Blogstars contest - Is it good for Indian Tech Blogging?

Microsoft announced a couple of weeks back about a new contest that they were holding called Blogstars. This a India specific contest, aimed at improving/supporting technical blogging in India.

At first looks, I was quite interested. I believe that technical blogging in India is still very low. Though blogging as such has grown by leaps and bounds in India, there are few, indepth technology blogs by people living in India (Please note, I did not say Indians).

A second look and I felt something was just not right. So this post is about the positives and negatives, I could see. It would be interesting to see other peoples views on this too..

Pros

1. Indian Tech blogging scene could do with help this could be it.
2. Provide recognition to good tech bloggers, who are currently not well known
3. This can be something that provides the needed initial momentum to get some good people to start blogging.
4. Create a new generation of Microsoft technology blogging out of India.
5. Spur people to blog on their use of Microsoft technology, that helps create more information on the web, thus helping the developer community.

Cons

1. Blogging is all about sustenance. Since this contest make no difference between a new and long running blog, it actually favour new blogs. So you can start a new blog, register for the contest, produce good posts for 8-10 weeks, win the contest and then stop blogging for the rest of your life. Since a blog that is there for a long time will have technical and personal posts, it is easier for a new blog to be considered more focused and so win.
2. It is more than a week since it was announced, but I don't see any blogs listed in the blogroll yet. That is indeed very worrying for me.
3. The panel of judges named are well known speakers and very knowledgeable (I actually know all the three very well and have great respect for them personally and know that they have tremendous passion for technology). But except for Venkat, none of the others (Sanjay, Praveen) seem to have updated their blogs recently (Also the updates to their blogs seem to be quite infrequent). And the worst part being their bios on the site does not even mention their blogs except for Venkat's.

So that leads me to ask the question, is this a about tech blogging or just technical writing? If it was about technical writing alone, wouldn't it be easier to have an competition for technical articles?

Final Thoughts

This is a good move Microsoft. But if you really want to help technology blogging,

• Get this going and get the people who are competing listed on the blogroll.
• Get a few good bloggers also into the panel  or get some kind of voting (by bloggers??/technorati??) mechanism to choose the winner. 
• Add some way to look at awarding sustenance too, as according to statistics, over 80% of blogs started do not last for more than 3 months.

And am I in the fray? As of now NO. Why? Because, I think I would rather let new talent be recognized instead. [But I will not say no to a link from any other blog or the Microsoft site ;)]

(Posted using Windows Live Writer Beta on Windows Vista RC1)

Comments

[Jignesh]

I Agree anand, I two saw the contest, I did not participate since then i had to create a new blog, where as i already have one. don;t have time to maintain multiple blogs.

- JIGS

[Anjana]

Exactly! Completely agree with you.
Panel was something that even i was wondering and not very convinced.
And as you said this would increase the number of new blogs temporarily and then people would just stop blogging.
And i also feel that if this contest is only for 'Technical blogs' the panel also needs to varied and technical (in different technologies).
And one more draw back of measuring ONLY technical blogs (In India )specifically is that people just copy MSDN content and call it a technical blog. It's very rare that pure technical blogs talk about new discoveries or the actual work the blogger himself is doing.

Probably Microsoft wants to create 1000 Scoble's from the Community. But then i don't think Scoble himself was completely a technical blogger. His blogs also have a mix of content :)

I had recently blogged on Indian blogging phenomena here http://weblogs.asp.net/anjanaram

[Monish]

Dear Anand – Thanks for your feedback.

I put this contest together. So I am going to take a shot at answering some of your questions.

1. The judges are renowned technical experts with great credibility in the technical community and vast experience of working with and as a part of the community for many years now. Since you know them, you would know that their ability to judge blogs in a credible fashion stands high in eyes of every other individual. The fact that two of them are not avid bloggers does not in any way impact their capability to judge a good blog.
a. A stray example – judges for the Miss World contest are not all ex-Miss Worlds, or associated with beauty. They are judges for their ability to identify the right talent. The personal and professional respect that Pravin, Venkat and Sanjay hold in the community and in the industry – I can confidently say – there couldn’t have been a better panel to judge this.
2. As Pravin mentioned – the objective of this blog to get a community of bloggers together, who go on to form a Blogging club-of-sorts.
a. Is tech blogging big in India? One doesn’t know. But it definitely exists. You are a part of it too! :)
3. Do we judge based on how long this blog has sustained. That is best left to the judges and we in no way influences that decision.
4. The blog-roll is now up. Thanks for keeping us honest. - http://www.microsoft.com/india/blogstars/blogroll.aspx
5. I also appreciate your thoughts around how we could have done this better. I would appreciate the opportunity to connect with you offline so that we can incorporate your feedback in our future programs. I hope that works for you. Pls do let me know.

Cheers, and yes, I do hope you register for the contest and encourage other fellow bloggers.

Jignesh - you don't have to create a new blog to participate.

Anjana - Great post on Indian blogging scene!

Thanks!

Monish