How to go blog-hunting

Diversity is one of the great attractions of the blogosphere, for human desires are vast and varied.

Some readers seek serious discussions on literature and cinema, some wish to peer voyeuristically into the personal lives of other people, still others yearn to see photographs of domestic cats with sundry household items placed on them.

A recent estimate indicated that the Indian blogosphere alone had grown thirty-fold between 2004-end and 2005-end "" now that's a lot of information- and opinion-clutter.

But life is short and one must also find time to do the laundry and occasionally talk to family members. With millions of online journals competing for your eyeballs, separating the wheat from the chaff can be quite overwhelming for the blog virgin. So here's a quick primer.

I would recommend starting with word of mouth: turn to blog-savvy friends, inform them of your interests and ask them to send you links. But in the unlikely event that you don't know anyone such (or that they're too busy surfing to want to help you), you can turn to the search engine.

Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com/ ), Blog Search (http://search.blogger.com/ ) and Blog Search Engine (http://www.blogsearch engine.com/ ) are all useful tools that throw up only blog-related results. It's important to understand how these work.

Much like Google's generic search engine for the WWW, they rank websites according to the number of external links to those sites. Which means that if you search for "food blogs", at the top of the results list will be the food blogs that have the most other sites linking to them. This is a fairly good (though not foolproof) indicator of the blog's quality and readership.

Most reliable "blog-finders" work on this principle. Other such tools include the immensely popular Technorati (http://www.technorati.com/ blogs/ ), which allows you to search for blogs by subject.

If you're a blogger yourself, you can register with Technorati and "tag" your blog with selected keywords, which will help in searches. Then there's the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem (http://truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.php ), which puts blogs in smart little categories (like Higher Beings, Playful Primates and Slimy Molluscs) according to the links they generate. However, you won't find blogs categorised by subject here.

Another way of searching for high-quality blogs is to check the nominee and winner lists at numerous blog awards (yes, such things do exist!).

The best-known among these is probably the Bloggies (http://2006.bloggies.com/ ), which has a few offbeat categories (like Best Craft Weblog and Best Gay/Lesbian Weblog) in addition to the more conventional ones. A desi version called the Indibloggies (http://indibloggies.org/ ) has been doing a decent job for the Indian blogosphere.

Highly recommended is DesiPundit (http://www.desipundit.com/ ), which sets out to be "the one-stop shop for the best of the Indian blogosphere".

The contributors to this site, all dedicated bloggers themselves, put up links to some of the best posts by Indian bloggers, along with commentary. The site has been going from strength to strength; it now has a separate section for blogs written in Hindi, Tamil and Kannada.

Of course, once you've acquired a certain comfort level with the blogosphere, you'll find your own ways to navigate and find sites of interest. The easiest way is to home in on the bloggers you have the highest regard for (and whose interests and tastes closely match your own) and check the links on their sidebar.

Don't expect to strike gold every time: some links will be there not because the blogger thinks very highly of those sites but because they belong to close friends/family members. But you'll be surprised by how fast the sphere will expand.

"" Jai Arjun Singh a.k.a. Jabberwock
(http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com)