Blog Aggregator or Bloggers Community is utmost important for Blogosphere. Because it works as a junction point for all the blogs of a certain community. One can find out what the other people are thinking or what is the recent trends of their own community from that junction. Besides that, a blog aggregator also inspires people to contribute in blogosphere. Amateur bloggers can improve their blog by the useful comments from the expert bloggers from that community. Also one has the scope to read any fact from different views in different blogs. A blog aggregator actually represents the culture, mentality and opinions of a community.
As a blogger I am only 6 months old and I believe I am still an amateur. Whenever on net, I find a blog by a Bangladeshi origin I am delighted. But it is sure a cumbersome job to search blogs by Bangladeshi origin people. So the first thing that stroke in my brain is to find out any Bangladeshi Bloggers Community. For the last few months I’ve googled for any Bangladeshi Blog Aggregator but I found nothing! There is no community for Bangladeshi Bloggers or aggregation of Bangladeshi Blogs! I’ve found a name of Bangladeshi blog aggregator from Hasin’s blog, but for some reason it is not alive now. So the research result is “WE DON’T HAVE ANY ACTUAL BLOGGERS COMMUNITY OR BLOG AGGREGATOR FOR THE BLOGS MAINTAINED OR CREATED BY BANGLADESHI ORIGIN BLOGGERS”.
Well some will mention that there are communities in SomwhereinBlog or Sachalayatan. But they host only their blogs. Many Bangladeshi have their blogs in Blogspot, WordPress, Livejournal, Typepad and in many more places. Also several bloggers host their blog in own servers. How do we got them all within our touch? Whatever I know, several steps are taken previously but all are private (more precisely personal) endeavours. A Bloggers Community or Blog Directory for a nation can’t be maintained personally. It requires groups of trained people. I assume that there are more than thousand of blogs in blogosphere maintained by Bangladeshi origins. How can it be handled personally? It must required properly trained tech-people.
So why don’t the IT companies of Bangladesh take the initiatives? They can recruit man power, they can maintain the site. Well the obvious question is what’ll be their profit by doing this. One way could be displaying advertises on that site. But I don’t think that they have to go for that. Because SomwhereinBlog or Sachalayatan are hosting so many blogs without showing any advertisements.
IndiBlogger could be an appropriate model. Almost every Indian blogs have been included in this site (as far as I know). I can propose some features for the Bangladesi Bloggers Community:
- Any Bangladeshi origin can submit their blog.
- Front page will display the latest posts from the member’s blogs.
- Also there will be a small window in front page depicting who’ve joined recently.
- A directory tab, where all the blogs are listed according to the most viewed and/or popularity and/or alphabetic order.
- A tab for notice board, where all the upcoming events will be announced. (If we create a community we must have some events to perform ain’t we?)
- The most important is the search option. Search option can be subdivided by in several options like – search by bloggers’ name, search by category, search by tag, search by bloggers’ location etc.
- RSS feed must be present there.
At the first place I mentioned that I am an amateur. So an IT professional can make better and more suggestions than mine. Can’t we take the initiative to create such a blog directory for our Bangladeshi bloggers? I am looking to the future to see this idea working.
Thanks for mentioning such a step. But as far as I see, everybody just suggests, none shows any interest making this thing true.
Actually we are not giving priority to this issue.
WordPress users are not listed anywhere. But Blogspot users are already lister here.
Sorry, here's the Link.
I don't see anything betterment whether users are listed in Blogspot or not. 'Cause there are many blog services and it is impossible for anyone to keep track all the user lists of all blog services.
"…everybody just suggests, none shows any interest making this thing true…". I agree with you. What I've felt that general users realize the issue but 'who' can make it true 'they' are not quite interested.
I agree with your concern. I have told earlier in a comment to another post that there was a blog aggregator by Habib by the name bdblogs.com for active bangladeshi blogs few months back.He was also thinking to open a forum for the discussion by the bloggers in that blog. The latest post were autoupdated everyday on the blog.It was a sort of group archieve for our posts.But why Habib didn't continue it, I don't know.
Either Habib or any of his friend can revive the site. Or as M@Q suggested some IT professional or IT companies can take up the initiative to develop a bangladeshi blog aggrgator.
Don't be disheartend.We should keep the idea resounding until it is materialised.
I spent a little time on your site this morning and decided to drop you a line; I really liked your post on blog aggregators for blogs of Bangladeshi origin. I thought maybe you'd be interested in checking out a new blogging widget that will launch over the next few months.
PLUMBB is sort of like a blogroll on steroids: part inline RSS reader and part content discovery tool, backed by a pretty robust analytics package. The blogger picks a list of blogs to include and recommends specific posts, and the widget displays the most popular and most discussed content right on the page. Readers can customize what they see, and bloggers get fun stats about what their visitors are reading. (Click here if you would prefer an even glossier, buzz-wordier pitch.)
Hello Tanim,
This is an excellent post. As another Bangladeshi blogger I ditto your concern. We need to unite.
I just noticed something, the way you are using Addthis bookmarking button in your side bar is problematic. You can learn why and you can also learn the right way here:
How to use the Addthis button PROPERLY in the side bar of a wordpress.com blog
It's a Bangladeshi blogger ("aka" me!) who diagnosed and solved the problem! 😀
Who can make this issue true, are not active nor interested.
I agree with you about it too. But do we really have anything to do in this case? If they (who could do) don't take necessary steps, then should we remain silent? Or do something?
This decision is up to us.
There were two Bangladeshi blog aggregators, bdblogs.com and bdblogs.net, and I was in touch with both their owners. Sadly, both have decided to discontinue the service, probably due to lack of revenue generation.
I run a Linux blog aggregator at http://blogs.linux.org.bd, and I can run a similar aggregator for Bangladeshi blogs. Any suggestion on domain names?
@ Netty Gritty
Thanx for noticing and mentioning the fault. I've fixed it 🙂
@ Aminul Islam Sajib
That's right. It's up to us. But how should we proceed? Well… you might notice that after your comment Russell has an idea! May be we should just start.
@ Russell
Thanks for stopping by my site. I am not quite sure if it is a cumbersome job for one person to handle a blog aggregator. But if you can run one then please start at once. We just need to sow the seed, when it'll be a plant you'll see more farmers around you. And thanks for proposing to take the initiative. I visited your site http://blogs.linux.org.bd . It is nice. But it has some scarcity. As an example, it doesn't have any optin for submitting a blog(s) by user(s). Never mind, I am just a novice in blogosphere. Can you please include the features in the aggregator that I've mentioned in my post? If you can then it'll be a marvelous job. If you want a name then I can propose for "www.bdbloggers.(net/com/org).bd" or "www.bdblogs.(net/com/org).bd"
I might not be able to get a new domain right now, but I can use an existing domain for the time being… http://blogs.ekushey.com sounds fine? If so then I can set it up by tomorrow. Later on we can move to a dedicated domain if there's enough response from people.
Nice to see the discussion has come up quite largely.
@ Russell
Waiting for seeing it happening… Thanks a lot…
M@q,
You are most welcome!
@Russell,
Go for it! I will promote it in my blog! too! 😀
I'm working on it. I'll notify when I'm done. Thanks.
The beta version is up at http://ekushey.com/blogs/ — it needs a lot of polishing though.
@ Russell
Thank you very much… You really have done a tremendous work… Yeap I understand it really needs the polishing job. In the first page the posts are displayed in full length. A full length post does not fit in a blog aggregator. It would be more decorous if only a few lines (as excerpts) for the post (under the post heading) is displayed. I don't have that much IT knowledge to design a site like this, so in my case it is more obvious that I can provide suggestions on the looking or handiness of the site. 🙂 Looking forward to see it more matured…
By the way, please keep a page for feedback… So that we can contact you about the site.
Yay! We are progressing already! 😀
It's great to see you guys taking this initiative – and we're honoured that you've been inspired by the IndiBlogger model. How about moving this discussion onto emails to see where it takes us? 🙂
The IndiBlogger Team http://www.indiblogger.in
Thanks to share such nice information.
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