiki.com where we hosted it decided to shut shop one fine day erasing all submissions our readers had made. We never got back to doing it again. So do I have a answer for Rada?

India’s foremost tech blogger, Amit Agarwal has an excellent directory of Indian blogs that he personally maintains. I recommend it highly since it is easy to use and is neatly categorized although I’m flattered he slots me among veterans. In fact, I use it often to find blogs if Technorati or Google Blogsearch fails. I hope I found you a solution, Rada.

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DesiPundit Poll – Types of Featured Bloggers

Patrix — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:36:59 +0000

Partly in response to this ‘rant’ and ensuing discussion in the comments, we would like to know what kinds of bloggers and blog content do you like to see featured more on DesiPundit. Tried-n-tested i.e. bloggers who feature often on DesiPundit due to their high-quality writing or Newbies i.e bloggers who are new to the blogging world. Although most would like to say both, we would like to know which do you prefer more?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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New Hindi Contributors

Patrix — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:21:27 +0000

I am pleased to welcome Kakesh Kumar and Anup Shukla aboard DesiPundit as our new Hindi contributors. Keep a tab on our Hindi section for the latest in the Indic blogosphere.

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