The India Blog Celebrity Top 10

The India blogging industry is still nascent with many still trying to reach a large audience. Unfortunately, India has been slow to adopt the internet with some estimates as low as 42,000,000 for both dial up and broadband. There are still some early blogger “celebrities” that are making an impact and we highlight them below using a five point criteria. In order to make the list, the blog subject matter needed to be primarily about India or related to India. We examined 100 India related blogs and scored them using the criteria in the table below:

The Criteria
1	Alexa Rank
2	Subscription Count
3	Google Page Rank
4	Technorati Authority & Buzz
5	Information Value (subjective)

Our number one India blog site ContentSutra is run by a Rafat Ali and is part of a larger network called PaidContent.org The company's news sites chronicle the economic evolution of digital content that is shaping the future of the media, information and entertainment industries. While the site takes much too long to load, its content is king and so by the way is its traffic - recording the highest website traffic in the group.

Number two on our list is VC Circle which chronicles India’s deal economy - venture capital, private equity, investment banking, mergers, acquisitions, corporate law, and entrepreneurship. VC Circle is run by Sahad P.V. (formerly of Business Today). If you want to keep tabs on Indian’s venture capital, private equity, mergers and acquisitions, investment banking space, then you need a subscription to his site.

At number three is a twenty two year old Indian blogger named Rajiv Dingra. If you’re looking for a tech savvy blogger with a sense of humor then turn to WatBlog. Dingra seems to have his finger on the pulse of India’s younger crowd and isn’t afraid to voice his opinion.

When Amit Varma founded the India Uncut site in December 2004, he thought the site would be an interesting hobby. The site quickly consumed most of his time and it paid off for him with ever increasing traffic. India Uncut checks in at Number 4 on our list.

Our Number 5 DesiPundit site lays its claim as India’s official opinions and observations daily site. Their motley crew of bloggers scattered across four continents and six time zones that keep the blog humming 24/7. They attempt to keep us informed of opinion India by linking to posts they find need a wider audience and discussion. According to the owner, “we are merely a reflection of the Indian blogosphere; we do not create content, we just link to it. Don’t be surprised if they come laced with our snarky and erudite comments though.”

The rest of our top 10 are listed below. These sites range from the ever more popular Trak.in which cleverly tracks technology and other India issues in an engaging way to the Indian Economy Blog which covers in depth India economic news and analysis.

Rank	Blog	Alexa	Subscription Count	Google Page Rank	India Tchnrti Buzz	Information Value
1	ContentSutra	42,574	8000 +/-	6/10	209	High
2	VC Circle	67,217	7123	5/10	133	High
3	WatBlog	76,904	NA	5/10	240	High
4	India Uncut	141,686	4029	4/10	406	Medium
5	DesiPundit	87,874	2550	3/10	317	Medium
6	Trak.in	65,344	1822	5/10	118	High
7	Pluggd.in	112,631	NA	5/10	168	High
8	The Indian Economy Blog	238.831	NA	5/10	184	High
9	Gautam Ghosh	377,812	1540	3/10	153	High
10	Startup Dunia	143,471	NA	4/10	81	High

Too Good to Miss

Unofficial Prime Minister Blog – Hilarious “unofficial” blog purportedly from Manhoman Singh. The writer has a great sense of humor and is willing to confront the powerful.

Rakesh Jhunjhunwala Blog – This spicy, no holds bar blogger throws punches at the biggest names in India. Ostensibly a secret journal of Jhunjhunwala, many think the site is run by a Mumbai insider who is getting ready to spill some real Dalal Street secrets.

India Inc. By Amit Agarwal – Arguably India’s most famous blogger, Amit did not make our list due to it being nearly impossible to distinguish his huge Digital Inspiration stats from his India Inc site.

India's Bloggers affecting India Politics

I came across this article today and wanted to share with all of you. It appears India's nascent blog ecosystem may finally be moving mainstream. While years behind Western countries, Blogs like Trak.in, Pluggd.in and others are starting to have some impact in India. I believe 2008 will be a year where India blogs increase in influence but not in affluence until India's bandwidth and online usage increase.

The article can be found here and below:

Joe C Mathew / New Delhi December 31, 2007

Early this year, Shamnad Basheer, a young intellectual property consultant, pointed out on his blog that a crucial paragraph in the report on patents by the RA Mashelkar panel was an exact copy of someone else’s research.

This is what prompted the former director-general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research to withdraw the report in February.

Three months later, Basheer was at it again. As the government went into a tizzy over reports that some yoga postures had been patented in the US, he cleared the air by writing on his spicyipindia.blogspot.com that actually they were just some yoga accessories.

These are just two instances of how bloggers are contributing to India’s transition to the new patent regime in which product patents are recognised as opposed to only process patents earlier.

Basheer, Sandeep Rathod, Firoz Ali and Varun Chhonker are among those whose blogs are being recognised for separating the wheat from the chaff in the flood of intellectual property (IP)-related information.

“In India IP is a recent trend. There isn’t enough affordable and readily available information,” Gopakumar Nair, a Mumbai-based patent expert, pointed out.

Basheer began with sporadic posts. “It began as a time-pass in 2005. However, I found that there is a lot of interest in this area and this year I roped in three others as regular contributors to the blog,” said Basheer.

Of the three, one is a legal consultant in New York, another a former journalist based in Paris and the third an Australian who focuses on global IP strategies.

Basheer, who has also taken a law student from Chennai on board, claimed that his blog is a one-stop shop for IP information.

Rathod, an IP professional attached to a global generic pharmaceutical company, draws hundreds of readers from across the IP space to his genericpharmaceuticals.blogspot.com.

According to him, his posts, which are about international developments and their relevance to India, are attracting the attention of policy-makers, brokerage firms, IP professionals and patent attorneys.

“The patent controller does not have to make public the decisions of the patents office. This is where I found my blog to be useful. Most of my entries are about pharmaceutical-specific patent information in the US, Europe and India,” Rathod said.

He also distances himself from his employer. “I am not bothered about the effects on any particular sector.”

For Chennai-based patent attorney Ali, pharmapatents.blogspot.com is a platform to explain the nuances of patent laws to the common man. “I give analyses of critical issues as and when they pop up.”

The author of a book on Indian patent laws uses the blog to keep its readers updated on the changes in Indian IP laws.

At least 500 readers flock everyday to patentcircle.blogspot.com to read the musings of Chhonker, a young IP consultant who specialises in IP litigation.

“I began blogging after I found that blogs in the US play a crucial role in understanding patent laws. Patent attorneys there discuss cases threadbare on the blogs and are even read by judges,” he said.