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This is second post in the series on Indian blogs. Today we share with you the blogging trends we noticed while doing survey of the Indian blogosphere for updating the Directory of Best Indian Blogs . There do not seem to be even a lakh [a hundred-thousand] blogs run by Indians and on India which are over a year old and are updated at least once a month in most part of their life. A large number of bloggers have more than one blog.  Most of the bloggers lose steam midway [details in this post on blogging habits ].  Young adults – who have to deal with major turning points such as leaving school / college, getting / losing job, marriage, conception, birth of the first child, break-up - often give a pause to blogging and when they re-start it, they tend to shift the main theme of their blog. Of all blogs, personal blogs seem to have the highest longevity. Among niche segments, tech, travel and cookery bloggers flourish well. A large number of blogs on these su...

updated: July 2020 While reviewing blogs and checking them for inclusion in the Indian blog directory , we find that majority of bloggers do not effectively use the facility of labeling (tagging) or categorizing blog posts. Some bloggers use labels indiscriminately, which hurts the blog/ website rather than helping the blogger or visitors. Before we move further, let me clarify the terminology: Definition of category and tags or labels, and their differences  Categories : Broad subject groups under which you can put your blog's content. E.g. on a blog on cooking, you can have categories like continental cuisine, fast food, Chinese food, Indian food. Tags / labels : Narrow subject groups. E.g. on a cooking blog, a post on fast food can have have tags such as: unhealthy food types, hot foods, spicy foods, New York street food, etc. Another difference between the two is: Categories can have sub-categories. Tags do not have sub-categories. As stated above, categories and tags both are ...

Updated as on 14th October, 2019. We have been compiling the Directory of Best Indian Blogs for nine years and have made a number of changes in selecting blogs for the Directory .  Starting with a complex formula that used Google PageRank, Alexa position, pageviews, etc, we changed to manual picking and have humanized our criteria progressively over the years. We believe that blogging is both a personal and social activity, and we do not hold a case against blogs on very personal matters as long as they meet our selection criteria. So, while a spirited, well-composed and regularly updated blog on one’s kid, dog or garden may get included, an extremely dull blog with copy-pasted newspaper columns, not allowing any sharing or interaction and not caring to provide any archive would get left out even though its content prima facie might look substantive. If we find great blogs, we’d not bind ourselves to a maximum number of blogs in the Directory . However, we intend to ha...

Blog meaning has changed over the years Blogs and traditional websites are subsets of the web world Websites have been in existence since the advent of the World Wide Web, and blogs came much later. The early blogs were true to their literary meaning – web log or web diary – but slowly they turned into full-fledged websites. Over time, the difference between a website and a blog has blurred to the extent that they look the same. The saying that was popular once – that a website is static while a blog is updated - does not hold good anymore. Technically speaking, blogs are a subset of web spaces or websites. In this assumption, all blogs are websites but not all websites are blogs. Loosely speaking, you can call a website with blogging features as a blog and a blog with lots of static content (that does not refresh) as a website. Both blogs and other websites have a homepage and a number of other pages. Web designing these days does not require writing each line of code, and ...

Thoroughly updated in November 2020 This is the last post in a 3 -part series on the use of images in blogs and websites. The first post dealt with basic considerations while putting images on blogs and websites  and the second one was on image editing concepts and tools . The present one deals with best practices in use of images on blogs and websites .   Types of image elements on blogs, other websites Images (and other visual elements such as color patterns and videos) are used on websites/ blogs for many purposes: Images are used as elements in web designing. They are an essential part of the theme/ template, background, title background,  pictorial headers and footers, navigation schemes etc.  They are put on posts/ articles to supplement the text. They can be featured images, normal images or thumbnails. In photo-blogs or photo-features, images are the dominant content of the blog. Images are also used for adding secondary visual elements, e.g. favi...

Updated in November 2020 This post is second in the 3-part series on the use of images on websites and blogs . The first post dealt with basic considerations in the use of images on the web. The present one deals with image/ photo editing basics. The next one covers the best practices in the use of images on the web . Let's go! As a blogger or website content creator, you must know how to edit your photos like a professional blogger. That does not need a high level of expertise, but knowing the photo editing concepts helps a lot.  Quality of blog images Quality of images used on websites and blogs depends on a number of parameters taken together. I will talk here of the most important quality factors.  Brightness.  When an image is not bright enough, shadows and poorly-lit areas look too dark. In too bright images, shiny objects lose details and turn white. Manually increasing brightness in an image makes it look whitewashed unless some other att...