The word is out.

Yes, it *is* out, folks. The 2005 Indian Weblog Results are here. Tons of very good folks won. Tons of very good folks lost. And a full 892 people cast their vote.

Excuse me for choking.

Eight Hundred and Ninety Two? Only?

No offence to the awards and the people hosting them, but is 892 reflective of the popularity of the Indian blog-o-pyramid? (No, silly, it's a different geometric object. blogododecahedron.) I mean that's like a small gully in mumbai. Or a 5 minute passing-through count on Brigade Road, Bangalore. That's how many people voted for the Best Indian Blogs.

To me there are two serious issues related to this.

Some people have said, in the past, that the Indian blog + i (sphere) is very complex. Yes, it is. But they said more. They've said: Blogs come of age, Bloggers as public regulators, Blogs are a warning to newspapers, etc. If only 892 people are voting in what seems to be the premier awards for Indiblogging, there's no way this "medium" has reached anywhere significant. I'm sure some of these blogs get more hits per day than 892!

So perhaps blogging isn't as widespread as some people think - or threatening the "main stream media". In India, I mean.

Secondly, The awardees deserved their awards, quite rightly so. But it's not in the right spirit for them to win an award where so few people vote. I maintain, these are excellent blogs - those that won and others that were nominated - but still, winning in such little franchise elicits little more than a "*shrug*". You won, but only 892 people cared enough to vote at all, and you got the highest percentage? It's less of a blogosphere (Ed: Finally!) than a blog-o-tiny-little-dot.

Think about it. If someone wanted to take this away from the good bloggers, then rigging 225 votes with REAL people ain't that difficult. One wouldn't even need to create false email ids, just do the mail-the-address-book-and-pass-it-on trick.

(I'm not in the best Indian Blog award nominees. And I'll probably never be, because I largely write as a narcissistic endeavour, not a journalistic one. I don't write very well, despite my wanting to believe the opposite, and I'm very aware of that.)

Oh and I didn't vote. Not because I didn't want to. I just couldn't deal with one blog winning when I really like so many of them. Maybe almost everyone's like me. Other than, of course, 892 people.