blogs


Blogger Quiz

For the DBM this time, Ajay and I prepared a blogger quiz. Here it is in case you want to find out how well you know “delhi bloggers”. Of course some of you might not have any clue about the answers because the questions were made on the state that the blog was in a few days before the DBM i.e. some questions pertain to the posts and hence are temporal. Some other questions pertain to general characteristics of blogs or may be the bloggers themselves. The main idea was to accumulate some little bit of trivia about the people who were attending the DBM so that we get down to breaking the ice and of course some questions about other non-delhi bloggers were also thrown in for “general knowledge”.

The answers are also under the questions themselves. I have written them in white so that you can see them by selecting the area.

1. Whose blog title is technically incorrect i.e the alias is not valid anymore because of change in status?
Answer – Deepan (Mind of an unmarried man)

2. Name one blogger couple who have a combined blog. Hint [can be outside DBM]
Answer – Sid/Tan – chronicled life

3. Which blogger has dates in Hindi on the blog?
Answer – Amit Ken

4. Which blogs name means “plucked flower” in Native American?
Answer – Mansi (Author – Priya)

5. Name 1 blogger who has a fotolog and a blog.
Answer – Simple Simon, Twilight Fairy, Netahoy, Chris sordid

6. Name 1 blogger who studies at MDI Gurgaon.
Answer – Ajay, Saurabh garg

7. Whose blog has 4 back to back posts on Holi itself?
Answer – Mohit Maheshwari

8. Who has recently woken up after 10 months hibernation in blogland?
Answer – Diya (could be many but it was Diya AFA attending members of DBM are concerned)

9. Which blogger has attended a blogger meet in another city as well and where?
Answer – Newton’s apple : Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore;
Adi : Hyderabad (That’s another thing Adi mahashya never turned up for DBM so technically the answer is incorrect)

10. Whose blog has a photo of the author in wedding gear?
Answer – Ajay (Married Single)

11. Who is the author of a cricket website and whose blog – India Uncut won the Best New IndiBlog 04?
Answer – Amit Varma.

12. Whose blog is so ‘comfortably numb’ that it’s dead since a year?
Answer – Piyush gupta (Phantasmic)

13. Whose blog has a space travel feel or at least it was intended to look like that?
Answer – Twilight Fairy .. :p..ahem

14. Name a food blog.
Answer – tancancook, madman’s shiok

15. Which former journalist writes “just a little something”, and has won at the Indiblog awards?
Answer – Anita Bora

16. Which blogger has been responsible for selecting the “sizzling blogs” on rediffblogs?
Answer – Toinks (Toinkdom1)

17. Which blogger’s fav song has to be: “Objects in the rear view mirror, may appear closer than they are”?
Answer – Prashant (post specific question)

18. Which blogger’s job involves inserting bugs into perfectly normal code?
Answer – Ankur (bugman).

19. Name one blogger whose blogging alias is also another valid Indian name?
Answer – Ajay (married single), Adi (sporadic thoughts)

All old timers were barred from answering the obvious questions. The new DBM bloggers who earn mention for answering 2 questions (each) correctly are Diya and Sruthijith.

PS. With so much of HTML for coloring text, “html-challenged me” can barely get myself to link all the ppl mentioned here, so please make do.


My share?

Sometime back I went through my site statistics and discovered yet another time that someone had searched for “twilight fairy” or “twilight fairy blog” or “twilght_fairy” (old blog URL) and landed on my blog. Since I hadn’t really seen what results are shown when one searches for “twilight fairy blog”, I went to the link too. The same usual stuff came up – blogs linking me, sites where I had left comments etc and some other random links with “twilight” in them. But there was one new link that was referring to my blog and this had never popped up before. Out of curiosity I went there and realised that it was my blogs details on a site which I had never visited so far – blogshares.com. I didn’t know what it was all about and why my site was there, but I guess it was because of web spiders that I was indexed there. This site had a lot of statistical stuff like incoming links (blogs which link to me etc), my blogshare (a share price for my blogs’ shares!), graphs showing how the number of incoming links trend has been and the share price trend (surprisingly it’s at an all time high right now!) and lots of other abbreviations & jargon which looked very close to stock market jargon. I guessed that this was just a timepass stockmarket kind of place, where ppl traded and hence the name – blogshares.

I am generally averse to stock markets and all stuff to do with finance, shares, trading etc. It intimidates me so much that I just don’t have the inclination to even try and understand how it works even though I hold several stock options of my current employer. So I tried glancing through the FAQ to see what blogshares is all about and then gave up by default, until I saw that there was a section on my page listing “recent buys/sells” where some strangers with even stranger names had bought and even sold my “blog shares”! What the heck! It seemed at the first look that these guys were making money out of *my* blog or its “quality” in terms of incoming links which in turn decides a share price! All is fine if it’s a silly game, but if it had anything to do with REAL money then I was sure to have felt pretty much conned.

I decided to “glance” one more time through the FAQ as long as I found it bearable. I didnt. Gave it up one more time but I did see a “premium member” option on the page and wondered if premium members got to trade with REAL stuff. There were a lot of bloggers whose blogshare pages were mentioned on my page itself. In fact most of the bloggers I have read are listed on this site. Simply because so many of them are there already, I have safely and (I think) correctly concluded that this is a silly share market game with no money involved. But I am still wondering why anyone would be so vela to spend their time trading with blogs! Can anyone explain what this is all about?



DBM – 5

Here we are with yet another meet at yet another venue with yet another “theme”. All bloggers from Delhi who are interested in meeting fellow bloggers from Delhi, please make your presence felt @

Flame’s Bistro, M-Block Market, GK II
on October 21st, 2004, 5 pm “onwards”