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Online services make trawling a thing of the past.

The speed at which the Indian blogosphere is expanding is quite incredible. I started my blog less than a year ago, but as an increasing number of people add their voices to the cacophony of cyberspace, I feel like a veteran already. Not surprisingly, it's hard to keep up with the many interesting opinions out there.

The information overload on the Net has led to a surfeit of websites and tools that make it easy for surfers to sift out reading material of relevance to them. To take a simple example: most dedicated blog-readers no longer trawl laboriously from one site to another; instead, they use Bloglines (http://bloglines.com), a site that lets you subscribe to as many blogs as you want and keeps you informed in a single window about updates. That means you don't have to visit each blog every day.

Then there's Desipundit (http://www.desipundit.com), which provides daily links to selected posts by Indian bloggers and showcases them under various categories. This site is a useful primer if you want to browse interesting posts across a range of topics without actually becoming a regular visitor to any one blog.

One of my favourite one-stop resources for Internet reading is Arts & Letters Daily (http://aldaily.com), a truly exhaustive website with a huge collection of links on literature, criticism, history and culture.

A&LD has a deliberately stuffy masthead with "A Service of the Chronicle of Higher Education" pompously embossed across it, but the links it provides are invariably great fun to read. Under three broad categories ("Articles of note", "New books" and "Essays and opinion"), a typical A&LD homepage packs in an enormous amount of information: over 200 links to articles (these are, of course, regularly updated), all accompanied by terse, tongue-in-cheek, 25-word descriptions.

These write-ups are exceptionally well-done and have the effect of sucking you into a link. I'm not a prolific online reader myself and usually stick to topics of special interest to me, but more than once I've found myself clicking on a link provided by A&LD just because their description makes the article sound so interesting.

Take these examples: "General de Gaulle asked how anyone could govern a nation that had 246 kinds of cheese. His solution: be the biggest cheese." and "In his dingy little 'writing hut', Roald Dahl kept candies and bottled bits of his lower spine. Kids love it. Their parents don't..." Wouldn't you want to read those?

Pointers to specific articles aside, the side panel on Arts & Letters Daily is even more comprehensive, with links to official websites of newspapers and magazines across the world, archives of columns, book reviews, independent websites and, yes, blogs. Is A&LD itself a blog? Well, certainly not of the "personal journal" variety, but if you consider the broad definition, which includes "sites that provide links and commentary", it's one of the very best.

(Jai Arjun Singh, aka Jabberwock, blogs at http://jaiarjun. blogspot. com)