No, I am not moving on with blogging and life ;) That’s the title of a competition that was recently held to promote an eponymous budding travel community. And what better person to win it than our friendly neighborhood Journalist Apurv ! The guy’s currently travelling on a pre-determined route and blogging about it at OKTataByeBye. His pictures and depiction have been a treat to the eye. Do check it out. While his postings sure do make the site come alive, I was more than a tad disappointed at how a site that intends to build a community actually promoted the whole event. The noise levels on the blogosphere were negligible, to say the least :-|

India, as an online business, is still in its nascent stage. There is an acute lack of good sites/communities on a variety of fields and that essentially opens up a wide range of sites that one could get into. Communities have been hard to come by, since the Indian populace is unique in that it tries to look for alternate grounds once it sees the first signs of any monetizing of communities that is inevitable after a time. Questions are raised on credibility, feasibility and veracity once communities start looking at raising monies. India still does not have your Weblogs, Inc style chain of blogs where user-generated-content is pretty high. People still have a very push-pull relation with websites where they either subscribe to feeds/newsletters or just browse around to sites that offer what they need. The interaction levels, are abysmal, to say the least ! Elsewhere, building communities around blogs written with an attitude seems to be a sure-shot way of off-setting some of the concerns of members on credibility ! Of-course, Content still rules and thats the reason why blogs such as Gizmodo/Engadget still attract the kind of premium rates for ads that many other full-blown sites can only dream of. No wonder, Weblogs found a suitor for $25million a while back ! Sure will be interesting to see if and when someone comes up with communities on these lines :)