Om Malik of GigaOm fame often says “Silicon Valley is a hot house where everyone smokes the same crappy weed and participates in a constant feedback loop.” Now we know on the internet everyone goes to their favorite hot houses i.e read their favorite bloggers. Indibloggies is a way to bring best of the weed from different spheres. So here are my nominations for my best weed err… nominations for Indibloggies

IndiBlog of the year - http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com

This has to go to the tsunamihelp. It mobilized the various people around the world and provided a single point of information for the Tsunami relief. A great example of power of blog medium.

Best Technology IndiBlog - http://123suds.blogspot.com/

Prof Sadagopan’s weblog is an excellent commentary on various Emerging Technologies, Thoughts, Ideas, Trends and Cyber world. Very well written and shows the thought process from a deep experience. Although Prof he could use a little bigger font on his blog :D

Another technology blog I would like to nominate is Gigaom by Om Malik. He has the uncanny ability to review and analyze various things happening in tech world. When world was singing praises of Gmail he raised the flag of disenchantment.

And the last tech blog which I would like to nominate is TechWhack by Sushubh. Don’t take his younger age for his naiveté in tech areas. If you subscribe to google news you would often find his posts on the front page in TechSection.

Best Humanities(Art, Society, Politicsetc) IndiBlog - http://www.drishtikona.com

Dristikona – a blog from a well experienced person Indra Sharma ji talks about Indian society and the challenges it faces. He never says a thing in vain and always proposes a solution to these hurdles. We all can learn a lot from his lifelong experiences and thoughts based on these which he shares through his blog. Hope more folks like him will join the bloggerdom.

IndiBlog lifetime achiever - http://opinion.paifamily.com

Nitin Pai’s The Acorn – a day is never complete without reading the opinions from his opinionated mind. His writing frequency and insight to the political/foreign policy/financial measures is commendable. He is also proxy-present in Hindi blogger world via his guest posts thru Debashish.

Best Indic (Indian Languages other than English) Blog

I will confine myself to the Hindi language for this as that is what I do. This has to be toughest category for me as every one has become a close friend in the Hindi blogger world. Moreover the bloggers I wanted to nominate have also sponsored prizes so it becomes doubly complex. Without more words I would like to nominate following three Hindi blogs for the best Indic Blog in no particular order

Ravi Ratlami ka Hindi Blog aur Ghazals – One of the most prolific writer in Hindi cyber world. He writes on socially relevant issues and all things technical related to Hindi. An accompanying gazal is his trademark and leaves people wondering how does he do it in such a short time.

Atul Arora ka Rojnamcha – another Hindi blog gem. He is known for his lucid writing style and various techniques he develops like how to measure if you are an NRI etc. He also has a blog-book about his memoirs in US.

Jitendra ka Mera Panna – has to be the 200 mph train of blog world. He started with blogspot and quickly outgrew to his own domain. His writing style is again unique and he uses various characters real or imaginary god knows for his blog. His writings are the talk of the town in this part of blogging world. There are times when only person writing in Hindi is him.

Best New Indic blog –
Fursatiya – Anup Shukla’s blog from Kanpur is another one of its kind new addition to Hindi world. His terse commentary on India’s culture and its unique idiosyncrasies is a must read. He also takes his shots on the hindi bloggers and is a joyful addition to hindi blogger cabal.

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Alright just 2 days left to send in your nominations for this Indibloggies 2004. I will be submitting my nominations for the following categories.

# IndiBlog of the year
# Best Technology IndiBlog
# Best Indic Blog
# Best Humanities(Art, Society, Politicsetc) IndiBlog
# Best Indic (Indian Languages other than Engilish) Blog

Send yours at pankajnarula at gmail dot com

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Various sources (Acorn, Brij et al) point to the Tsunami blog set up by few folks to aggregate the information about Tsunami relief efforts.

This link points to the list of important telephone numbers on the Tsunami blog.

Also contribute to the relief efforts in whatever way you can. Ram Dhan has made it very easy by setting up a site to contribute by Paypal. Click the link below to find more

Contribute via Paypal on Ram Dhan’s Site

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I think I am going to be reading Sadgopan’s blog more and more. He pointed to an article in CIO magazine about an IT project faliure. Now I work as a consultant who implements IT systems to automate business processes. Studying and practicing good project implementation practices is something which I have deep interest in. The article sums it well at the end and every business stake holder should learn it by heart that

There is big leverage between IT and the business processes when you deal with a large supply chain,” he says. “Just looking at contingency planning from an IT point of view would be a big mistake. It has to be looked at from an integrated view of IT processes and the business.

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Being a consultant you are constantly, though rightfully, asked by the clients to document everything before you leave. Now updating my personal blog I am my own client so why be partial towards oneself. Here is what I did to update Beta Thoughts to version 3.0.

1. Download Latest Nightly

2. Adapt Ryan’s Kubrick Theme
a. style.css for width and color changes
b. header.php for header image width
c. Create pages for Links template and Archives template

3. Introduce Navigation based on Listamatic’s Simple Horizontal List
a. style.css for navlist
b. create a navigation.php and include it in header.php to show on every page

4. Plugins
a. Brian’s Latest Comment for Activity in the sidebar -
b. Nick Momriks Recent Posts for Other Recent Posts in the sidebar
c. Alex’s Related Posts on the Single Post page
d. Kitten’s Spam Words
e. Matt’s Spam Stopgap

5. Announce on Wordpress Support Forum

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Sadagopan’s weblog on Emerging Technologies,Thoughts, Ideas,Trends and Cyberworld is a very insightful blog on an amazing gamut of things. Just read his commentry on James Surowiecki’s article about relationship between technological advancement and happiness. Sums up pretty well at the end

My Take: I would think yes in three ways, A. By creating a huge industry, technology is defintely creating new buisness value and by extension helping the stakeholders. B. By making life better fot the society as a whole C. Tech industry is one of the fastest innovators and so is able to roll out newer solutions/products faster - in the process helping society at large happy by providing new variety!!.

And here is my take on it :D I have often wondered about the happiness. During the surveys that James Surowiecki articles talks about when people were asked about happiness were they thinking about fun or happiness. It is quite too often that one would confuse between the too. To me real happiness is like looking at one’s kids, getting the love of one’s life etc. Having fun would be visiting Disney world, taking the roller coaster ride etc. It is this fun that looses its novelty just too easy. After being on a ride on 30 feet roller coaster you want to have a bigger thrill, so you go for 50 feet and so on.

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Few weeks back I attended Future Salon for the first time. It was by none other than Doug Engelbart and the topic was Collective IQ. I have to admit my mind has a bent for the collective word. Having been a past fan of Ayn Rand, collective word ring some negative bells in my mind. Essentially that every thing great comes from works of few genius beings. So I was more than anxious to hear great mind’s thoughts. Without surprise someone asked the same question during the talk. Discussion among the audience led to the idea – yes great ideas come from great minds but they always stand on the shoulders of giants. Ah.. simple thought but epiphany for me :D

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